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Bread Circuses Theories Of Mass Culture As Social
Decay 1st Edition Edition Patrick Brantlinger Digital
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Author(s): Patrick Brantlinger
ISBN(s): 9781501707643, 1501707647
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Year: 2016
Language: english
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Spirit of Reform:

British Litera tu re and Polities,
1832-1867
BREAD&
CIRCUSES
Theories of
Mass Culture as
Social Decay
by Patrick
Brantlinger
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS . Ithaca and London

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aided in bringing this book to
publication.
Copyright © 1983 by Cornell University Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit
our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
First published 1983 by Cornell University Press.

First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1985.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brantlinger, Patrick, 1941–
Bread and circuses.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mass media—Social aspects—History. 2. Mass society—History.
3. Culture. 4. Popular culture. 5. Classicism. I. Title.
HM258.B735 1984 302.2′34 83-45134
ISBN 978-0-8014-1598-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8014-9338-6 (paper)
The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
3050-2281d-1Pass.indd 1 6/9/2016 8:40:07 PM

For Andy, Susan, and Jeremy
Contents
Preface 9
1. lntroduction: The Two Classicisms 17
z. The Classical Roots of the Mass Culture Debate 53
3. "The Opium of the People" 8z
4. Some Nineteenth-Century Themes: Decadence, Masses, Empire,

Gothic Revivals 113
5. Crowd Psychology and Freud's Model of Perpetual Decadence 154
6. Three Versions of Modern Classicism: Ortega, Eliot, Camus 184
7. The Dialectic of Enlightenment Z2Z
8. Television: Spectacularity vs. McLuhanism Z49

8 CONTENTS
9. Conclusion: Toward Post-Industrial Society 278
Index 299
Preface
F OR better or worse, the most powerful, influential instruments

for the dissemination of values, knowledge, and art are today the
mass media. Among artists and intellectuals, the cultural domination
of radio, film, and television is normally viewed with apprehension.
Teachers of literature, for example, often express the fear that books
are an endangered species, that literacy is dying out, that it is giving
way to what Jerzy Kosinski calls "videocy. "1 Political theorists on both
the right and the left argue that the mass media are "totalitarian"
rather than "democratic," that they are a major-perhaps the major-
destroyer either of "individualism" or of "community." Often these
apprehensions are expressed in terms of a mythology that 1 call "nega-
tive classicism," according to which the more a society comes to de-
pend on "mass culture," the more it falls into a pattern of "decline and
fall" once traced by Rome and perhaps by other extinct civilizations.
These apprehensions are not necessarily mistaken, but the mythology
of negative classicism tends to obscure what is new and potentially
liberating in our present situation.
1. See the interview with Jerzy Kosinski by David Sohn, "A Nation of Videots,"
Media and Methods, 11 (April 1975), 24-31, 52-57. A recent study of responses to
literacy and the forces that threaten it is Robert Pattison, On Literacy: The Polifics of
the Word fmm Homer to the Age of Rack (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Pattison's book unfortunately appeared too late for me to consider it here. See al so my
essays "The Multiversity as a Mass Medium," Radical Teacher, 13 (March 1979),
28-32, and "Mass Communications and Teachers of English," College English, 37
(January 1976), 490-509.
10 PREFACE
The purpose of this hook is to criticize negative classicism as it has

heen applied to mass culture not just in our electronic present hut
over the last two centuries. The most recent "bread and circuses"
responses to television and the welfare state are hardly new; they echo
the reactions of artists and intellectuals from as long ago as Juvenal' s
age to the entry of "the common people" into the cultural arena, or to
the imposition on society of a centralized or mass-produced culture.
Negative classicism is the product of several traditions of culture theo-
ry, fi'om offshoots of Burkean conservatism to the esthetic postulates
of ~larxism. My hope is that a critique of the mythology of negative
classicism will help to open the way for new ideas ahout culture and
societv.
I do not wish to revive or defend older forms of culture, either
"high" or "mass," an)' more than I wish to champion the electronic
mass media as the)' are now employed in both capitalist and socialist
countries to distract, to narcotize, to sell toothpaste and beer, fascism
and Soviet Marxism. The two major arguments in defense of the mass
media which have developed over the last twenty years I find largel)'
unacceptable. The first line of defense is that of Marshall McLuhan
and his disciples; the second is the case for "cultural pluralism" as fully
compatible with-indeed, as partly a product of-the mass media, an
argument that Herbert Gans, for example, makes in Popular Culture
and High Culture. 2 If ~lcLuhan counters the mythology of negative
classicism, it is only to substitute another mythology, equally suspect,
based Oll the belief that the mass media are making the world over
into an electronic utopia. Gans, on the other hand, represents a prag-
matic liheralism whose main tenets have he en directly challenged by
the monopolistic, perhaps even totalitarian, tendencies of the mass
media. vVhere others find the erosion of democracy, Gans finds an
enduring vitality. His vision reconciles democracy and massification in
a way that, I helieve, cannot he squared with reality. A third defense
of mass culture and the mass media might he expected to develop
from Marxism, hut the most influential versions of ~larxist culture
theory in vVestern E urope and America have treated the media in
terms of reification, negation, monopoly capitalism, and therefore in
2. Raymond Rosenthal, ed., McLllhal1: Pro ami CO/l (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969):
Herhert J. Cans, Popular Culture a/ld High ClIltllre: AIl Arwh¡sís tll1d Ecaluatioll of
Taste (l\ew York: Basic, 1974).
PREFACE 11
terms of "empire and decadence," "bread and circuses"-as in Her-

bert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man.
In my own reading and thinking about the mass media, 1 have
wished to find sorne theory that would convince me that, somehow or
other, in sorne not too remote future, mass culture and democratic
community will coincide. They promise to do so, as Raymond
Williams, among other theorists, has suggested; but that promise
seems to rece de just as fast as the mass media achieve new levels of
power, influence, and sophistication. 3 Given this disillusioning pat-
tern, we may indeed be justified in using sorne version of negative
classicism to understand where the mass media are leading uso But
whatever liberating potential there may be in the technology of the
media counts for little in an apocalyptic mythology that reads the
doom of empires in what seem to be among the most constructive,
original developments of the age. How can this contradiction be un-
derstood? The history of theories about mass culture-which is more
often than not the history of negative classicism, Roman analogizing,
"bread and circuses"-may provide at least sorne clues to the future
toward which the mass media are propelling us, or to the future we
may create for ourselves through learning to use the mass media in
democratic ways.
Many people and several institutions have helped me complete this

project. 1 am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation; their fellowship allowed me to spend 1978-79 at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, beginning research that must have
sounded strange and unlikely at the proposal stage. 1 am also grateful
to Kenneth Gros Louis, John Reed, Jerome Buckley, and Patrick
McCarthy for their support in the early going, and to Indiana Univer-
sity for the "leave without pay" and Summer Faculty Fellowships
that added both free time and financial support to the Guggenheim.
1 went to Berkeley in part because the University of California is
blessed with two scholars, Leo L6wenthal and Martin Jay, who know
3. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Harper and
Row, 1966 [first published in 1958]); The Long Revolutíon (London: Chatto and Wind-
us, 1961); Television: Technology and Cultural Fonn (New York: Schocken, 1975
[1974]). The influence ofWilliams's thinking on my own will be apparent throughout
this book.
12 PREFACE
more about the history of the Frankfnrt Institute than anyone else.
They offered me their time, ideas, criticisms, and even their libraries
with great generosity. Both read parts of this book in early and embar-
rassingly rough drafts, and both offered suggestions that were astute,
usable, and yet also enconraging.
Others-Ellen Anderson Brantlinger, :\lartha Vicinus, Eugene
Kintgen, and Matei Calinescu-also read and criticized parts of this
book at various stages. I am grateful to aB of them, but especially to
Ellen and Matei. Ellen not only helped and enconraged me in numer-
ous ways, but patiently endnred a good deal of absent-mindedness,
sloppy housekeeping, and plain blue funk from me while I was writ-
ing. With his criticisms and suggestions about new books and articles
to read, Matei helped me to sharpen most of the chapters, focusing
my attention on the paradox of progress as decadence.
Some of the ideas in this study 1 first tried out in a graduate course
at Indiana: L68o, Literary Theory. I team-taught that course with
Christoph K. Lohmann, whose knowledge of American writers helped
me at the start of this project. During the semester we taught to-
gether, Chris brought many of my thoughts about mass culture into
better focus. 1 also imagine that many of the comments and questions
of our L680 students are registered in this book. Other students and
colleagues have helped with suggestions, information, eonversation,
research, translating, and typing, including Marilyn Breiter, Joan
Corwin, Linda David, Joseph Donovan, John Eakin, Catherine Gal-
lagher, Camille Garnier, Daniel Granger, Donald Gray, Raymond
Hedin, Joonok Huh, Lewis :\1iller, James Naremore, Robert Nowell,
Marsha Richmond, Sheldon Rothblatt, Seott Sanders, Michael
Sheldon, Anthony Shipps, Robert Smith, Elisa Sparks, Lee Sterren-
burg, Paul Strohm, Timothy Wiles, and John Woodeoek. I also thank
Jerzy Kosinski for eoming to my aid when a journal mangled an essay
of mine, the better parts of which 1 have revived in this book. And
both David Riesman and :\Iiehael Grant generously answered my
requests for information.
Whom have I left out? Perhaps our television set, but it is occupied
most of the time when 1 want to watch it by Andy, Susan, and Jeremy
(no, they have not been transmogrified into "videots," and they are
not usually "barbarians" either). 1 suppose I have them to thank for
keeping me at work those evenings when what I wanted to watch was
PREFACE 13
not what they were watching. And 1 can be even more thankful to
them for another reason: someday they may read this book and
understand why 1 wrote it for them.
PATRICK BRANTLINGER
Bloomington, Indiana
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
CIIAPTER 1
Introduction:
The Two Classicisms
'"Ve change cures, finding norte effecti¡;e, neme calid, beca use
lce hace faith neither in the ¡¡ea ce u;e seek rlOr in the pleasurcs
¡ce ¡JlIrsue. Versatile sages, ¡ce are the stoics ami epicurealls of
lnodern Romes.
-E. ~1. CIOHA'i, A. Sl!ort Historl¡ of Decm¡
T HIS is an examination of reactions to mass culture that interpret

it as either a symptom or a cause of social decay. Television, for
example, is sometimes treated as an instrument with great educational
potential which ought to help-if it is not already helping-in the
creation of a genuinely democratic and universal culture. But it just as
often evokes dismay, as in Jerzy Kosinski's novel amI movie Beillg
There; its most severe critics treat it as an instrument of totalitarian
manipulation amI social disintegration. All critical theories of mass
culture suggest that there is a superior type of culture, usually defined
in terms of some historical moclel: the Enlightenment, the Renais-
sanee, the NI icldle Ages, Periclean Athens. 1 shall call looking to the
past for an ideal culture "positive classicism." But critical theories of
mass culture also often suggest that the present is a recreatiO!1 or
repetition of the past in a disastrous way: the modern world is said to
have entered a stage of its history like that of the decline ancI bll of the
Roman Empire. Hence, "bread amI circuses." Comparisons of mo<1-
ern society with Roman imperial decadence 1 shall caH "negative
classicism. "
Frequently what a social scientist or a literary critic or a popular
18 BREAD AND G/RGUSES
journalist offers as analysis of mass culture or the mass media proves to

be something else: a version of a persistent, pervasive mythology that
frames its subject in the sublime context of the rise and fall of empires,
the alpha and omega of human affairs. Very little has been written
about mass culture, the masses, or the mass media that has not been
colored by apocalyptic assumptions. It would be too easy to say that
where genuine analysis ends mythologizing begins, but that is often
the case. The terms ofthis mythology-"mass culture" itself, but also
"the masses," "empire," "decadence," "barbarism," and the like-
defy definition. Their meanings shift with each new analysis, or rather
with each new mythologizing. U nless it is rooted in an analysis of
specific artifacts or media, the phrase "mass culture" usually needs to
be understood as an apocalyptic idea, behind which lies a concern for
the preservation of civilization as a whole. 1 call negative classicism a
"mythology" both because it is apocalyptic and because it pervades all
levels of public consciousness today, from scholarly and intellectual
writing to the mass media themselves. Of course it is a secular mythol-
ogy, close to Roland Barthes' s concept of "myth as depoliticized
speech"; a near synonym for it might be "ideology." But negative
classicism transcends the specific ideologies-conservatism, liberal-
ism, radicalism, fascism, socialism, Marxism-and is used in different
ways by them all. Its most thoughtful expositors elaborate and qualify
it with great sophistication and rationality, but it still functions more
like an article of faith than like a reasoned argument: in many cases, a
mere passing allusion to "bread and circuses" or to such related no-
tions as "decadence" and "barbarism" is meant to trigger a chain of
associations pointing toward a secularized Judgment Day in which
democracy, or capitalism, or Western civilization, or "the technologi-
cal society" will strangle upon its own contradictions, chief among
which is likely to be an amorphous monstrosity called "mass culture."
M y chief purpose has been to provide a critique of the mythology of
negative classicism as it has developed over the last two centuries in
relation to "mass culture": the mass media, journalism, mass educa-
tion, the cultural effects of the processes of democratization and indus-
trialization. Since a complete history of this mythology would have to
survey most writing about culture and society over the same time
span, 1 have chosen instead to focus on major patterns and major
cultural theorists. The first chapter offers an overview of some of the
The Two Classicisms 19
assumptions and theories that shape contemporary responses to mass

culture, as well as a capsule history of the "bread and circuses" analo-
gy. The second looks back to the Greek and Roman origins of modern
culture theories, including the two classicisms themselves. The third
returns to the modern world via an examination of some of the main
con tribu tion s of the Christian tradition to contemporary theorizing
about mass culture. It focuses on the idea of religion as the antithesis
of classical culture, and as somehow proletarian or for the masses, and
therefore as a version of mass culture-"the opium of the people."
The fourth chapter then turns to the "decadent movement," primarily
among nineteenth-century French and British writers, to show how it
developed as a defensive response to the democratization and indus-
trialization-that is, the "massification"-of culture. "Decadent"
poets and artists were the first major group of intellectuals to develop
a mythology based upon the analogy of modern society to the declin-
ing Roman Empire. The fifth chapter turns to the origins of Freud's
theories of civilization in his group psychology and its forebears, such
as Gustave Le Bon's "crowd psychology." Freud adopts much ofthe
negative thinking about "the masses" present in Le Bon, Nietzsche,
and other late nineteenth-century writers; the emergence of "the
masses" or of "mass culture" is a sign of the beginning of the end of
civilization, a return to barbarismo Chapter 6 explores the culture
theories of three contrasting figures from the first half of this century:
José Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, and Albert Camus. The first two
offer elaborate versions of negative classicism; Camus has enough faith
in ordinary human nature to believe in the prospect of a mass culture
that is not decadent, but that is instead synonymous with a free,
humane civilization. The seventh chapter examines the mass culture
theories of the chief representatives of the Frankfurt Institute-The-
odor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Ben-
jamin. The concept of the "dialectic of enlightenment" points to a
regression of civilization that, according to these theorists, is largely
caused by mass culture and the mass media, at least as these have
developed under capitalismo The last chapter focuses on television, as
reflected in the apocalyptic ideas of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan,
and others, including the Frankfurt theorists. The mythology of nega-
tive classicism seems inevitably to point to television as the chief
culprit in the alleged decline and fall of contemporary culture. Yet
20 BREAD AND CIRCUSES
television and the other mass media are historically without prece-
dent, and the "bread and circuses" analogy may finally be no more
than a term in an eschatological fantasia that obscures the liberating
potential of the new communications technology. In the conclusion. I
suggest some of the factors that obstruct the realization of this poten-
tial, including some forms of negative classicism.
In general negative classicism has in volved associating mass culture
and the mass media with other socioeconomic factors that are clearly
destructive or "decadent." In a recent essay that discusses uncon-
trolled industrial expansion, overpopulation, international conflict,
and an alleged demise of political leadership, 1. Robert Sinai pays
most attention to "mass culture" or "mass civilization" as the principal
cause of the "disaster and decay" that he forecasts as the immediate
future of the world. Even something so apparently constructive as
"mass literacy" is, from Sinai's perspective, destructive: "mass liter-
acy has, as ought to be more than apparent by now, lowered the
generallevel of culture and understanding. "1 A McLuhanesque addi-
tion to this idea is that, according to Sinai, "the old verbal culture is in
decline and there is everywhere a general retreat from the word." As
in McLuhan, the visual mass media, cinema and television, are tbe
main saboteurs of mass literacy, although mass literacy itself has been
a cause of the decay of something else-high culture or civilization,
developed only through the leadership of creative elites.
The high culture based on privilege and hierarehieal order and sus-
tained by the great works uf the past anel the truths and beauties
aehieved in the tradition destroyed itself in two World \V<lrs. We are
now living in a cruel "late stage in \Vestern affairs" marked bv
feelings of disarray, by a regress into violenee and moral obtuseness,
by a central failure of values in the arts and in the graces of personal
and social behaviour. Confused and bombarded, modern man is
suffused with fears of a new "Dark Age" in which civilisation itself as
we have known it may disappear or be confined to ... smal! islands
of archaic conservation. [16)
Sinai is undoubtedly speaking loosely here, because what he says in

the rest of his essay is not that high culture cornmitted suicide, but
that mass culture has assassinated the genuine al·ticle, the elitist civi-
1. 1. Robert Sinai, "\Vhat Ails Us and Why: On the Roots ofDisaster and Decav,"
Encounter, April 1979. p. 15·

lization of the past. And, where mass culture is perceived as a destruc-

tive force or tendency, as in an example of negative classicism like
Sinai' s, the fall of empires is rarely far behind. "All social systems are
ruled by an iron law of decadence," says Sinai, and ours is no excep-
tion. If the term "decadence" alone does not point clearly to the
decline and fall of the Roman Empire, then the term "barbarism"
brings the pattern into focus. Echoing Toynbee, Ortega, Spengler,
Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and many other negative classicists, Sinai
believes that high culture is today besieged by "the masses," bent on
the "vulgarisation and proletarianisation" of "the arts and sciences."
The masses represent "the new barbarism," which has "arisen within
modern civilisation rather than being an invasion from without."
In a discussion of Sinai' s essay published in a later issue of Encoun-
ter, several writers, while agreeing with much of his analysis, offer
wry, thoughtful comments about his doomsaying. They point out that,
if the emergence of the masses and the development of mass culture
has its destructive side (and what process of social change has not?), it
has also its constructive side. Elitism or aristocracy may have given
rise to high culture, but on the backs of the vast majority. Further-
more, as Ronald Butt writes, "if it is the fate of all civilisations" to
decline and fall, "why should it disturb us intellectually (whatever the
inconvenience to us personally), particularly if it is part of a natural
process of death and rebirth?"2 Butt's question, of course, reveals an
illogicality characteristic of all prophetic social criticism, including the
mythology of negative classicism. If the falls of empires can be proph-
esied, they must be predetermined. Because the "iron law of dec-
adence" must be inescapable to be "iron," the better part of intellec-
tual valor would seem to entail making the best of abad situation
rather than writing Jeremiads about it. Besides, as Butt goes on to say,
although Rome did indeed fall, out of its decay "came the much
higher, more spiritual and humane aspirations of Christian Europe."
He adds: "It is not a fashionable thing to say, but ... 1 would person-
ally have, preferred to live in the humane cultural excitement of Alfred
the Great's Christian court than in the bread-and-circuses atmosphere
of Imperial Rome. Except, of course, for the lack of hot water and
heating."
The phrase panem et circenses, or "bread and circuses," comes
2. "The Sinai Discussion," Encounter, February 1980, pp. 87-93.

from Juvenal' s tenth satire. Referring to the attempted coup by Se-

janus against Tiherius, Juvenal writes:
And what does the mob ofRemus sayr It foHows fortune, as it always
does, and rails against the condemned [Sejanus]. That same rabhle,
if Nortia [Etrusean goddess of fortune] had smiled npon the
Etrusean [Sejanus], if the aged Emperor had heen struck down
unawares, would in that very honr have conferred upon Sejanus the
title of Augustus. Now that no one huys our votes, the publie has
long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed COJl1-
mands, consulships, legioIls and aH else, now meddles no more and
longs eagerly for just two things-Bread and Circllses!:3
Juvenal suggests that the Roman Republic has given way to the Em-
pire hecause the fickle populace has abandoned its political respon-
sihilities f{¡r doles of food and the lures of the racetrack and the arena.
In modern writing, his phrase is often cited in criticisms of mass
culture to denote a process of social decline. The modern masses (so
goes the argument) have abandoned polítical involvement in favor of
welfare programs and the distractions of the mass media. The result is
the betrayal of the Enlightenment ideal of democracy hased on an
educated, egalitarian public and the emergence of fascist and socialíst
tyranny, the final totalitarian shapes of "mass society." Analyzing the
"Caesarian democracy" established in nineteenth-century France by
N apoleon III, Sir Lewis N amier uses Juvenal' s phrase in a way that
sums up what it has come to mean in contemporary discourse: "Panem
et circenses once more-and at the end of the road, disaster." 4 It
hardly matters that when Juvenal wrote, the Empire' s star was still
rising and Roman civilization was at its height. Juvenal' s is the with-
ered hand of the satirist-almost of the prophet-that seems to point
to the precipice. So Juvenal takes his place in the already well popu-
lated ranks of modern forecasters of doom.
In his survey of theories of mass society, Salvador Ciner says, "Of
all the contributions made by Roman thought and imagery to what
would later become the mass society outlook, probably the 1110st
3. Juvenal, Satires, x, in G. G. Ramsey, ed. and tr., Juvenal and Persius

(Cambridge, ~lass.: The Loeb Classical Library, 1918). 1 have altered Ramsey's "bread
and games" to "bread ami circuses."
4. Sir Lewis Namier, Vanished Supremacies: Essays on Ellropean History,
1812-1918 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963 [195 8]), p. 55.
The Two e lassicisms 23
important was the belief that the multitude must be fed bread and
cheap entertainment if it was to be kept quiet, submissive and loyal to
the powers that be. ",5 This belief has remained powerfullong after the
Roman circuses and coliseums have fallen to ruins. How often it has
served as a Machiavellian rule for actual policymaking cannot even be
guessed. But it has frequently been asserted that "bread and circuses"
underlies a supposed collusion between governments and the pro-
ducers of culture and entertainment. According to David Riesman,
"'conspiracy' theories of popular culture are quite old" and are
"summed up ... in the concept of 'bread and circuses.'" Riesman
cites Thorstein Veblen' s 1929 Dial editorial, "The Breadline and the
Movies," for presenting "a more sophisticated concept, namely, that
the modern American masses paid the ruling class for the privilege of
the very entertainments that helped to keep them under laughing
gas. "6
From Veblen's perspective and more generally from that ofthe left,
"bread and circuses" has proved a useful phrase for helping to explain
and condemn the processes by which capitalism has managed to de-
flect "the proletariat" from its revolutionary goal. From the viewpoint
of the right, the phrase has been just as useful for helping to explain
and condemn the failures of egalitarian schools and mass cultural
institutions such as television and the press to educate "the masses" to
political responsibility. In both cases, the culture and also the political
attitudes of "the masses" are criticized, as are the ways in which the
ruling class or the government manipulates them. And in both cases,
the shade of Rome looms up to suggest the fate of societies that fail to
elevate their masses to something better than welfare checks and mass
entertainments.
Those who have translated, imitated, or cited Juvenal have no
doubt always interpreted "bread and circuses" as showing the political
and cultural irresponsibility of the common man, though they have
not always found something clearly analogous in their own eras. Thus,
John Dryden drew a neoclassical moral from Juvenal about the "folly"
5. Salvador Ciller, Mass Society (New York: Academic, 1976), p. 23·

6. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961
[1950]), p. 153· Thorstein Veblen, editorial on panem et circenses from The Dial, 14
June 1919, reprinted in Essays in Our Changing Order (New York: Viking, i934), pp.
45°-53·
24 BREAD AND G/RGUSES
of "the Mob" or the "Rascal crowd" when it tried to play politics, but
he could not think of a better translation of panem et circenses than
this:
But we who give our Native Ríghts away,

And our Inslav'd Posterity betray,
Are now reduc'd to beg an Alms, and go
On Holidays to see a Puppet Show.7
Needless to say, "puppet show" is an inadequate rendering of the

excitement of the mass "spectacles" of chariot races in the Circus or of
gladiatorial combats in the Coliseum. Samuel Johnson's "imitation" of
Juvenal' s tenth satire, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," gets no closer:
Through Freedom's sons no more remonstrance rings,

Degrading nobles and controuling kíngs;
Our supple tribes repress their patriot throats,
And ask no questions but the price of votes;
With weekly libels and septenníal ale,
Theír wísh ís full to riot and to raíl. 8
This is not to say that Dryden and Johnson were unclear about the
meaning of Juvenal's phrase; they were both gaod neaclassícists who
knew Roman history thoroughly. But they could think of no clase
parallels either for panem or for circenses in their own society, Britain
between the Restoration and 1749. Both Montesquieu in 1734 and
Gibbon starting in 1764 gave explanations of the imperial policy of
bread and circuses, but no more than Dryden and Johnson did they
think of it as a contemporary problem.
The great historian of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was an
ardent believer in modern enlightenment and progress, who did not
think that "the triumph of barbarism and religion" which had de-
stroyed ancient civilization would repeat itself in the modern world.
Though Gibbon believed that the Roman experience offered lessons
that any wise nation should learn, he saw little danger of E urope' s
7. John Dryden, "The Tenth Satyr of Juvenal, Translated into English Verse," in
Poems, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), n, 723-24.
8. Samuel Johnson, "The Vanity of Human Wishes, The Tenth Satire of Juvenal
Imitated," in Rasselas, Poems and Selected Prase, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1952), p. 50.
being plunged into a new Dark Age. "The experienee offour thousand
years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions: we
eannot determine to what height the human speeies may aspire in
their advanees towards perfeetion; but it may safely be presumed that
no people, unless the bee of nature is ehanged, will relapse into their
original barbarismo "g The experienee of the Freneh Revolution, hmv-
ever, led more conservative thinkers to helieve that Europe as a
whole was threatened by a reversion to barbarism, the Dark Ages, or
worse. Metaphors drawn from Roman history are always close at hand
in Edmund Burke, fur example, as when he worries ahout "barbarism
with regard to science and literature" as a result of revolutionary
values, or when he writes of the property confiseations in Franee in
terms of similar eonfiseations under Sulla. 1O
~lueh modern history has involved at least a surfaee imitation oi"
classical models, from the arehiteeture of government buildings to the
outward shape of events. "The tradition of aH the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare 011 the brain of the living," wrote ~1arx. He
had in mind the way the French Revolution "draped itself alternately
as the Roman Republie and the Roman Empire." So Franee between
1789 and 1814 had been haunted by the ghosts of "resurreeted Ro-
mans-the Brutuses, Graechi, Publieolas, the tribunes, the senators
and Caesar himself," the last in the shape of Napoleon. Either history
repeats itself or we make it repeat itself by imitating classical models.
This happens, Marx believed, either beeause people cannot shape the
future freely (whieh partly means without making the same mistakes
twiee) or, what amounts to the same thing, because most people are
not heroes.
\Vholly absorbed in the production of wealth ancI in the peaceflll

struggle of competition, [the French bourgeoisie after 18301no ]ong-
er compre hended that ghosts fi-om the days of Rome had watched
over its cradle. But unheroic as bourgeois society is, yet it had !leed
oi" heroísm, oi" sacrifiee, uf terror, of civil war and uf natíonal battles
9. Edward Gibbon. Decline aY/el Pall of the ROlllan Empíre, 6 \'ols. (l\"ew York:
Everyman's Library, 1954 [1910]), (Y, 111. Ñlontesquieu, Consíelerations OH the
Causes of the Greatness of the ROlllans anel Their Decline, tr. David Lowenthal C\;ew
York: The Free Press ancl Collier-~Iaemillan, 19(5).
lO. Edmund Burke, Refleetions on the Revollltion in Primee (Baltimore: Penguin,
19( 9), pp. 193, 216- 17.
to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the

Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideas and the art forms, the
self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from them-
selves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles. l l
Implicit in Marx' s Roman analogizing is the question of the extent to

which the past always shapes the future, and beyond this lies the
further possibility-of course rejected by all orthodox Marxists-that
the future may inevitably be a repetition of the past, or that, as many
of the great classical writers thought, history moves in a circle.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, partly as a reflection of
revolutionary times, references to bread and circuses begin to point
morals that foreshadow modern critiques of mass culture. Montaigne,
Robert Burton, and Sir Richard Steele wrote about the Roman games
more or less as did Montesquieu and Gibbon, without any great moral
concern. But in 1782 Joseph Priestley criticized "the barbarous exhi-
bit ion of gladiators," and in the early nineteenth century, Chateau-
briand, Byron, Sismondi, and De Quincey all condemned the Roman
games on humanitarian grounds. 12 In "Childe Harold' s Pilgrimage,"
Byron's hero, standing in the ruins of the Coliseum, remembers the
fallen gladiators and praises barbarian innocence, "butcher' d to make
aRoman holiday" (stanza CXLI). Byron's full moral goes beyond hu-
manitarian sympathy to imply a connection between bread and cir-
cuses and the downfall of ancient civilization.
But here, where Murder breathed her bloody steam;

And here, where buzzing nations choked the ways,
And roar'd or murmur'd like a mountain stream
Dashing or winding as its torrent strays;
11. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte" (1852), in Robert C.
Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 437-
12. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, tr. E. J. Trenchmann, 2 vols. (London: Oxford,
1927), 11, 134-35; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 2 vols. (London: Peter
Parker, 1676), n, 171-72; Richard Steele, The Spectator, nos. 449 and 436; Joseph
Priestley, Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, 2 vols. (London: Johnson,
1782), l, 219; Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," canto IV, stanzas 128-45; Vicomte
de Chateaubriand, Etudes ou discours historiques sur la chute de l'empire Ro-
main ... (Paris: Carnier, 1873 [1831]), pp. 402-3; I.C.L. de Sismondi. A History of
the Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Longman, Brown, Creen, and Longmans,
n.d.), l, 24-25 and 121-22; Thomas De Quincey, The Caesars (Boston: Ticknor, Reed,
and Fields, 1851), pp. 120-21.
Here, where the Roman millions' blame or praise

Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd,
My voice sounds much, and faH the stars' faint rays
On the arena void-seats crush'd-walls bow'd-
And gaHeries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud.
This is not a translation or imitation of Juvenal, of course, but some-

thing better: a critical interpretation ofhistory. In this regard, roman-
ticism seems preferable to classicism: it offers the belief that Rome feH
to make way for progress, or the more general belief that it is possible
to improve upon the pasto In any case, only in Byron' s time does the
idea ofbread and circuses come to be viewed with a certain horror, as
a pattern that modern society is unfortunately imitating aH too closely,
but also one that, if understood criticaHy, can perhaps be avoided.
"When under the Emperors, the old Romans asked for nothing but
bread and amusements," wrote Giuseppe Mazzini in 1844, "they be-
carne the most abject race conceivable, and after submitting to the
stupid and ferocious tyranny of the Emperors they basely feH into
slavery to the invading Barbarians. "13 Here is a nemesis to avoid, if at
aH possible. Mazzini is concerned with the waning of moral idealism in
the modern world, both on the part of rulers and on the part of the
people. He still does not have an exact analogy for Juvenaí's circuses
in mind, but is rather thinking about the encroachments of bourgeois
industry and commerce upon the life of the spirit, much as Marx does
in the "resurreeted Romans" passage. In 1836 Mazzini had written:
"We remember that when the material factor began to hold the field
in Rome, and duty to the people was reduced to giving them bread
and public shows, Rome and its people were hastening to destruction;
beeause We see today in Franee, in Spain, in every country, liberty
trodden under foot, or betrayed precisely in the name of commercial
interests and that servile doctrine which parts material weH-being
from principIes. "14 So for Mazzini as for many later social critics, what
may seem like progress in one sense-the ruthless advance of "com-
mercial interests"-seems like decadence in another.
As an Italian, Mazzini inherited both a negative and a positive
13. Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man, and Other Essays, ed. Thomas Jones
(New York: Everyman's Library, 1907), p. 16.
14· Ibid., p. 133·
classicism. The aim of his liberal nationalism was to resurrect Roman

unity and glory in their best forms, while avoiding the problems of
decadence and barbarismo Much the same aim was later adopted by a
far less liberal nationalist party, the Fascists, who quite lite rally
sought to resurrect the Roman Empire and who saw in their Duce the
ghost of Caesar. Mazzini was an ardent republican and believer in
national self-determination, never an imperialist. But empire was the
order of the day for the Fascists, as indeed it had become for many of
the other nations of Europe after the Franco-Prussian War. And mod-
ern imperialism more than ever called up Roman ghosts. "For Fas-
cists the tendency to Empire, that is to say, to the expansion of
nations, is a manifestation of vitality; its opposite, staying at home, is a
sign of decadence. "15 So wrote the new Caesar, Mussolini, in his 1932
encyclopedia article, "The Doctrine of Fascism." Mussolini could also
say, echoing Mazzini' s call for a spiritual re vi val: "AH belief is extinct,
we have no faith in our gods, no belief in the Republic. Great princi-
pIes are no more. Material interests reign supreme. The multitude
demands bread and amusements. "16 Part of the sad irony is that
Mussolini gave the ltalian masses bread and amusements and little
else except for polítical violence and tyranny at home and warfare
abroad-in Ethiopia, in Spain, and in the rest of Europe. The Roman
Empire was indeed reborn in Italy in the 1920S, but its life was brief
and tragic: it rushed through the cycle of rise, decline, and faH in
twenty rather than in a thousand years.
From 1870 down to World War 11, meanwhile, the other countries
of Europe also marched across much of the rest of the world like new
legionnaires. Sorne Englishmen expected their empire to be the new
Athens instead of the new Rome, but it is not clear that Britain was
more successful at spreading civilization than at exploiting the "dark"
corners of the earth. The Pax Britannica was at least metaphorically
parallel to the Pax Romana (a "peace," however, which in both cases
15. Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism" (1932), reprinted in Adrian Lyt-
telton, ed., [tal¡an Fascisms: From Pareto to Gelltile (New York: Harper and Row,
1973), p. 56. It is clear from the same document that Mussolini thought of his move-
ment as a "classical revival" (p. 66).
16. Mussolini quoted by Mario Palmieri, The Philosoph¡/ of Fascism (Chicago: The
Dante Alighieri SOCÍety, 1936), p. 46.
The TU/o Classicisms 29
was characterized by almost continuous warfare somewhere in the

world) , though there were many who believed, with Sir John R.
Seeley, that the British Empire was destined to more glorious ends
than Rome: "No greater experiment has ever been tried on the globe,
and ... the effects of it will be comparable to the effect of the Roman
Empire upon the nations of Europe, nay probably they \viH be much
greater."17 German expansionists, by way of contrast, often dreamed
about rekindling harbarian vigor rather than about restoring Roman
imperial or classical greatness; after Herder, Fichte, amI \Vagner,
Kultur meant something pristine and Gennanic, rising out of the
forests wbence long ago had come the Cimbri and the Teutons. \Vhile
tbeir Italian alIies yearnecl for Augustan power anel glory, many Ger-
mans-perhaps more honestly-joined up for new barbarian inva-
sions, to overwhelm amI to purify tbe decrepit civilization Hrst planted
by Rome. l !)
M ussolini's "classical reviva!" was of course a fraudulent classicism
anel an affront to those humanists who helieve that knowleelge of the
classical past is necessary to the defense of modern civilization, who
think that learning is a keystone of freedom, anel who see in bscism
not a revival of an ancient heritage but a travesty of it-a revival at
best of barbarismo AH the same, the classicist clefenders of high cul-
ture against the clepredations of "the masses" have themselves fi-e-
quently been fascists 01' hlscist sympathizers: the "case" of Ezra Pound
is not unique, but is to greater or lesser clegree the case also of the
other "reactionaries" whose politics have been analyzed by John R.
Harrison: T. S. Eliot, \V. B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Law-
rence. HJ To their number must he aclded many other intelleduals wllo
managed through the first half of this century to be both classicists ancI
17· Sir John H.. Sede\, The Expallsíoll ofEng/and (Chicago: l'ni\ersity ofChicago
Press, 1971 [lil8,3]), p. 240.
18. The iJea that Englancl shoule! be the ne\V Athens rather than RonlE' oI the \\'orle!
\Vas expresseJ, e.g., bv F. See(¡ohm, "Ill1perialisll1 anJ Socialisll1," Xineteellth (.'1:11-
tlln/, 7 (April 1880), 728. For British-Roman parallels, see RaYlllond F. Betts. 'The
Allusiotl to ROllle in British lmperialist Thollght oI the Late-"'¡¡netecnth ane! Earh-
T\Ventieth Centuries," VietoriaY! Studies, 15 (1971-72), 149-59. For Gerlllan-harbar-
ian parallels, see Peter \'iereck, MetaJ!o!itíes: From the Rumantíes to Ilit/er (l\'ew
York: Knopf 1941l.
19. John R. Harrison, The ReaetiuY!aries (1\ew York: Sehoeken, 19661.
30 BREAD AND eIReUSES
hlscists, or who otherwise put high culture into the service of total-
itarian causes. The case against the reactionaries can he matched by
that against those ~larxists \vho, in the face of Stalinism, continued to
be apologists for Soviet totalitarianism. But conscious declarations of
positive classicism-as félr example those ()f T. S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound, Charles Maurras and T. E. Hulme, Friedrich Nietzsche and
lrving Babbitt-have usually in volved reactionary rather than leftist
or even liberal political attitudes.
As defined within the framework of the two classicisms, "mass cul-
ture" emerges as an apocall'ptic concept, the undoing of true culture
or civilization. Negative classicism mal' be a natural and perhaps even
logical response to modern political and ecological crises. lt is harder
to understand whl' mass culture or the mass media should be included
among the major causes of crisis. From a liberal perspective, anl'
diflusion of culture outward or "downward" to the vast majority
should he seen as a sign of progress rather than decadence. But the
very phrase "mass culture" was first used in diagnoses of social disease
and breakdown. Closely linked to the emergence of "the masses" as a
revolutionary threat in the last century, and then also to the reaction-
ary and hlscist threat in this century, "mass culture" as a theoretical
category is viewed as the special product of "mass society," which in
turn is either totalitarian or a stage between democracy and totalitaria-
nism, as the former collapses into the latter. The phrase "mass cul-
ture" originated in discussions of mass movements and the effects of
propaganda campaigns, film, and radio shortly befo re the outbreak of
\'1orld War n. The systematic study of propaganda techniques hegan
somewhat earlier, just after \Vorld \'1ar 1, at approximately the same
time that psychoanalysis was becoming widely influential. Kindred
tenns-"mass art," "mass entertainment," and "mass communica-
tions"-also crop up in the 1930s. The main reason is not hard to
discover: the convergence in that decade of concern about the effects
of radio and the movies (with television clearly on the horizon) and
concern about the rise of totalitarian parties and "mass societies" in
Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. 20
Framed by the totalitarian movements of the 1930S, "mas s culture"
20. Oxford English Dictionary. Supplcmcnt (Oxford: Clarendon. 1976), ll, 849.
The Two Classicisms
from the outset has carried negative connotations. The terms closest
to it in English, "popular" and "folk culture," are both older and les s
pejorative, though sometimes they, too, have been linked to "barbar-
ism" and "decadence." Unlike "the folk" or even "the people," how-
ever, "the masses" have usually been perceived as a threat to the
existence of civilization, closer to the second than to the first term in
Matthew Arnold's title, Culture and Anarchy, or to "ignorant armies
clashing by night" than to the "sweetness and light" of the "classics."
Hence, "mass culture" appears on the modern scene as a primarily
political and apocalyptic term, used to refer to a symptom of social
morbidity, the cancer or one of the cancers in a failing body politic.
U nlike the phrase "mass culture," the mythology of negative classi-
cism did not originate as a response to European social breakdown
between the two world wars, but much earlier, as a response to
industrial and democratic "progress" perceived as breakdown. It first
developed and thrived upon the weaknesses and inconsistencies of
nineteenth-century liberalismo The "decadent movement" of Thé-
ophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire arose in opposition to bour-
geois notions of social advance through technological and commercial
expansiono Liberalism in both Europe and America looked forward to
the gradual extension of democracy to all social classes and eventually
to all nations. Democratization was to be made effective through uni-
versal education and an extension of industrial prosperity to all classes
and nations. But the change would occur through the elevation of "the
lower orders" or "masses" toward the standard of living of the upper
classes rather than through the "leveling" of those upper classes. The
liberal utopia of the future would stop short of egalitarianism and of
any radical tampering with the institution of private property. Social
class differences might diminish, but the hegemony of the bourgeoisie
would remain intact through the gradual incorporation of the working
class into the political system. As Raymond Williams has shown for
Britain, "culture" became a key term in nineteenth-century liberal
theory, for it was by the diffusion of culture partly through state-
supported schools that "the masses" could gradually be pacified and
brought into the fold. To cite Matthew Arnold' s title again, "culture"
was to supplant "anarchy."
No matter how optimistic, most liberal theories of progress barely
concealed a number offears. One was that the working-class "masses"

would not be patient enough for a gradual program of enculturation to
take effect. Trade unionism, socialism, and revolution were among tbe
working-class responses to social injustices that seemed unmitigated
by piecemeal measures of liberal refonn. A related fear, finding fre-
quent expression toward the end of the nineteenth century in theories
of "crowd psychology" such as Gustave Le Bon's, was that "the
masses," rather than being transformed into some approximation of
the bourgeoisie, would "invade" or "engulf" the bastions of privilege.
Defenses of "elites" and "minorities," like those in Alexis de Tocque-
ville' s Democracy in America and J ohn Stuart MilI' s On Liherty, ap-
peared to be liberalized versions of conservative defenses of class and
of "noble" values. Instead of their elevation through a wholesome
absorption of "high culture," "the masses," it was often feared, would
drag everything down to their level, perhaps smashing the very ma-
chinery of civilization in the process. These fears, only shadows in
much liberal writing, were forthrightly expressed in conservative the-
ories that sought to counteract democratization, as for example in
Edmund Burke's Rejlections on the Revolution in France and Joseph
de Maistre's Soirées de Saint Pétershourg.
The recent history of theorizing about mass culture has involved a
repetition of many of the ideas first expressed by Burke and de ~1ais
treo In the 1960s, negative classicism was partly balanced by optimis-
tic and utopian themes like those summed up in Theodore Roszak' s
The Making 01 a Counter Culture (1969) and Charles Reich's The
Greening 01 America (1970). Much ofthe optimism ofthat decade was
generated by the activist hopes of the New Left. But, like some other
hopeful movements, the New Left has followed a course of disillusion-
ment that can be illustrated by another title, from a work by (me of the
disillusioned, Jim Hougan-Decadence: Radical Nostalgia, Narciss-
ism, and Decline in the Seventies (1975). America has not "greened,"
and the counterculture, fragilely blooming in the wasteland, has
proved to be easily co-optable by the mass media. Hougan' s title is
similar to others from the mid-seventies on, which purport to show
where society has gone wrong and which suggest that it is entering a
new period of "decadence" or "barbarism" or both, perhaps to he
followed by a new "Dark Age." According to L. S. Stavrianos in his
paradoxically hopeful essay, The Promise 01 the Coming Dark Age
(1976), "the circumstances of the faH ofRome . are very relevant to

the present world. "21
On the basis of the term's most frequent uses in contemporary
discourse, no strict definition of "mass culture" is possible. It is every-
thing and anything, depending on what a particular critic most wishes
to anathematize. Radicals may see omens of decline and faH in the
demise of the New Left and the co-optation of the counterculture by
the mass media. Conservatives find evidence of social decay in the
New Left and the counterculture themselves. In The Death of Pro-
gress (1972), Bernard James cites Arnold Toynbee's distinction be-
tween external and internal barbarians, and writes:
Where the external barbarian pounds at the gates of civilization with

battering ram and war club, the internal barbarian insinuates values
and habits that degrade civilized life from within. 1 interpret much of
the so-called counter-culture we witness about us today as evidence
of such internal barbarismo It takes the fonn of vandals scratching
obscene graffiti on the wall of a synagogue or a courthouse; it is a mass
of middle-class youth milling about at rock fests, knee deep in the
rubbish of spent affiuence; it is the faddish imitation of primitive
dress and body paint. 22
This assessment of the "barbarism" of the counterculture contains

nothing new; members of the Beat Generation of the 1950s, after aH,
were dubbed "holy barbarians," and they in turn were only the mod-
ern American carriers of the "barbarism" and "decadence" of nine-
teenth-century Bohemianism. But, as "rock fests" suggests, there is
more than a hint in James's account of "the decay of meaning" of a
confluence between "mass" and "counter" culture; for him, "barbar-
ism" stands for both. James goes on to say that the significance of the
new barbarians "is that they betray gross and alíen values, beHowing
curses from beyond the walls of civility . . . . They are evidence that
something has gone out of modern Western civilization, that some-
thing is also insinuating itself through every breach in Western ideals.
They bring to mind images of goatskin-dad Visigoths stumbling
21. L. S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco: Free-
man, 1976), p. 6. For the transition from the more optimistic mood of the 19605 to the
pessimism of the 1970s, see Daniel Yankelovich, The New Morality: A Profile of
American Youth in the 70'S (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).
22. Bernard James, The Death of Progress (New York: Knopf, 1973), p. 38.
among the ruins of ancient Rome, draping themselves with loot, grin-
ning as they urinate at the base of empty temples in the Forum. These
symbols of Classic ideals had no meaning to such meno "23
The "symbols of Classic ideals," however, have a great deal of
meaning to most radical intellectuals, even though they do not always
admit it. Like Marx and like the Frankhlrt Institute theorists, contem-
porary radical s are often at least covert classicists. Nlany of the crea-
tors of the counterculture of the 1960s saw themselves working in
opposition to various stifling versions of mass and middle-class culture
(often treated under the same rubric), as Todd Gitlin' s recent assess-
ment of the largely destructive impact of the mass media on the N ew
Left suggests (The Whole World Is Watching, 1980). And if modern
Bohemianism and student unrest bear more than a superficial re-
semblance to their nineteenth-century counterparts, then perhaps
their self-consciously "decadent" and "barbaric" features have par-
tially obscured their cultural originality and energy. The nineteenth-
century artistic "decadence," hlr from signaling a cultural decline and
fall, was a major source of artistic renewal and of modern avant-
gardism, in opposition to bourgeois and academic conformity. Much
that is most vigorous in contemporary culture may also delight in
naming itself-and in being named by its critics-"decadent" and
"barbaric. "
The irony ofhistorical cyclism lends to many expressions of negative
classicism a quality of paradox: out of progress comes decline and bll.
"Growing efficacy involves growing degeneration of the life instincts,"
writes 1. Robert Sinai in The Decadence of the Modern World (1978),
"the decline of mano Every progressive impulse must sooner or later
become fatigued . . . a culture may founder on real and tangible pro-
gress. "24 As the leading edge of progress, the promise of fuumment
toward which aH industrial and democratic effort at least ought to be
directed, "mass culture" emerges in much contemporary discourse as
the biggest of recent historical disappointments or frauds, the apoc-
alyptic pivot upon which the rise of "the masses" or "the common
man" or "mass democracy" turns back on itself. Sinai' s paradox nf the
decadence of progress can be seen in similar assertions by many re-
cent writers. Marya Mannes wonders whether, "in the midst of the
23· Ibid., p. :39·
24. l. Robert Sinai, The Decadence of the Modern World (Cambridge, ~Ia,s.:
Schenkman, 1978), p. 5.
greatest technological leap known to man, the mastery of [the 1 uni-

verse," we may not be facing "a night of the soul, a return to a new
f()fJTI of barbarism?"25 And Hans Morgenthau declares that "it is one
of the great ironies of contemporary history that the moral and mate-
rial decline of the West has in good measure been accomplished
through the moral and material triumphs of the West."26
Pride goeth before a fal1. Gihhon and Montesquieu had written that
Rome fell hecause of her "immoderate greatness." In his "Discourse
on the Arts and Sciences," Rousseau makes a stern Fabricius de-
nounce the "fatal arts"-everything from rhetoric to amphitheaters-
of Rome, aH of which might be construed as signs of progress, but
which Fahricius interprets instead as fatal to "the ancient Roman
simplicity." "The Roman Empire in its turn, after having engulfed aH
the riches of the universe, feH a prey to peoples who knew not what
riches were."27 Luxury undermines empires, which is another way of
saying that civilization leads to the death of civilization. The same
parado x or perhaps tautology is central to much contemporary writing
ahout mass culture. The mass media are the most powerful instru-
ments ever invented for the dissemination of civilization; they are also
frequently declared to he the tools of our cultural suicide. Viewed
through the telescope of negative classicism, mass culture is the cul-
ture of imperialism, and the end of all empires is "harharism" and
"decadence." As Rome was both the zenith and the burying ground of
ancient civilization, so modern mass society with its mass culture is
both zenith and nadir of modern progress, acme and end of the line for
the "dual revolutions" of industrialization and democratization. Or so
negative classicists either fear or hopeo
For the mythology of negative classicism, mass culture is only one
factor, although oH:en the main one, in a larger system of paraHels
between the Roman Empire and modern society. According to Robert
Nisbet in Twilight of Authoríty (1975), "The Romanization ofWestern
society proceeds apace. "28 From Caesar to Charlemagne to N apoleon
to Napoleon III to Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin: such has been the
25 . .'vlarya Mannes, They (Carden City, N.Y.: DouhIeday, 1968), p. 32.

26. Hans Morgcnthau, "Decline of the West," Partisan RedelL', 42 (1975), 514.
27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "A Discourse 011 the Arts and Sciences," in rhe Social
Contraet ane! Diseourses, tr. G. D. H. CoIe (New York: Dutton, 1973), pp. 12 and 17.
2S. Rohert :'\Iisbet, Trcilight of Authoríty (New York: Oxford University Press,
1975), p. 174·
BREAD AND e/ReUSES
repetitious course of the nations of Europe, doomed apparently to call

and recall the ghost ofCaesar. Even more frequently, America rather
than Europe is seen as the new Rome. In The Crisis of Our Age
(1941), Pitirim Sorokin writes: "Many signs suggest a possibility that
America may play, in a modified form, in regard to Europe, the role of
Rome in regard to Greece."29 Similarly, Arnold Toynbee, that great
exponent of negative classicism, declares that America "now stands for
what Rome stood for"-that is, for the defense of imperial vested
interests against the needs of the poor and of the Third World coun-
tries. 30 More recently, casting a jaundiced glance back at the deterio-
ration of "the American dream" in the 1970s, Malcolm Muggeridge
quotes Gibbon's statement that "it was artfully contrived by Augustus
Caesar that in the enjoyment of plenty, the Romans should lose the
memory of freedom," and comments: "In the case of the American
dream, for Augustus Caesar read the media and the advertisers who
support them. "31 "Bread and circuses" is here synonymous with mass
culture and also with the economic prosperity associated with con-
sumerism, which from a liberal perspective might be viewed as signs
of progress rather than decadence.
Equivalent examples abound. Arthur M. Schlesinger's The Imperi-
al Presidency (1973) invokes the Roman transition from Republic to
Empire, as do also the titles of Amaury de Riencourt's two books on
American politics: The Coming Caesars (1957) and The American Em-
pire (1968). "The parallel established in The Coming Caesars between
the development of the Classical world and the development of the
modern Western world provides the conceptual framework for
[Riencourt's later] study ofthe rising American empire. In particular,
the similarity of the ancient Greeks to the modern Europeans, and of
the ancient Romans to the modern Americans, remains implicit
throughout."32 A striking example of the persistence of negative clas-
sicism occurs in America as a Civilization (1957), when Max Lerner
29. Pitirim Sorokin, The Crisis ofOur Age: The Social and Cultural Outlook (New
York: Dutton, 1941), p. 256.
30. Arnold J. Toynbee, America and the World Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1962), p. 92.
31. Malcolm Muggeridge, "On the Threshold ofthe Eighties," The American Spec-
tator, May 1980, p. 15.
32. Amaury de Riencourt, The American Empire (New York: Dell, 1970 [1968)), p.
xi.
tries to reject Roman parallels to the American experience. His list of

the possible similarities between America and Rome (including every-
thing from "bread and circuses" and "the turning toward new re-
ligious cults" to the importance of the military and "the premonition
of doom in the distant march of barbarian tribes") is so long that it
finally seems difficult to think of ways in which America is not Rome:
"To finish the portrait, add the cult of magnificence in public build-
ings and the growth of the gladiatorial arts at which the large number
of the people are passive spectators but emotional participants; the
increasing violence within the culture; the desensitizing and deper-
sonalizing of life; the weakening of the sen se of place; the decay of
rurallife; the uprooting of people in a mobile culture; the concentra-
tion of a megalopolitan urbanism." But even this does not "finish the
portrait," because Lerner con tin ues wi th "the greater looseness of
family ties and sexual relations ... the exploration of deviant and
inverted forms ofbehavior; the Byzantinism oflife, the refinements of
luxury"-and so forth.3 3 After this grand summation of all the ways in
which America seems to be repeating Rome, Lerner concludes anti-
climactically that "America is not Rome but itself." Well, yes, but
what he really shows is how negative classicism can overshadow even
the writings of the liberal believers in social progress.
That our age and culture are apocalyptic is a truism. As Frank
Kermode remarks, we are always striving to satisfy "our deep need for
intelligible Ends," and to do so we often resort to "myths of Empire
and Decadence. "34 Doomsaying, present to greater or lesser extent in
all ages, has become the chief mode of modern culture. In the early
1970S the report of the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth, gave the
world approximately a century to survive. AIso in 1972, in The Dooms-
day Syndrome, John Maddox questioned the more extreme proph-
ecies of the ecologists and wrote:
It used to be commonplace for men to parade city streets with

sandwich boards proclaiming "The End of the World is at Hand!"
They have been replaced by a throng of sober people, scientists,
philosophers, and politicians, proclaiming that there are more subtle
33. Max Lerner, America as a Civilizatíon, 2 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1967 [1957)), 11, 934-35·
34. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press,
1967), p. 8.
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
calamities just around the comer. The human race, they say, is in
danger of strangling itself by overbreeding, of poisoning itself with
pollution, of undermining its essential human character by tamper-
ing with heredity.35
For the first time in the history of America (Europe has had earlier
and perhaps greater causes for pessimism), the general public' s faith
in progress has broken down. Images of ecological catastrophe, energy
shortages, economic depression, and the neo-Malthusian "population
bomb" have merged with older fears of a nuclear holocausto According
to Jeremy Rifkin in Entropy (1980), the second law of thermodynamics
and not progress is the shape of things to come. Even the mass media
now frequently convey the message of a social decline for which,
according to the "bread and circuses" analogy, the mass media them-
selves are largely to blame. Beneath the gimcrack surface of happy
gadgetry and smiling toothpaste ads which is often mistaken for the
whole of American mass culture, a quite dismal, catastrophic vision of
the future has been spreading. Perhaps this means that the gap be-
tween disenchanted intellectuals (whose business it has always been
to express critical alienation) and the public or the mas ses is closing.
Perhaps it means that a new wave of gloomy religious emotion is
sweeping over the masses, with as yet unforeseen consequences. Nei-
ther prophecies of doom nor mass religious movements, however, are
new historical phenomena. Just as an analogy for the welfare state and
the modern mass media is frequently found in "bread and circuses,"
so an analogy for modern mass eschatology is frequently found in the
rise and spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire. Mass
culture is often attacked as the ultimate result of secularization;
"bread and circuses" are held to be among the worst products of an
age that has liquidated the sacred. But mass culture is frequently also
attacked as a surrogate religion, or at least as a breach in the walls of
civilization through which the religious irrationality of the masses is
beginning to intrude. Ironically, the mythology of negative classicism
frequently warns us against the mythologizing or the quasi-religious
functions of the mass media.
The apocalyptic warnings of negative classicism have their reflec-
tions in the mass media themselves. According to W. Warren Wagar,
35. John Maddox, The Doomsday Syndrome (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 1.
at least since 1914 "the serious literature of most Western countries"

has been "drenched with apocalyptic imagery." Among other exam-
pIes, Wagar points to "the 'cyclical' historians, Spengler, Toynbee,
Sorokin, and their disciples, [who] predict the imminent going-under
of modern civilization. "36 A recent, rather diluted version of Spengler
and Toynbee is Roberto Vacca's The Coming Dark Age (1971). De-
spite his fears about the masses and mass culture, moreover, Vacca
expresses apocalyptic themes not far removed from those in such mass
circulation science fiction stories and films as A Canticle for Liebo-
witz, Omega Man, Dune, and Star Wars. 37 In all of these works, "the
end of our time is upon us," and the barbarization-if not the total
destruction--{)f the world is at hand. Perhaps the major difference
between negative classicism in the cyclical historians and apocalyptic
themes of social decay or destruction in the mass media is the degree
to which the former accuse mass culture itself of subverting civiliza-
tion. But often there seems liule to choose between the gloomy news
of "the last days" as expressed in the writings of an intellectual doom-
sayer like 1. Robert Sinai and the mass eschatology that filters through
television and newspaper headlines. In both cases, it seems appropri-
ate to wonder if we are witnessing a rebirth of religious irrationality,
and perhaps even to wonder if warnings of social disintegration may
be symptoms of the disease they warn us against.
The distinction between "high" and "mass" culture, dubious at
best, breaks down when it comes to such widely shared phenomena as
the mythologization ofhistory or apocalyptic doomsaying. Though it is
more common to see the mass media as purveyors of shinier tooth-
pastes than of eschatological dread, a major theme of current mass
culture is that the mass media themselves are either "decadent" or
"barbarie" or both, that they are instruments of our destruction, that
theyare leading society down the garden path to totalitarianism. The
displacement ofbooks by television in Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel
and film Fahrenheit 451 is an example, and so is Paddy Chayefsky's
movie Network. And Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, with its "videot"
36. W. Warren Wagar, The City oi Man (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. 4. See also
Ceorge Watson, "The Myth ofCatastrophe," The Yale Review, 65 (Spring 1976), 359:
catastrophe was "the nearly universal myth of literary intellectuals between the wars.··
37. See Harold L. Berger, Science Fiction and the New Dark Age (Bowling Creen,
Ohio: Bowling Creen University Popular Press, 1976).
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
antihero Chance, expresses in fable form the now quite widespread

fear that television is rotting people' s minds. Kosinski echoes older
fears about the totalitarian tendencies of the mass media-the argu-
ments of the Frankfurt Institute theorists, for example, according to
which the "culture industry" operates as propaganda machinery first
for capitalist exploitation of the masses, and then (capitalism inevitably
breaking down) for fascism. 38
Not only is the intellectual concept of mass culture often an es-
chatological one, but tbe mass media also convey apocalyptic self-
reflections, including negative classicism. These eschatological self~
reflections derive partly from the fact that television, for example,
especially in its commercial forms, tends to destroy all boundal'ies
between one thing and another-between toothpaste ads and Shake-
speare, crime and politics, sexual reticence and sexual exploitation,
soap operas and news, "children's hours" and adult programming, and
so forth. It also derives from the commercially stl'ategic antithesis
between "entertainment" and everything deemed culturally "se-
rious." As Erik Barnouw observes, "As used fol' decades by Holly-
wood and today by networks and sponsors, [entertainment] implies
that there is no message-messages being for Western U nion-and no
purpose of any sort other than to fill leisure time and make you fe el
good. "39 A crude cultural judgment is thus built into television, con-
trasting information and entertainment. The news is supposed to be
serious and important; the rest is supposed to be one form or anothel'
01' distraction from the world's woes. This, too, is a kind of classicism
and a faint affirmation of the polítical responsibility that Juvenal
thought had in his day been abandoned for bread and circuses. Most
watchers of the Super Bowl or of World Cup soccer do not realize that
they are mimicking the spectators in Roman arenas, cheering madly
and turning thumbs up or down for their favorite gladiators, but that
comparison is nevertheless implicit in the very structure 01' televised
sports "spectaculars." In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher
Lasch quotes a surfboard rider on how the intrusion 01' the netwol'ks
38. Jerzy Kosinski, HA Nation 01' Videots," Media and Methods, 11 (April 1975).
39. Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a l\1odern Potentate (New York: Oxford
U niversity Press, 1978), p. 101.
The Two Classicisms
has affected his avocation: "Television is destroying our sport. The TV

producers are turning a sport and an art form into a circus. "40
N egative classicisrn, however unconsciously, has become part of the
self-definition of the mass media. Those critics who believe that mass
culture is only a uniform mush that wipes out all distinctions fail to see
that the media produce their own negations. They know themselves to
be inferior, ephemeral, throw-away, decadent, even while they are
all-pervasive and seemingly all-powerful. Their empire, too, is built
on sand. And they are forever implying or echoing classical ghosts,
shadowy memories of high culture. Most television drama is not trag-
ic, it is not antique, it cannot be Sophocles or Shakespeare-and
everyone infers that it must be antithetical to tragedy. Injust the same
way, the more cheery and sparkling the toothpaste ads, the more mass
eschatology lurks just behind the surface of the screen, adhering invis-
ibly to it like a sort of emotional plaque. It needs only an occasional
entrance on the evening news or a brief outburst of terror in a police
drama for its un in tended message to register. One of the more mea-
surable effects of televised violen ce concerns the extent to which
heavy viewers overestimate the amount of violence in the real world.
Television tries to say: all is well with the world. We conclude: all is
not well with the world.
Television is the perfect reification machine, but its dehumanizing
and distinction-blurring messages tend to unravel and fall apart in the
moment of their fabrication. The same quality of monolithic impen-
etrability coupled with internal cracks and weaknesses characterizes
all industrialized mass culture. Above all, mass culture always offers a
pretense of dialogue when it is in fact monologue imposed from aboye
or outside the life of the individual "consumer." Jürgen Habermas
describes one of the ways in which mass culture tends to call forth its
dialectical negative when he writes:
The gentle social control exercised by the mass media makes use of
the spectacles of an undermined private sphere in order to make
political processes unrecognizable as such. The depoliticized public
real m is dominated by the imposed privatism of mas s culture. The
40. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of

Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 106.
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
personalization of what is public is thus the cement in the cracks of a

relatively well-integrated society, which forces suspended conflicts
into areas of social psychology. There they are absorbed in categories
of deviant behavior: as private conflicts, illness, and crime. These
containers now appear to be overflowing. 41
The fake privatization of public concerns together with the monologic

denial of two-way or democratic communication cannot maintain its
illusory hold over the consciousness of "the masses" or "the public"
forever, and is perhaps always dimly perceived as inadequate, subhu-
man, undemocratic.
Partly through cracks in the mass media themselves, then, negative
elassicism has become the major myth of our time. Its development
has been an important aspect of Western cultural history since about
the time of the French Revolution. In order to understand its contem-
porary manifestations, I have followed it back as far as Gibbon and
Burke, though I have also concentrated on sorne of its chief my-
thologizers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These inelude
Marx, Engels, and the Frankfurt Institute theorists on the left; exis-
tentialists from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Gabriel Marcel, Karl
Jaspers, and Albert Camus; Freud, Jung, and the psychoanalysts; the
"cyclical historians"; and Baudelaire, Flaubert, Matthew Arnold, T.
S. Eliot, José Ortega y Gasset, down to Marshall McLuhan, Christo-
pher Lasch, Richard Sennett, and Daniel Bell among cultural critics
and theorists. Most of these figures partake to greater or lesser degree
of the two elassicisms, because most of them treat contemporary mass
culture as the antithesis of sorne true way, whether that way involves
an individual "leap of faith" as in Kierkegaard, proletarian education
and revolution as in Marx, the transcendence of the exceptional man
as in Nietzsche, adherence to an Enlightenment ideal of reason as in
Freud, Christianity plus a nostalgic authoritarianism not far from fas-
cism as in Eliot, or the advocacy of democratic and communitarian
ideals as in Lasch and Sennett. The list is far from complete, but these
are among the most influential and representative shapers of the two
elassicisms and of contemporary theories of mass culture. An analysis
of their thinking should suggest both that our present insistence upon
41. Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and
Politics, tr. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1970), pp. 42-43.
The Twa Classicisms 43
decadence and apocalypse, though extreme, is hardly new, and also

that even in periods and writers who have seemed to believe most
optimistically in the idea oflinear progress, the undercurrent of nega-
tive classicism has run strang.
Just as varieties ofliberalism have striven for release fram the past,
varieties of classicism have striven to restore its authority. Fram its
beginnings in Renaissance humanism, modern classicism has mea-
sured a defective present against a largely utopian pasto While the
recollection of past cultural greatness has often helped to invigorate
current strains of art, writing, and education, the act of recollection
itself may suggest the "decadence" as easily as the innocent "rude-
ness" or "barbarism" of the presento Friedrich Schiller' s distinction
between "naive" and "sentimental" poetry involves a related contrast,
but one that ought to present difficulties for any version of classi-
cism. 42 "Naive" art is straight from the source, fram "nature"; "senti-
mental" art longs for the condition of "naivete," but can do no better
than imitate it. "Sentimentality" is thus always a symptom of the
artist's fallen state, the inability to re capture lost innocence. Classi-
cism as the defense of the high culture of the past against the sup-
posedly mindless mass culture of the present wears the aspect of
Schiller's "sentimentality." As such, it is itself a symptom of "dec-
adence," or of the distance from our "naive," supposedly organic and
healthful raots in the classical pasto Here classicism and mass society
with the mass culture that classicism rejects prove inseparable, parts
of a single historical totality that may be called "modern civilization"
or the "modern condition." Here, too, arises the paradox that classi-
cism itself may be as sterile and empty as what it condemns, while
mass culture in its latest manifestations-the cinema, radio, televi-
sion, at least in their formative periods-may behave like Schiller' s
"naive" art, displaying perhaps a complete ignorance of past culture,
but also displaying the creative energy and freshness that often accom-
pany the births of new art forms and media. (Perhaps the fact that
television grew upon ground already planted by motion pictures and
radio explains why it has seemed less "naive" and vigoraus than its
predecessors. It inherited two very short but spectacular traditions,
42. Friedrich Schiller, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (Oxford: Black-
well, 1957 [1795])·
44 BREAD AND GlRGUSES
and may thus have suffered under the burden of its own dimly recog-
nized but oppressive classicism.)
As a form of utopian recollection and cultural "sentimentality,"
modern classicism is always a debate between the ancients and the
moderns in which the ancients win-a debate between past "high
culture" and present "mass," or "popular," or "démocratic," or "total-
itarian," or "commerical," or "bourgeois," or "secular," or "indus-
trial" pseudoculture. Conservative and radical critiques both lead to
identifications of mass culture with either "decadence" or "barbarism"
or both. But from a third perspective, that of democratic liberalism,
mass culture is sometimes seen as the last, best hope of civilization.
The diffusion of culture-knowledge, an appreciation of the beautiful,
perhaps wisdom-to the common man, even when it involves dilution
or sorne los s of value or substance, is declared to be a new factor in
history which should be viewed optimistically. Thus, according to
Herbert J. Muller in The Uses of the Past, Roman analogies should be
at least temporarily shelved, because "common men are having their
first real chance in history, and have not had it long." 43 However that
may be, in America as in Europe, especially after Vietnam and Water-
gate, the rising tide of social crisis literature with its catastrophic mass
culture theories has aH but drowned out voices of liberal caution such
as MuHer's.
The bread and circuses pattern cannot itself be seen as a major
causal factor in the decline and faH of Rome; it may be symptomatic of
decadence, but the sources of decay went deeper. Nevertheless, one
frequent explanation for the decay of ancient civilization is at least
related to bread and circuses. This is the idea that, as Rome grew from
a city-state on the model of the Greek polís to an empire on the
Alexandrian model, it took on the character of a mass society. Roman
civilization was invaded from without by the barbarians, but it was
also subverted from within by "the lower classes." In a passage that
inspired Muller's defense of the common man, Mikhail Rostovtzeff
presents this thesis at the end of The Social and Economíc History of
the Roman Empíre. At sorne point in its development, classical civi-
lization ceased to assimilate the masses. Whether they were internal
43. Herbert J. Muller, The Uses of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press,
1957 [1952]), p. 233·
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
[Contents]
Chapter ii
THE SPOTTED LARINUS
Larinus is a vague term, which cannot teach us anything. The word
sounds well. It is something not to afflict the ear with raucous
spittings; but the prentice reader wants more than this. He expects
the name to give him, in euphonious syllables, a brief description of
the insect named. This would help to guide him in the midst of the
vast multitude.
I cordially agree with him, while recognizing what an arduous task it

would be to devise a rational nomenclature that would give the
beasts the forenames and surnames which they deserve. Our
ignorance condemns us to be vague and often nonsensical. Let us
consider a case in point.
What does Larinus mean? The Greek lexicon tells us: Λαρινός, fatty,
fat. Has the insect which is the subject of this chapter any right to
such a description? Not at all. It is corpulent, I agree, as are the
Weevils generally, but does not more than another deserve a
certificate of obesity.
Let us look a little deeper. Λαρός means pleasant to the taste,

pleasant to the eye, dainty, sweet. Are we there now? Not yet. To be
sure, the [19]Larinus is not without daintiness, but how many among
the long-nosed Beetles excel him in beauty of costume! Our osier-
beds provide nourishment for some that are flecked with flowers of
sulphur, some that are laced with Chinese white, some that are
powdered with malachite-green. They leave on our fingers a scaly
dust that looks as though it were gathered from a Butterfly’s wing.
Our vines and poplar-trees have some that surpass copper pyrites in
metallic lustre; the equatorial countries furnish specimens of
unparalleled magnificence, true gems beside which the marvels of
our jewel-cases would pale. No, the modest Larinus has no right to
be extolled as superb. The title of dandy must be awarded to others,
in the beak-bearing family, rather than to him.
If his godfather, better-informed, had named him after his habits, he

would have called him an artichoke-thief. The group of the Larini, in
fact, establishes its offspring in the fleshy base of the flowers of the
Carduaceæ, the thistle, the cotton-thistle, the centaury, the carline
thistle and others, which, in structure and flavour, recall more or less
remotely the artichoke of our tables. This is its special province. The
Larinus is charged with the thinning out of the fierce, encroaching
thistle.
Glance at the pink, white or blue heads of a Carduacea. Long-

beaked insects swarm, awkwardly diving into the mass of florets.
What are [20]they? Larini. Open the head, split its fleshy base.
Surprised by the air and by the light, plump, white, legless grubs
sway to and fro, each isolated in a small recess. What are these
grubs? Larinus-larvæ.
Here accuracy calls for a reservation. A few other Weevils, related to

those whose history we are considering, are also partial, on behalf of
their family, to the fleshy receptacles with the artichoke flavour. No
matter: the species that take the lead in numbers, frequency and
handsome proportions are the authorized exterminators of the
thistle-heads. Now the reader knows as much as I can tell him.
All the summer, all the autumn, until the cold weather sets in, the
most ornamental of our southern thistles grows profusely by the
roadside. Its pretty, blue flowers, gathered into round, prickly heads,
have won it the botanical name of Echinops, in allusion to the
Hedgehog rolled into a ball. It is indeed like a Hedgehog. Better still:
it is like a Sea-urchin stuck upon a stalk and turned into an azure
globe.
Beneath a screen of star-shaped flowerets the shapely tuft hides the

thousand daggers of its scales. Whosoever touches it with an
incautious finger is surprised to encounter such aggressiveness
beneath an innocent appearance. The leaves that go with it, green
above, white and fluffy underneath, do at least warn the
inexperienced: they are [21]divided into pointed lobes, each of which
bears an extremely sharp needle at its tip.
This thistle is the patrimony of the Spotted Larinus (L. maculosus,

Sch.), whose back is powdered with cloudy yellow patches. The
Weevil browses very sparingly on the leaves. June is not yet over
before she is exploiting the heads, green at this time and the size of
peas, or at most of cherries, with a view to establishing her family.
For two or three weeks the work of colonization continues on globes
which grow bluer and larger day by day.
Couples are formed, very peaceably, in the glad morning sunlight.

The nuptial preliminaries, resembling the embraces of jointed levers,
display a rustic awkwardness. With his fore-legs the male Weevil
masters his spouse; with his hinder tarsi, gently and at intervals, he
strokes her sides. Alternating with these soft caresses are sudden
jolts and impetuous jerks. Meanwhile, the object of these attentions,
in order to lose no time, works at the thistle-head with her beak and
prepares the lodging for her egg. Even in the midst of her wedding
the care of the family leaves this laborious insect no repose.
What precisely is the use of the Weevil’s rostrum, this paradoxical

nose, such as no carnival mummer would venture to wear? We shall
find out at leisure, taking our own time.
My prisoners, enclosed in a wire-gauze cover, [22]are working in the
sunlight on my window-sill. A couple has just broken apart. Careless
of what will happen next, the male retires to browse for a while, not
on the blue thistle-heads, which are choice morsels reserved for the
young, but on the leaves, where a superficial scraping enables the
beak to remove some frugal mouthfuls. The mother remains where
she is and continues the boring already commenced.
The rostrum is driven right into the ball of florets and disappears
from sight. The insect hardly moves, taking at most a few slow
strides now in one direction, now in another. What we see is not the
work of a gimlet, which twists, but of an awl, which sinks steadily
downwards. The mandibles, the sharp shears affixed to the
implement, bite and dig; and that is all. In the end, the rostrum
used as a lever, that is to say, bending upon its base, uproots and
lifts the detached florets and pushes them a little way outwards. This
must cause the slight unevenness which we perceive at any
inhabited point. The work of excavation lasts a good quarter of an
hour.
Then the mother turns about, finds the opening of the shaft with the
tip of her belly and lays the egg. But how? The pregnant insect’s
abdomen is far too large and too blunt to enter the narrow passage
and deposit the egg directly at the bottom. A special tool, a probe
carrying the egg to the point required, is therefore absolutely
needed here. [23]But the insect does not possess one that shows;
and things take place so swiftly and discreetly that I see nothing of
that kind unsheathed.
No matter, I am positively convinced of it: to place the egg at the

bottom of the shaft which the rostrum has just bored, the mother
must possess a guide-rod, a rigid tube, kept in reserve, invisible,
among her tools. We shall return to this curious subject when more
conclusive instances arise.
One first point is gained: the Weevil’s rostrum, that nose which at
first sight was deemed grotesque, is in reality an instrument of
maternal love. The extravagant becomes the everyday, the
indispensable. Since it carries mandibles and other mouth parts at its
tip, its function is to eat, that is self-evident; but to this function is
added another of greater importance. The fantastic stylet prepares
the way for the eggs; it is the oviduct’s collaborator.
And this implement, the emblem of the guild, is so honourable that

the father does not hesitate to sport it, though himself incapable of
digging the family cells. Like his consort, he too carries an awl, but a
smaller one, as befits the modesty of his rôle.
A second point becomes clear. In order to insert the egg at

convenient points, it is the rule for the insect to possess an
implement with two functions, an implement which at the same time
opens the passage and guides the eggs along it. [24]This is the case
with the Cicada, 1 the Grasshopper, 2 the Saw-fly, the Leucospis 3 and
the Ichneumon-fly, 4 all of whom carry a sabre, a saw or a probe at
the tip of the abdomen.
The Weevil divides the work and apportions it between two

implements, one of which, in front, is the perforating auger, and the
other, behind, hidden in the body and unsheathed at the moment of
the laying, is the guiding tube. Except in the Weevils, this curious
mechanism is unknown to me.
When the egg is placed in position—and this is quickly done, thanks

to the preliminary work of the drill—the mother returns to the point
colonized. She packs the disturbed materials a little, she lightly
pushes back the uprooted florets; then, without taking further
trouble, she goes away. She sometimes even dispenses with these
precautions.
A few hours later, I examine the heads exploited, which may be

recognized by a certain number of faded and slightly projecting
patches, each of which shelters an egg. With the point of my
penknife I extract the little, faded bundle and open it. At the base, in
a small round cell, hollowed [25]out of the substance of the central
globule, the receptacle of the thistle-head, is the egg, fairly large,
yellow and oval.
It is enveloped in a brown substance derived from the tissues

injured by the mother’s auger and from the exudations of the
wound, which have set like cement. This envelope rises into an
irregular cone and ends in the withered florets. In the centre of the
tuft we generally see an opening, which might well be a ventilating-
shaft.
The number of eggs entrusted to a single head may easily be

ascertained without destroying the cells: all that we need do is to
count the yellow blurs unevenly distributed over the blue
background. I have found five, six and more, even in a head smaller
than a cherry. Each covers an egg. Do all these eggs come from the
same mother? It is possible. At the same time, they may be of
diverse origin, for it is not unusual to surprise two mothers both
occupied in laying eggs on the same globe.
Sometimes the points worked upon almost touch. The mother, it

seems, has a very restricted numerical sense and is incapable of
keeping count of the occupants. She drives her probe into the
florets, unheeding that the place beside her is already taken. As a
rule there are too many, far too many feasters at the niggardly
banquet of the blue thistle. Three at most will find enough to live on.
The first-comers will thrive; the [26]laggards will perish for lack of
room at the common table.
The grubs are hatched in a week: little white atoms with red heads
to them. Suppose them to be three in number, as frequently
happens. What have the little creatures in their larder? Next to
nothing. The echinops is an exception among the Carduaceæ. Its
flowers do not rest upon a fleshy receptacle expanded into a heart,
like the artichoke’s. Let us open one of the heads. In the centre, as a
common support, is a round firm nucleus, a globe hardly as large as
a peppercorn, fixed on the top of a little column which is a
continuation of the axis of the stem. That is all.
A scanty, a very scanty provision for three consumers. In bulk there

is not enough to furnish the first few meals of a single grub; still less
is there enough—for it is very tough and unsubstantial—to provide
for those fine layers of fat which make the grub look as sleek as
butter and are employed as reserves during the transformation.
Nevertheless, it is in this paltry globule and the small column which

supports it that the three boarders find, their whole life long, the
wherewithal to feed and grow. Not a bite is given elsewhere; and
even so the attack is delivered with extreme discretion. The food is
rasped and nibbled on the surface and not completely consumed.
To make much out of nothing, to fill three starveling bellies,

sometimes four, with a single [27]crumb, would be out of the
question. The secret of the food-supply is not contained in the small
amount of solid matter that has disappeared. Let us look into this
more closely.
I take out a few larvæ which are already fairly well-grown and install
dwellings and dwellers in glass tubes. For a long time, with my
pocket-lens, I watch the prisoners. I cannot see that they bite into
the central knob, which is already damaged, nor the axis, which also
has been cut into. From these surfaces, which have been scored
since I know not how long; from what appeared to be their daily
bread, their mandibles remove not the smallest particle. At most the
mouth is applied for a moment to the surface; then it is withdrawn,
uneasy and disdainful. It is evident that the ligneous fare, though
still quite fresh, does not suit.
The proof is completed by the final result of my experiments. In vain

I keep the thistle-heads fresh in glass tubes, plugged with a stopper
of wet cotton-wool: my attempts at rearing are not once crowned
with success. As soon as the head is removed from the plant, its
inhabitants begin to die of starvation, whether I intervene or
whether I do not. They all pine away in the heart of their native
globe and at last perish, no matter in what receptacle—test-tube,
flask or tin box—I place my collection. Later, on the other hand,
when the feeding-period is over, I shall find it very easy [28]to keep
the grubs in good condition and to follow at will their preparations
for the nymphosis.
This failure tells me that the larva of the Spotted Larinus does not
sustain itself with solid food; it prefers the clear broth of the sap. It
taps the cask of its azure cellar, that is to say, it makes a careful
gash in the axis of the head as well as in the central nucleus.
From these surface wounds, which are kept open by fresh strokes of
the plane as soon as a dry scab forms upon them, it laps the sap of
the thistle, which oozes up from the roots. As long as the blue globe
is on its stalk, very much alive, the sap ascends, the broached casks
exude their contents and the grub sips the nourishing draught. But,
once detached from the stem, cut off from its source of supply, the
cellar runs dry. Thereupon the larva promptly dies. This explains the
fatal catastrophe of my attempts to rear it.
All that the Larinus-larvæ need is to lick the exudations from a
wound. The method employed is henceforth obvious. The new-born
grubs, hatched upon the central globe, take their places around its
axis, proportioning the distance between them to the number of
guests. Each of them peels and slashes with its mandibles the part
in front of it, causing the nutritious moisture to exude. If the spring
dries up through healing, fresh bites revive it.
But the attack is made with circumspection, [29]The central column

and its circular capital form the mainstay of the globe. If too
extensively injured, the scaffolding would bend before the wind and
bring down the dwelling. Moreover, the conduits of the aqueduct
must be respected, if a suitable supply of sap is to be provided until
the end. Accordingly, whether three or four in number, the grubs
abstain from rasping the surface too deeply.
The cuts, which amount to no more than a judicious paring of the

surface, imperil neither the solidity of the structure nor the action of
the vessels, so that the blossoms, their plunderers notwithstanding,
retain a very healthy appearance. They expand as usual, except that
the pretty, blue ground is stained with yellow patches, which grow
wider from day to day. At each of these points, a grub is established
under the cover of the dead florets. Each blemish marks one diner’s
seat at table.
The florets, as we said, have for their common support, for their
receptacle, the round knob surmounting the axis. It is on this
globule that the grubs begin. They attack a few of the florets at their
base, uprooting them without injuring them and thrusting them
upwards with a heave of the back. The spot thus cleared is slightly
broken into and hollowed out and becomes the first refreshment-bar.
What becomes of the items removed? Are [30]they thrown to the

ground as inconvenient rubbish? The tiny creature is careful not to
do anything of the kind, which would mean exposing its plump back,
a small but enticing morsel, to the eyes of the foe.
Pushed back, the materials cleared away remain intact, still clustered
together in their natural position. Not a flake, not a chip falls to
earth. By means of a quick-setting, rain-proof glue, the whole of the
fragments detached are cemented to the base in a continuous sheaf,
so that the blossom is kept intact, save for the yellowish tint of the
parts wounded. As the grub increases in size, more florets are cut
away and take their place, beside the others, in the roof, which
swells by degrees and ends by bulging out.
Thus a quiet dwelling is obtained, sheltered from wind and weather

and the heat of the sun. Within, the hermit sips at his cask in safety;
he waxes big and fat. I suspected it, that the larva would be able to
make up by its own industry for the rough-and-ready installation of
the egg! Where maternal care is lacking, the grub possesses special
talents as a safeguard.
Nevertheless, nothing in the grub of the Spotted Larinus reveals the

skilful builder of thatched huts. It is a little sausage of a creature, a
rusty yellow in colour and bent into a hook. There is not a vestige of
legs; the whole equipment consists of the mouth and the opposite
end, an active [31]auxiliary. What can this little roll of rancid butter be
capable of doing? To observe it at work is easy enough at the
propitious moment.
In the middle of August, when the larva, having achieved its full
growth, is busy strengthening and plastering its abode in view of the
approaching nymphosis, I half-open a few cells. The hulls opened,
but still adhering to the natal blossom, are arranged in a row in a
glass tube which will enable me to watch the work without
disturbing the worker. I have not long to wait for the result.
In a state of repose, the grub is a hook with the extremities very
near together. From time to time I see it bring the two ends into
intimate contact and close the circuit. Then—do not let us be
shocked by the grub’s procedure: this would mean misconceiving
life’s sacred simplicities—then with its mandibles it very neatly
gathers from the stercoral orifice a tiny drop the size of an ordinary
pin’s head. It is a muddy white liquid, flowing like gum, similar in
appearance to the resinous beads that ooze from the horned galls of
the turpentine-tree when you break them.
The grub spreads its little drop over the edges of the breach made in
its dwelling; it distributes it here and there, very sparingly; it pushes
and coaxes it into the gaps. Then, attacking the adjacent florets, it
picks out the shreds and chips and bits of hairs.
This does not satisfy it. It rasps the axis and [32]the central nucleus
of the blossom, detaching tiny scraps and atoms. A laborious task,
for the mandibles are short and cut badly. They tear rather than
slice.
All this is distributed over the still fresh cement. This done, the grub
bestirs itself most strenuously, bending into a hook and straightening
out again; it rolls and glides about its cabin to make the materials
amalgamate and to smooth the wall with the pad of its round rump.
When this pressing and polishing is finished, the larva once more
curves into a circle. A second white drop appears at the factory-door.
The mandibles take hold of the ignominious product as they would
of an ordinary mouthful; and the process is repeated as before: the
cell is first smeared with glue and then encrusted with ligneous
particles.
After thus expending a certain number of trowelfuls of cement, the

grub remains motionless; it seems to be abandoning a job too much
for its means. Twenty-four hours later, the open hulls are still gaping.
An attempt has been made to repair the cell, but not to close it
thoroughly. The task is too heavy.
What is lacking? Not the ligneous materials, which can always be

obtained from the grub’s surroundings, but the adhesive cement, the
factory having closed down. And why has it closed down? The
answer is quite simple: because the vessels [33]of the thistle-head
detached from its stalk are dry and can no longer furnish the food
upon which everything depends.
The curly-bearded Chaldean used to build with bricks of mud baked

in the kiln and cemented with bitumen. The Weevil of the blue
thistle possessed the secret of asphalt long before man did. Better
still: to put its method into practice with a rapidity and economy
unknown to the Babylonian contractors, it had and still has its own
well of bitumen.
What can this viscous substance be? As I have explained, it appears

in opal drops at the waste-pipe of the intestine. Becoming hard and
resinous on contact with the air, it turns a tawny red, so much so
that the inside of the cell looks at first as though coated with quince-
jelly. The final hue is a dull brown, against which pale specks of
mixed ligneous refuse stand out sharply.
The first idea that occurs to one’s mind is that the Weevil’s glue must
be some special secretion, not unlike silk, but emerging from the
opposite pole. Can there be actually glands secreting a viscous fluid
in the grub’s hinder part? I open a larva which is busily building.
Things are not as I imagined: there is no glandular apparatus
attached to the lower end of the digestive canal.
Nor is there anything to be seen in the ventricle. Only the Malpighian

tubes, which are rather large [34]and four in number, reveal, by their
opaline tint, the fact that they are fairly full; while the lower portion
of the intestine is dilated with a pulpy substance which
conspicuously attracts the eye.
It is a semi-fluid, viscous, treacly material of a muddy white. I

perceive that it contains an abundance of opaque corpuscles, like
finely powdered chalk, which effervesce when dissolved in nitric acid
and are therefore uric products.
This very soft pulp is, beyond a doubt, the cement which the grub
ejects and collects drop by drop; and the rectum is obviously the
bitumen-warehouse. The parity of aspect, colour, and treacly
consistency are to me decisive: the grub consolidates and cements
and creates a work of art with the refuse from its sewer.
Is this really an excremental residue? Doubts may be permitted. The

four Malpighian tubes which have poured the powdered urates into
the intestine might well supply it with other materials. They do not
in general seem to perform very exclusive duties. Why should they
not be entrusted with various functions in a poorly-equipped
organism? They fill with a chalky broth to enable the Capricorn’s
larva to block the doorway of its cell with a marble slab. It would not
be at all surprising if they were also gorged with the viscous fluid
that becomes the asphalt of the Larinus. [35]
In this embarrassing instance the following explanation may possibly

suffice. The Larinus’ larva observes, as we know, a very light diet,
consisting of sap instead of solid food. Therefore there is no coarse
residue. I have never seen any dirt in the cell; its cleanliness is
perfect.
This does not mean that all the nourishment is absorbed. There is
certainly refuse of no nutritive value, but it is thin and almost fluid.
Can this be the pitch that cements and stops up the chinks? Why
not? If so, the grub would be building with its excrement; with its
ordure it would be making a pretty home.
Here we must silence our repugnance. Where would you have the
recluse obtain the material for its casket? Its cell is its world. It
knows nothing beyond that cell; nothing comes to its assistance. It
must perish if it cannot find its store of cement within itself. Various
caterpillars, not rich enough to afford the luxury of a perfect cocoon,
have the knack of felting their hairs with a little silk. The Larinus
grub, that poverty-stricken creature, having no spinning-mill, must
have recourse to its intestine, its only stand-by.
This stercoral method proves once more that necessity is the mother
of invention. To build a luxurious palace with one’s ordure is a most
meritorious device. Only an insect would be capable of it. For that
matter, the Larinus has no monopoly of this architectural style, which
is [36]not described in Vitruvius, 5 Many other larvæ, better-furnished
with building-materials—those of the Onites, the Onthophagi, 6 the
Cetoniæ, 7 for example—greatly excel it in the beauty of their
excremental edifices.
When completed, on the approach of the nymphosis, the abode of

the Larinus is an oval cell measuring fifteen millimetres in length by
ten in width. 8 Its compact structure almost enables it to resist the
pressure of the fingers. Its main diameter runs parallel with the axis
of the thistle-head. When, as is not unusual, three cells are grouped
on the same support, the whole is not unlike the fruit of the castor-
oil-plant, with its three shaggy husks.
The outer wall of the cell is a rustic bristle of chips and hairy débris
and above all of whole florets, faded and yellow, torn from their
base and pushed out of place while retaining their natural
arrangement. In the thickness of the wall the cement predominates.
The inner wall is polished, washed with a red-brown lacquer and
sprinkled with an incrustation of ligneous fragments. [37]Lastly, the
pitch is of excellent quality. It makes a solid wall of the work; and,
moreover, it is impervious to moisture: when immersed in water, the
cell does not permit any to pass through to the interior.
In short, the Larinus’ cell is a comfortable dwelling, endowed, in the

beginning, with the pliancy of soft leather, which allows free scope
for the growing-process; then, thanks to the cement, it hardens into
a shell permitting the peaceful somnolence of the transformation.
The flexible tent of the early days becomes a stout manor-house.
Here, I told myself, the adult would pass the winter, protected
against the damp, which is more to be dreaded than the cold. I was
wrong. By the end of September most of the cells are empty, though
their support, the blue thistle, eager to open its last blooms, is still in
fairly good condition. The Weevils have gone, in all the freshness of
their flowered costume; they have broken out through the top of
their cells, which now gape like broken pitchers. A few loiterers still
lag behind at home, but are quite ready to make off, judging by their
agility when my curiosity chances to set them free.
When the inclement months of December and January have arrived,

I no longer find a single cell inhabited. The whole population has
migrated. Where has it taken refuge? [38]
I am not quite sure. Perhaps in the heaps of broken stones, under

cover of the dead leaves, in the shelter of the tufts of grass that
grow beneath the hawthorn in the hedges. For a Weevil the country-
side is full of winter-resorts. We need not be anxious about the
emigrants; they are well able to look after themselves.
None the less, in the face of this exodus, my first impression is one
of surprise. To leave such an excellent lodging for a casual shelter, of
doubtful safety, seems to me a rash and ill-advised expedient. Can
the insect be lacking in prudence? No; it has serious motives for
decamping as quickly as possible when the autumn draws to an end.
Let me explain matters.
In the winter the echinops is a brown ruin which the north-wind

tears from its hold, flings on the ground and reduces to tatters by
rolling it in the mud of the roads. A few days of bad weather turn
the handsome blue thistle into a mass of lamentable decay.
What would become of the Weevil on this support, now the

plaything of the winds? Would her tarred cask resist the assaults of
the storm? Would she survive rolling over the rough soil and
prolonged steeping in the puddles of melted snow?
The Weevils foreknow the dangers of a crazy support; warned by the

almanac of instinct, they foresee the winter and its miseries. So they
[39]move house while there is yet time; they leave their cells for a
stable shelter where they will no longer have to fear the vicissitudes
of a dwelling blown along the ground at random.
The desertion of the casket is not a sign of rash haste on the part of
the Larinus: it shows a clear perception of coming events. In fact, a
second Larinus will teach us presently that, when the support is safe
and solidly rooted in the ground, the natal cell is not deserted until
the return of the fine weather.
In conclusion, I ought perhaps to mention an apparently

insignificant, but very exceptional fact, which I have only once
observed in my dealings with the Spotted Larinus. Considering the
scarcity of authentic data as to what becomes of instinct when the
conditions of life are altered, we should do wrong to neglect these
trifling discoveries.
Making ample allowance for anatomy, a precious aid, what do we
know of animals? Next to nothing. Instead of inflating cabbalistic
bladders with this nothing, let us collect well-observed facts,
however humble. From a sheaf of such facts a clear, calm light may
shine forth one day, a light far preferable to the fireworks of theories
which dazzle us for a moment only to leave us in blacker darkness.
Here is this little detail. By some accident an egg has fallen from the
blue globe, its regular lodging, into the axilla of a leaf half-way up
the [40]stem. We can even admit, if we choose, that the mother,
either by inadvertence or by intention, laid it at this point herself.
What will become of the egg under such conditions, so far removed
from the rules? What I have before my eyes tell us.
The grub, faithful to custom, has not failed to broach the stem of the
thistle, which allows the nourishing moisture to ooze from the
wound. As a defence it has built itself a pitcher similar in shape and
size to that which it would have obtained in the thistle-head. This
novel edifice lacks only one thing: the roof of dead florets bristling
on the customary hut.
The builder has contrived to do very well without its floral pantiles. It
has made use of the base of the leaf, one lobe of which is involved,
as a support, in the wall of the cell; and from both leaf and stalk it
has taken the ligneous particles which it had to imbed in the cement.
In short, except that it is bare instead of surrounded with a palisade,
the fabric adhering to the stalk does not differ from that hidden
beneath the withered florets of the thistle-head.
People set great store by environment as a modifying agent. Well,

here we see this famous environment at work. An insect is placed as
much out of its element as it can be, but without leaving the food-
plant, which would inevitably be the end of it. Instead of a ball of
close-packed flowers it [41]has for its workshop the open axilla of a
leaf; instead of hairs—a soft fleece easily shorn off—it has for its
materials the fierce teeth of the thistle. And these profound changes
leave the builder’s talents unperturbed; the house is built according
to the usual plans.
I agree that I have not allowed for the influence of the centuries.
But what would this influence bring about? It is not very clear. The
Weevil born in an unusual place retains no trace of the accident that
has happened. I extract the adult from his exceptional cell. He does
not differ, even in size, a not very important characteristic, from the
Larini born in the regular cell. He has thriven on the axilla of the leaf
as he would have done on the thistle-head.
Let us admit that the accident is repeated, that it even becomes a

normal condition; let us suppose that the mother decides to
abandon her blue balls and to confide her eggs to the axillæ of the
leaves indefinitely. What will this change bring about? The answer is
obvious.
Since the grub has once developed without hindrance on a site alien
to its habits, it will continue to thrive there from generation to
generation; with its intestinal cement it will continue to shape a
protective pitcher of the same pattern as the old, but, for want of
materials, lacking the thatch of withered florets; in short, its talents
will remain what they were in the beginning. [42]
This example tells us that the insect, as long as it can accommodate

itself to the novel conditions imposed upon it, works in its
accustomed fashion; if it cannot do so, it dies rather than change its
methods. [43]
Cf. The Life of the Grasshopper, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander

1
Teixeira de Mattos: chapters i. to v.—Translator’s Note. ↑
Cf. idem: chapter xiv. and passim.—Translator’s Note. ↑
2
Cf. The Life of the Fly: chapter iii.—Translator’s Note. ↑
3
Cf. The Life of the Caterpillar, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander
4
Teixeira de Mattos: chapter xiv., in which the activities of one of the
Ichneumon-flies, Microgaster glomeratus are described.—Translator’s Note. ↑
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (fl. 1st century b.c.), the Roman architect and engineer,
5 author of De Architectura.—Translator’s Note. ↑
For the Onitis and Onthophagus Dung-beetles, cf. The Sacred Beetle and
6
Others: chapters xi. and xiv. to xviii.—Translator’s Note. ↑
Rose-chafers. Cf. More Hunting Wasps: chap. iv.—Translator’s Note. ↑
7
·585 by ·39 inch.—Translator’s Note. ↑
8
[Contents]
Chapter iii
THE BEAR LARINUS
I sally forth in the night, with a lantern, to spy out the land. Around
me, a circle of faint light enables me to recognize the broad masses
fairly well, but leaves the fine details unperceived. At a few paces’
distance, the modest illumination disperses, dies away. Farther off
still, everything is pitch-dark. The lantern shows me—and but very
indistinctly—just one of the innumerable pieces that compose the
mosaic of the ground.
To see some more of them, I move on. Each time there is the same
narrow circle, of doubtful visibility. By what laws are these points,
inspected one by one, correlated in the general picture? The candle-
end cannot tell me; I should need the light of the sun.
Science too proceeds by lantern-flashes; it explores nature’s

inexhaustible mosaic piece by piece. Too often the wick lacks oil; the
glass panes of the lantern may not be clean. No matter: his work is
not in vain who first recognizes and shows to others one speck of
the vast unknown.
However far our ray of light may penetrate, the illuminated circle is
checked on every side by the [44]barrier of the darkness. Hemmed in
by the unfathomable depths of the unknown, let us be satisfied if it
be vouchsafed to us to enlarge by a span the narrow domain of the
known. Seekers, all of us, tormented by the desire for knowledge,
let us move our lantern from point to point: with the particles
explored we shall perhaps be able to piece together a fragment of
the picture.
To-day the shifting of the lantern’s rays leads us to the Bear Larinus
(L. ursus, Fabr.), the exploiter of the carline thistles. We must not let
this inappropriate name of Bear give us an unfavourable notion of
the insect. It is due to the whim of a nomenclator who, having
exhausted his vocabulary, baffled by the never-ending stream of
things already named, uses the first word that comes to hand.
Others, more happily inspired, perceiving a vague resemblance

between the sacerdotal ornament, the stole, and the white bands
that run down the Weevil’s back, have proposed the name of Stoled
Larinus (L. stolatus, Gmel.). This term would please me; it gives a
very good picture of the insect. The Bear, making nonsense, has
prevailed. So be it: non nobis tantas componere lites.
The domain of this Weevil is the corymbed carlina (C. corymbosa,

Lin.), a slender thistle, not devoid of elegance, harsh-looking though
it be. Its heads, with their tough, yellow-varnished [45]spokes,
expand into a fleshy mass, a genuine heart, like an artichoke’s,
which is defended by a hedge of savage folioles broadly welded at
the base. It is at the centre of this palatable heart that the larva is
established, always singly.
Each has its exclusive demesne, its inviolable ration. When an egg, a
single egg, has been entrusted to the mass of florets, the mother
moves on, to continue elsewhere; and, should some newcomer by
mistake take possession of it, her grub, arriving too late and finding
the place occupied, will die.
This isolation tells us how the larva feeds. The carlina’s foster-child
cannot live on a clear broth, as does the echinops’; for, if the drops
trickling from a wound were sufficient, there would be victuals for
several here. The blue thistle feeds three or four boarders without
any loss of solid material beyond that resulting from a slight gash.
Given such coy-toothed feeders, the heart of the carline thistle
would support quite as many.
It is always, on the contrary, the portion of one alone. Thus we
already guess that the grub of the Bear Larinus does not confine
itself to lapping up discharges of sap and that it likewise feeds upon
its artichoke-heart, the standing dish.
The adult also feeds upon it. On the cone covered with imbricated
folioles it makes spacious excavations in which the sweet milk of the
plant hardens into white beads. But these broken [46]victuals, these
cut cakes off which the Weevil has made her meal, are disdained
when the egg-laying comes into question, in June and July. A choice
is then made of untouched heads, not as yet developed, not yet
expanded and still contracted into prickly globules. The interior will
be tenderer than after they are full-blown.
The method is the same as that of the Spotted Larinus. With her
rostral gimlet the mother bores a hole through the scales, on a level
with the base of the florets; then, with the aid of her guiding probe,
she installs her opalescent white egg at the bottom of the shaft. A
week later the grub makes its appearance.
Some time in August let us open the thistle-heads. Their contents

are very diverse. There are larvæ here of all ages; nymphs covered
with reddish ridges, above all on the last segments, twitching
violently and spinning round when disturbed; lastly, perfect insects,
not yet adorned with their stoles and other ornaments of the final
costume. We have before our eyes the means of following the whole
development of the Weevil at the same time.
The folioles of the blossom, those stout halberds, are welded

together at their base and enclose within their rampart a fleshy
mass, with a flat upper surface and cone-shaped underneath. This is
the larder of the Bear Larinus.
From the bottom of its cell the new-born grub [47]dives forthwith into
this fleshy mass. It cuts into it deep. Unreservedly, respecting only
the walls, it digs itself, in a couple of weeks, a recess shaped like a
sugar-loaf and prolonged until it touches the stalk. The canopy of
this recess is a dome of florets and hairs forced upwards and held in
place by an adhesive. The artichoke-heart is completely emptied;
nothing is respected save the scaly walls.
As its isolation led us to expect, the grub of the Bear Larinus

therefore eats solid food. There is, however, nothing to prevent it
from adding to this diet the milky exudations of the sap.
This fare, in which solid matter predominates, necessarily involves

solid excreta, which are unknown in the inmate of the blue thistle.
What does the hermit of the carline thistle do with them, cooped up
in a narrow cell from which nothing can be shot outside? It employs
them as the other does its viscous drops; it upholsters its cell with
them.
I see it curved into a circle with its mouth applied to the opposite
orifice, carefully collecting the granules as these are evacuated by
the intestinal factory. It is precious stuff, this, very precious; and the
grub will be careful not to lose a scrap of it, for it has naught else
wherewith to plaster its dwelling.
The dropping seized is therefore placed in position at once, spread

with the tips of the mandibles [48]and compressed with the forehead
and rump. A few waste chips and flakes, a few bits of down are torn
from the uncemented ceiling overhead; and the plasterer
incorporates them, atom by atom, with the still moist putty.
This gives, as the inmate increases in size, a coat of rough-cast

which, smoothed with meticulous care, lines the whole of the cell.
Together with the natural wall furnished by the prickly rind of the
artichoke, it makes a powerful bastion, far superior, as a defensive
system, to the thatched huts of the Spotted Larinus.
The plant, moreover, lends itself to protracted residence. It is slightly

built but slow to decay. The winds do not prostrate it in the mire,
supported as it is by brushwood and sturdy grasses, its habitual
environment. When the handsome thistle with the blue spheres has
long been mouldering on the edge of the roads, the carlina, with its
rot-proof base, still stands erect, dead and brown but not
dilapidated. Another excellent quality is this: the scales of its heads
contract and make a roof which the rain has difficulty in penetrating.
In such a shelter there is no occasion to fear the dangers which

make the Spotted Larinus quit her pitchers at the approach of
winter: the dwelling is securely founded and the cell is dry. The Bear
Larinus is well aware of these advantages; she is careful not to
imitate the other in wintering under the cover of dead leaves and
stone-heaps. [49]She does not stir abroad, assured beforehand of the
efficiency of her roof.
On the roughest days of the year, in January, if the weather permits

me to go out, I open the heads of the carline thistles which I come
across. I always find the Larinus there, in all the freshness of her
striped costume. She is waiting, benumbed, until the warmth and
animation of May return. Then only will she break the dome of her
cabin and go to take part in the festival of spring.
In majesty of bearing and magnificence of blossom our kitchen-

gardens have nothing superior to the cardoon and its near relative
the artichoke. Their heads grow to double the size of a man’s fist.
Outside are spiral series of imbricated scales which, without being
aggressive, diverge at maturity in the shape of broad, stiff, pointed
blades. Beneath this armament is a fleshy, hemispherical swelling, as
big as half an orange.
From this rises a serried mass of long white hairs, a sort of fur, than
which a Polar Bear’s is no thicker. Closely surrounded by this hair, the
seeds are crowned with feathers which double the thickness of the
shaggy chevaux de frise. Above this, delighting the eye, blooms the
spreading tuft of flowers, coloured a splendid lapis lazuli, like that of
the cornflower, the joy of the harvest.
This is the chief domain of a third Larinus (L. scolymi, Oliv.), a big
Weevil, thickset, broad-backed, powdered with yellow ochre. The
cardoon, [50]which provides our table with the fleshy veins of its
leaves, but whose heads are disdained, is the insect’s customary
home; but, should the gardener leave the artichoke a few late
heads, these are accepted by the Larinus as eagerly as the
cardoon’s. Under different names, the two plants are merely
horticultural varieties; and the Weevil, a thorough expert, makes no
mistake about it.
Under the scorching July sun, a cardoon-head exploited by the Larini

is a sight worth seeing. Drunk with heat, busily staggering amid the
thicket of blue florets, they dive with their tails in the air, sinking and
even disappearing into the depths of the shaggy forest.
What do they do down there? It is not possible to observe them

directly; but a local inspection after the work is finished will tell us.
Between the tufts of hairs, not far from the base, they clear with the
rostrum a place to receive their egg. If they are able to reach a
seed, they rid it of its feathers and cut a shallow cup in it, an egg-
cup as it were. The probe is pushed no farther. The fleshy dome, the
tasty heart which one would at first suppose to be the favourite
morsel, is never attacked by the pregnant mothers.
As might have been expected, so rich an establishment implies a

numerous population. If the head is a good-sized one, it is not
unusual to find a score or more of table-companions, plump, [51]red-
headed grubs, with fat, glossy backs. There is plenty of room for all.
For the rest, they are of a very stay-at-home habit. Far from straying
at random over the abundant food-supply, in which they might well
sample the best and pick their mouthfuls, they remain encamped
within the narrow area of the place where they were hatched.
Moreover, despite their corpulence, they are extremely frugal, to
such a point that, excepting the inhabited patches, the floral head
retains its full vigour and ripens its seeds as usual.
In this blazing summer weather, three or four days are enough for
the hatching. If the young grub is at some distance from the seeds,
it reaches them by slipping along the hairs, a few of which it gathers
on its way. If it is born in contact with a seed, it remains in its native
cup, for the desired point is attained.
Its food consists, in fact, of the few surrounding seeds, five or six,
hardly more; and even so the greater number are only in part
consumed. True, when it has grown stronger, the larva bites deeper
and digs in the fleshy receptacle a little pit that will serve as the
foundation of its future cell. The waste products of nutrition are
pushed backwards, where they set in a hard lump, held in position
by the palisade of the hairs.
A modest scale of diet, when all is said: half a dozen unripe seeds
and a few mouthfuls taken [52]from the cake consisting of the
receptacle. These peaceful creatures must derive singular benefit
from their food to acquire such plumpness so cheaply. An
undisturbed and temperate diet is better than an uneasy feast.
Two or three weeks devoted to these pleasures of the table and our
grub has become a fat baby. Then the blissful consumer becomes a
craftsman. The placid gratification of the belly is followed by the

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A Companion to the Victorian Novel Blackwell Companions to

Bread and Circuses Euergetism and municipal patronage in

Britain Mass Observation social surveys Mass Observation

Critical Theories of Mass Media Then and Now 1st Edition

An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture 2nd Edition

Bread staling 1st Edition Chinachoti

Jerusalem as the Text of Culture 1st Edition Dorota

Social Selves Theories of Self and Society 2nd Edition Dr

The Spirit of Reform:

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS . Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1983 by Cornell University Press

First published 1983 by Cornell University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons

3050-2281d-1Pass.indd 1 6/9/2016 8:40:07 PM

1. lntroduction: The Two Classicisms 17

z. The Classical Roots of the Mass Culture Debate 53

3. "The Opium of the People" 8z

4. Some Nineteenth-Century Themes: Decadence, Masses, Empire,

5. Crowd Psychology and Freud's Model of Perpetual Decadence 154

6. Three Versions of Modern Classicism: Ortega, Eliot, Camus 184

7. The Dialectic of Enlightenment Z2Z

8. Television: Spectacularity vs. McLuhanism Z49

9. Conclusion: Toward Post-Industrial Society 278

F OR better or worse, the most powerful, influential instruments

The purpose of this hook is to criticize negative classicism as it has

terms of "empire and decadence," "bread and circuses"-as in Her-

Many people and several institutions have helped me complete this

T HIS is an examination of reactions to mass culture that interpret

journalist offers as analysis of mass culture or the mass media proves to

assumptions and theories that shape contemporary responses to mass

Sinai is undoubtedly speaking loosely here, because what he says in

Encounter, April 1979. p. 15·

lization of the past. And, where mass culture is perceived as a destruc-

2. "The Sinai Discussion," Encounter, February 1980, pp. 87-93.

from Juvenal' s tenth satire. Referring to the attempted coup by Se-

3. Juvenal, Satires, x, in G. G. Ramsey, ed. and tr., Juvenal and Persius

5. Salvador Ciller, Mass Society (New York: Academic, 1976), p. 23·

But we who give our Native Ríghts away,

Needless to say, "puppet show" is an inadequate rendering of the

Through Freedom's sons no more remonstrance rings,

\Vholly absorbed in the production of wealth ancI in the peaceflll

to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the

Implicit in Marx' s Roman analogizing is the question of the extent to

But here, where Murder breathed her bloody steam;

Here, where the Roman millions' blame or praise

This is not a translation or imitation of Juvenal, of course, but some-

classicism. The aim of his liberal nationalism was to resurrect Roman

was characterized by almost continuous warfare somewhere in the

concealed a number offears. One was that the working-class "masses"

(1976), "the circumstances of the faH ofRome . are very relevant to

Where the external barbarian pounds at the gates of civilization with

This assessment of the "barbarism" of the counterculture contains

greatest technological leap known to man, the mastery of [the 1 uni-

25 . .'vlarya Mannes, They (Carden City, N.Y.: DouhIeday, 1968), p. 32.

repetitious course of the nations of Europe, doomed apparently to call

tries to reject Roman parallels to the American experience. His list of