they had been joined by the run-a-ways from Herdonea, we find a renewal1 of severity towards a certain class, viz. the wealthier of them who served in the cavalry. The rest, however, enjoyed a more or less legitimised position; they were still kept separate from other troops, but were assigned year by year by the Senate as part of the forces entrusted to the officer in command of Sicily. This continued until 204 B.C. when the whole situation was changed by the arrival of Scipio. We have just seen how he had secured, after a struggle, the command of Sicily with permission to cross to Africa if he chose. But beyond the forces in Sicily no army had been given him for the purpose, and like another brilliant Italian commander of a later day, Garibaldi, Scipio had to rely for his great enterprise largely on the help of volunteers. Naturally he was not inclined to despise any trained forces that he could secure; and having received a favourable report from his predecessors of the way in which these patient men of Cannae had behaved in small operations in the last six years, he proclaimed. that he would make no difference between the men of this group and the rest in choosing men for the great invasion of Africa. After carefully weeding out the physically unfit, he embodied the rest in his army, and they shared in the final victory of Zama. The Romans conquered even Hannibal in the field because they had first achieved a victory over the spirit of disaffection in the hearts of their own citizens. How far can we be sure that we did the same?

THE QUEST FOR QUADRATUS.

BY J. RENDEL HARRIS, M.A., LITT.D., D.THEOL., ETC.

CURATOR OF MANUSCRIPTS IN THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY.

S

OME time ago, we drew attention to the fact that the story of the Passion or Martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, as it is related in Greek documents (preserved in Mount Sinai and elsewhere), and printed in the Greek Patrology among the Lives of the Saints which are ascribed to Symeon Metaphrastes, contains a piece of apologetic matter which had clearly been copied, by the writer of the Acts of the Martyrdom, from some very early Christian author. We suggested, also, that this borrowed matter might possibly be part of a lost Apology for the Christian Faith, known to have been presented, early in the second century, by Quadratus, Bishop of Athens, to the Emperor Hadrian. Finally, we pointed out that in the Acts of Catherine with its embedded Apology, we have a literary parallel to the story of Barlaam and Joasaph, whose nucleus and centre of crystallization is the incorporated Apology which an Athenian philosopher, named Aristides, had presented to the same Emperor, and we concluded by offering evidence for our belief that the books are by the same author, and that the prior document of the pair was the Martyrdom of Catherine.

Our present purpose is to continue, if not to conclude, the evidence for these assumptions.

In the case of Barlaam and Joasaph the identification in the body of the romance was rendered easy, by the fact that Aristides had been discovered in a Syriac translation in the Library in Mount Sinai, which told us definitely whose Apology it was; but in the case of the Catherine document we had no such assistance; the dissection had to be done in the dark, or in a very subdued light, and it was left to further investigation to settle whether the recovered author was

Quadratus or not. We had no reason to doubt that a document which was of the nature of an Apology was in the Catherine text: but it had not been employed with the same simplicity of transference and completeness of incorporation as in the case of Barlaam and Joasaph with Aristides. We can see this pretty clearly if we put the Catherine Apology under the critical microscope.

Its argument is seen to be on quite a different plane from that of Aristides. It would not be unfair to that philosopher to say, that, although he clearly identifies himself with the Stoic school of thought, so that his opening chapter reads like a summary of a Stoic lecture, his chief interest was the indictment of the Morals of Olympus, an indictment which serves as a foil for an exquisite picture which he presents of the simplicity, purity, and benevolence of the early Christian believers.

In the case of the Catherine Apology the writer has a different method to pursue; he is a destructive critic of the Euhemerist order; the gods, as Euhemerus said, are dead men deified, and the proof can be made from the Pagan literature and the Greek historians, as the writer of the Martyrdom undertakes to show. It was a dangerous method to adopt; for in Greek circles, Euhemerism was commonly equated with Atheism, and Atheism was one of the popular cries against the Christians, as, for example, when the mob shouted, "Down with the Atheists !" at the trial of Polycarp; but in imperial circles, also, and in the second century, when there was a line of deified emperors to look back upon, and another line to look forward to, it required no small courage for a Christian controversialist to take up the Euhemerist position. When we look more closely into the matter, we see that the Apologist, whoever he was, did not altogether neglect the method which Aristides found so attractive. He had something to say about the Chronique Scandaleuse of the Greek Mythology, and the author of the Catherine Acts has slurred it over. We will give an instance of what we mean.

In c. 10 the Acta have side-thrusts at Zeus, who is described as a liar and a trickster (σxóλcov), a knave and a deceiver (πavoûрyov, άπаτe@vα), and these charges are to be proved from Homer, but the passages from the poet are not given, and we are left to imagine the breach of the truce with the Greeks, which Zeus takes a hand in, and similar matters. Evidently the text has been abbreviated. This is

followed by the scandalous story of the way in which three of the great Olympians plotted the capture and imprisonment of Zeus himself, to whom Thetis comes with information of the plot and assistance against it. The writer says that the scheme was engineered by 'Hera, Poseidon, and Athena.' The order of the words shows that the Iliad is quoted, for here is the line

Ηρη τ' ἠδὲ Ποσειδάων καὶ Παλλὰς ̓Αθήνη.

Il. i. 399:

but, as quotation, it has dropped out from the text which again becomes suspect of abbreviation. The whole passage will be found quoted in Ps. Justin, Cohort. 2, probably from our lost Apology.

A more striking case is the omission of Platonic matter from the argument; although, when the story of the oratorical skill of Catherine comes to its end, in a not unworthy passage, the Emperor is told that he has heard what Plato has to say, and has come under the charm of Orpheus, whom even lifeless things obey. Orpheus is in the text, perhaps abbreviated, but Plato is absent; but, as we shall see presently, he must have stood there, for he is actually referred to; and, indeed, in some passages of the Republic, for instance, he talks like a Christian Apologist so as to invite quotation. We infer, then, that the Catherine text is, as regards the Apologetic matter which it has incorporated, incomplete and abbreviated. We are now going in search of the missing matter.

In the Lives of the Saints as edited in Latin by Surius, and in Greek and Latin in the same volume of the Greek Patrology (tom. 116) from which we took our text of St. Catherine's Martyrdom, there will be found a long story of the Martyrdom of Saint Eustratius and his Companions. It is, indeed, a long-winded story, some sixty columns of text, relating the trial and torture of a group of martyrs from Cappadocia and Cilicia, with all the extravagance that monastic imagination can attach to official and imperial cruelty. Most of it is sheer waste of time to read, but the attention is arrested here and there, and problems are suggested similar to those which we met in the Catherine legend. The text is one of those that are grouped under the name of Symeon Metaphrastes, but here again we have to ask the question whether Symeon the Translator really had anything to do with

it. Perhaps, as in the other case, the Greek may be wholly or in part original.

The opening paragraphs of the Acts of Eustratius are very like the introduction to the Acts of Catherine. Here also, we begin with a statement that in the days of certain persecuting emperors (this time it is Diocletian and Maximin), the whole Roman Empire had lapsed into paganism and was enthusiastic, under imperial pressure, for the cult of idols, and the suppression of the Christian Faith. Those who did not fall into line with the Imperial edicts were to be punished in their goods and in their persons. There is a rough parallelism, as we have said, with the Acts of Catherine; it may be conventional, and it may be accidental.

As we run our eyes over the story, we stumble upon a block of Apologetic matter, and at the same time upon a quotation from Aeschylus. The martyr Eustratius begins to expound the Christian Faith to the Governor before whom he is brought; if we omit certain interjections on the part of the Governor, in the style of a Platonic dialogue, we have before us a long continuous exposition of Christianity; first, why it is not possible to accept the classical presentation of the Pagan Deities; second, what is the Christian Doctrine of the Creation, the Fall and the Redemption. Under the former head, the Apologist is emphasising that 'Plato was of us.' We have then portion of an Apology, and it is a Greek Apology. That it is original Greek, at all events in this part of the Martyrdom, was apparent from the Aeschylean quotation. It runs as follows: 'We are not to say with Aeschylus,

θεὸς μὲν αἰτίαν φύει βρότοις

ὁτ ̓ ἂν κακῶσαι δῶμα παμπήδην θέλῃ.

a

This is a fragment from the lost play of the Niobe, and a reference to Nauck's Fragments of the Tragic Poets will tell us that it is found in Plato, Republic, ii. p. 380 a, in Eusebius, Praep. Evang. xiii. p. 643 (from Plato), in Plutarch, De audiendis poetis, c. 17, p. 17, and de comm. sens. c. 14, p. 465, as well as in Stobaeus. Nauck does not know that the passage occurs in the Acts of Eustratius; but it is no matter, for on looking closer at our text, we shall see that the Aeschylus fragment is only there, because the writer is quoting Plato's Republic, and, it is hardly necessary to add, quoting in the