=co 'CO APOTHEOSIS AND AFTER LIFE PLATE 1. THE EMPEROR JUSTINIAN. I. Silver Disc in Petrograd. 2. Gold Medallion formerly in Paris. APOTHEOSIS AND AFTER LIFE Three Lectures on Certain Phases of Art and Religion in the Roman Empire BY MRS. ARTHUR;STRONG, Lrrx.D., LL.D. FORMER STUDENT OF THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS J LIFE FELLOW OF GIRTON COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; HONORARY MEMBER OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF ATHENS AND OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA ; AND ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD 1915 DGr III SI Printed in Great Britain ENVOI ERRATA P. vi, 1. ip. The reliquary of Ugolino di Maestro Vieri at Orvieto holds not the fragments of the True Cross, but an even more unique relic, the Sanctissimo Corporate. P. 73. By some inadvertence Dryden's translation of Virgil, Aeneid, vi. 851-852 has been substituted for that of Lord Bowen, originally chosen by me as laying stress on the quality of mercy referred to in the text : These be thine arts, thy glories, the ways of peace to proclaim, Mercy to show to the fallen, . P. 242, 1. 2. For temples read temper. elusions of scholarship. Other moods would take us to the Campagna^ or to the city's ( enchanted gardens? Do you remember that Easter Eve on the Via Appia when a great red moon lay in a hollow of the Alban hills 1 Or that sombre garden on the Esquiline, under whose ENVOI A CHRISTIAN MALLET lme me Marechaldes Logis au XXH Rtgiment de Dragons, IV* Etcadron aux Armies, en campagnc MY DEAR CHRISTIANA / always like to remember how we smuggled you, a French subject, into our British School in the guise of honorary assistant secretary. But from the first I pre- ferred to call you my adopted son, as by a premonition that we should be united always in a common love of Rome, and this con- fidence of mine was never betrayed, for Rome in her every aspect found you responsive. Those were fruitful hours that we spent together in the Villa Giulia, trying to reconstruct some picture of the vanished civilisation of the Latin race ; or in the Vatican, where the masterpieces of Greek sculpture revealed to us the spell by which Greece held her grim conqueror captive ; or in the Baths of Diocletian, where we traced on the stelae of her Provinces the religious beliefs that helped Rome to establish her Imperial sway, and the soldiers of her legions to live and die faithful to her service. And always, whether among the ruins and relics of classics or of Mediaeval Rome, or in the churches and palaces of the Rome of Sixtus and Bernini, I was glad to balance the impetuous judgments ofyour youth against the measured con- clusions of scholarship. Other moods would take us to the Campagna, or to the city's 1 enchanted gardens? Do you remember that Easter Eve on the Via Appia when a great red moon lay in a hollow of the Alban hills ? Or that sombre garden on the Esquiline, under ivhose vi APOTHEOSIS AND AFTER LIFE desolate paths lie the ruins of the Golden House built by the rest- less genius who was Nero ? Or the groves of the Villa Mattei and the seat under the old sarcophagus where S. Philip discorreva delle cose dell' anima with his disciple.s ? At times we went further afield to Arezzo, where the master- piece of Piero della Francesca, transfigured in the evening light, made usforget the humbler Arretine ware we had come to study ; to Orvieto, where by a special grace we saw high above the altar, like a vision of the Holy Grail vouchsafed to the Knights of old, the enamelled reliquary that holds the fragments of the True Cross. Do you ever think of the little fiat on the Monte Tarpeo, and of the view, perhaps the noblest in the world, which would at times be lifted by music beyond the conditions of time and space ? How poignantly these memories and impressions crowded upon us as we left Rome that June morning of last year ; yet how swiftly regrets yielded to the magic of the hour, as we were borne through the sunlit Campagna and the hill towns of Latium to the noonday rest at Benedictine Monte Cassino, whence you had written to me a year before 'one could do great things here' The beauty of the Italian afternoon mellowed as we passed from Latin to Greek lands, and reached the gracious hospitality of the villa embowered in the ilex groves of Posilippo. A few days more and white sails were bearing us over a summer sea from Sicilian to Ionian waters, to yourfirst glimpse of Greece. It thus in was memory of our Roman friendship that I first wished to dedicate to you this little book, and also because while I was endeavouring to convey to my audiences in America some- thing of what I conceived the spirit of Rome to mean to our modern world, you were putting into practice the Roman virtues of dis- and cipline endurance during the first months of your military service. Little did either of us guess that when I revised the lectures for publication it would be during weeks of alternating hopes and fears, relieved by trust in the alliance ofyour country ENVOI VI 1 and of mine in the cause of liberty\ lit up by the brave confidence of your letters which confirmed what we already knew in our hearts of the valour of yourself and your Dragoons. On that fateful night of July 31 st you had ridden out of Reims with France's a miles since then vanguard, simple Cavalier (paene !) ; you have twice won your promotion. It is with affectionate pride, therefore, that I inscribe beneath your name the grade you have just won by an act ofgreat bravery on the battlefield. Once again have you proved yourself worthy to serve in one of the proudest regiments of France, Dragons que Rome cut pris pour des legionnaires. * * * * The news of your fresh promotion to the grade of Lieutenant, and of your decision to pass into the Infantry for the sake of more continuous work in the trenches, comes as I correct this proof. But I like to think that you would wish mt to retain the original superscription in remembrance of a sharply defined phase of your life. Feb. 27, 1915. E. S. PREFACE DURING the fall of 1913 it was my high privilege, as lecturer on the Charles Eliot Norton foundation of the Archaeological Institute of America, to speak on the subject of the Roman Empire and of Roman art and religion before about twenty-five centres of the Institute, before the Universities of Wisconsin and Princeton, the Colleges of Brynhjawr, Wellesley and x Vassar, and in the Lecture Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of New York. These Lectures form the basis of the present book. To my audiences I would like to record my thanks for their cordial and en- couraging reception, and in a more personal manner I would thank the President of the Archaeological Institute, Professor Shipley of the Washington Uni- versity, St. Louis, and its indefatigable Secretary, Dr. Mitchell Carroll of Washington. I may add that my choice of subject was determined in the first instance by the belief that any discussion, however modest and restricted in compass, concerned with doctrines of Apotheosis and of the Soul's ultramundane destiny, would be welcomed by audiences, many of whom had listened the previous year to M. Cumont's lectures on Astrology and Religion, now embodied in the brilliant book that we all know. The lecture on the Apotheosis has developed by x APOTHEOSIS AND AFTER LIFE slow degrees out of a lecture on the influence of the before Imperial figure on later decorative art, given the Architectural Society of Oxford as far back as 1908. In the same way, the lectures on the After Life are the expansion of some three pages on the tomb- stones of the Roman Provinces of Central Europe which appeared in the first number of the Journal of Roman Studies in connection with the Exhibition of the art of the Roman Provinces at the Baths of Dio- cletian in 1911. In both cases the long prelude on the similar problems of Greek art seemed necessary in order to determine more closely than is usually the case in lecture-rooms and handbooks, the precise debt of Rome to Greece and the originality of her own contribution. In their present expanded form the lectures were repeated at Rome in the spring of this year before the students of our British School, which in part accounts for the delay in the publication of the book. The subjects of the two lectures, though v akin, are approached from a somewhat different standpoint. In the first lecture I have tried to account for the centralised formula that appears in late Imperial reliefs by showing the r6le played by the cult of the Emperor in the formation of what appears to be a new type of composition. Primarily, therefore, this is a study of certain phases of antique design. The two ' lectures on the Symbolism of the After Life,' on the other hand, represent the attempt to disentangle the various strains of thought and belief, whether native or foreign, that went to the shaping of the magni- PREFACE xi ficent sepulchral imagery of the Empire. The lectures, which, as the Introductory Address shows, are speci- ally intended for students, are put forward much in the form in which they were delivered, so that I trust that their many deficiencies may be ascribed not to ignorance only, but to the want of space and oppor- tunity for a fuller treatment.