the morals of Part V of the
Anthology most near to those of real life among respectable persons? Are
there not subjects on which Plato himself sometimes makes our flesh
creep? What are we to feel about slavery, about the exposing of
children? True, slavery was not peculiar to antiquity; it flourished in
a civilized and peculiarly humane people of English blood till a
generation ago. And the history of infanticide among the finest modern
nations is such as to make one reluctant to throw stones, and even
doubtful in which direction to throw them. Still, these great facts and
others like them have to be understood, and are rather hard to
understand, in their bearing on the religious life of the ancients.

Points of minor morals again are apt to surprise a reader of ancient
literature. We must remember, of course, that they always do surprise
one, in every age of history, as soon as its manners are studied in
detail. One need not go beyond Salimbene's Chronicle, one need hardly go
beyond Macaulay's History, or any of the famous French memoirs, to
realize that. Was it really an ordinary thing in the first century, as
Philo seems to say, for gentlemen at dinner-parties to black one
another's eyes or bite one another's ears off?[177:1] Or were such
practices confined to some Smart Set? Or was Philo, for his own
purposes, using some particular scandalous occurrence as if it was
typical?

St. Augustine mentions among the virtues of his mother her unusual
meekness and tact. Although her husband had a fiery temper, she never
had bruises on her face, which made her a _rara avis_ among the matrons
of her circle.[177:2] Her circle, presumably, included Christians as
well as Pagans and Manicheans. And Philo's circle can scarcely be
considered Pagan. Indeed, as for the difference of religion, we should
bear in mind that, just at the time we are about to consider, the middle
of the fourth century, the conduct of the Christians, either to the rest
of the world or to one another, was very far from evangelical. Ammianus
says that no savage beasts could equal its cruelty; Ammianus was a
pagan; but St. Gregory himself says it was like Hell.[178:1]

I have expressed elsewhere my own general answer to this puzzle.[178:2]
Not only in early Greek times, but throughout the whole of antiquity the
possibility of all sorts of absurd and atrocious things lay much nearer,
the protective forces of society were much weaker, the strain on
personal cha