he less. He was also a philosopher in his
way. He had read not only the literature of Greece, but that of his
adopted land, and he was especially familiar with Lucretius and his pupil
Virgil. His intellectual existence, however, was not particularly happy.
Rome was a pleasant city; his occupation was one in which he delighted;
the thrill of a newly noticed Lucretian idea or of a tender touch in
Virgil were better to him than any sensual pleasure, but his dealings
with his favourite authors ended in his own personal emotion, and it was
sad to think that the Hermes on which he had spent himself to such a
degree should become a mere decoration to a Roman nobleman's villa,
valued only because it cost so much, and that nobody who looked at it
would ever really care for it. Once, however, he was rewarded. He had
finished a Pallas Athene just as the sun went down. He was excited, and
after a light sleep he rose very early and went into the studio with the
dawn. There stood the statue, severe, grand in the morning twilight, and
if there was one thing in the world clear to him, it was that what he saw
was no inanimate mineral mass, but something more. It was no mere
mineral mass with an outline added. Part of the mind which formed the
world was in it, actually in it, and it came to Charmides that intellect,
thought, had their own rights, that they were as much a fact as the
stone, and that what he had done was simply to realise a Divine idea
which was immortal, no matter what might become of its embodiment. The
weight of the material world lifted, an avenue of escape seemed to open
itself to him from so much that oppressed and deadened him, and he felt
like a man in an amphitheatre of overhanging mountains, who should espy
in a far-off corner some scarcely perceptible track, and on nearer
inspection a break in the walled precipices, a promise, or at least a
hint, of a passage from imprisonment to the open plain. It was nothing
more than he had learned in his Plato, but the truth was made real to
him, and he clung to it.

"Rome at the end of the third century was one of the most licentious of
cities. It was invaded by all the vices of Greece, and the counterpoise
of the Greek virtues was absent. The reasoning powers assisted rather
than prevented the degradation of morals, for they dissected and
represented as nothing all the motives which had hitherto kept men
upright. The healthy and uncorrupted instinct left to it