CHAPTER XXI

ATHENS AND LOS ANGELES

There has been peace in the cave for a while, because Mrs. Ogi has been interested in learning about the Greeks. "I perceive," she says, "that there are superstitions in the arts, just as in religion."

"Exactly," says Ogi; "and they serve the same purpose. They begin as honest ignorance, and are then taken up and used as a source of income and a shield to privilege."

Says Mrs. Ogi, "It strikes me the Greeks lived in a country very much like Southern California."

"Quite so. The climate is the same; and the rocky hills and fertile valleys, and people living the outdoor life, and giving their time to sports. The one-piece bathingsuits that have come into fashion in our 'beauty parades' are about the same thing as the Greek maidens running naked in the games. And if you want to parallel the darker side of Greek sensuousness-"

"There is Hollywood," says Mrs. Ogi.

"There is all smart society, as much luxury and wantonness as your thesis requires."

"But then, why has Los Angeles never had any art? I know what you are going to say-our mental energy goes into real estate advertisements. But joking aside, why?"

"Because the people here have never had a struggle. They came into a country already prepared for them, inhabited by tame Indians living on piñon nuts.

settlers had to do was to subdivide the land, and raise the price once every year. They are too polite to have an art; if anybody makes a crude effort, it is a masterpiece, and we all get together and boost. You can write one feeble book, and live a life-time on your reputation. Los Angeles is a fruit that was rotten before it was ripe." "What are we going to do?" asks Mrs. Ogi.

"We are going to take our choice between a social revolution and a slave empire."

Mrs. Ogi is not certain about her choice; she sits, watching the entrance of the cave out of the corner of her eye the ancestral habit of expecting some hostile in

truder. After a while she remarks, "I notice you didn't say anything about slavery in Greece."

"It will be better to deal with slavery in the case of the Romans, where its effects show so plainly. The Greeks had slavery, but the force which destroyed their civilization was faction. They had their 'world war,' and Sir Gilbert Murray, who knows them by heart, has drawn a parallel between that war and ours; it is so exact that it makes you laugh-or weep, according to your temperament. The Greek struggle was between the Athenian empire, a democratic sea power, and the Spartans, an aristocratic, military people with no nonsense about them. The war lasted for two generations, off and on; they hadn't developed the technique of extermination as we have. But they had all the social and psychic factors of our 'war for democracy'-'defeatists' and 'bitter-enders,' poets and propagandists of hate, statesmen promising utopias after victory, after victory, spies and spies and informers and provocateurs, refugees crowding into the cities, landlords raising rents, food famines, rationing of supplies, and profiteers coining fortunes out of the general misery. And of course the demagogues and haters had their way; Athens was ruined and Sparta was bled white, and the Greeks became subjects, first of Macedonia, then of the Romans, then of the Turks."

"Thus endeth the first lesson," says Mrs. Ogi. "And now for the Romans."

"Well, the Romans didn't bleed themselves to death; they were practical fellows, with a business man's point of view. They turned their deadly short swords against other races; and when they had conquered somebody, they put him to work for the glory of the Grand Old Party. They were 'hard-boiled,' as we say; our big business men of the rougher type-old P. D. Armour, and Pullman, and 'Jesse James' Hill, and Harriman, and the elder Morgan, and Judge Gary. This banker in Chicago that the Republican party has just put over on us as vicepresident, General 'Helen Maria' Dawes-he commanded an army against the Germans, and having conquered them, he goes back to put them under bond, to set them at work for long hours, and drain the milk out of the mothers' breasts, and feed it to the international bankers, instead of to the German infants. That was a perfect Roman job.

and General Helen Maria would have been the boy after the Romans' own heart; they would have made him a prefect over the whole of Asia Minor, or Northern Africa, or Spain, and he would have come home a millionaire-but never so rich as the head of one of the Morgan banks in Chicago!"

"I shouldn't think you'd get much art out of people like that," says Mrs. Ogi. "But go ahead and tell us the story."

CHAPTER XXII

THE SLAVE EMPIRE

Rome, like all other nations, was founded by stern, determined men, who believed in themselves and in their tribal gods. They conquered the peninsula of Italy, and built mighty cities, and a net-work of military roads, and aqueducts which endure even today. All that time their state was a republic; in fact, they made the word for us— res publicæ mean public affairs, and all Roman citizens took part in them, discussed and voted, passed laws and enforced the laws. They raised armies, and built fleets of ships, and conquered Carthage, and ultimately the whole Mediterranean world. But, according to the custom of the time, they enslaved their prisoners in war; and so, in the course of six or eight centuries, Rome provided the classic demonstration of what slavery does to civilization.

Emerson has said that wherever you find a chain fastened to the wrist of a slave, you find the other end fastened to the wrist of a master. It is possible for a slave-holder to be a virtuous man, but it is impossible for him to raise virtuous children. Slaves are tricky and dishonest, full of suppressions and secret vices; even where they mean well, they debauch the young by waiting upon them and depriving them of initiative. Why should a young aristocrat work, when he knows he will grow up to inherit papa's money? In a few generations he is too effeminate even to fight. Why should he risk his precious. life, when he can hire common soldiers?

Not only that, but slavery undermines free labor, and breaks down the farming class. Cheap food poured into

Rome, and the farmers were ruined, and their sons drifted into the cities. The lands of Italy were mortgaged, and the money-lenders got them. Wealthy merchants and officials returning from the provinces became owners of vast estates, while the cities were crowded with a hungry mob, idle, dissolute-and victimized by the owners of slum tenements. You may see every bit of that reproduced in the United States today, for chattel slavery and wage slavery are in their economic effects the same. The only difference is that a process which took six or eight centuries in Rome is taking one century under the stimulus of machinery.

The Roman mob had the vote, and they used it to get something for themselves. There came class struggles, bitter and ferocious. Two young brothers of the aristocracy, Caius and Tiberius Gracchus, became champions of the common people-what we call "parlor Socialists." They were assassinated, and the partisans of privilege, the "old gang," proceeded to slaughter everybody in Italy who threatened their power. There followed two generations of civil strife, and then came a strong man, Julius Cæsar, who put an end to political democracy. In history books that are taught to our school children today you will read that Cæsar was a great and virtuous protector of law and order; because the class which is paying for school text-books in capitalist America is waiting hopefully for the arrival of exactly such a man to put an end to the threat of industrial democracy.

So Rome became in form what it was in fact, an empire, the most colossal machine for plundering that had ever been seen on earth. A little inside gang of rich men ran it, and kept the mob satisfied by bread and circuses and gladiatorial shows. The Roman emperors tried every form of debauchery and blood-thirsty cruelty, incest and unnatural vice, and crowned it by having themselves made into gods with their statues set up to be worshiped in the temples. Their heirs took to murdering and poisoning each other, and Rome was governed by palace revolutions. Then the army discovered that it could share the graft, and the troops took to revolting and setting up their leaders as emperors and gods. All the while the tribute continued to roll in-the wealth of the whole world squandered in one mad orgy—

"Look here," says Mrs. Ogi; "you have got in a solid chapter of preaching-and we are trying to find out about art!"

"I'm all through now," says her husband, humbly. "But no one could understand Roman art without understanding the economics of slavery."

CHAPTER XXIII

DUMB PIOUS ENEAS

In the beginning the Romans didn't bother very much with art. In their public buildings they were content to take over the Greek styles-but making them heavy and solid, so as to last to the end of time. The attitude of a Roman gentleman toward the fine arts reminds me of a wealthy Southern planter whose son wanted to become a violinist, and the father said, "I can hire all the fiddlerfellows I want." The Roman gentleman bought people of that sort-musicians, dancers and poets with skill handed down from "the glory that was Greece."

Until the republic was dead and the Emperor Augustus took the throne. Then came a time of peace, and a Roman scholar, the son of a country proprietor, looked about him, and seeing the perils of internal decay and outside barbarism looming over his world, he recalled the stern sobriety of the good old days, and yearned to bring back the governing class of Rome to reverence for their ancestors. There is a report that the Emperor Augustus himself suggested the task to the poet; anyhow, Mr. Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil, set himself with sober deliberation to the making of a piece of Roman national and religious propaganda.

It was to be an epic after the fashion of Homer, written in dactylic hexameter, like Homer. Virgil cast about him for a hero, and selected a legendary Trojan. named Æneas, who was said to have fled from the Greeks and to have founded Rome. The characters in Homer carried an adjective before their names, "the wily Ulysses," "the swift-footed Achilles," and so on. Therefore this hero must have an adjective, and he becomes "the pious Æneas"-the man who respects the old-time