ened by rightly directed feeling; of course he does no justice to the old opposition between the higher intellectual nature and the lower passionate animal nature.

His criticism of philosophy is of course inadequate. He regards Cicero as the greatest master of it; if Cicero did not know a thing, it is beyond the reach of the unassisted human intellect. He knows Plato, but only second-hand, and he does not seem to know any Peripatetic author but Aristotle, whom also he knows at second-hand, and Seneca is to him the one representative of Stoicism. In fact, his culture is purely Latin; the only Greek writer he knows well is the "Sibyl." His Latin culture, too, is limited: he knows Cicero and Vergil, and the authors to whom they introduce him. Even Cicero he does not know intelligently; the distinction between his oratorical and philosophical style seems to escape Lactantius, who constantly speaks of " perorating," though, to do him justice, it is the last thing he thinks of doing. For a book to be read, his "Institutions" are eloquent; for a series of speeches they would be decidedly tame. They have less oratorical movement than the apologies of Tertullian or of St. Cyprian, still less have they the clumsy rhetorical gait of Arnobius, who, if we may trust St. Jerome, was successful as a pleader, while Lactantius was hardly successful as a rhetorician.

There is much less power than ferocity in the treatise "De Mortibus Persecutorum," though the passion is strong enough to have roused a suspicion that the author is declaiming without regard to facts. Yet, by a curious irony of history, his book has come to be one of our chief authorities for the eventful period between the abdication of Diocletian and the overthrow of Maxentius; for the Christian historians would not write freely of the secular history of their persecutors, and Christian scholars refused to hand on the pagan histories that were written. The date of the work, about 314, is fixed by the entry of Licinius into Nicomedia to publish the edict of Milan, in the middle of June, A.D. 313. It begins with assuring Donatus, a confessor who had been six years in prison, that his prayers are heard; the Church is rising again, for 1 Lact. "Div. Inst." vi. 17. Cogitatio nihil aliud quam mentis agitatio.

princes have been raised up to cancel the wicked commands of tyrants. Besides this work, if it be his, Lactantius wrote two books on some unknown subject to Asclepiades, and four books of letters to Probus, and two to Severus, and two to Demetrianus, to whom he dedicated the work "De Opificio Dei." In these last, and perhaps in the treatise to Asclepiades, the author shocked St. Jerome by affirming that the Spirit was not a separate hypostasis; but in general his correspondence was lengthy, and handled religious topics only incidentally, both which circumstances we know from a letter of St. Damasus, who found them equally objectionable.

THE PANEGYRISTS.

The Christian rhetoricians are connected in one way or another with Africa. The pagan rhetoricians, who continue after such a long interval the work of the younger Pliny, are almost all in one way or another connected with Gaul, which, throughout the fourth century, was the most important province of the empire from a military and administrative point of view. Perhaps we a little overrate the importance and representative character of the Gallic or quasi-Gallic panegyrists, who have reached us simply because they were at the pains to write out and publish their speeches, for most of the occasions on which they were delivered were celebrated by many other orators in many other cities. An emperor who visited a great city expected to hear his praises from its orators. Every five years the festival of his accession was kept, and this was always a proper occasion for a speech, whether he was present or not. Lastly, the birthday of the city of Rome came every year, and this was an occasion for speeches, though perhaps less indispensable than the festivals of emperors. Still, it is worth observing that towards the end of this period Symmachus, the famous prefect of the city under Theodosius and Honorius, wrote a letter asking for a Gallic rhetorician to train his son, because he himself had been trained by an old man from the Garumna, doubtless a member of the school of Bordeaux, whose traditions were celebrated by Ausonius. Besides, the eloquence of Latium, which Symmachus was anxious not to

disparage, was an old and hackneyed thing, which those who had the knack went through mechanically, to receive the conventional plaudits of connoisseurs. It would have been a

shocking thing if Rome had been without distinguished orators or distinguished ballet-dancers; perhaps the reputation was of the same kind. In Gaul the audience, at any rate, was fresh, and helped the speaker to take himself seriously. Gaul, in the time of Maximian, was, to compare small things with great, in something the state which the Roman world was in the time of Augustus: it was settling down after an exhausting crisis; the struggle with Carausius recalls the struggle with Antonius, the revolt of the Bagaudæ recalls the revolt of Spartacus and the Servile wars of Sicily: both owed their temporary success to the intolerable condition of the country laborers. The wars of the pretenders which went on during the reigns of Gallienus and Claudius, till at last Tetricus entreated Aurelian to deliver him from the tyranny of his own army, remind us of the civil wars of the last century of the Republic; and, lastly, the frontier was constantly threatened, as the frontier of Italy had been till the limit of the Danube was established by the victories of Drusus and Tiberius.

Juvenal knew of no occasion for literary display beyond the games at Lyons; but in the era of Constantine there were public schools at Autun, which had been suppressed during the troubles, and were restored by the favor of Constantine; and Autun was by no means a solitary instance. It was probably every way inferior to Trèves, the capital of Maximian and Valentinian.

The two earliest speeches are addressed to Maximian: they are generally ascribed to an older Mamertinus, because the Mamertinus who was made consul by Julian is described as the younger. The first is in honor of the birthday of Rome, and alludes to the intention of subduing Carausius. The author is curiously frank in speculating upon Maximian's ignorance, which was sufficiently notorious; but one might have expected that an orator, speaking in an emperor's presence, would either avoid topics that the emperor could not understand, or give him credit for understanding them, if he had

not skill enough to tell the story in such a way as to convey the knowledge he assumed his hearers to possess. The speech dates from A.D. 289, and is comparatively short and simple. The second is much more curious: it dates from 293, or earlier, as Maximian and Diocletian were still sole emperors, and the author has much to say of their felicity and their "piety," a curious topic in the case of Maximian, who, by all accounts, was at all times ferocious. He confines himself to these topics in the main because he, like other orators whom he admires, has celebrated Maximian's military merits (the only real merits he had) in another speech. It is doubtful whether we can identify this with the speech of A.D. 289. There the author does not confine himself exclusively to Maximian's military merits, and has not quite as wide a range of particles as we find in the second speech, the author of which credits the emperor with ability to follow his historical allusions. He exhibits his gaucherie in another way: he had spoken before the emperor once, and made a vow that his majesty should deign to hear him again (literally, "hear him with the same dignation," graciously thinking the speaker worthy of the theme); consequently the public expected to hear him when the five years' festival came round; but, as Maximian could not hear him, the public could not hear him either; and the author gravely explains that he seizes the opportunity of the emperor's birthday to make amends to both for the delay, which he does not the least regret, but the contrary, as his speech for the fifth anniversary of the emperor will come in just as well for the tenth.

There is no clew to the nationality of either of these speakers, if they are to be regarded as two, except that neither was in the strictest sense a Roman. We know more of Eumenius, who was the grandson of a Greek rhetorician who settled at Autun. He himself had not been in the habit of speaking in public, but had confined himself to his duties as a professor. He had wished himself to retire into the country, but Constantius had employed him as tutor to Constantine, an office for which Eumenius, who felt a little past work, would have preferred to recommend his son. The employment, however,

naturally required a man of assured reputation, and Eumenius had to content himself with launching his son as advocate of the exchequer, while he employed the magnificent pension he received from Constantius to endow the schools of Autun, which the emperor graciously permitted to be restored. The rhetorician naturally took advantage of his liberality to deliver his first public oration in 296, soon after Constantius had reconquered Britain. It was addressed nominally to the president of Gallia Lugdunensis. Another was addressed to Constantine, who was visiting Trèves, and was still expected to stand through speeches in his honor, for which reason Eumenius probably kept his speech as short as he meant to in delivery, though the speech, as we read it, is unmercifully long. Apparently he had delivered a speech in honor of Maximian, which did not interfere with a very enthusiastic speech in honor of Constantine, addressed to him on the birthday of Rome, soon after the execution of Maximian, A.D. 310, which is politely treated as a suicide, the effect of remorse, though just before he taunts the poor old emperor with having allowed himself to be taken alive and the like. The speech has a practical object, and in this it succeeded. Constantine did pay a visit to Autun, and allowed the city to take the new title, soon to be dropped, of Flavia Augusta, and, what was more important, reduced.the taxation considerably, by lowering the assessment from 42,000 taxable units to 27,000. Of course he was rewarded by a speech of thanksgiving, in which Eumenius acknowledged the duty of celebrating the everlasting fifth anniversary, although it was then happily over.

It is curious that Eumenius, who was a mere schoolman, should, upon the whole, show more tact and taste than contemporaries or successors, who were famous in the forum. Perhaps the constant familiarity with text-books, which preserved some echo of the tradition of better days, may have kept him out of some pitfalls.

A harmless and colorless writer, whose name has perished, wrote a speech to congratulate Constantine on his marriage with Maximian's daughter in 307. The speech is interesting because it shows how completely Constantine was identified