Hughes, Merritt Y.

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AN ANCIENT TEMPLE TO TOLERANCEBY MERRITT Y. HUGHESPRIEST-KINGS and god-emperors are no4: nsnally regarded asprophets of religious toleration. Traditionally, the Romanemperors, ''as a class," have been best known to fame as persecutorsof the early Church and they have suilered double condemnationbecause the two idealists among them, Marcus Aurelius and Julianthe Apostate, both sanctioned the choice between the divine Caesarand the divine Jesus by the death penalty. During the past centuryboth men have won a little sympathy as romantic martyrs to thespirit of dying paganism, but the tide of modern sentiment has notreally turned in their favor. Swinburne and Ibsen both failed tomake a sympathetic figure of Julian, and Alarcus Aurelius is assplendidly aloof from the modern world as he was from his own.Probably with much justice and common sense, we refuse to be-come partisans of those who staked everything on the defence ofthe abstract past against the living present and the future.Intellectually at least, there was a quintessential kind of toler-ance possible for a Roman emperor which was infinitely more pro-found than our modern tolerance of spiritual live and let live.Imagine a man bringing to the purple strong religious instinctsaccentuated by a dash of superstition and cultivated by wide, thoughsuperficial reading of ancient philosophy. Give him the curiosity andintelligence of a modern student of comparative religion. Supposehim free to travel everywhere through the Roman world duringtwenty years of almost unbroken peace and think of him as domi-nated by a desire to solve the problem of government with a relig-ious formula. Such a man was Hadrian and in his villa near Tivoliwe have the ruins of a vast shrine which he erected to his ownpassion for combining into a single personal experience all the livingreligious faith, both traditional and philosophical, which he hadfound in his journeys through the Empire.298 THE OPEN COURTHadrian's journeys around the rim of the Roman world undoubt-edly were sentimal. There is proof enough of that in the familiarstory of Antinous, the beautiful Greek boy whom he discovered inSyria and made his favorite page, and in whose honor he foundedAntinoopolis on the Nile, at the point where the youth was drowned.But Hadrian was as shrewd as he was spontaneous in his sentimen-tality. He understood the Greeks whom he had to govern, and,if he shared their weaknesses, he won their affection. Three timeshe went to the Near East in the eighteen years after he becameEmperor in 119 A. D., and each time hundreds of coins were struckin his honor by the towns through which he passed, all wishingGood Luck to Augustus. Far out on the Parthian frontier he helda durbar, after the manner of the Princes of Wales in India, andthe independent, barbarian kings from the desert came to meethim at such a feast of sentimental hypocrisy as only those of uswho were in Paris during the Armistice can imagine. Yet he some-how managed to reach an understanding with them which kept thepeace in the East for the better part of a century.Like the present Prince of Wales, Hadrian seemed to find thatthe art of government was best understood as a perpetual pleasurejourney, a journey, that is, which gave pleasure to other people. Hewas near Antioch when he became, rather unexpectedly. Emperor.He went straight to Rome, and no sooner was acknowledged therethan he left for Britain by way of the Roman frontiers in Germanyand Holland. He was away on a three-year tour which includedFrance, Spain, Morocco and Asia before he saw Rome again. Asa pleasure journey the trip had limitations for all concerned. OneRoman gentleman whom he invited to go along as a travelling com-panion refused its hardships in a famous quatrain which has beentranslated—without the apologies due to the author of Hiawatha—in this way:"I would rather not be Caesar,Have to haunt Batavian marshes,Lurk about among the Britons,Feel the Scythian frost assail me."The Travels with a Donkey would be much less admired by most ofits readers if its story had to be lived instead of read, and it wouldbe interesting to know how the little, middle-aged man of geniuswalking bare-headed imder a private soldier's kit in the cold of Ger-many or the heat of Egypt really felt about it all. L'n fortunately.AN ANCIENT TEMPLE TO TOLERANCE 299he did not leave any record of his sensations, except the big villaon the edge of the Roman Campagna below Tivoli.The villa is a log-book, the biggest ever kept and absolutelyunique. Hadrian began it when he had returned from his secondbig swing around the imperial circle and it was building during hislast great "pleasure journey." It is rather a begging of the questionto dispose of all his travels under that name, but both his Germanand English biographers. Gregorovius and T.. \\'. Henderson, do so.The name does better justice to the spirit with which he bore theirhardships than it does to his objects in taking theuL On that lastexpedition he travelled through Syria and AralMa. He went fardown the Euphrates and up the Xile. From Antioch and Palmyraand Alexandria he sent back the specifications of his finest adven-tures m architecture and scenery to be built into the mighty pleasuredome decreed at Tibur. His idea in doing so bears comparisonwith our world's fairs, or perhaps better with the Imperial Exhibi-tion at A^'embley, or with the beautiful exposition which united theSpanish world at Seville, for Hadrian was a courageous liberalabout race and colonial problems and he tried to wipe out all thediscriminations to the prejudice of the Roman provinces in com-parison with Italy. In one respect his villa resembled the ]\Iission-ary Exposition at the A^atican this year, for it assembled templesof most of the religions of the Roman world. To be sure, it wasnot dedicated to the concjuest of the religions represented, but itsubtly symbolized the absorption of them all into the cult of theEmperor, ";he super-religion of the Roman state.The temples to the Eastern gods are the most mysterious thingsabout Hadrian's villa, just because they are such starkly clear proofsof the difference between the Roman world and our own which wefind it hardest to grasp. .V man who claimed divine honors fromhis subjects and got them, a man to whom statues were erected inevery city in the world so that the trade in them was standardizedover the whole jMediterrancan basin, surrounded himself with tem-ples to all the gods whose cults were popular anywhere in theRoman world. It was not that he wished to hob-nob with his fel-low gods. He was not crazy, like Alexander, who went out to thetemple of Ammon near Thebes, and came back with a revelationof son-ship to Zeus and took divine honors to himself ever after.Hadrian took pleasure in insisting unceremoniouslv that he was aman. When he was at Thebes he seems to have gone into the desertat sunrise to see the musical statue of Juppiter-Ammon quite as a300 THE OPEX COURTmodern tourist or scientist would go. Or would it be nearer thetruth to say that he went in the spirit of a pilgrim, a theosophicalpilgrim with curiosity and respect for religious ideas of any kindwherever they were definite and intense enough to have embodiedthemselves in a ritual? We have no name for this kind of thingin the modern world. We call it Tolerance, as if a world of merenegation could describe a lifelong passion. With feeble imagina-tions we feel toward it in our science of comparative religions. Butthe truth is that we do not understand it and probably have no roomfor it. Our modern missionary movements, and the conception ofcolonization now put in action by all western nations except theFrench are founded upon interests and ideas of which it was asheer denial. Probably the only poet in the English-speaking worldspontaneously creating anything akin in spirit to Hadrian's templesto the gods of the gorgeous but superstitious East, is A^'achel Lind-say. Lindsay has imaginad glorious fanes to be built by all theChristian denominations living together in unity in Springfield, Illi-nois, a hundred years from now. What a timid amateur in synthe-sizing piety the American would seem to the Roman!Realistic historians such as Signor Ferrero may be right in sug-gesting that Hadrian, like Aurelian who tried to unify the Romanworld on a basis of Mithraism, and like Constantine, who actuallydid unify it on a basis of Christianity, was only making politicalexperiments in religion. Xo doubt, that is part of the truth abouthis character, but it does not explain his enthusiasm or his touch ofgenius. No one could build Hadrian's replica of the shrine in whichthe mysteries were celebrated at Alexandrian Canopus—crudethough the building may have been-—without a fragment of that cre-ative fusion of the religious and architectural passion embodied inthe twentieth century in Mr. Cram. Hadrian was a serious dilet-tante in religions, and from that, in his times, it was only a step tosuch natures as those of Apollonius of Tyana and of Plutarch whohonestly tried to make a synthesis of all the religious traditionsaround them for the salvation of people intelligent enough to under-stand them.Only a fragment of the tufa core of the Canopus temple is leftat Tibur. The shell of stone and the main mass of the buildingare gone. P)Ut enough remains to certify that Hadrian had caughtthe essential thing in the colossal architecture of Egypt and to sug-gest that he may have given its illusion as successfully as he gavethe much more difficult illusion of vastness in the dome of the Pan-AN ANCIENT TEMPLE TO TOLERANCE 301theon. The story is that he had a httle reproduction of the townof Canopus built around the shrine for the Mysteries. It was allself-contained and lay in a little valley out of sight of the rest ofthe villa. There the gossip of Rome said that the Emperor partici-pated in rites too magnificent and sensual for western imaginationsto conceive. Certainly the city can have had small part in the dreamsthat he cultivated in his little Egypt.Rome was not really shut out of the villa at Tibur. The citylay on the horizon, and inside the Cyclopean walls of the park threethousand of the Praetorian Guards had quarters. Six or seventhousand people in all lived with the Emperor and the spirit of theplace must have been as little as possible like that of Louis XIV'sA'ersailles. It was a model city as much as it was a villa, and as suchit was perhaps most truly the expression of Hadrian's personality.He had spent his life in founding cities—Adrianople, Antinoopolison the Xile, Aelia on the Black Sea. and scores of others. He hadnever lost interest in rebuilding dilapidated Athens. At Tibur hewould build a city for himself. If it did not have its roots in theeconomic life of the Empire, it would at least be a less dangerousparasite than Caprae in the ancient world, or than Coney Islandtoday. And it would be beautiful. Of that he was sure, for he in-tended to make it out of copies of some of the loveliest buildingsthat he had seen on his travels. So he seems to have tried to givethe effect of having lifted Athens bodily from Greece to Italy. ALyceum, ^n Academy, a Prytaneum and a Painted Colonnade wereall parts of the main unit of building in the villa. For the mostpart, only the floors and the stumps of the pillars in the greatcloisters are left, but they are proof that there was no crowding.Every building stood free, and almost every building must havehad its individual level among the rolling foothills of the Apennineswhere Hadrian—thinking of the clear definition of the temples onthe Acropolis—had chosen his site.We should do Hadrian no injustice if we compared his villa tosome of the famous literary LTopias, best of all with Plato's Repub-lic. He may not have been a Platonist, but the villa was a philoso-pher's paradise, and no better short definition than that could be in-vented for all the Utopias which have ever been described. Thereis just enough left of the roll in the villa which is called tradition-ally "the Hall of the Philosophers" to assure the visitor that theroof of the colonnade was high enough to give a pleasant resonanceto a confident speaker's voice, and that the space was just big302 THE OPEN COURTenough to accommodate that fit audience—few, but not too few—which Protagoras and all his children love.Around the great circular portico the life of the villa must havecentered and the baths, the basilica and the distant Greek theatremust have been foils for the unmitigated play of conversation thatwent on there. Just above the portico one niched wall of the librarystill stands. The room was big enough to contain all the books ofvalue in Greek and Latin literature, but, however rich it may havebeen, it must have been too dark to invite much reading indoors.Readers must have taken the rolls into the gardens and porticos toscan them and talk about them in a setting marvellously like thatworld half of livid reality and half of bright imagination in whichthe Platonic Socrates talked over books and the men who presumedto write them.Superficially, to a modern visitor, the villa seems like a sheercaprice, an abuse of the tyranny that gave unlimited slave labor toone man. How little a mere caprice it really was, and how closelylinked it was with the most humane ideas of the ancient world, willappear in an instant if it is compared with the little Versailles withwhich a King of Bavaria amused himself not many years ago, orwith the pleasure parks built by the two rich men of the English"Romantic Revolt," Horace Walpole and Beckford. StrawberryHill and Fonthill Abbey were both exaggerated efl^orts to escapefrom life. Poe, in The Domain of Arnheim, distilled the essenceof those efforts in landscape gardening of his English predecessors.A man to whom, by a chance which Poe did not very convincinglyexplain, the control of all the capital in the world fell, built a parkof vast extent and of perfect beauty, but furnished with only a sin-gle building, the palace of the owner. Park and palace were soimagined that only a single individual could enjoy them. A houseparty there would be inconceivable, even to Mr. Shaw. They werethe projection of a fancy much more individualistic than artistic. Poebarricaded his imaginary paradise against all but a few visitors,just as Beckford morbidly excluded almost all visitors from Font-hill. Hadrian's villa may have been as full of caprices as HoraceWalpole's Gothic mansion, but it was something altogether differ-ent. Its builder had lived in extraordinarily active contact withmen and ideas and it contained as much of his world as he couldcrowd into it. H the author of J^athek had been in Rome, Hadrianwould have invited him to Tibur and installed him in the role ofAN ANCIENT TEMPLE TO TOLERANCE 303Rhadamanthus in the little Tartarus which reminded gtiests at thevilla that their host was an adept of the Mysteries of Eleusis.In the Sibylline Books there was a prophecy in which many ofhis contemporaries saw Hadrian intended. It said that a king witha brow of silver, who bore the name of a sea. would build templesand altars in every city, would travel through the world on foot, andwould understand all magic mysteries. As the journal intimc of thatmessianic king, kept in landscape and architecture, the villa at Tibur,in spite of its dilapidations, is alive with meaning.

An Ancient Temple to Tolerance.

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An Ancient Temple to Tolerance.

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