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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

The Art of the Roman Empire

ad 100–450
Second Edition

Oxford History of Art

Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford,

Humfrey Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
and Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago.
In 2009 he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2017 a Fellow of the British Academy.
Since 2013 he has been Principal Investigator in the Empires of Faith Project
between the British Museum and the University of Oxford. He is married
with four children and lives in Oxford.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

Oxford History of Art

Titles in the Oxford History of Art series are up-to-date, fully illustrated introductions
to a wide variety of subjects written by leading experts in their field. They will appear
regularly, building into an interlocking and comprehensive series. Published titles
appear in the list below.

WESTERN ART WORLD ART PHOTOGRAPHY

Archaic and Classical Aegean Art and The Photograph
Greek Art Architecture Graham Clarke
Robin Osborne Donald Preziosi and
Louise A. Hitchcock WESTERN SCULPTURE
Classical Art from
Sculpture 1900–1945
Greece to Rome Early Art and Architecture
Penelope Curtis
Mary Beard and of Africa
John Henderson Peter Garlake Sculpture Since 1945
Andrew Causey
The Art of the Roman African-American Art
Empire AD 100–450 Sharon F. Patton THEMES AND GENRES
Jaś Elsner Nineteenth-Century Landscape and Western Art
Early Medieval Art American Art Malcolm Andrews
Lawrence Nees Barbara Groseclose Portraiture
Medieval Art Twentieth-Century Shearer West
Veronica Sekules American Art Beauty and Art
Art in Renaissance Italy Erika Doss Elizabeth Prettejohn
Evelyn Welch Australian Art
Andrew Sayers REFERENCE BOOKS
Northern Renaissance Art
Susie Nash Byzantine Art The Art of Art History:
Robin Cormack A Critical Anthology
Art in Europe 1700–1830 Donald Preziosi (ed.)
Matthew Craske Art in China
Modern Art 1851–1929 Craig Clunas
Richard Brettell Indian Art
After Modern Art Partha Mitter
1945–2000 Native North American Art
David Hopkins Janet Berlo and
Ruth Phillips
WESTERN ARCHITECTURE
The Pacific Arts of
Early Medieval Architecture Polynesia and Micronesia
Roger Stalley Adrienne L. Kaeppler
Medieval Architecture
Nicola Coldstream WESTERN DESIGN
Renaissance Architecture Twentieth-Century Design
Christy Anderson Jonathan Woodham
European Architecture Design in the USA
1750–1890 Jeffrey Meikle
Barry Bergdoll Fashion
Modern Architecture Christopher Breward
Alan Colquhoun
Architecture in the
United States
Dell Upton
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

Oxford History of Art

The Art of the

Roman Empire
ad 100–450
Second Edition

Jaś Elsner

1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a r­ egistered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in c­ ertain other countries
© Jaś Elsner 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First published 1998 by Oxford University Press
Second edition published 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942555
ISBN 978–0–19–876863–0
Printed in Great Britain by
Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

For Silvia, Maia, Jan, Anna, and Isabel

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

Contents

Preface xi

Note on the Second Edition xv

1 Introduction 1
The Scope of This Book: Redefining the Present
by Rewriting the Past 1
Continuity and Change 8
The Role of the Visual in Roman Culture 10
The Changing Nature of Roman Art and the Art-Historical
Problem of Style 13

PART I IMAGES AND POWER 23

2 A Visual Culture 25
Art in State Ceremonial 26
Art in Civic Life 32
Art Inside the Roman House 40
Change and Continuity 44
3 Art and Imperial Power 49
The Animate Image and the Symbolic Unity of the Empire 50
Imperial Self-Promotion 54
Continuity and Change 59

vii
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

PART II IMAGES AND SOCIETY 83

4 Art and Social Life 85
Representing Status 86
The Elite 89
The Accoutrements of Domestic Life: Rituals of Dining 94
Paideia in the Household 97
5 Centre and Periphery 107
Local Identity and Empire-Wide Acculturation: The Problems
of ‘Romanization’ 109
Late Antiquity: The Periphery’s Ascendancy at the Expense of
the Centre 117
The Visual Dynamics of Romanization 124
From Romanization to Christianization 129
6 Art and Death 135
Elevating the Dead: Identity, Narrative, and Representation 137
Myth and the Adaptation of Culture in the Sculptors’ Workshops 141
Imperial Death: From Pagan to Christian Times 146

PART III IMAGES AND TRANSFORMATION 155

7 Art and the Past: Antiquarian Eclecticism 157
Classicism in the Second Sophistic 157
Classicism in the Late Empire 173
8 Art and Religion 185
An Epoch of Transformation 185
Image and Ritual in Traditional Religion 188
Mystery Cults and New Religions: Art and the Construction
of Identity 191
Differentiation and Syncretism: Cultic Creations of Meaning 196
Christian Triumph: A New Religion as State Cult 205
An Official Religion and its Public Presence 209
Sanctity, Relics, and Christianization 214

viii Contents
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

9 The Eurasian Context 221

An Interconnected World 222
Appropriations of Images 225
An Interconnected Discourse of Visual Culture 231
No Empire is an Island 241

PART IV EPILOGUE 243

10 Art and Culture: Cost, Value, and the Discourse of Art 245
The Earnings of Artists: Diocletian’s Price Edict of ad 301 245
The Value of Art 247
Ideal and Actual 248
The Transformation of Culture and the Discourse of Art 251

Afterword: Some Futures of Christian Art 255

From Scripture to Symbolism 255
From Idol to Icon 259

Notes 263

List of Illustrations 277

Bibliographic Essay 285

Timeline 296

Index 305

Contents ix
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

Preface

In keeping with the aims of the Oxford History of Art, this book attempts to
provide a new and accessible approach to the arts of the Roman empire from
ad 100 to 450, that is, in the periods known as the ‘Second Sophistic’ and ‘Late
Antiquity’. I explain the reasons for choosing these dates, as well as my
method and aims, in the first chapter. As a discussion of Graeco-Roman art,
the book may be read in conjunction with the two other books on Greek and
Roman art in this series—Archaic and Classical Greek Art (by Robin Osborne)
and Classical Art: From Greece to Rome (by Mary Beard and John Henderson)—
as well as Janet Delaine’s book on Roman architecture. But this volume can
also be treated as an introduction to the origins of Christian art in its Roman
cultural context.
The avid reader of timelines may wonder why that included in this volume
seems perversely detailed. There are (at least) two ways to write a general book
of this sort: one might take a chronological approach—treating the period in
chapters which examine decades, centuries, or dynasties—or a thematic one,
in which each chapter focuses on a separate issue, and attempts to treat the
entire period in what is called a synchronic manner. Although I had originally
proposed to write a chronological book, I decided after much thought that
what I wished to say was best suited to a synchronic and thematic discussion.
In order that the reader who is new to Roman art should not feel stranded on
an isthmus of unfamiliar history in the midst of a sea of incomprehension,
I have attempted to provide a rather detailed timeline to help with at least
some matters of chronological orientation and historical context.
I have tried as much as possible to relate my general discussion to the spe-
cific images I have chosen to illustrate—which means that these particular
objects have to do a good deal of ‘work’ as historical documents. The format of
a series like this forces one to be extremely selective about choosing illustra-
tions: I have been allowed fewer than 200 pictures of the thousands of surviv-
ing objects from three and a half centuries of art in the Roman empire, each
of which has a fair claim to be included. My selection has been governed in
part by a (surely unsuccessful) attempt to be ‘objective’ about what are the key
images surviving from the era under discussion, in part by my own particular
convictions and subjective interests, and in part by what I believed my readers
would themselves expect from a book on this period—so that it might be
reasonably representative of what are currently regarded as the main (dare
one say it still, the canonical) objects. But I would find it hard to disagree with
someone who objected that the selection was tilted to public and especially
Detail of 130 imperial art at the expense of smaller and more private objects, or that
xi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

architecture has been presented as little more than a setting for works of art.
Likewise, for reasons of space and expense, I have had to be very restrictive
about the quantity of diagrams and reconstructions of monuments which
have not survived (or have survived in very fragmentary condition) but are
known from the archaeological record.
This book is underpinned by the firm conviction that Graeco-Roman
writings about art (for which our period is in fact the golden age) are as
important to an understanding of the reception and cultural context of
images as the surviving objects themselves. I have tried to be wide-ranging in
my quotations from all kinds of ancient sources, and have usually used readily
available translations (often altering them in the sometimes conflicting inter-
ests of greater accessibility and accuracy). One interesting problem is that the
Romans themselves rarely thought about art or described it in the ways
employed by a modern book, like this one, which puts pictures next to their
discussion or analysis. While many Roman portraits, for example, were
labelled with the name of the subject—as well as, more rarely, the names of
the artist and the dedicator (something like a modern picture caption or
shortish museum label, see 19, for example)—works of art were often dis-
cussed and written about in their absence. Ancient critics and historians have
left us a rich legacy of ekphraseis, or descriptions of art, whose rhetorical
elegance at their best is perhaps a better account of the effects of art, and
especially of naturalism, than any analyses written since. But in using these
descriptions, by the likes of writers such as Lucian or Philostratus, for the
purposes of modern art history, I have to confess to a certain uneasiness.
The closer one feels one has come to defining how images worked in any
particular aspect of their Graeco-Roman cultural and historical context, the
further one fears one has departed from the ways the ancients themselves
enjoyed and reflected upon their art.
From what I have said already, it will be obvious that this account aims to
examine the ways Roman and early Christian images worked in their cultural
and social context. In particular, I have sought to explore some aspects of how
art both reflected and contributed to social construction, as well as how
it functioned as a marker for different kinds of personal identity—social,
­provincial, religious. This means that I have focused primarily on the role of
images within cultural history. There is a price to pay for this kind of approach:
inevitably, it allows relatively little scope for discussion of the aesthetics of
Roman art, or the specific developments of style, form, and technique over
a period of 350 years, or the special nature (even the philosophical basis) of
naturalism—the particular visual convention which came to an end in the
early middle ages. I do not believe that these are insignificant issues. But it is
true that they have broadly dominated general discussions of Roman art in
the past, and so—at this point—a more strictly cultural-historical approach
has much to recommend it.
There are many debts acquired in writing a book. Above all, this project
was inspired by my students at the Courtauld Institute—BA, MA, and
PhD—whose questions have relentlessly goaded me into thinking again
about the usual assumptions and stories we are told about Roman and early
Christian art. Two recent seminars in London have enabled me to examine a
number of key artefacts in the British Museum in the company of some

xii Preface
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

expert critical companions: these were David Buckton’s informal ‘hands-on’

series of meetings to look at late antique and Byzantine objects, and the stu-
dent seminars organized by Emmanuele Curti, Jeremy Tanner, and Ute
Wartenberg, as well as myself, among the Townley marbles of the British
Museum. I have learnt much from these encounters and from all who took
part. At a late stage, the award of a Hugh Last Fellowship by the British
School at Rome enabled me to test much of my text before the silent but
potent jury of the objects and buildings in Rome it discusses. The success of
my time in Rome owes much to the heroic efforts of Maria Pia Malvezzi,
secretary of the British School, who relentlessly pursued the authorities on
my behalf to give me access to buildings and objects not currently on public
view. I would like to thank my Courtauld colleagues, Robin Cormack, Paul
Crossley, and John Lowden, for their support over the years, their comments
on my work, their encouragement in reading early drafts. In the hunt for
photographs, I am most grateful to George Galavaris, Herbert Kessler, Tim
Potter, Bert Smith, and John Wilkes. Two friends, especially, have given me
the benefit of copious and detailed notes on virtually every page of a chaotic
manuscript: they’ve put me through a purgatory of rewriting and re-thinking,
and only one day will Chris Kelly and Robin Osborne be forgiven! But the
book is profoundly better for their efforts.
Three people have conspired to give me the time to make the writing
­possible and simultaneously to deprive me of any spare moments in which to
write: whenever, with the aid of Silvia, my wife, I closed the door and turned
the computer on, Maia, my 2-year-old daughter, found a way to get in and
turn upside down what I was typing. And when my son, Jan, was born, just a
week after the completion of the typescript but with many of the captions
and the timeline still to write (let alone the process of proofreading and
checking), all hell did its best to break loose! So, I shall dedicate what I have
written to them. Maybe one day they will forgive me.
J.E., London, July 1997

Preface xiii
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

Note on the
Second Edition

The first edition of this book was completed in the summer of 1997 and
­published in 1998. Of course, a number of things have changed in the study
of Roman and early Christian art in the last twenty years and a number of
new emphases have come to the fore, but I have judged that to tinker with
the text would blur the lines of an argument about the visual culture of the
Roman world that was strong in its time and remains valid. So, with the
exception of an entirely new chapter in an area which the first edition had
not addressed—the movement of aspects of Roman art into the east, and the
presence of some aspects of Asian material culture in the Roman world, as
well as possibilities of interconnection and mutual influence—I have made
little more than minor corrections to the original text. I have however
entirely updated the bibliographic essay, so that today’s readers can follow
the issues as they are currently being explored in the scholarly literature
written in the English language. Given that the target audience of the book
is English-language university students and other people largely new to
Roman art in this period, I have kept to the discipline of citing only works
written in English (although this is but a subset of the large and multilingual
scholarly literature on Roman antiquity), except where there is no alternative.
In formulating my thoughts for the new chapter, I have been extremely for-
tunate to be working in the Empires of Faith project (which has run from
2013 to 2018) on the development of art and religion across Eurasia in late
antiquity (https://empiresoffaith.com). I would like to thank my colleagues
in that enterprise—Rachel Wood, Georgi Parpulov, Elisabeth O’Connell,
Maria Lidova, Stefanie Lenk, Richard Hobbs, Dominic Dalglish, Katie
Cross, Belinda Crerar, Robert Bracey, Nadia Ali, and Philippa Adrych, in
reverse alphabetical order—as well as to express my gratitude for the spon-
sorship and institutional support of the Leverhulme Trust, the British
Museum, and Wolfson College, Oxford, and on a personal front to the
President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (who have allowed
me to go chasing such exciting themes). At Oxford University Press,
Matthew Cotton has been an enthusiastic editor and Rosanna van den
Bogaerde an indefatigable picture researcher.
Oxford, July 2017

xv
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

The Roman Empire under Trajan and Hadrian AD 98–138

North
Sea
IRELAND
Baltic
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Hildesheim

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Conquest during reign of Trajan
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Conquest during reign of Trajan
abandoned by Hadrian
Frontiers in AD 138

xvi maps
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

Sarmatians
Scythians

i
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s KINGDOM OF
THE BOSPOROS

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maps xvii
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

The Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century AD

BRITANNIA II
North
Sea

A
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CAESARIENSIS
B R I TA N N I A
1 MAXIMA
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LUGDUNENSIS III
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The three Praetorian Prefectures NIA LIBYA
SUPERIOR
Prefecture of the Gauls Frontiers of the Empire at the
death of Theodosius I (395)
Prefecture of Illyria,
Line of demarcation between the Empire
Italia, and Africa
of the East and the Empire of the West in 395
Prefecture of the East Boundaries of the Dioceses

1 The fifteen dioceses according to the ‘Notitia Dignitatum’

(end 4th–beginning 5th cent.)
Boundaries of the Provinces
Territory abandoned during the 3rd century

xviii maps
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

Caspian Sea

DACIA

e SCYTHIA

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Adamklissi Black Sea
AI DAC
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maps xix
 North Sea
JUTES?

Baltic Sea

NS
5th cent.

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Angles

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This map shows the west and southward advances of the Germanic tribes and the Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries. However, the impression given of the empire’s collapse
under relentless barbarian assault is misleading: many of the Germanic tribes became rapidly Romanized or assimilated into Roman culture and sovereignty, while others
conquered and ruled over populations which continued for some time to live according to Roman patterns.
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Introduction

1
The Scope of This Book: Redefining the Present
by Rewriting the Past
This book is about the arts of the Roman world from the height of the Roman
empire in the second century ad (under a series of famous ‘good’ emperors
like Trajan and Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius) to the fully
established Christian empire of the fifth century. It explores Roman art in
what have traditionally been seen as three phases of Roman history: the
­triumphant second century (famously described by Edward Gibbon as ‘the
period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human
race was most happy and prosperous’); the so-called ‘crisis’ of the third cen-
tury when military, economic, and social turmoil is represented as creating
the conditions for a radical transformation of Roman culture; and the empire
of Constantine and his successors, when a new religion and highly innovative
modes of cultural life came to redefine the Roman world. We confront the
arts of Rome in their moment of maximum stability as mature exemplars
(visual as well as social) of the classical tradition, and in a period of change,
whose results would inform the arts and culture of the Byzantine and western
middle ages for over a thousand years.
It may seem strange, on the face of it, for a book about the history of art
in the Roman empire to begin in what appears to be the middle of the
story—in the second century ad. After all, this is more than a century after
the imperial system had been established by Augustus following his great
victory over Mark Antony at the battle of Actium in 31 bc. In fact, most
books on Roman art tackle the periods of the Republic and the empire,
finishing conveniently with the alleged end of paganism and the affirma-
tion of Christianity under Constantine in the early years of the fourth cen-
tury ad. To end the story with the coming of Christianity ignores the fact
that the post-Constantinian empire saw itself as entirely continuous with
its pagan ancestor: Constantine’s visual image-makers incorporated sculp-
tures from the reigns of his distinguished second-century predecessors,
Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius, in his arch in Rome [1], while the
emperors Theodosius (378–95) and Arcadius (383–408) erected columns in
Constantinople carved with spiral friezes showing their illustrious victo-
ries, following the model of the famous Roman columns set up in memory
of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius (see 36, 37). At what is usually regarded as
the beginning of the story, Republican and early imperial Rome have much
in common with the Hellenistic Greek world whose monarchies, estab-
Detail of 73 lished in the eastern Mediterranean, Rome conquered throughout the

1
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1 second and first centuries bc. The story of early Roman art is most interest-
The Arch of Constantine, ingly told as a portion of the complex tale of Hellenistic art: it is a narrative
erected on the Via of indigenous Italian forms giving way to imperial and cosmopolitan styles
Triumphalis in Rome, in
honour of Constantine’s
which proclaimed dominance over multicultural societies, and a tale of the
victory over Maxentius in sometimes burdened, and sometimes playful, inheritance of the previously
ad 312 and of his decennalia, formed classical Greek artistic canon.
or tenth anniversary as This book begins by asking the question of what is most interesting
emperor, in ad 315.
Of the visible sculpture, the
about Roman art from the end rather than the beginning. If the origins of
reliefs in the top storey, on Roman art lie in the confrontation of the indigenous Italian arts with those
either side of the inscription, of Greece, the end lies in one of the signal transformations in all of world
come from a monument art: the end of classical antiquity and the rise of Christian culture. This
made for Marcus Aurelius in
the late 170s. The statues on
period, known as late antiquity (which lasted from the early third to, at
the upper level, representing least, the mid-fifth century ad), brought profound changes in social, politi­
Dacian prisoners, probably cal, and personal relationships, in the formation of organized Christianity
come originally from the (not only as a religion, but also as a dominant cultural system), in the refor-
forum of Trajan and date from
the second decade of the
mulation of attitudes to the family, to sexuality, to the body itself. These
second century ad. The transformations were not imposed upon the Roman world but were created
roundels in the middle tier by it and within it: they were made possible by the reinterpretation of
above the smaller bays come ­history and mythology in a completely new, Christian, framework. The very
from a monument erected
under Hadrian from the adaptation of so many aspects of Roman ­culture to the demands of a
130s. The remaining Christian mentalité was itself an imperialist project on the part of
sculpture—the spandrels over Christianity as the new official religion of the Roman state. Although the
the arches, the bases of the
transformation of culture on almost every level (and not least in the realm
columns at ground level and
the friezes above the smaller of art and architecture) counts as one of the truly radical breaks in world
bays—is Constantinian. history, it did not necessarily seem so at the time. In many ways, I will argue,

2 Introduction
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the history of Roman culture had already prepared the ground for the process
of unprecedented internal self-transformation.
My thesis is that the dynamics that motivated the great cultural changes
of late antiquity already existed within Roman culture, which had long
been willing to redefine its present by freely reinterpreting its past. The
transformation in culture which brought Roman paganism (by which I
mean here also its social, religious, and economic structures, as well as its
forms of visual and architectural representation) to an end is a process
whose success was anticipated by earlier changes in Roman culture. One of
the persistent cultural features of the Roman world was its ability to rein-
vent itself while preserving a rhetoric of continuity. The present could be
radically transformed above all by rewriting the past so that the new pat-
terns of the present appeared as a seamless development from the past.
Roman historians, from Livy in the age of Augustus to Cassius Dio in the
third century and the church historian Eusebius in the fourth, were among
the prime masters of this art.
A famous example of this double strategy, whereby the political and social
realities of the present are fundamentally changed while the myth-history of
the past is spectacularly redefined, was the moment when Augustus trans-
formed the established forms and rituals of the Republic into the new model
of a monarchy. While constantly affirming continuity with the Republic,
which he claimed to be restoring, Augustus set about creating an entirely new
structure of rule. All the complex politics of the formation of an imperial
system were bolstered by a pervasive cultural programme (in the visual arts
and in literature) which redefined Rome’s history in terms of the mythology
of Augustus’ family (reaching back to Aeneas, the legendary ancestor of the
Roman people) and which reconceptualized Rome’s relations with the Greek
world, whose Hellenistic monarchies formed Augustus’ model for an empire
dominated by a single ruler.
However, Augustus’ establishment of what is known as the principate (since
the system was dominated by the single figure of the princeps, or emperor) was
only the first of a series of such changes whose culmination would be
Constantine’s espousal of Christianity. This book opens with the second great
transformation of Roman culture in the imperial era—the phenomenon
known to history (for so it was named by its first historian, the third-century
Greek writer Philostratus) as the Second Sophistic. In this period—less in fact an
era with specific dates at either end than a new cultural outlook which took
hold of the empire gradually from the second half of the first century ad and
rose to its zenith in the second and early third centuries—Rome again pro-
foundly redefined its past. The late Republic and early Empire had affirmed a
strongly Italic, Roman identity against the pervasive influence of all kinds of
Greek luxuries and debaucheries (at least this had been the rhetorical position
of aristocratic Romans, writers, and governors). But as shaped in the Second
Sophistic, the Roman world became much more directly philhellenic in atti-
tude, culture, and education: it became Graeco-Roman. That is, where earlier
Roman imperial attitudes had affirmed a political and moral superiority over
other nations and especially Greece, the Second Sophistic created a more
integrated and holistic cultural system based largely on Greek educational
values and on shared Graeco-Roman mythology.

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Consider these famous lines from Vergil’s Aeneid (6.847–53), written in the
second half of the first century bc under Augustus:
Let others better mould the running mass
Of metals, and inform the breathing brass,
And soften into flesh a marble face;
Plead better at the bar; describe the skies,
And when the stars descend, and when they rise.
But Rome! ’tis thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule mankind, and make the world obey:
Disposing peace and war thy own majestic way.
To tame the proud, the fettered slave to free,
These are imperial arts, and worthy thee.

This passage (rendered here in John Dryden’s translation), with its appropria-
tion of the arts of government to the Romans and its relegation of the
other arts—less important to an imperial conqueror, like rhetoric, sculpture,
and astronomy—to ‘others’ (which means primarily to the Greeks), could not
have been written in the Second Sophistic. It marks a sentiment of Roman-
centred imperial snobbery which was quite simply out of date by the middle
of the second century ad.
Compare the contemporary responses to the emperor Nero’s infatuation
with all things Greek in the sixties ad, which was ahead of its time and was
roundly vilified as a perfect example of every sort of moral, sexual, and personal
iniquity, with those to the greater (if perhaps less flamboyant) hellenophilia
of Hadrian—emperor in ad 117–38, less than sixty years after Nero’s fall.
While Nero was damned for his Greekness, Hadrian was praised. Yet the
latter not only spent years in the Greek-speaking provinces of the empire
(longer in fact than Nero) and pioneered an impressive programme of invest-
ment and building in Greece itself, but changed significantly such important
aspects of his representation as the imperial portrait—which had always been
clean-shaven in the Roman Republican style, but was now bearded in emulation
of the Greek philosopher king [2]. Increasingly, literature throughout the
Roman world came to be written in Greek and education came to be offered
by Greek teachers of rhetoric, called sophists, travelling through the empire.
One of Hadrian’s successors as emperor, Marcus Aurelius, even composed
philosophical meditations, writing in Greek.
Art not only reflected the changing values of the Second Sophistic, it
was also an agent of change. Images gave popular currency to new, philhel-
lenic, styles (like Hadrian’s beard) and to new forms of material culture
which had previously been unfamiliar. On a much less elevated social level
than imperial portraiture, burial practices changed from the traditional
Roman form of cremation to inhumation in a stone coffin called a sar-
cophagus. These sarcophagi came to be carved not only with family por-
traits (as had earlier Roman grave reliefs), but also with scenes from Greek
mythology, such as the confrontation of Meleager and Atalanta with the
Calydonian Boar [3]. Both on an imperial and on a private level, in the
most public images of the emperor’s portrait and in the most personal
themes chosen for one’s tomb, there was a persistent affirmation of a Greek
cultural past and ancestry for Roman subjects from all over the empire.
Art, in propagating these themes and myths, often to a barely literate

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2
Marble portrait of Hadrian
from Rome, made after
ad 117.

Like Augustus before him,

Hadrian (who acceded to the
purple aged 41 and reigned
for 21 years) hardly ages in
the portrait-types which
survive of him, even those
designed and carved
relatively close to his death.
This example, broken at the
neck, preserves the upper
folds of a military mantle
about the shoulders. The
visual rhetoric of the
bearded philosopher king
was thus set effectively
against the traditional
military intimations of the
victorious general.

audience of viewers, had a prime function in spreading cultural identity

and defining change.
One of the conspicuous achievements of the Second Sophistic was the
empire’s reformulation as a culturally integrated whole. The peoples of the
entire empire, from Britain and Spain to Egypt and Syria, shared not only a
single currency, an economy, an army, and a government, but also an ideology
of common Graeco-Roman myths, of public rituals (such as the games), and
of religious practices (including the cult of the emperor). In the early third
century, the emperor Caracalla extended the rights and privileges of Roman
citizenship to all the free inhabitants of the empire. And throughout the third
century the position of emperor was largely occupied by men from the distant
provinces (for instance, Africa, Palestine, Syria, Illyria) and even from very
lowly social backgrounds: if we believe the Christian apologist, Lactantius,
the emperor Diocletian appears to have been the son of an ex-slave (and

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3 whatever the truth of this, his father was certainly of relatively low rank).
Marble sarcophagus from There was great religious tolerance of local diversity, except in the case of
Rome with the myth of those few religions which were themselves anti-pluralist and refused to toler-
Meleager, c. ad 180. One of
nearly 200 extant examples
ate the worship of any gods but their own—Christianity, Judaism, and other
of this theme from Greek monotheistic sects, like Manichaeism, being the classic examples. There was
mythology. also a great deal of travel through the empire (for military, economic, educa-
In the centre, Meleager is tional, religious, and touristic reasons), bringing the spread of a number of
about to kill the Calydonian
Boar, surrounded by other
formerly localized cults to a very wide area. In the third century ad, for
huntsmen. Atalanta, with instance, the worship of Mithras (originally an Iranian deity from outside the
whom Meleager fell in love, Roman empire’s sphere of influence) is found in its Roman form scattered
is depicted twice—behind from Hadrian’s Wall and London to Rome and Ostia, from Germany to Spain,
him and immediately in front
of him, attacking the boar.
from Gaul to Dura Europos in Syria. Indeed, it was the very universalism of
Unlike the male hunters, the Second Sophistic—its tendency to spread a common culture of educa-
who are for the most part tion, expectations, religion—which would serve to help prepare the empire
nude, she is draped and for its rather surprising takeover by the adherents of one very specific
wears boots. On the lid,
Meleager’s dead body is
­religious cult which combined claims for universal salvation with a profound
carried back home in solemn understanding of the power of education through literacy.
procession, while his mother If the empire could experience profound change during an era of relative
Althaea commits suicide
political stability and social coherence, it is not surprising that—in
(on the far right).
response to crisis—the Roman world should again be willing to embrace
fundamental transformation. For example, in the 280s and 290s, Diocletian
(284–305) radically reorganized the military, economic, and administrative
structure of the empire into a ‘tetrarchy’ or college of four joint emperors
who, acting together, could best resist the terrible threats of barbarian
invasion and internal turmoil that had nearly overthrown the state in the
previous fifty years. This change, in many ways as significant as Augustus’
original transformation of the Republic into an empire, was presented as
a revival of the traditional religion and culture of Rome—with Diocletian
and his senior co-emperor, Maximian, presented as embodiments of
Jupiter and Hercules.

6 Introduction
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Likewise, in the fourth century, Constantine, who became one of the

t­ etrarchs after 306, reconquered the whole empire, placed it under his sole
dominion and reformulated it (building on many of Diocletian’s innovations)
in what was to become a Christian mould. Between 313, when Constantine
legalized Christianity (a religion severely persecuted only a decade earlier by
Diocletian) and 391 when Theodosius banned sacrifice, the central sacred rite
of every form of ancient paganism, the Roman empire underwent remarkable
changes in its religious life and identity. The espousal of Christianity precipi-
tated a still more significant break with the past than even the Second
Sophistic’s affirmation of a Greek cultural heritage for the whole Roman
world. The pluralist polytheism of literally dozens of mutually tolerant reli-
gions was replaced by a single exclusive initiate cult, to which—by roughly
the sixth century ad—it became virtually impossible not to belong, if one
wished to get on in the world. The relatively loose structure of imperial

4
The sacrifice of Isaac,
fresco from the Via Latina
Catacomb, Cubiculum C,
Rome, painted c. ad 320.
Abraham raises his sword to
slay his son, according to the
text in Genesis 22. 1–14.
Above left, the hand of God
has been lost. Beside
Abraham is a sacrificial altar
with burning wood and the
ram which God has provided
to be killed in Isaac’s place.
Below is an extra textual
addition of a servant with
a donkey. Abraham’s
willingness to sacrifice his
only son came to be seen as
a typological foreshadowing
of God’s willingness to
sacrifice Jesus in order to
save the world.

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provinces, governors, and cults which had controlled the empire gave way to
a system underpinned by a universal Church which combined authority with
a strongly coherent belief system at its core. Ultimately, the political, cultural,
and geographic sense of Graeco-Roman identity associated with being a
Roman citizen in the period of the Second Sophistic was transformed into a
religious identity which focused on Christianity as being the deepest mark of
belonging to the Roman world.
The process was complex and slow. The visual arts were not only one of the
areas where change (in style, form, subject matter, iconography, even the types
of objects produced) was most visible and pronounced; they were also a key
agent in transmitting the meanings of the empire’s new Christian identity to
its subjects. Once again, the Roman empire changed its present by rewriting
its past. The origins of the new Christian dispensation for the Roman world
were to be traced jointly in the imperial pagan past and in the Old Testament
( Jewish) scriptures of a small religious sect whose Hebrew writings had been
entirely unknown to the vast majority of Roman citizens during the long his-
tory of the empire. The present, a Christian present, was rewritten in terms of
a Jewish past (told in the books of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible,
known as the Septuagint); and to these supremely important narratives,
access was permitted through rituals of initiation like baptism, through a
religious education in a whole new sacred mythology, and through the visual
images which juxtaposed Christian and Old Testament themes. A new
method, called ‘typological exegesis’, was developed for understanding the
connections of past and present. The copious writings and commentaries of
the Church Fathers (themselves drawing on rhetorical and philosophical
methods of argument going back to Plato and Aristotle) created ways of
tying Christian events, like the crucifixion and sacrifice of Jesus, to their Old
Testament foreshadowings or prototypes—for instance, Abraham’s attempt
to sacrifice Isaac, his only son [4]. The results of such complex typological
connections were transmitted directly and fluently to (often illiterate)
Christian believers in works of art and in sermons.

Continuity and Change

The traditional picture of Roman history in our period is one of cardinal
change. The principate of Trajan (ad 98–117) marked the last and highest
point of Roman military expansion, with the triumphant conquest of Dacia
in the wars of 101–2 and 105–6 (celebrated repeatedly in works of art like
Trajan’s Column, his victory monument at Adamklissi, and other relief sculp-
tures in Rome, see 36, 53, 83, 84), and the extension of Roman military control
far into Armenia and Parthia in the east. By contrast, Hadrian’s reign (117–38)
saw a shift from a policy of conquest to the manning of boundaries as defen-
sive barriers, most potently visualized by the building of Hadrian’s Wall. The
essentially defensive, rather than aggressive, nature of late Roman warfare
became the norm as early as the last quarter of the second century, when
Marcus Aurelius was forced to fight a series of northern wars in the 170s
against various nomadic barbarian tribes (celebrated in the sculpted reliefs of
his column in Rome, see 37). The movements of the barbarians from Asia
into central and northern Europe, and their attempts to infiltrate the empire
in search of booty or settlement, were a continual factor from the late second

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century. But in the fourth century, the arrival of the Huns at the Danube in 376
exerted a decisive pressure on the tribes settled around the empire’s northern
borders to move west and south. The resulting invasions into the territories of
the Roman state would ultimately overwhelm the empire in the west. In the
first half of the fifth century, the Vandals would take control of North Africa,
the Visigoths would invade Spain, and a series of tribes—not least the Goths
and the Huns—made repeated incursions into Italy (see the map on p. xx).
Against such pressure, it is not surprising that the fabled force of Roman
arms occasionally gave way. Certainly, it is hard to compare Trajan’s spectacu-
lar victories in Dacia and Parthia with the defeat of the emperor Valerian by
the Sassanid successors of the Parthians in ad 260, the fall of the emperor
Valens and the massacre of his army by the Goths at Adrianople in 378, and
the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth in 410 without thinking of decline. Yet
we should remember that in the glory days of the late Republic, Crassus, the
Roman governor of Syria, had suffered a terrible defeat by the Parthians at
Carrhae in 55 bc, while in ad 9, during the later years of Augustus, the general
Varus along with three entire legions had been slaughtered in a battle in the
German forests. One of the great successes of late Roman military policy was
the integration of Romanized (and often Christianized) barbarians not only
into the army, but even into the highest offices of the state—for instance, the
pagan Frankish general Arbogast and the Christian Vandal regent Stilicho,
both of whom held power in the later fourth and early fifth centuries.
The dynamics behind the story of radical change depend especially on the
notion of a third-century crisis between ad 235 and 284, marked by a rapid
turnover of emperors, virtually continual warfare (internal and external), as
well as the collapse of the silver currency and the government’s recourse to
exactions in kind. This crisis has been seen as providing the impetus for the
fundamental military, administrative, financial, and religious reforms under
Diocletian (284–305) and Constantine (306–37). Yet this emphasis—for all its
persuasiveness in charting the passage from antiquity to the ‘Dark Ages’—
may be profoundly misleading. In part, we are dependent on sources, largely
written for and about the imperial court, which inevitably but perhaps
unjustifiably see emperors and other ‘major players’ as the centre and the
motivators of the action. But were the emperors the main agents of change?
Certainly rulers (and their tax collectors) are seldom irrelevant to their subjects,
but they may have bulked far smaller in the daily lives of the empire’s popula-
tions than our sources would like us to imagine. On many of the great estates
and in the empire’s metropolitan centres (especially in the east), it may be that
the primary impression—apart from the news of particular, temporary, crises—
was one of resplendent continuity with the hallowed past. The traditional
patterns of education, the strength of archetypally Roman social rituals (such
as the baths, the amphitheatre, and the banquet), and not least the functions
of the arts themselves, speak of manifold and deep continuities, despite the
apparently objective nature of change.
Change may, in effect, be more our perception, reading the surviving
entrails of the empire from the outside (as it were), than the perception of
those who lived at the time. Many social changes—and not just those that
took place in the period of the Second Sophistic—were imperceptible and
their impact was slow. In the arena of the arts, it is striking that once one has

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eschewed a conventional stylistic account in favour of a thematic analysis of

images according to their social and cultural functions, the evidence points
towards very deep continuities. From the end of the third century, the pat-
terns of patrician patronage, the culture of wealthy villas and their decoration,
the lavish accoutrements of the dinner table, the continuing adornment of
cities with impressive new buildings (especially churches)—all this seems to
have been virtually unaffected by military or economic crisis. Imperial art
continued to propagate all the time-honoured forms of public display
through images—bronze and marble statuary, state reliefs and dedications,
columns and triumphal arches—well into the fifth century. Private art pre-
served the pre-Christian culture of Second Sophistic Hellenism in its visual
narratives and its iconography well beyond the end of the fifth century. Far
from fading into the twilight of the Dark Ages, Roman architecture—whose
most important surviving monument in our period was Hadrian’s Pantheon
in Rome—would continue its exploration of domes, vaults, and space into the
building of Christian churches. The culmination of this process, in the sixth
century, would be perhaps the greatest of all Roman buildings—Justinian’s
monumental church of St Sophia in Constantinople.

The Role of the Visual in Roman Culture

spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsae
Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.99

In several significant ways, the Roman world was a visual culture. It was a
society of public rituals—religious (both pagan sacrifice and the Christian
liturgy), social (for example, the gladiatorial displays, chariot races, and the
animal fights of the amphitheatre), and intellectual (as in the great public
rhetorical debates between sophists, doctors, and other kinds of academics,
sometimes conducted in the presence of the emperor himself ). These rituals
were intensely visual: the audience or congregation went both to watch
and to be seen (as the poet Ovid wrote of women going to the theatre in
his Ars Amatoria). It was a culture whose fictions, in the form of romantic
novels, emphasized the vivid portrayal of other countries, of described pic-
tures, of the processes of looking and being looked at. It was a civilization
which theorized the visual more intensely than at any other time in antiquity—
especially through the literary descriptions (ekphraseis) of works of art,
paintings, and sculptures in writers like Lucian (in the second century), the
elder and younger Philostratus (in the third), and Callistratus (perhaps in
the fourth).
With the vast majority of the empire’s inhabitants illiterate and often
unable to speak the dominant languages of the elite, which were Greek in
the east and Latin in the west, the most direct way of communicating was
through images. People learnt about their emperor—who he was, what he
looked like, the attributes of his power—through his portrait on coins
which circulated on all social levels throughout the empire, in paintings and
in the statues which occupied prime positions not only in civic and public
space, but also in the temples of the centre and the provinces, especially the
temples of the imperial cult. Such images, confronting the empire’s subjects
in every mode of their social, economic, and religious lives, helped to

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construct a symbolic unity out of the diverse peoples who comprised the
Roman world by focusing their sense of hierarchy on a supreme individual.
When an emperor died, his heirs might laud his images as those of a god—
proclaiming a continuity of succession and erecting temples in his honour.
When an emperor was overthrown, his images were often violently eradicated
in a damnatio memoriae, an abolition of his very memory, which informed the
populace graphically and compellingly of the change in political authority
at the top.
However, the role of images in the spread of political information was,
before the coming of Christianity, in many ways dependent on their role in
religion. People knew their gods through the statues which depicted them,
with a statue’s particular attributes in a specific site often marking a local
myth or ritual variation of a more general sacred cult. Ancient polytheism was
not a religion of written scriptures and doctrines, under the structure of a
hierarchical and organized Church. It was an immensely varied series of local
cults, myths, and rites, administered by local communities and often heredi-
tary priesthoods. It was eclectic and diverse, largely pluralist, and tolerant.
Images and myths provided the main forms of ‘theology’ in the ancient
world—giving worshippers the means to recognize and think about their
gods. When pilgrims went to a temple to receive an oracle or a cure through
a dream, for instance, it was through his appearance that they would know
the god, and by the brightness of the deity’s face or the sternness of his
countenance that they would interpret his divine message.
With the coming of Christianity, the role of art in religion changed radically,
though it did not lose its central importance. The Christian God, unlike his
pagan predecessors, was known not through graven images but through a
sacred scripture. That body of texts—not only the Bible in the early period,
but a great range of what are now known as apocrypha, gradually excluded
from the orthodox scriptures, together with a plethora of commentaries
written about the scriptures by various theologians and bishops—was not
accessible at first hand, except to the literate few. The sacred texts had to be
expounded through sermons, heard directly by congregations, and through
images, seen directly by worshippers. The spread of Christianity, not only its
presentation of the ministry of Jesus and his apostles, but the theological
linking of those stories with the Old Testament narratives which were seen as
precursors to the events of the Gospels, was facilitated by, indeed was to some
extent dependent on, images. This was to occasion some concern in the
Church’s hierarchy, since art necessarily simplified, often misinterpreted, and
sometimes falsified the complex tenets of the faith.
On a more social level, it was through public buildings (the baths, the
arena, the marketplace, the gymnasium) that a distinctively Roman way of
life was propagated in the cities of the empire from Asia Minor and Syria
to Spain, from Africa to Gaul. The rituals of cultivated Roman living—of
bathing, of dining, of gladiatorial fighting and animal slaughter in the arena,
of public and private sacrifice—were systematically displayed in the villas and
houses of the elite. The magnificently decorated mosaic floors surviving from
every province and the lavish silverware which adorned the dinner tables of
the wealthy amply attest to the power of images in reinforcing these quintes-
sentially Roman modes of civic life. Art and architecture made possible the

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rituals of Roman daily life, images naturalized the appropriateness of that life
through repeated representation; together those rituals and images formed a
potent means of ‘Romanization’—of bringing the still ethnically, linguisti-
cally, and culturally diverse communities around the Mediterranean into a
single imperial polity. While some of these rituals, notably public sacrifice,
were brought to an end by the coming of Christianity, most—such as the elite
symposium or the games—continued through late antiquity and were
actively propagated by the imperial government in Christian times.
One way to build a coherent cultural background, to bind the peoples of
the empire together, was to emphasize a shared cultural heritage based on the
classical myths and literature of Greece (and to some extent of Rome itself ).
This was a particular achievement of the Second Sophistic, and on the visual
level it is one way to explain the presence of so many mythological represen-
tations of themes like Narcissus, Dido and Aeneas, Meleager and Atalanta.
They formed a loose cultural identity for the citizens of the empire which
could knit together the villa-owner in Britain with his contemporaries in
Antioch, Carthage, or Cyprus. Later, Christianity—as a religion of initiation
and repeated participation in sacred ceremonial and mysteries—would form
a still closer ideological narrative to construct a shared identity and bind
the peoples of the empire together; but even in the first centuries after
Constantine’s conversion, many Christian Romans still asserted their
Hellenic identity by surrounding themselves with the images of the literary
and mythical canon. In a sense, before the advent of Christianity, such myth-
ological images defined the loose combination of the secular and sacred
modes of polytheistic living; after the conversion of Constantine, they came
to define the secular world by contrast with the sacred, Christian, world—
until that secular culture was (after our period) finally all but eliminated.
The bulk of our images come from the milieu of the upper or governing
classes, who could afford the luxury of possessing art, and depict their ways of
life as they wanted to be seen. Art represents the world not as it was, but as
those who paid for or produced it wished the world to be. Slavery, that (to us)
cruel but fundamental pivot of the ancient economy, is depicted in art (see 17,
60, 66) not as it was (from the slave’s viewpoint) but as it was seen (from the
master’s). Women, whose position was central both to social life (whether as
wives or as prostitutes) and to the ancient economy of inheritance, were also
widely depicted—but inevitably from the predominant male point of view.
There is very little by way of an independent female voice in ancient Roman
culture, whether pagan or Christian; but there was always a strong mytho-
logical, imperial, religious, and familial assertion of the normative images of
womanhood in its prime roles as goddess, empress, priestess, and mother.
With the coming of Christianity, many of the forms of normative woman-
hood would change—from wife, priestess, and goddess to holy virgin, martyr,
and above all the Virgin Mother of God.
Finally, just as our images are limited as a portrait of their world by the
ideologies of those who commissioned, made, and viewed them, so our access
to antiquity is limited not just by our own presuppositions, but by the history
of attitudes, archaeology, and taste leading up to us. Many things—often the
prime masterpieces of ancient art—have been lost, whether by neglect, by
deliberate destruction (of a pagan god’s statue by Christians, for instance), or

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by the greed of later owners (as when Pope Urban VIII plundered the bronze
beams of the Pantheon’s portico in the 1620s to provide metal for cannons and
for the altar canopy designed by Bernini for St Peter’s). We necessarily write
our history looking not at antiquity as it was, but at the visual, archaeological,
and literary fragments which survive. Sometimes these are rich, as in the per-
sonal correspondence between Marcus Aurelius and his tutor of rhetoric,
Fronto, or in the surviving imperial sculpture in Rome, and give what appears
to be a precise and accurate picture of the reality (though we should always be
wary of generalizing from too much detail—we have relatively little of
Marcus’ equally prolific correspondence with anyone else); sometimes the
remains are poor, as in the case of ancient painting from our period, and leave
us only the scope for the most sketchy of accounts.

The Changing Nature of Roman Art and the Art-Historical

Problem of Style
This book explores the way art both reflected and helped precipitate the cultural
changes of the Roman world. Moving from a period of political stability to
one of greater uncertainty, from the supreme self-confidence of the imperial
establishment during the Second Sophistic to the religious conversion of late
antiquity, we will observe the functions, forms, and transformations in visual
images—in their uses, their appearance, and their scope. One, perhaps sur-
prising, element in the story—given the tremendous changes in the period—
is how much, especially in the imagery and social functions of art, proclaimed
continuity. The stylistic and thematic eclecticism, the veneration for the
­classical arts of the past, and even many pervasive visual motifs (from the arena
to pagan mythology, from hunting to the illustration of literary themes)—all
these characteristics of second-century art are equally true of the arts of the
Christian fourth and fifth centuries, despite the changes of meaning and
emphasis which some of these motifs underwent.
Usually the story of Roman art in late antiquity is told as the narrative of a
radical transformation in the forms and style of visual images. The period with
which this book opens produced some of the greatest and most influential
masterpieces of naturalistic sculpture which have survived from antiquity.
It was by such magnificent marble statues as the Apollo Belvedere (probably
made in the first third of the second century ad [5]) or the Capitoline Venus
(dating also from the mid-second century) that the Renaissance’s love affair
with naturalism was inspired. The Apollo Belvedere, probably a copy of a
bronze original by Leochares of the fourth century bc, was one of the most
celebrated and influential of all classical sculptures during the Renaissance.
After its discovery (sometime in the later fifteenth century), it found its way
by 1509 into the papal collections, where it remained one of the prize exhibits
in the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican. It was through such images that
the history of the rise of classical naturalism has been written. There were
other supremely skilful variations on and creative copies of great sculptures
made by Greek artists, like Leochares or Praxiteles, in the fifth and fourth
centuries bc. Likewise our period saw the creation of some of the most mag-
nificent ‘baroque’ sculptures of the Roman period—for instance, the Farnese
Hercules (see 114), itself a version of a famous statue by the fourth-century
Greek artist Lysippus, or the Farnese Bull (see 121) (both from the early third

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5 century ad, and found in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome)—spectacular carvings

Marble statue of Apollo, which played with the full scope of naturalistic imagery, extending its limits
from the first half of the to flamboyant and ‘mannerist’ effect.
second century ad, known as
the ‘Apollo Belvedere’.
Yet, by the fourth century ad, the outstanding classical heritage of the arts
Left: The statue as restored which imitated nature and created an impression of lifelike realism began to
in the 1530s, with the be replaced by non-naturalistic modes of representation. For example, com-
addition of the right forearm, pare the roundel of the emperor Hadrian sacrificing to the goddess Diana [6],
the left hand, and the
fig leaf. Such resorations—
originally carved for a public monument in the ad 130s (about the same time
often highly fanciful and as the Apollo Belvedere) and later incorporated in the Arch of Constantine,
sometimes constituting with the bas-relief frieze of the emperor Constantine addressing the Roman
downright forgeries—were people from the rostra in the Roman forum, sculpted for the Arch of
frequent in the antiquities
market of the Renaissance
Constantine nearly 200 years later [7]. Both scenes are symmetrical compos-
and Grand Tour. itions, but note the spatial illusionism of the Hadrianic tondo with its clear
Right: The statue as restored marking of foreground and background figures (Hadrian—whose face was
after the Second World War, later recut—on the viewer’s right-hand side, stands in front of the statue of
with most of the non-antique
Diana with a cloaked attendant behind him to the right). The draperies of the
accretions (except the
fig leaf) removed. Whether figures on the tondo fall naturalistically about their bodies, giving an illusion
the modern concern to of volume and mass, of limbs and space. The plinth of the cult statue, which is
return such marbles to their placed in the open in front of a tree, is itself offset at an angle, giving an impres-
‘authentic’ form constitutes
sion of perspective which is reinforced by the disposition of the figures.
an improvement is, and will
remain, a moot point. By contrast, the Constantinian adlocutio (or address to the populace) has
eschewed all the visual conventions of illusionistic space and perspectival
naturalism so elegantly embodied by the roundel. Background is indicated

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6
One of eight marble roundels
depicting Hadrian hunting,
executed in the 130s and
subsequently incorporated
into the Arch of Constantine.
The series of eight combines
a celebration of hunting
(an activity for which
Hadrian was famous) with a
focus on piety and the
careful rendering of a rustic
setting. Four of the eight
scenes depict the act of
sacrifice at an altar before
the statue of a deity. In this
relief (from the south side of
the Arch of Constantine),
Hadrian, the first figure on
the right-hand side, pours a
libation to the goddess Diana.

simply by placing a row of equal-sized heads above the foreground figures,

who stand in a line with little hint of naturalistic poise or posture. Draperies,
far from exposing the forms of the bodies beneath them, are rendered as drill
lines incised into the flat surface: they stand as a sign for clothing but they
neither imitate real dress nor emphasize the physical volumes of the bodies
they clothe. There is no sense of perspective, just a flat surface with the most
important figures clustered on the raised podium around the emperor, who
stands beneath two banners at the centre. In the Hadrianic tondo, the statue
is obviously a statue—differentiated in scale from the other figures and placed
on a plinth. By contrast, the two seated figures to either side of the rostra in
the adlocutio relief are not obviously different from the other figures, yet they
represent not human figures but statues of Constantine’s deified predecessors,
Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. The fact that the three highest figures in the
relief are Constantine (had his head survived) and the two deceased emperors
works to make the political point that Constantine is their successor, even
their embodiment. Both reliefs were displayed together as part of the same
monument during the Constantinian period (and thereafter), as the
Hadrianic tondo was incorporated into the decoration of the Arch of
Constantine in Rome. The tondo (one of eight), with Hadrian’s head recut to
resemble Constantine or his father Constantius Chlorus, as well as other

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7 sculptures from monuments of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, became part of a

Adlocutio relief, c.315, from complex visual politics designed to legitimate Constantine in relation to the
the Arch of Constantine, great emperors of the second century.
showing the emperor
addressing the people.
The arts of the late third and the fourth centuries—not only political
This image is famous for its images like those on the Arch of Constantine, but also (perhaps especially)
intimations of late antique the sacred arts—were the crucible in which the more ‘abstract’ forms of
style, including centralizing medieval image-making were created. The great variety in the visual forms
symmetry, the frontality of
the emperor, the stacking of
of the arts in late antiquity make our period simultaneously the ancestor of
figures, and the elimination medieval and Byzantine art on the one hand, and of the Renaissance (which
of illusionism in depicting replaced and rejected medieval styles of image-making) on the other. Indeed,
space. The setting is the the juxtaposition of styles in the reliefs of the Arch of Constantine proved a
Roman forum. Constantine
speaks from the rostra.
principal basis for the Renaissance’s formulation of artistic ‘decline’ in late
Behind are the five columns antiquity in the writings of Raphael and Vasari. One of our difficulties as
of Diocletian’s decennial students of the period is that we approach it, inevitably, with preconceptions
monument, of ad 303, formulated by the kinds of more recent art we ourselves may enjoy: medieval
crowned with statues of the
four tetrarchs and Jupiter in
‘symbolism’, Renaissance and post-Renaissance ‘naturalism’, modernist
the centre (beneath whom ‘abstraction’ and ‘expressionism’, post-modernist ‘eclecticism’. One of the
Constantine stands). riches of the Roman imperial art explored here is that, not only did it have
To the right is the Arch of
elements of all these qualities, but it is in many ways their direct ancestor.
Septimius Severus (erected
in 203); to the left, the The stylistic challenge of the juxtapositions of the reliefs on the Arch of
arcades of the Basilica Julia Constantine has led scholars in a search through the history of Roman art
and the single bay of the to explain how and when the classical conventions governing representa-
Arch of Tiberius, both
tions like the Hadrianic tondo gave way to the proto-medievalism of the
now lost.
Constantinian frieze. In many ways the history of late Roman art has become
a quest for the first moment of decline. Among the candidates have been
the arts of the Severan period (193–235), those of the Antonine dynasty
(in particular, reliefs and sarcophagi from the reigns of Marcus Aurelius, 161–80,
and Commodus, 180–92), and even earlier art from the lower classes, like the
remarkable Trajanic circus relief from Ostia (see 14). The overwhelming bur-
den of this stylistic story has been a narrative of incremental decline, leading
to radical change. It has married perfectly with the traditional and

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oversimplified historical picture of crisis in the third century followed by the

end of classical antiquity and the onset of the Christian middle ages. Both
history and art history have insisted on change, and both have seen formal
structure (whether the stylistic forms of images or the administrative order-
ing of the empire) as responses to a social and stylistic crisis.
However, to examine the visual material with such a strong emphasis on
stylistic change has led to a number of errors, or at least exaggerations. First,
the transformation from the illusionistic arts of the second century (and
before) to the symbolic arts of late antiquity has invariably been represented
as ‘decline’: decline from the hard-won naturalism of Greek classicism into
hierarchic images that no longer imitate what they represent but rather gesture
towards their meaning as signs or symbols; decline from the elegant illusion-
istic evocation of space and perspective in the Hadrianic tondi to the flat
surfaces, the stacked, ill-proportioned, and schematically realized figures of
the Constantinian friezes. Yet ‘decline’ is a modern value judgement (spe-
cifically a post-Renaissance posture) revealing a particular strand of modern
prejudice (or ‘taste’)—it certainly does not reflect how the Roman world saw
its image-making at the time. On the contrary, the designers of the Arch of
Constantine appear to have been quite happy to juxtapose images which are
stylistically contrasting, even jarring, to modern eyes. Second, while it is true
that the Constantinian adlocutio relief was an affirmation of a hierarchical
and ritualized vision of empire (looking back in visual terms beyond the
relatively abstract arts of the tetrarchs as far as the frontal portrayals of
the emperor on the column of Marcus Aurelius and in Severan times, see 23),
it is impossible to demonstrate that any apparent break in visual forms was
dependent on any simple or wholesale change in social structures. True, the
whole period from the later second century to the fifth was one in which very
profound changes took place; but it was a slow and incremental process
lasting several centuries.
Third, the selection of objects for stylistic comparison is always dangerously
arbitrary. Had the designers of the Arch of Constantine chosen a different

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8 series of second- and fourth-century objects for their juxtapositions, the

Marble pedestal of the Arch would have occasioned far less scandal in later centuries. Take, for
Column of Antoninus Pius, instance, one of the two decursio scenes from the base of the column dedicated
erected in his memory in
Rome in ad 161.
by the co-emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus in ad 161 to the
The four faces of the memory of their deified predecessor Antoninus Pius [8]. Although its small
pedestal show a scene of figures are rendered realistically enough, this sculpture—which represents
imperial apotheosis [13], one of the rituals at Antoninus’ funeral and deification—ignores the classi-
two virtually identical
images of the funerary
cizing illusions of perspective and space characteristic of most contemporary
decursio ceremony (one of sculpture in order to give a rather more schematic rendering of a sacred
which is shown here), and ceremony. The galloping figures and the standard-bearers around whom the
a dedicatory inscription. horsemen ride are seen, as a composition, from above (a bird’s eye view, as it
The decursio scenes
represent a ritual of circling
were), but each figure is carved as if we were looking at it from ground level.
by mounted cavalry of a The sense of encirclement is achieved, not by illusionism, but by the stacking
group of praetorians with of rows of figures. There is a fundamental discrepancy (from the naturalistic
two carrying military point of view) between the compositional arrangement—which demands
standards in the centre.
that we be shown only the tops of the riders’ heads, since we are looking down
from a height—and the depiction of the figures, which would suggest that all
three rows should be shown in a single plane. Compare this scene with the
fourth-century porphyry sarcophagus of St Helena, mother of Constantine,
discovered in the remains of her mausoleum in Rome and depicting the
triumph of Roman soldiers over barbarians [9]. Despite the fact that it was
much restored in the eighteenth century, the sculpture of this object—with
its realistic figures but non-illusionistic spatial and perspectival field—is
close to the spirit of the Antonine column base. Even the military subject

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9
Porphyry sarcophagus of
Helena, from her mausoleum
on the Via Labicana in
Rome, c. ad 325.
Despite its use to house the
remains of Constantine’s
sainted mother (died c. 329),
whose pilgrimage to the Holy
Land in 327 led by the end
of the fourth century to the
legend that she had
discovered the True Cross on
which Christ had been
crucified, this sarcophagus
displays no overtly Christian
decoration. Its military
subject matter, showing
Romans in triumph over
barbarians, suggests it may
originally have been
intended for a male member
of the imperial house.

matter and the penchant for stacking rows of figures against an undeter-
mined background is similar in both sculptures. Had carvings like these been
juxtaposed on the Arch of Constantine, we might never have imagined them
to be over 150 years apart. Beside other, much more coherently naturalistic,
Antonine works—including the famous relief of imperial apotheosis carved
for the very same column base from the very same block of stone possibly by
the very same artists (see 13)—the decursio panel looks decidedly out of place,
if one uses purely stylistic critera for judgement. Beside the adlocutio relief of
the Arch of Constantine, the sarcophagus of Helena looks intensely classicizing.
Clearly there was a great deal more stylistic variation within the arts of any
particular moment in our period—even in objects produced specifically for
the imperial centre at Rome—than any straightforward stylistic comparisons
of single objects will allow.
Another approach to the arts of late antiquity—that espoused traditionally
by historians of early Christian and Byzantine art—has been to see them
teleologically, with the visual changes as part of a wider cultural process which
led naturally to the triumph of Christianity and Christian art. To some extent,
of course, this is valid as a retrospective way of looking at the material: by
(say) the eighth century ad pretty well all pagan themes and naturalistic
forms had been extirpated from the canon of visual production. However, the
triumph of Christianity (indeed, even its very theological definition) was too
haphazard and uncertain, at least in the fourth century, for any attempt

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10
Gold-glass medallion,
perhaps from Alexandria,
dated anywhere between the
early third and the mid-fifth
centuries ad.
This family group of a
mother, in a richly
embroidered robe and
jewels, with her son and
daughter, bears the
inscription BOUNNERI
KERAMI. This may be an
artist’s signature or the name
of the family represented.

to eradicate classicism. Indeed, well beyond our period—into the sixth and
seventh centuries—there was a flourishing production of pagan imagery and
naturalistic styles on the textiles and silverware used not only by isolated
pagan groups in the peripheries of the empire, but even by the imperial
Christian court at Constantinople. Also, as we shall see, it was not just
Christian art, but also the arts of other mystical or initiate sects in the period
before Constantine’s legalization of Christianity which encouraged increasing
(non-naturalistic) symbolism; and it was pre-Christian imperial art—the art
of the tetrarchic emperors of the late third century ad—which imposed the
first systematically simplified and schematized forms on the visual propaganda
of the Roman world.
My own approach in this book, signalled by choosing the dates with which
it starts and ends, is twofold. First, I reject the notion of decline. There are
obvious changes between ad 100 and 450 in the styles and techniques used for
art, as well as in the kinds of objects produced (for example, late antiquity saw
a rise and rapid development in the art of high-quality ivory carving). But
there are also profound continuities between the visual productions of the
pagan and Christian empires, as the following chapters will show. Take, for
example, the beautiful gold-glass medallion from Brescia, which could have
been made at any point in our period—its transfixing naturalism gestures
towards the second century, while its technique is more typical of objects
from the fourth [10]. Perhaps from Alexandria, since its inscription is in the
Alexandrian dialect of Greek, it probably found its way early to Italy—at
any rate, it was incorporated there in the seventh century in a ceremonial,
jewelled cross. Whenever it was made, and for the duration of its use in
antiquity, the imagery of this gem speaks of the continuity and values of
family life, of the wealth and patronage of aristocratic elites, of the high value
placed on exquisite workmanship from the second century to the fifth.
Second, I have ignored the historiographic divide (virtually a wall of non-
communication) between those who write about ‘late antique art’ from the
point of view of the classical heritage and those who write about ‘early
Christian art’ from the stance of its medieval and Byzantine inheritance.
While the dichotomy is understandable—given the different trainings and
expectations with which its upholders were educated—it is, quite simply,

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false. There was a multiplicity of cultures in the world of the later Roman
empire which—far from being exclusive—saw themselves (especially after
the legalization of Christianity) as part of a single political entity. The arts of
that world were inextricably interrelated. If I have one overriding aim, it is to
show how early Christian art was fully part of late antiquity, how—for all its
special features—it developed out of, and reacted to, the public and private,
religious and secular, visual culture of the later Roman empire.

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Part I
Images and Power
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A Visual Culture

2
Only very rarely does art function as a documentary description of an actual
event (although much of the specialist literature on Roman art is concerned
with inferring such events from works of art on the grounds that images may
be documentary). Whether one looks at images in the most public of official
contexts, like imperial ceremonial, or in the more private—at least, the less
official—spheres of daily life, in neither case are we concerned with accurate
records of actuality. Rather, art in both the public and private spheres serves as
a way of celebrating familiar institutions or rituals—whether these be visiting
the baths or the circus in the context of ordinary Romans’ lives or the great
ceremonies of largitio, adventus, and so forth in the diary of imperial activity.
The representation of such rituals helped to elevate these activities from
repeated mundane actions into better performances constitutive of what it
meant to be a citizen of the Roman empire. The rituals of Roman life—­
perhaps even more in the private than in the public sphere—served, more than
any other factor, to define what it was to be quintessentially Roman. To be a
Roman was to do the kinds of things repeatedly represented in Roman art: to
dine in a particular manner, to make sacrifice, to go to the baths, the arena, and
the amphitheatre, to participate as an audience in the official ceremonial
events in one’s city over which the emperor, or his representative, presided.
The rituals, institutions, and activities in which images were used, or
which works of art memorialized, relate to a specific yet dynamic space in
cultural experience. They helped to establish—indeed to construct—the
identities of Roman citizens on all social levels from emperors to freedmen,
from wealthy benefactors to slave girls, in what might be called the space
between self and the world. Even in the private house, certain areas were less
than ‘private’ in our sense of the word: areas which were open to the view and
even the entry of guests (some perhaps uninvited) and clients. 1 In such
­‘private’ areas, many of the most fundamental Roman social rituals—sacrificial
libation, salutation of a patron by his clients, the entertainment of chosen
guests at the dinner table—took place.
The visual arts as a means of defining identity filled (in many ways, ­created)
the social environment in which Romans lived—from some (if not all) the
rooms of their houses to the public spaces of urban life. This was particularly
the case in the cities, but was also true of the rural villas and retreats favoured
by the elite. In the public and visual space between self and the world, images
not only helped to establish the terms on which a collective social identity
and subjectivity might be defined. They were also used to announce some-
Detail of 11 one’s status within that system, to negotiate issues of ethnicity, class, and

25
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

gender, to promote a person or family or group (even a city) beyond local con-
fines into the broader cultural ambience of the Roman empire.
Despite some significant changes over the period which this book covers,
a focus on the presence of images in Roman culture indicates great continui-
ties. The style of imperial ceremonial (and its representations) may have
changed between ad 100 and 450, but the basic ceremonies and the basic
rationale behind them (of providing a format where the emperor might be
seen by his people) remained remarkably similar. Likewise, in the private
sphere, aristocratic Romans continued most of the rituals of daily life from
the pagan period into the Christian era, with particular exceptions of course
in the realm of religion. But where private libations may have largely given
way to going to church by the fifth century, the games and chariot racing
(for example) continued to enjoy unabated popularity in the cities, despite
some severe condemnation of such frivolities from the Church Fathers. It
is these fundamental continuities of identity, ritual activity, and social
meaning that an overzealous concentration on stylistic and cultural change
tends to obscure.

Art in State Ceremonial

The official ceremonials of Roman culture were spectacular. They employed
works of art—statues, lavishly embroidered robes, painted banners—not
simply as decoration, but also as an essential ingredient of the action. Art
could be used to evoke the grandeur of the imperial past, the glorious extent
of the empire in the present, the dignity of the great Roman institutions. One
striking feature of continuity from the pagan Roman empire of Augustus and
his successors to the Christian empire of Constantine and Theodosius the
Great was an emphasis on state ceremonial and grandiose ritual as a way of
defining hierarchy and monarchic power. We cannot understand the official
art of the Roman state—its most public monuments and celebrations of the
emperor—without due regard to the significance of this art as perhaps the
prime factor in creating the aura of an august imperial presence.
In this section, I use a number of contemporary and first-hand accounts to
evoke the pervasiveness of the visual in the culture of the Roman state. Take
the remarkable description of the apotheosis of the emperor Pertinax in
ad 193, written by a participant in the event, the Roman senator and historian,
Cassius Dio:
Upon establishing himself in power, Septimius Severus erected a shrine to Pertinax, and
commanded that his name should be mentioned at the close of all prayers and all oaths; he
also ordered that a golden image of Pertinax be carried into the Circus on a car drawn by
elephants, and that three gilded thrones be borne into the other amphitheatres in his
­honour. His funeral, in spite of the time that had elapsed since his death, was carried out
as follows. In the Roman Forum a wooden platform was constructed hard by the marble
rostra, upon which was set a shrine, without walls, but surrounded by columns, cunningly
wrought of ivory and gold. In it there was placed a bier of the same materials, surrounded
by heads of both land and sea animals and adorned with coverlets of purple and gold. Upon
this rested the effigy of Pertinax in wax, laid out in triumphal garb; and a comely youth
was keeping the flies away from it with peacock feathers, as though it were really a person
sleeping. While the body lay there in state, Severus as well as we senators and our wives
approached, wearing mourning; the women sat in the porticoes, and we men under the
open sky. After this there moved past, first, images of all the famous Romans of old, then

26 A Visual Culture
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/01/18, SPi

choruses of boys and men, singing a dirge-like hymn to Pertinax; there followed all the
subject nations, represented by bronze figures attired in native dress, and the guilds of the
City itself—those of the lictors, the scribes, the heralds, and all the rest. Then came images
of other men who had been distinguished for some exploit, or invention or manner of life.
Behind these were the cavalry and infantry in armour, the race-horses, and all the funeral
offerings that the emperor and we (senators) and our wives, the more distinguished knights,
and communities, and the corporations of the City, had sent. Following them came an altar
gilded all over and adorned with ivory and gems of India. … At the Campus Martius a pyre
had been built in the form of a tower having three stories and adorned with ivory and gold
as well as a number of statues, while on its summit was placed a gilded chariot in which
Pertinax used to drive. Inside this pyre funeral offerings were cast and the bier was placed
in it, and then Severus and the relatives of Pertinax kissed the effigy. The emperor then
ascended a tribunal while we, the senate, except the magistrates, took our places on wooden
stands in order to view the ceremonies both safely and conveniently. The magistrates and
equestrian order, arrayed in a manner befitting their station, and likewise the cavalry and
the infantry, passed in and out around the pyre performing intricate evolutions, both those
of peace and those of war. At last the consuls applied fire to the structure, and when this had
been done, an eagle flew aloft from it. Thus was Pertinax made immortal.2

This is a rare, if perhaps slightly ironic, account of one of the great official cer-
emonies of the Roman state, the apotheosis of a deceased emperor. For the art
historian, what is immediately striking are the number of images which per-
form key functions in the rituals—giving the whole ceremony a potent visual
force to which Dio was sensitive. From the procession of a golden image of the
dead emperor into the Circus Maximus and the use of a splendidly attired wax
effigy of Pertinax ‘as if it were really a person sleeping’ to the statues represent-
ing the famous Romans of the past, the images of distinguished men, and the
bronzes signifying the provinces, the whole ritual is composed of works of art.
The Roman state, in its present geographic extent (through the bronze figures
of the provinces) and in its past as personified by the portraits of great men,
comes to be visually evoked and embodied by images. Dio repeatedly empha-
sizes the sumptuous materials and colours: ivory and gold were the traditional
materials of cult statues and thus very suited to an event in which a man will be
turned into a god; purple and gold were the imperial colours.
Of course, this is not in any sense a text about images. Its very significance
comes from the fact that Dio has no particular interest in art for its own sake; he
just gives it its proper place in the complex and impressive dynamics of imperial
ceremonial. Images do not simply decorate the activities; rather, they constitute
a central part of the ritual. Crucially, Pertinax himself can only exist through his
representations—whether as wax effigy or golden statue (as later, he would be
present as a god in a series of divine statues). But the Roman state as a meaning-
ful and historical institution—its glorious men of the past and its conquered
provinces—is also made present through images, as well as through the assem-
bled orders of senators, knights, cavalry, infantry, guilds, and City corporations.
Images are thus not merely passive representations or adornments. They are
active. They are paraded, displayed, and even burnt in a fire which will trans-
form the wax effigy of Pertinax into the living presence of a deity—as well as
consuming the pyre with its statues and the emperor’s gilded chariot.
Art too could capture the splendour of this kind of ceremony. A late
antique ivory now in the British Museum, the right-hand leaf of a diptych,
depicts an apotheosis with striking similarities to Dio’s description [11]. The

Art in State Ceremonial 27

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 Her right ear, that is filled with dust,
Hears little of the false or just

now, and if she is gone to the happy hunting grounds, so much the
better for her, dear old pet.”
We had our sorrows; clouds sometimes seemed to darken our
horizon; and we would speak together in whispers of some family
grief which was not wholly understood by us, or of certain things in
the world which seemed to us even then to be not as they should
be. We had a handsome brother, John, who used to entertain us in a
gentle way with stories of the sea, which we loved to hear; and who
on one occasion returned home with his pockets filled with young
tortoises for us. He died at sea. We were awed by the grief of our
father and mother. We reminded each other of Mrs. Hemans’ Graves
of a Household—
He lies where pearls lie deep;
He was the loved of all, yet none
O’er his low bed may weep.

Later our eldest sister married and went out to China. Her letters
from the Far East were read aloud in the family, and our curiosity
and interest were immensely stirred by her descriptions of that
country, of storms at sea, of the customs and ways of the people, of
her visit to the house of a great Mandarin, &c. China seemed then
much farther away than it seems now.
Living in the country, far from any town, and, if I may say so, in the
pre-educational era (for women at least), we had none of the
advantages which girls of the present day have. But we owed much
to our dear mother, who was very firm in requiring from us that
whatever we did should be thoroughly done, and that in taking up
any study we should aim at becoming as perfect as we could in it
without external aid. This was a moral discipline which perhaps
compensated in value for the lack of a great store of knowledge. She
would assemble us daily for the reading aloud of some solid book,
and by a kind of examination following the reading assured herself
that we had mastered the subject. She urged us to aim at
excellence, if not perfection, in at least one thing.
Our father’s connection with great public movements of the day—the
first Reform Bill, the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery, and
the Free Trade movement—gave us very early an interest in public
questions and in the history of our country.
For two years my sister and I were together at a school in
Newcastle. My sister did not love study, and confessed she “hated
lessons.” The lady at the head of the school regretted this. She was
not a good disciplinarian, and gave us much liberty, which we
appreciated, but she had a large heart and ready sympathy. In spite
of the imperfectly learned lessons, she discerned in my sister some
rare gifts—a spark of genius (a word which would have been
strongly deprecated by my sister as applied to herself); and used
furtively to gather up and preserve (we discovered afterwards)
scraps of original writings of my sister, and copy books full of quaint
pen-and-ink drawings. She also appropriated, and would privately
show to friends, a book, a History of the Italian Republics, on the
margins of which throughout my sister had illustrated that history in
a most original and humorous manner.

The following extract from one of Josephine Butler’s last letters,

written to friends in Switzerland in 1905, tells how her “travail of
soul” on behalf of oppressed womanhood began at an early age
when she was only seventeen.

My father was a man with a deeply rooted, fiery hatred of all

injustice. The love of justice was a passion with him. Probably I have
inherited from him this passion. My dear mother felt with him, and
seconded all his efforts. When my father spoke to us, his children, of
the great wrong of slavery, I have felt his powerful frame tremble
and his voice would break. You can believe, that at that time sad
and tragical recitals came to us from first sources of the hideous
wrong inflicted on negro men and women. I say women, for I think
their lot was particularly horrible, for they were almost invariably
forced to minister to the worst passions of their masters, or be
persecuted and die. I recollect the story of a negro woman who had
four sons, the sons of her master. The three eldest were sold by the
father in childhood for good prices, and the mother never knew their
fate. She had one left, the youngest, her treasure. Her master, in a
fit of passion, one day shot this boy dead. The mother crawled
under a ruined shed of wood, and with her face to the earth she
prayed that she might die. But first she prayed, for she was a
Christian, that she might be able to forgive her cruel master. The
words, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you,” sounded in
her heart; and she cried to heaven, “Jesus, help me to forgive!” And
so she died, her poor heart broken. I remember how these things
combined to break my young heart, and how keenly they awakened
my feelings concerning injustice to women through this conspiracy
of greed of gold and lust of the flesh, a conspiracy which has its
counterpart in the white slave owning in Europe.
Something of her struggles at this period is shown in the following
memories, recorded in 1900.

My early home was far from cities, with parents who taught by their
lives what true men and women should be. Few “priests or pastors”
ever came our way. Two miles from our home was the parish church,
to which we trudged dutifully every Sunday, and where an honest
man in the pulpit taught us loyally all that he probably himself knew
about God, but whose words did not even touch the fringe of my
soul’s deep discontent.
It was my lot from my earliest years to be haunted by the problems
which more or less present themselves to every thoughtful mind.
Year after year this haunting became more tyrannous. The world
appeared to me to be out of joint. A strange intuition was given to
me whereby I saw as in a vision, before I had seen any of them with
my bodily eyes, some of the saddest miseries of earth, the
injustices, the inequalities, the cruelties practised by man on man,
by man on woman.
For one long year of darkness the trouble of heart and brain urged
me to lay all this at the door of the God, whose name I had learned
was Love. I dreaded Him—I fled from Him—until grace was given
me to arise and wrestle, as Jacob did, with the mysterious Presence,
who must either slay or pronounce deliverance. And then the great
questioning again went up from earth to heaven, “God! Who art
Thou? Where art Thou? Why is it thus with the creatures of Thy
hand?” I fought the battle alone, in deep recesses of the beautiful
woods and pine forests around our home, or on some lonely hillside,
among wild thyme and heather, a silent temple where the only
sounds were the plaintive cry of the curlew, or the hum of a summer
bee, or the distant bleating of sheep. For hours and days and weeks
in these retreats I sought the answer to my soul’s trouble and the
solution of its dark questionings. Looking back, it seems to me the
end must have been defeat and death had not the Saviour imparted
to the child wrestler something of the virtue of His own midnight
agony, when in Gethsemane His sweat fell like great drops of blood
to the ground.
It was not a speedy or an easy victory. Later the conflict was
renewed, as there dawned upon me the realities of those earthly
miseries which I had realised only in a measure by intuition; but
later still came the outward and active conflict, with, thanks be to
God, the light and hope and guidance which He never denies to
them who seek and ask and knock, and which become for them as
“an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast.”
Looking my Liberator in the face, can my friends wonder that I have
taken my place, (I took it long ago)—oh! with what infinite
contentment!—by the side of her, the “woman in the city which was
a sinner,” of whom He, her Liberator and mine, said, as He can also
say of me, “this woman hath not ceased to kiss My feet.”
 CHAPTER II.
OXFORD.

No record of Josephine Butler’s life would be at all true or

complete which did not include some account of her husband.
His strong and gentle spirit greatly influenced and aided her in
all her public work, not only with whole-hearted sympathy, but
with active co-operation whenever he had leisure from his other
duties. The following pages are taken from her Recollections of
George Butler.

In visiting some great picture gallery, and passing along amidst

portraits innumerable of great men—of kings, statesmen,
discoverers, authors or poets—I have sometimes been attracted
above all by a portrait without a name, or without the interest
attaching to it of any recorded great exploit, but which, nevertheless
interests for its own sake. Something looks forth from those eyes—
something of purity, of sincerity, of goodness—which draws the
beholder to go back again and again to that portrait, and which
gives it a lasting place in the memory long after many other
likenesses of earth’s heroes are more or less forgotten. It is
somewhat in this way that I think of a memorial or written likeness
of George Butler, if it can but be presented with a simplicity and
fidelity worthy of its subject. His character—his singlemindedness,
purity, truth, and firmness of attachment to those whom he loved—
seem to me worthy to be recorded and to be had in remembrance.
M. Fallot, in the Revue du Christianisme Pratique, sketches in a few
words the character of the revered teacher of his youth, Christophe
Dieterlin, whose mortal remains rest beneath the hallowed soil of the
Ban de la Roche, in the Vosges, surmounted by a rock of mountain
granite—a suitable monument for such a man. When his pupil
questioned him concerning prayer, he replied: “The Lord’s Prayer is
in general sufficient for me. When praying in these words, all my
personal preoccupations become mingled with and lost in the great
needs and desires of the whole human race.” “He was a Christian,”
says M. Fallot, ”hors cadre, refractory to all classification, living
outside all parties,” a child of Nature and a son of God. These words
might with truth be applied to the character of George Butler. It
would be difficult to assign him a definite place in any category of
persons or parties. He stands apart, hors cadre, in his gentleness
and simplicity, and in a certain sturdy and immovable independence
of character.
George Butler was born at Harrow on the 11th of June, 1819. He
was the eldest son of a family of ten—four brothers and six sisters.
Nothing very remarkable in the way of hard study or distinction can
be recorded of him during his school career. When questioned in
later life concerning any excellency he attained there, he would
answer, reflectively, that he was considered to be extremely good at
“shying” stones. He could hit or knock over certain high-up and
difficult chimney-pots with wonderful precision, to the envy of other
mischievous boys, and I suppose to the annoyance of the owners of
the chimney-pots. His father, the Dean of Peterborough, wrote to me
in 1852: “Your references to George’s early days make me feel quite
young again. He certainly was a nice-looking boy, and had a pretty
head of hair; at least I thought so, and the remembrance of those
nursery days is pleasant to me. But oh! those early experiments in
the science of projectiles upon the chimney-pots of the Harrovian
neighbours—why remind me of them, unless you are yourself
possessed of the same spirit of mischief?”
But school life was not all play for George Butler. He showed an early
aptitude for scholarship, gaining among several prizes that for Greek
Iambics. In the autumn of 1838 George went up to Trinity College,
Cambridge. During the year he spent at Cambridge the sense of
duty and of responsibility for the use of opportunities and gifts which
he possessed lay dormant within him. Those who loved him best
often thanked God, however, as he did himself in later life, that he
had escaped the contamination of certain influences which leave a
stain upon the soul, and sometimes tend to give a serious warp to
the judgment of a man in regard to moral questions. A remarkable
native purity of mind, and a loyal and reverent feeling towards
women, saved him from associations and actions which, had he ever
yielded to them, would have been a bitter memory to such a man as
he was. In the interval between leaving Cambridge and going to
Oxford he spent several months in the house of Mr. Augustus Short
(afterwards Bishop of Adelaide). It was while under his roof that he
imbibed a true love of work, and learned the enjoyment of
overcoming difficulties, and of a steady effort, without pause,
towards a definite goal.
One of his life-long and most valued friends, the Rev. Cowley
Powles, writes: “It was, I think, in 1841 that Butler got the Hertford
Scholarship. I remember meeting him just after his success had
been announced. I was coming back from a ride, and he stopped me
and said: ‘I have got the Hertford.’ The announcement was made in
his quietest voice, and with no elation of manner, though his
countenance showed how much he was pleased. Never was there a
man with less brag about him.” In 1843 George Butler took his
degree, having obtained a first class. He kept up his connection very
closely with Oxford for four years, making use of the time for various
studies, and taking pupils or reading parties during the long
vacations. In 1848 he was appointed to a Tutorship at the University
of Durham, which he retained for a little more than two years. It was
during the latter part of his residence there that I first made his
acquaintance.
The following, written after our engagement, shows his extreme
honesty of character, while it indicates in some faint degree his just
and unselfish view of what the marriage relation should be; namely,
a perfectly equal union, with absolute freedom on both sides for
personal initiative in thought and action and for individual
development.
“I do not ask you to write oftener. I would have you follow the
dictates of your own heart in this; but be always certain that
whatever comes from you is thrice welcome. I write because I feel it
to be necessary to my happiness. I have lately written to you out of
the fulness of my heart, when my soul was deeply moved to strive
after a higher life. But often my letters will be about trifling matters,
so that you may be tempted to say, ‘Why write at all?’ Yet, after all,
life is largely made up of trifles. Moreover, I do not wish to invest
myself in borrowed plumes. I do not want you to find out later that I
am much like other people, perhaps even more commonplace than
most. I would rather your eyes were opened at once. I cannot
reproach myself with ever having assumed a character not my own
to you or to anyone. Such impostures are always too deeply
purchased by the loss of self-respect. But I fear that you may have
formed too high an estimate of my character—one to which I can
never come up; and for your sake I would wish to remove every veil
and obstacle which might prevent your seeing me just as I am. If I
were only to write to you when my better feelings were wrought
upon, you might think me much better than I am, so I will write to
you on every subject and in every mood. Those lines which I sent to
you gave no exaggerated picture. I have often felt in a very different
spirit to that in which we should say ‘Our Father.’ The praying for
particular blessings, which is enjoined by the words of the Lord
Jesus, ‘Ask, and ye shall receive,’ has appeared to me at times as
derogatory to the omniscient and all-provident character of God. Can
He, I have thought, alter the smallest of His dispensations at the
request of such a weak and insignificant being as I am? This vain
philosophy, the offspring of intellectual pride, has had more to do
with blighting my faith than wilful sin or the world’s breath! But
though I have ‘wandered out of the way in the wilderness,’ I do not
despair of taking possession of the promised land. You say you can
do so little for me. Will it be little, Josephine, if, urged by your
encouragement and example, I put off the works of darkness and
put on the armour of light? Blessings from the Giver of all blessings
fall upon you for the joy you have given to me, for the new life to
which you have called me! I should think it undue presumption in
me to suggest anything to you in regard to your life and duties. He
who has hitherto guided your steps will continue to do so. Believe
me, I value the expression of your confidence and affection above
‘pearls and precious stones’; but I must not suffer myself to be
dazzled, or to fancy that I have within me that power of judging and
acting aright which would alone authorise me to point out to you any
path in which you ought to walk. I am more content to leave you to
walk by yourself in the path you shall choose; but I know that I do
not leave you alone and unsupported, for His arm will guide,
strengthen and protect you. I only pray, then, that you may be more
and more conformed to the image of Him who set us a perfect
example, and that He will dispose my heart to love and admire most
those things in you which are most admirable and lovely.”
During the years 1848-49 the Dean of Peterborough frequently
wrote to his son expressing his desire to see him turning his mind
towards the ministry—hoping that he would decide on taking orders.
The Dean was sincerely convinced that there was nothing which
ought to make his son hesitate to take so serious a step, and that
the duties of a clergyman would have a beneficial effect on his
character, tending to his highest good and happiness. That, however,
was far from being his son’s view of the matter. While appreciating
his father’s motives in urging him in this direction, and replying in
general terms with a gentle courtesy, he seems to have felt
convinced that it was impossible for him to follow his advice in the
matter. Finally he wrote: “I thank you, my dear father, for your
welcome letter. I think I have already told you that I have no internal
call to, nor inclination for, the Church. On the contrary, I should feel I
was guilty of a wrong action if I embarked in any work or profession
for neither the theoretical nor the practical part of which I had any
taste. And if this be true of ordinary professions, is it not so in a
tenfold degree in the case of the Church? I feel at present no
attraction towards the study of dogmatical theology, or any branch
of study in which a clergyman should be versed; and I cannot get
over the scruples I have against such a step as you advise. I am at
present engaged, usefully I hope, in a place of Christian education,
closely connected with a cathedral church, with abundant
opportunities of adding to my stock of knowledge in various
subjects, as well as of imparting to others what I know. I do not see,
at present, any necessity for planning any change in my mode of
life.”
How was it then, it may be asked, that he did actually elect to
become a clergyman some six years later? The answer is, he had
gradually become convinced that the work of his life was to be
educational, and the desire arose in his mind to be able to stand
towards the younger men or boys who should come under his care
in the position of their pastor as well as their teacher. He weighed
the matter gravely for a long time before becoming a clergyman; but
after having taken the step, he never repented of having done so. To
the end of his life, however, his character continued to be essentially
that of a layman. In 1851 he wrote:—
“You know that I don’t like parsons; but that is not to the point. If I
should ever take orders, I don’t mean to be a mere parson; for if I
were like some of them whom I know I should cease to be a man. I
shall never wear straight waistcoats, long coats and stiff collars! I
think all dressing up and official manner are an affectation; while
great strictness in outward observances interferes with the devotion
of the heart; and though it may indicate a pious spirit—and therefore
deserves our respect—it shows, as I think, a misconception of the
relation in which we stand to God, and of the duties we owe to man.
It seems to me, after all, that being a good clergyman is much the
same thing as being a good man. I have a longing to be of use, and
I know of no line in which I can be more useful than the
educational, my whole life having been turned more or less in this
direction. It is a blessed office that of a teacher. With all its troubles
and heart-wearyings and disappointments, yet it is full of delight to
those who enter upon it with their whole heart and soul, and in
reliance upon our great Teacher. I know of no occupation which
more carries its present reward with it.”
Our marriage took place on the 8th of January, 1852, at Dilston.
Shortly afterwards we settled at Oxford, which became our home for
five years. In reviewing the work done by George Butler in the
course of his educational career, one cannot but be struck by the
fact that he was somewhat in advance of his time. There are men
theoretically in advance of their times, who do good service by their
advocacy of progressive principles in writing or in speech. With him
it was more a matter of simple practice. He perceived that some
study useful or necessary for the future generations, and in itself
worthy, had scarcely an acknowledged place in the curriculum of the
schools and universities, or that some new ground necessary to be
explored was still left untrodden; and without saying much about it,
without any thought of being himself a pioneer in any direction, he
modestly set himself to the task of acting out his thoughts on the
subject. His absolute freedom from personal vanity withheld him
from proclaiming that he was about to enter on any new line, and at
the same time enabled him to bear with perfect calm, if not with
indifference, the criticisms, witty remarks and sometimes serious
opposition which are seldom wanting when a man or woman
ventures quietly to encroach upon the established order of things in
any department of life. At Oxford he was the first who brought into
prominence the study of geography. His geographical lectures there
were quite an innovation, creating some amusement and a good
deal of wonder as to how he would succeed. It was a subject which
had hitherto been relegated in an elementary form to schools for
boys and girls, and was unrecognised, except by a very few persons,
as the grand and comprehensive scientific study which it is now
acknowledged to be.
At Oxford the subject was entirely new, at least to the older
members of the university, who, however, to their credit, came to
the lectures, and listened with teachable minds to truths novel to
them concerning the world they were living in. We drew large
illustrative maps for the walls of the lecture room. I recall a day
when I was drawing in a rough form an enlarged map of Europe,
including the northern coast of Africa and a part of Asia Minor. It
happened that several fellows and tutors of colleges called at that
moment. I continued my work while they chatted with him on the
curiosity of his introduction in Oxford of so elementary a study. The
conversation then turned on letters we had just received from Arthur
Stanley and Theodore Walrond, who were visiting Egypt. “Where is
Cairo?” someone asked, turning to the map spread on the table. I
put the question to an accomplished college tutor. His eye wandered
hopelessly over the chart. He could not even place his hand on
Egypt! I was fain to pretend that I needed to study my performance
more closely, and bent down my head in order to conceal the
irreverent laughter which overcame me.
George Butler was one of the first, also, who introduced and
encouraged the study of Art in Oxford in a practical sense. In the
winter of 1852-53 he obtained the permission of the Vice-Chancellor
and Curators to give a course of lectures on Art in the Taylor
building. These lectures were afterwards published by J. W. Parker,
under the title of Principles of Imitative Art. While promoting the
study of Art in Oxford, working with pupils, and examining in the
schools, he undertook to write a series of Art criticisms for the
Morning Chronicle and afterwards for another paper, visiting for this
purpose the galleries and yearly exhibitions in London. This he did
for a year or two.
“It was amusing,” he wrote to his mother, after his first visit in this
capacity to the Society of British Artists, “to see the ‘gentlemen of
the press’ (of whom I was one!) walking about dotting down
observations. I travelled up to town with Scott, the architect, who
has engaged me to attend a meeting of his workmen, and give them
an address on ‘Decorative Art and the Dignity of Labour.’ Josephine
and I are both engaged in copying some drawings by Turner in the
Taylor Gallery.”
Indefatigable in his efforts to master any subject which attracted
him, he was also equally ready and anxious to impart to others any
knowledge he had thus gained. He found time among his other
occupations to make a very thorough study of some ancient Oscan
inscriptions, with engravings of their principal monuments, which he
found in the Bodleian Library. He became much interested in that
portion of history—almost lost in the mists of the past—which is
illustrated by the marvellous records and monuments of Oscan,
Umbrian, and Etruscan life in the great museum at Bologna. He
worked at and completed, during one of the long vacations, a series
of enlarged copies in sepia of the small engravings and prints of
these monuments in the Bodleian. These enlargements were suitable
for wall illustrations, for a set of lectures which he afterwards gave
on the “Ancient Races of Italy.” It was very pleasant to us when we
visited Florence together, some years later, to see the originals of
some of the Cyclopean ruins of which we had together made large
drawings, those gigantic stones of all that remains of the ancient
Etruscan walls of Fiesole, up to the lovely heights of which we drove
one clear, bright winter’s day.
I have many other memories of our life at Oxford—some very sweet,
others grave. I recall with special pleasure our summer evening
rides. During the first two years we spent there my father kindly
provided me with a horse, a fine, well-bred chestnut. My husband
and I explored together all the rising grounds round Oxford. Behind
our own little garden there were tall trees where nightingales sang
night and day for a few weeks in spring. But it was in the Bagley
Woods and in Abingdon Park that those academic birds put forth all
their powers. We sometimes rode from five in the afternoon till the
sun set and the dew fell, on grassy paths between thick
undergrowths of woods such as nightingales love to haunt, and from
which issued choruses of matchless song.
Our Italian studies were another source of enjoyment. Dante
Rossetti was then preparing matter for his book, Dante and His
Circle, by carefully translating into English the Vita Nuova and lyrical
poems of Dante, together with other sonnets and poems written by
some of his predecessors, such as Cavalcante, Orlandi and Angiolieri
of Siena. Mr. Rossetti sent to us occasionally for criticism some of his
translations of the exquisite sonnets of Dante, the English of which
he was anxious to make as perfect as possible. We had visited
Rossetti’s studio at Chelsea, where he had shown us his portfolios of
original sketches for his great paintings, besides many unfinished
drawings and pathetic incidents expressed in artist’s shorthand—
slight but beautiful pencil designs. My husband’s critical faculty and
classical taste enabled him to return the sonnets submitted to his
judgment with occasional useful comments. There was little to find
fault with in them, however.
Aurelio Saffi was at this time in exile and living in Oxford. He had
been associated with Mazzini and Armellini in the Triumvirate which
ruled in Rome for a short period, and was parliamentary deputy for
his own native town of Forli. He was a cultivated and literary man,
with a thorough knowledge of the Italian poets. As an exile his
material means were at that time very slender. My husband sought
his acquaintance, and invited him to give a series of evening lectures
on Dante in our own drawing-room. These were attractive to some,
and increased the personal interest felt in Saffi in the university.
Twenty-seven years later, having returned to Italy from exile, Saffi
was presiding at a great congress in Genoa where we were. He
alluded, with much feeling, to the years he had spent in Oxford; and
turning to my husband, who was near him, he said: “It is twenty-
seven years to-day that, an exile from my native land, I had the
happiness of being received in your house at Oxford, and I have
never forgotten, and shall never forget, the hospitable and gracious
reception given to me by you and your worthy companion. The times
are changed; a long interval has elapsed, and it is to me a great joy
to-day to greet you once more, and on my native soil.”
But this pleasant life at Oxford had its shadow side. I had come from
a large family circle, and from free country life to a university town—
a society of celibates, with little or no leaven of family life; for Oxford
was not then what it is now under expanded conditions, with its
married fellows and tutors, its resident families, its ladies’ colleges,
and its mixed, general social life. With the exception of the families
of a few heads of houses, who lived much secluded within their
college walls, there was little or no home life, and not much freedom
of intercourse between the academical portion of the community and
others. A one-sidedness of judgment is apt to be fostered by such
circumstances—an exaggeration of the purely masculine judgment
on some topics, and a conventual mode of looking at things.
In the frequent social gatherings in our drawing-room in the
evenings there was much talk, sometimes serious and weighty,
sometimes light, interesting, critical, witty and brilliant, ranging over
many subjects. It was then that I sat silent, the only woman in the
company, and listened, sometimes with a sore heart; for these men
would speak of things which I had already revolved deeply in my
own mind, things of which I was convinced, which I knew, though I
had no dialectics at command with which to defend their truth. A
few remarks made on those evenings stand out in my memory. They
may seem slight and unimportant, but they had a significance for
me, linking themselves, as they did, to long trains of thought which
for some years past had been tending to form my own convictions.
A book was published at that time by Mrs. Gaskell, and was much
discussed. This led to expressions of judgment which seemed to me
false—fatally false. A moral lapse in a woman was spoken of as an
immensely worse thing than in a man; there was no comparison to
be formed between them. A pure woman, it was reiterated, should
be absolutely ignorant of a certain class of evils in the world, albeit
those evils bore with murderous cruelty on other women. One young
man seriously declared that he would not allow his own mother to
read such a book as that under discussion—a book which seemed to
me to have a very wholesome tendency, though dealing with a
painful subject. Silence was thought to be the great duty of all on
such subjects. On one occasion, when I was distressed by a bitter
case of wrong inflicted on a very young girl, I ventured to speak to
one of the wisest men—so esteemed—in the university, in the hope
that he would suggest some means, not of helping her, but of
bringing to a sense of his crime the man who had wronged her. The
sage, speaking kindly however, sternly advocated silence and
inaction. “It could only do harm to open up in any way such a
question as this. It was dangerous to arouse a sleeping lion.” I left
him in some amazement and discouragement, and for a long time
there echoed in my heart the terrible prophetic words of the painter-
poet Blake—rude and indelicate as he may have been judged then—
whose prophecy has only been averted by a great and painful
awakening—
The harlot’s curse, from street to street,
Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.

Every instinct of womanhood within me was already in revolt against

certain accepted theories in society, and I suffered as only God and
the faithful companion of my life could ever know. Incidents
occurred which brought their contribution to the lessons then sinking
into our hearts. A young mother was in Newgate for the murder of
her infant, whose father, under cover of the death-like silence
prescribed by Oxford philosophers—a silence which is in fact a
permanent endorsement of injustice—had perjured himself to her,
had forsaken and forgotten her, and fallen back, with no accusing
conscience, on his easy, social life, and possibly his academic
honours. I wished to go and speak to her in prison of the God who
saw the injustice done, and who cared for her. My husband
suggested that we should write to the chaplain of Newgate, and ask
him to send her to us when her sentence had expired. We wanted a
servant, and he thought that she might be able to fill that place. She
came to us. I think she was the first of the world of unhappy women
of a humble class whom he welcomed to his own home. She was not
the last.
A travelling circus came to the neighbourhood. A young woman who
performed as an acrobat somehow conveyed to us her longing
desire to leave the life in which she was plunged, the most innocent
part of which was probably her acrobatic performances. She had
aspirations very far beyond what is usually expected from a circus
woman. She wanted to serve God. She saw a light before her, she
said, and she must follow it. She went secretly to churches and
chapels, and then she fled—she did not know where—but was
recaptured. It was a Sunday evening in hot summer weather. I had
been sitting for some time at my open window to breathe more
freely the sultry air, and it seemed to me that I heard a wailing cry
somewhere among the trees in the twilight which was deepening
into night. It was a woman’s cry—a woman aspiring to heaven and
dragged back to hell—and my heart was pierced with pain. I longed
to leap from the window, and flee with her to some place of refuge.
It passed. I cannot explain the nature of the impression, which
remains with me to this day; but beyond that twilight, and even in
the midst of the pitiful cry, there seemed to dawn a ray of light and
to sound a note not wholly of despair. The light was far off, yet
coming near, and the slight summer breeze in those tall trees had in
them a whisper of the future. But when the day dawned it seemed
to show me again more plainly than ever the great wall of prejudice,
built up on a foundation of lies, which surrounded a whole world of
sorrows, griefs, injustices and crimes which must not be spoken of—
no, not even in whispers—and which it seemed to me then that no
human power could ever reach or remedy. And I met again the
highly-educated, masculine world in our evening gatherings more
than ever resolved to hold my peace—to speak little with men, but
much with God. No doubt the experience of those years influenced
in some degree my maturer judgment of what is called “educated
public opinion.”
My motive in writing these recollections is to tell what he was—my
husband—and to show how, besides all that he was in himself and
all the work he did, which was wholly and especially his own, he was
of a character to be able from the first to correct the judgment and
soothe the spirit of the companion of his life when “the waters had
come in even unto her soul.” I wish to show, also, that he was even
more to me in later life than a wise and noble supporter and helper
in the work which may have been called more especially my own. He
had a part in the creation of it, in the formation of the first impulses
towards it. Had that work been purely a product of the feminine
mind, of a solitary, wounded and revolted heart, it would certainly
have lacked some elements essential to its becoming in any way
useful or fruitful. But for him I should have been much more
perplexed than I was. The idea of justice to women, of equality
between the sexes, and of equality of responsibility of all human
beings to the moral law, seems to have been instinctive in him. He
never needed convincing. He had his convictions already from the
first—straight, just and clear. I did not at that time speak much, but
whenever I spoke to him the clouds lifted. It may seem a little
strange to say so, but, if I recall it truly, what helped me most of all
at that time was, not so much any arguments he may have used in
favour of an equal standard, but the correctness with which he
measured the men and the judgments around him. I think there was
even a little element of disdain in his appreciation of the one-sided
judgments of some of his male friends. He used to say, “I am sorry
for So-and-So,” which sounded to me rather like saying, “I am sorry
for Solomon,” my ideas of the wisdom of learned men being,
perhaps, a little exaggerated. He would tell me that I ought to pity
them. “They know no better, poor fellows.” This was a new light for
me, I had thought of Oxford as the home of learning and of intellect.
I thought the good and gifted men we daily met must be in some
degree authorities on spiritual and moral questions. It had not
occurred to me to think of them as “poor fellows!” That blessed gift
of common sense, which he possessed in so large a degree, came to
the rescue to restore for me the balance of a mind too heavily
weighted with sad thoughts of life’s perplexing problems. And then
in the evenings, when our friends had gone, we read together the
words of Life, and were able to bring many earthly notions and
theories to the test of what the Holy One and the Just said and did.
Compared with the accepted axioms of the day, and indeed of
centuries past, in regard to certain vital questions, the sayings and
actions of Jesus were, we confessed to one another, revolutionary.
George Butler was not afraid of revolution. In this sense he desired
it, and we prayed together that a holy revolution might come about,
and that the Kingdom of God might be established on the earth. And
I said to myself: “And it is a man who speaks to me thus—an
intelligent, a gifted man, a learned man too, few more learned than
he, and a man who ever speaks the truth from his heart.” So I was
comforted and instructed. It was then that I began to see his
portrait given, and I see it still more clearly now as I look back over
his whole past life, in the 15th Psalm: “Lord, who shall dwell in Thy
tabernacle? Or who shall rest upon Thy holy hill? Even he that
leadeth an uncorrupt life, and doeth the thing which is right, and
speaketh the truth from his heart. He that hath used no deceit in his
tongue, nor done evil to his neighbour, and hath not slandered his
neighbour. He that setteth not by himself, but is lowly in his own
eyes, and maketh much of them that fear the Lord. He that
sweareth unto his neighbour, and disappointeth him not, even
though it were to his own hindrance.”
The winter floods which so often surrounded Oxford during the
years of which I am writing are probably remembered with a
shudder by others besides myself. The mills and locks, and other
impediments to the free flow of the waters of the Isis, were, I
believe, long ago removed, and the malarial effect of the stagnation
of moisture around the city ceased with its cause. But at that time
Oxford in winter almost resembled Venice, in its apparent isolation
from the land, and in the appearance of its towers and spires
reflected in the mirror of the floods. “It rained,” wrote George in
January, 1856, “all yesterday, and to-day it is cold and damp.
Indeed, immediately after sunset the atmosphere of Oxford
resembles that of a well, though that is scarcely so bad as the
horrible smell of the meadows when the floods are retiring. Then
one is conscious of a miasma which only a strong constitution can
long resist.”
My health failed. I became weak and liable to attacks of chills and
fever. We drove out occasionally to the heights above Oxford, to
reach which we were obliged to pursue for some distance a road
which resembled a sort of high level or causeway (as in Holland)
with water on each side. Looking back from the higher ground, the
view of the academic city sitting upon the floods was very
picturesque. Indeed, the sound of “Great Tom” knelling the curfew
from his tower had a very musical and solemn effect as it came over
the still waters, resembling a little in pathos the sound of a human
voice giving warning of the approach of night; or, like Dante’s Squilla
di lontana—
The distant bell
Which seems to weep the dying day;

but poetry and sentiment could not hold out against rheumatic pains
and repeated chills.
I spent several months of that year—1856—in Northumberland with
our children, my husband joining us after he had completed his
engagements as a public examiner in London. His letters, during the
few weeks of our separation, seemed to show a deepening of
spiritual life—such as is sometimes granted in the foreshadowing of
the approach of some special discipline or sorrow. He seems to have
felt more deeply during this summer that he must not reckon on the
unbroken continuance of the outward happiness which had been so
richly granted to us.

To Mrs. Grey.
Oxford, June 6th, 1856.
“I am glad to feel that my treasures are in such good hands and
life-giving air. I hope their presence at Dilston will contribute to
the assurance that marriage is not a severance of family ties,
but that both Josephine and I revert with the fondest
attachment to old scenes and dearly loved friends at Dilston.”

To his wife.
June, 1856.
“I am grieved to hear of your sufferings; but you write so
cheerfully, and express such a loving confidence in One who is
able to heal all our sicknesses, that I dare not repine. However
sad at heart I may sometimes feel about you, I will try to bring
myself face to face with those mighty promises which are held
out to those who ‘rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him.’
And then I hope we shall still be able to go hand in hand in our
work on earth.”

To his wife.
July 13th, 1856.
“I have been reading Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’ and correcting my
review of it for Fraser’s Magazine. Reading love stories which
end in death or separation makes me dwell the more thankfully
on my own happiness. It is no wonder that I am sanguine in all
circumstances, and that I trust the love and care of our
Almighty Father, for has He not blessed me far beyond my
deserts in giving me such a share of human happiness as falls
to the lot of few? Yet He has given us our thorn in the flesh, in
your failing health, and our uncertain prospects. But these shall
never hinder our love; rather we will cling to that more closely
as the symbol and earnest of the heavenly love which displayed
itself in that wondrous act—on Calvary—which the wise men of
this world may deem of as they will, but which to us will ever be
the most real of all realities, and the sure token of our
reconciliation with God.
“I think we are well fitted to help each other. No words can
express what you are to me. On the other hand, I may be able
to cheer you in moments of sadness and despondency, when
the evils of this world press heavily upon you, and your strength
is not sufficient to enable you to rise up and do anything to
relieve them, as you fain would do. And by means of possessing
greater physical strength, and considerable power of getting
through work, I may be enabled to help you in the years to
come, to carry out plans which may under His blessing do some
good, and make men speak of us with respect when we are laid
in our graves; and in the united work of bringing up our
 children, may God so help us that we may be able to say, ‘Of
those whom Thou gavest us have we lost none.’”

While exercising much self-denial and reserve in making such

extracts as the above, I give these few as affording glimpses of his
inner mind and deep affection; for his character would be very
inadequately portrayed if so prominent a feature of it were
concealed as that of his love for his wife, and the constant blending
of that love with all his spiritual aspirations and endeavours. That
love was part of his being, becoming ever more deep and tender as
the years went on. I have spoken of the strength and tenacity of his
friendships. These qualities entered equally into his closest domestic
relations. In the springtime of life, men dream, speak, write and sing
of love—of love’s gracious birth and beautiful youth. But it is not in
the springtime of life that love’s deepest depths can be fathomed, its
vastness measured, and its endurance tested. There is a love which
surmounts all trial and discipline, all the petty vexations and worries,
as well as the sorrows and storms of life, and which flows on in an
ever deepening current of tenderness, enhanced by memories of the
past and hopes of the future—of the eternal life towards which it is
tending. It was such a love as this, that dwelt and deepened in him
of whom I write to the latest moment of his earthly life, to be
perfected in the Divine presence.
On joining us at Dilston, an arrangement was made with the vicar of
the parish of Corbridge (in which Dilston was situated) that he
should take his duty, occupying his house for the autumn, during his
absence from home. Dissent prevailed largely in the neighbourhood.
But during the time that he acted as the clergyman of the parish the
church was well filled. Many Wesleyans came, who had not before
entered its doors, as well as several families of well-to-do and well-
instructed Presbyterian farmers—shrewd people, well able to
maintain their ground in a theological controversy. They were
attracted, no doubt, partly by the relationship of the temporary
minister to my father, who was so much beloved and esteemed
throughout the county, and a constant worshipper in the village
church, and partly by the simple Christian teaching for which they
thirsted, and which they now found. There was little real poverty. We
visited the people sometimes together, and their affections were
strongly gained.
Our return to Oxford was not auspicious. The autumn fell damp and
cold. It was decided that I should go to London to consult Sir James
Clarke, on account of what seemed the development of a weakness
of the lungs. I recall the tender solicitude which my husband showed
for me on the journey, and also the kindness of the venerable
physician. I was scarcely able to rise to greet him when he entered
the room. At the close of our interview he merely said, “Poor thing,
poor thing! You must take her away from Oxford.” We proposed to
return therefore at once to make necessary preparations for the
change, when he interposed, “No, she must not return to the chilling
influence of those floods, not for a single day.”
This was no light trial. Our pleasant home must be broken up; all the
hopes and plans my husband had cherished abandoned; the house
he had taken and furnished at some expense as a Hall for
unattached students thrown on his hands. To carry it on alone, to be
separated for an indefinite time from each other, was scarcely
possible. There seemed for the present no alternative. He accepted
calmly, though not without keen regret, what was clearly inevitable.
The difficulties of our position were for a time increased by a serious
reverse of fortune experienced by my father, who had always been
ready to aid on occasion the different members of the family. There
had occurred a complete collapse of a bank in which he was a large
shareholder. The loss he sustained was great. The spirit in which he
bore the trial raised him still higher in the estimation of those who
already so highly valued and admired him. Trouble followed upon
trouble for a time, and my husband suffered all the more because of
some inward self-reproach for having failed to exercise sufficient
providence and foresight in the past. His greatest anxiety was for
me; but that happily was gradually lightened as time went on.
Through the kindness of his friend, Mr. Powles, my husband was
called to take temporarily the charge of a chapel at Blackheath, in
the summer of 1857, which gave him useful and congenial
ministerial work while continuing his literary pursuits. He had gone
on in advance to arrange for our removal to Blackheath.

To her husband.
St. Barnabas Day,

June 11th, 1857.

God bless you to-day and always, and make you a “Son of
Consolation” to many in the time to come, as you have been to
me. Earthly success is no longer our aim. What I desire above
all for you is the fulfilment of the promise: “They that are wise
shall shine as the light, and they that turn many to
righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever.” I had an
encouraging conversation yesterday with——, which fell in with
the train of my thoughts regarding you and myself. She said she
had seen many cases in which individual chastening had
preceded a life of great usefulness, though the subject of the
chastening had thought at the time that his life was passing
away, wasted or only spent in learning the lesson of submission.
She thought that those to whom the discipline of life comes
early rather than late ought to thank God; for it makes them
better able to minister to others, and to walk humbly with their
God. May that be the case with us. The little boys remembered
your birthday before they were out of bed this morning, and
have made an excursion to Nightingale Valley in honour of it.
 CHAPTER III.
CHELTENHAM.

In the autumn of 1857 my husband was invited to fill the post of

Vice-Principal of the Cheltenham College. He accepted the invitation,
and we went to Cheltenham the same year. He here entered upon
his long course of assiduous and untiring work as a schoolmaster—a
work which covered a quarter of a century, beginning at Cheltenham
in 1857, and continued at Liverpool from the winter of 1865-66 until
1882. We gained much at Cheltenham in an improved climate, and
in the cessation of material difficulties and anxieties. We lived in a
large house, in which, for some years, we received a number of
pupils. It was characteristic that it should have supplied some of the
best athletes of the College, and many successful competitors in the
school games, in feats of strength, activity and skill. My husband
considered physical training to be an essential part of the education
of youth.
Our summer vacations continued to be spent largely at Dilston; we
went however one year to Switzerland with our eldest son. We
visited Lucerne and its neighbourhood, and afterwards the Rhone
Valley, Chamounix, and the great St. Bernard, passing a night at the
hospice, where we profited much by our intercourse with the
beautiful dogs, one of whom, a veteran called Bruno, the forefather
of many a noble hound, attached himself to us, and made himself
our cicerone among the rocks in the desolate surroundings of the
monastery. Another summer excursion was, with two of our children,
to the Lakes of Killarney, including a visit to my brother, Charles
Grey, who lived then in a house of Lord Derby, at Ballykisteen, in the
“golden vale” of Tipperary. In both these years my husband brought
home many sketches. The grey rocks skirting the borders of
Killarney lakes, with their richly-coloured covering of arbutus and
other flowering trees and evergreens, were tempting subjects for
water-colours.
My father had been a friend of Clarkson, and a practical worker in
the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. When the War of
Secession in America broke out, my husband’s sympathies were
warmly enlisted on behalf of those who desired the emancipation of
the slaves, and he perceived that that was indeed the question, the
vital question of justice, which lay at the root of all that terrible
struggle. This was one of several occasions in our united life in
which we found ourselves in a minority; members of a group at first
so insignificant that it scarcely found a voice or a hearing anywhere,
but whose position was afterwards fully justified by events. It was a
good training in swimming against the tide, or at least in standing
firm and letting the tide go by, and in maintaining, while doing so, a
charitable attitude towards those who conscientiously differed, and
towards the thousands who float contentedly down the stream of
the fashionable opinion of the day. In this case the feeling of
isolation on a subject of such tragic interest was often painful; but
the discipline was useful, for it was our lot again more emphatically
in the future to have to accept and endure this position for
conscience’ sake.
I recollect the sudden revulsion of feeling when the news was
telegraphed of the assassination of President Lincoln; the
extraordinary rapidity of the change of front of the “leading journal;”
and the self-questionings among many whose intelligence and
goodness had certainly given them the right to think for themselves,
but who had not availed themselves of that right. I remember the
penitence of Punch, who had been among the scoffers against the
abolitionists of slavery, and who now put himself into deep
mourning, and gave to the public an affecting cartoon of the British
Lion bowed and weeping before the bier of Lincoln. A favourite
scripture motto of my husband’s was, “Why do ye not of yourselves
judge that which is right?” But he was not argumentative. He loved
peace, and avoided every heated discussion. His silence was,
perhaps, sometimes not less effectual by way of rebuke or correction
of shallow judgments than speech would have been. Goldwin Smith,
one of the few at Oxford who saw at that time the inner meanings of
the American struggle, paid us a visit. It occurred to us, while
listening to some pointed remarks he was making on the prevalent
opinion of the day, to ask him to write and publish something in
reply to the often-repeated assertion that the Bible itself favours
slavery. “The Bible,” he replied, “has been quoted in favour of every
abomination that ever cursed the earth.” He did not say he would
write; but the idea sank into his mind, and not long after he sent us
his able and exquisite little book, entitled Does the Bible sanction
Slavery?—a masterly and beautiful exposition of the true spirit of the
Mosaic law, and of the Theocratic government and training of the
ancient Hebrew people in relation to this and other questions. This
book was naturally not popular at the time, and I fear it has long
been out of print. (It was published in 1863.)

In this connection it is interesting to record, that two other

notable books owed their inspiration in a large measure to
Josephine Butler. The Patience of Hope, by Dora Greenwell,
published in 1859, was dedicated to J. E. B., with the inscription
—A te principium, tibi desinet (from thee begun with thee my
work shall close). Te sine nil altum mens inchoat (without thee
nothing high my mind essays). Frederic Myers, who had been at
school at Cheltenham College, in his Fragments of Inner Life,1
tells how“Christian conversion came to me in a potent form—
through the agency of Josephine Butler, née Grey, whose name
will not be forgotten in the annals of English philanthropy. She
introduced me to Christianity, so to say, by an inner door; not to
its encumbering forms and dogmas, but to its heart of fire. My
poems of St. Paul and St. John the Baptist, intensely personal in
their emotion, may serve as sufficient record of those years of
eager faith.” St. Paul, published in 1867, was dedicated to J. E.
B., with the inscription—ᾗ καὶ τὴν ἐμὴν ψυχην ὀφείλω (to whom
I owe my very soul). In 1869 Myers gave up a Lectureship at
 Trinity in order to devote himself to the promotion of the higher
education of women, and he was one of the small band of
university men, who worked hard with Josephine Butler and her
colleagues on the North of England Council, to which we shall
refer later on.

Among the public events which interested us most during these

years was the revolution in Naples, the change of dynasty, and
Garibaldi’s career. Our interest was in part of a personal nature, as
my sister, Madame Meuricoffre, and her husband were in the midst
of these events. She had succeeded Jessie White Mario in the care
of the wounded Garibaldians in the hospitals, and was personally
acquainted with some of the actors in the dramatic scenes of that
time. Having told her that my husband had set as a subject for a
prize essay—to be competed for in the College at Cheltenham—“The
unification of Italy,” my sister mentioned it to Garibaldi, in expressing
to him our sympathy for him and his cause. He immediately wrote a
few lines, signing his name at the end, to be sent, through her, to
the boy who should write the best essay on the subject so near to
his heart.
A part of the summer holidays of 1864 were spent at Coniston in the
house of Mr. James Marshall, which he lent to us. His sister, Mrs.
Myers, had been our kind and constant friend at Cheltenham. It was
a beautiful summer. We had returned to Cheltenham only a few days
when a heavy sorrow fell upon our home, the brightest of our little
circle being suddenly snatched away from us. The dark shadow of
that cloud cannot easily be described. I quote part of a letter written
some weeks after our child’s death to a friend.

Cheltenham, August, 1864.

These are but weak words. May you never know the grief which
they hide rather than reveal. But God is good. He has, in mercy,
at last sent me a ray of light, and low in the dust at His feet I
have thanked Him for that ray of light as I never thanked Him
for any blessing in the whole of my life before. It was difficult to
endure at first the shock of the suddenness of that agonising
death. Little gentle spirit! the softest death for her would have
seemed sad enough. Never can I lose that memory—the fall,
the sudden cry, and then the silence. It was pitiful to see her,
helpless in her father’s arms, her little drooping head resting on
his shoulder, and her beautiful golden hair, all stained with
blood, falling over his arm. Would to God that I had died that
death for her! If we had been permitted, I thought, to have one
look, one word of farewell, one moment of recognition! But
though life flickered for an hour, she never recognised the father
and mother whom she loved so dearly. We called her by her
name, but there was no answer. She was our only daughter, the
light and joy of our lives. She flitted in and out like a butterfly all
day. She had never had a day’s or an hour’s illness in all her
sweet life. She never gave us a moment of anxiety, her life was
one flowing stream of mirth and fun and abounding love. The
last morning she had said to me a little verse she had learned
somewhere—
Every morning the warm sun
Rises fair and bright;
But the evening cometh on,
And the dark, cold night.
There is a bright land far away,
Where tis never-ending day!
The dark, cold night came too soon for us, for it was that same
evening, at seven o’clock, that she fell. The last words I had
with her were about a pretty caterpillar she had found; she
came to my room to beg for a little box to put it in. I gave it her
and said, “Now trot away, for I am late for tea.” What would I
not give now for five minutes of that sweet presence? The only
discipline she ever had was an occasional conflict with her own
strong feelings and will. She disliked nothing so much as her
little German lessons. Fräulein Blümke had called her one day to
have one. She was sitting in a low chair. She grasped the arms
of it tightly, and, looking very grave and determined, she
replied, “Hush, wait a bit, I am fighting!” She sat silent for a few
moments, and then walked quickly and firmly to have her
German lesson. Fräulein asked her what she meant by saying
she was fighting, and she replied, “I was fighting with myself”
(to overcome her unwillingness to go to her books). I overheard
Fräulein say to her in the midst of the lesson: “Arbeit, Eva,
arbeit!” To which Eva replied with decision, “I am arbeiting, Miss
Blümke, as hard as ever I can.”
One evening last autumn, when I went to see her after she was
in bed and we were alone, she said: “Mammy, if I go to heaven
before you, when the door of heaven opens to let you in I will
run so fast to meet you; and when you put your arms round
me, and we kiss each other, all the angels will stand still to see
us.” And she raised herself up in her ardour, her face beaming
and her little chest heaving with the excitement of her loving
anticipation. I recall her look; not the merry laughing look she
generally had, but softened into an overflowing tenderness of
the soul. She lay down again, but could not rest, and raising
herself once more said, “I would like to pray again” (she had
already said her little prayer); and we prayed again, about this
meeting in heaven. I never thought for a moment that she
would go first. I don’t think I ever had a thought of death in
connection with her; she was so full of life and energy. She was
always showing her love in active ways. We used to imagine
what it would be when she grew up, developing into acts of
mercy and kindness. She was passionately devoted to her
father, and after hugging him, and heaping endearing names
upon him, she would fly off and tax her poor little tender fingers
by making him something—a pincushion or kettle-holder. She
made him blue, pink, white and striped pincushions and mats,
for which he had not much use. But now he treasures up her
poor little gifts as more precious than gold. If my head ached,
she would bathe it with a sponge for an hour without tiring.
Sweet Eva! Well might the Saviour say, “Of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven.” She was so perfectly truthful, candid and pure. It
was a wonderful repose for me, a good gift of God, when
troubled by the evils in the world or my own thoughts, to turn
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