A RETROSPECTIVE GLANCE 



yet unborn and human life the merest bauble. Yet 

 the same eyes that witnessed these scenes with ecstat- 

 ic approval would have been averted in pious horror 

 had an anatomist dared to approach one of the muti- 

 lated bodies with the scalpel of science. It was sport 

 to see the blade of the gladiator enter the quivering, 

 living flesh of his fellow-gladiator ; it was joy to see the 

 warm blood spurt forth from the writhing victim 

 while he still lived; but it were sacrilegious to ap- 

 proach that body with the knife of the anatomist, 

 once it had ceased to pulsate with life. Life itself was 

 held utterly in contempt, but about the realm of death 

 hovered the threatening ghosts of superstition. And 

 such, be it understood, was the attitude of the Roman 

 populace in the early and the most brilliant epoch 

 of the empire, before the Western world came under 

 the influence of that Oriental philosophy which was 

 presently to encompass it. 



In this regard the Alexandrian world was, as just 

 intimated, far more advanced than the Roman, yet 

 even there we must suppose that the leaders of thought 

 were widely at variance with the popular conceptions. 

 A few illustrations, drawn from Greek literature at 

 various ages, will suggest the popular attitude. In 

 the first instance, consider the poems of Homer and of 

 Hesiod. For these writers, and doubtless for the 

 vast majority of their readers, not merely of their own 

 but of many subsequent generations, the world is 

 peopled with a multitude of invisible apparitions, 

 which, under title of gods, are held to dominate the 

 affairs of man. It is sometimes difficult to dis- 

 criminate as to where the Greek imagination drew 



293 



