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The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

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Title: The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

Author: T. R. Glover


        
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Language: English

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THE

CONFLICT OF RELIGIONS

IN THE

EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE



BY

T. R. GLOVER


  FELLOW AND CLASSICAL LECTURER OF
  ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
  HON. LL.D., QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, CANADA




FOURTH EDITION




METHUEN & CO. LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON




  First Published . . March 18th, 1909
  Second Edition  . . June 1909
  Third Edition   . . August 1909
  Fourth Edition  . . October 1910




BY THE SAME AUTHOR


LIFE AND LETTERS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY

STUDIES IN VIRGIL




{v}

PREFACE

A large part of this book formed the course of Dale Lectures delivered
in Mansfield College, Oxford, in the Spring of 1907.  For the
lecture-room the chapters had to be considerably abridged; they are now
restored to their full length, while revision and addition have further
changed their character.  They are published in accordance with the
terms of the Dale foundation.

To see the Founder of the Christian movement and some of his followers
as they appeared among their contemporaries; to represent Christian and
pagan with equal goodwill and equal honesty, and in one perspective; to
recapture something of the colour and movement of life, using
imagination to interpret the data, and controlling it by them; to
follow the conflict of ideals, not in the abstract, but as they show
themselves in character and personality; and in this way to discover
where lay the living force that changed the thoughts and lives of men,
and what it was; these have been the aims of the writer,--impossible,
but worth attempting.  So far as they have been achieved, the book is
relevant to the reader.

The work of others has made the task lighter.  German scholars, such as
Bousset, von Dobschuetz, Harnack, Pfleiderer and Wernle; Professor F. C.
Burkitt and others nearer home who have written of the beginnings of
Christianity; Boissier, Martha and Professor Samuel Dill; Edward Caird,
Lecky, and Zeller; with the authors of monographs, Croiset, de Faye,
Greard, Koziol, Oakesmith, Volkmann; these and others have been laid
under contribution.  In another way Dr Wilhelm Herrmann, of Marburg,
and Thomas Carlyle have helped the {vi} book.  The references to
ancient authorities are mostly of the writer's own gathering, and they
have been verified.

Lastly, there are friends to thank, at Cambridge and at Woodbrooke, for
the services that only friends can render--suggestion, criticism,
approval, correction, and all the other kindly forms of encouragement
and enlightenment.

ST JOHN'S COLLEGE,
  CAMBRIDGE,
    _February 1909_.




{vii}

CONTENTS


CHAP.                                             PAGE

    I. ROMAN RELIGION  . . . . . . . . . . . . .     1
   II. THE STOICS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    33
  III. PLUTARCH  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    75
   IV. JESUS OF NAZARETH . . . . . . . . . . . .   113
    V. THE FOLLOWERS OF JESUS  . . . . . . . . .   141
   VI. THE CONFLICT OF CHRISTIAN AND JEW . . . .   167
  VII. "GODS OR ATOMS?"  . . . . . . . . . . . .   196
 VIII. CELSUS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   239
   IX. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA . . . . . . . . . .   262
    X. TERTULLIAN  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   305
       INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   349




{1}

  THE CONFLICT OF RELIGIONS
  IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE




CHAPTER I

ROMAN RELIGION

On the Ides of March in the year 44 B.C. Julius Caesar lay dead at the
foot of Pompey's statue.  His body had twenty three wounds.  So far the
conspirators had done their work thoroughly, and no farther.  They had
made no preparation for the government of the Roman world.  They had
not realized that they were removing the great organizing intelligence
which stood between the world and chaos, and back into chaos the world
swiftly rolled.  They had hated personal government; they were to learn
that the only alternative was no government at all.  "Be your own
Senate yourself"[1] wrote Cicero to Plancus in despair.  There was war,
there were faction fights, massacres, confiscations, conscriptions.
The enemies of Rome came over her borders, and brigandage flourished
within them.

At the end of his first _Georgic_ Virgil prays for the triumph of the
one hope which the world saw--for the preservation and the rule of the
young Caesar, and he sums up in a few lines the horror from which
mankind seeks to be delivered.  "Right and wrong are confounded; so
many wars the world over, so many forms of wrong; no worthy honour is
left to the plough; the husbandmen are marched away and the fields grow
dirty; the hook has its curve straightened into the sword-blade.  In
the East, Euphrates is stirring up war, in the West, Germany: nay,
close-neighbouring cities break their mutual league and draw the sword,
and the war-god's unnatural fury rages over the whole world; even as
when in the Circus the chariots burst {2} from their floodgates, they
dash into the course, and pulling desperately at the reins the driver
lets the horses drive him, and the car is deaf to the curb."[2]

Virgil's hope that Octavian might be spared to give peace to the world
was realized.  The foreign enemies were driven over their frontiers and
thoroughly cowed; brigandage was crushed, and finally, with the fall of
Antony and Cleopatra, the government of the whole world was once more,
after thirteen years of suffering, disorder and death, safely gathered
into the hands of one man.  There was peace at last and Rome had
leisure to think out the experience through which she had passed.

The thirteen years between the murder of Caesar and the battle of Actium
were only a part of that experience; for a century there had been
continuous disintegration in the State.  The empire had been increased,
but the imperial people had declined.  There had been civil war in Rome
over and over again--murder employed as a common resource of politics,
reckless disregard of the sacredness of life and property, and thorough
carelessness of the State.  The impression that England made upon
Wordsworth in 1802 was precisely that left upon the mind of the serious
Roman when he reflected upon his country.  All was "rapine, avarice,
expense."

  Plain living and high thinking are no more:
  The homely beauty of the good old cause
  Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,
  And pure religion breathing household laws.


Such complaints, real or conventional, are familiar to the readers of
the literature of the last century before Christ.  Everyone felt that a
profound change had come over Rome.  Attempts had been made in various
ways to remedy this change; laws had been passed; citizens had been
banished and murdered; armies had been called in to restore ancient
principles; and all had resulted in failure.  Finally a gleam of
restoration was seen when Julius began to set things in order, when he
"corrected the year by the Sun" and gave promise of as true and
deep-going a correction of everything else.  His murder put an end to
all this at the time, and it took thirteen years to regain the lost
opportunity--and the years were not {3} altogether loss for they proved
conclusively that there was now no alternative to the rule of the
"Prince."

[Sidenote: The cause of Rome's decline]

Accordingly the Prince set himself to discover what was to be done to
heal the hurt of his people, and to heal it thoroughly.  What was the
real disease? was the question that men asked; where was the root of
all the evil? why was it that in old days men were honest, governed
themselves firmly, knew how to obey, and served the State?  A famous
line of Ennius, written two centuries before, said that the Roman
Commonwealth stood on ancient character, and on men.--

  _Moribus antiquis stat res Romano, virisque._

Both these bases of the national life seemed to be lost--were they
beyond recall? could they be restored?  What was it that had made the
"ancient character"?  What was the ultimate difference between the old
Roman and the Roman of the days of Antony and Octavian?  Ovid
congratulated himself on the perfect congruity of the age and his
personal character--

  _haec aetas moribus apta meis--_

and he was quite right.  And precisely in the measure that Ovid was
right in finding the age and his character in agreement, the age and
national character were demonstrably degenerate.  It was the great
question before the nation, its statesmen, patriots and poets, to find
why two hundred years had wrought such a change.

It was not long before an answer was suggested.  A reason was found,
which had a history of its own.  The decline had been foreseen.  We are
fortunately in possession of a forecast by a Greek thinker of the
second century B.C., who knew Rome well--Polybius, the intimate of the
younger Scipio.  In the course of his great summary of the Rome he
knew, when he is explaining her actual and future greatness to the
Greek world, he says:--"The most important difference for the better,
which the Roman Commonwealth appears to me to display, is in their
religious beliefs, for I conceive that what in other nations is looked
upon as a reproach, I mean a scrupulous fear of the gods, is the very
thing which keeps the Roman Commonwealth together; (_synechein ta
rhomaion praumata_).  To such an extraordinary height is this carried
among them (_ektetragoetai {4} kai pareisektai_) both in private and
public business, that nothing could exceed it.  Many people might think
this unaccountable, but in my opinion their object is to use it as a
check upon the common people.  If it were possible to form a state
wholly of philosophers, such a custom would perhaps be unnecessary.
But seeing that every multitude is fickle and full of lawless desires,
unreasoning anger and violent passion, the only resource is to keep
them in check by mysterious terrors and scenic effects of this sort
(_tois adelois phobois kai te toiaute tragodia_).  Wherefore, to my
mind, the ancients were not acting without purpose or at random, when
they brought in among the vulgar those opinions about the gods and the
belief in the punishments in Hades: much rather do I think that men
nowadays are acting rashly and foolishly in rejecting them.  This is
the reason why, apart from anything else, Greek statesmen, if entrusted
with a single talent, though protected by ten checking-clerks, as many
seals and twice as many witnesses, yet cannot be induced to keep faith;
whereas among the Romans, in their magistracies and embassies, men have
the handling of a great amount of money, and yet from pure respect to
their oath keep their faith intact."[3]  Later on Polybius limits his
assertion of Roman honesty to "the majority"--the habits and principles
of Rome were beginning to be contaminated.[4]

[Sidenote: The political value of religion]

This view of the value of religion is an old one among the Greeks.
Critias, the friend of Socrates, embodied it in verses, which are
preserved for us by Sextus Empiricus.  In summary he holds that there
was a time when men's life knew no order, but at last laws were
ordained to punish; and the laws kept men from open misdeeds, "but they
did many things in secret; and then, I think, some shrewd and wise man
invented a terror for the evil in case secretly they should do or say
or think aught.  So he introduced the divine, alleging that there is a
divinity (_daimon_), blest with eternal life, who with his mind sees
and hears, thinks, and marks these things, and bears a divine nature,
who will hear all that is said among men and can see all that is done,
and though in silence thou plan some evil, yet this shall not escape
the gods."  This was a most pleasant {5} lesson which he introduced,
"with a false reason covering truth"; and he said the gods abode in
that region whence thunder and lightning and rain come, and so "he
quenched lawlessness with laws."[5]

This was a shallow judgement upon religion.  That "it utterly abolished
religion altogether" was the criticism of Cicero's Academic.[6]  But
most of the contemporary views of the origin of religion were shallow.
Euhemerism with its deified men, and inspiration with its distraught
votaries were perhaps nobler, a little nobler, but in reality there was
little respect for religion among the philosophic.  But the practical
people of the day accepted the view of Critias as wise enough.  "The
myths that are told of affairs in Hades, though pure invention at
bottom, contribute to make men pious and upright," wrote the Sicilian
Diodorus at this very time.[7]  Varro[8] divided religion into three
varieties, mythical, physical (on which the less said in public, he
owned, the better) and "civil," and he pronounced the last the best
adapted for national purposes, as it consisted in knowing what gods
state and citizen should worship and with what rites.  "It is the
interest," he said, "of states to be deceived in religion."

So the great question narrowed itself to this:--Was it possible for
another shrewd and wise man to do again for Rome what the original
inventor of religion had done for mankind? once more to establish
effective gods to do the work of police?  Augustus endeavoured to show
that it was still possible.

On the famous monument of Ancyra, which preserves for us the Emperor's
official autobiography, he enumerates the temples he built--temples in
honour of Apollo, of Julius, of Quirinus, of Juppiter Feretrius, of
Jove the Thunderer, of Minerva, of the Queen Juno, of Juppiter
Liberalis, of the Lares, of the Penates, of Youth, of the Great Mother,
and the shrine known as the Lupercal; he tells how he dedicated vast
sums from his spoils, how he restored to the temples of Asia the
ornaments of which they had been robbed, and how he {6} became Pontifex
Maximus, after patiently waiting for Lepidus to vacate the office by a
natural death.  His biographer Suetonius tells of his care for the
Sibylline books, of his increasing the numbers, dignities and
allowances of the priests, and his especial regard for the Vestal
Virgins, of his restoration of ancient ceremonies, of his celebration
of festivals and holy days, and of his discrimination among foreign
religions, his regard for the Athenian mysteries and his contempt for
Egyptian Apis.[9]  His private feelings and instincts had a tinge of
superstition.  He used a sealskin as a protection against thunder; he
carefully studied his dreams, was "much moved by portents," and
"observed days."[10]

[Sidenote: Rome's debt to the gods]

The most lasting monument (_aere perennius_) of the restoration of
religion by Augustus consists of the odes which Horace wrote to forward
the plans of the Emperor.  They were very different men, but it is not
unreasonable to hold that Horace felt no less than Augustus that there
was something wrong with the state.  His personal attitude to religion
was his own affair, and to it we shall have to return, but in grave and
dignified odes, which he gave to the world, he lent himself to the
cause of reformation.  He deplored the reckless luxury of the day with
much appearance of earnestness, and, though in his published
collections, these poems of lament are interleaved with others whose
burden is _sparge rosas_, he was serious in some degree; for his own
taste, at least when he came within sight of middle life, was all for
moderation.  He spoke gravely of the effect upon the race of its
disregard of all the virtues necessary for the continuance of a
society.  Like other poets of the day, he found Utopias in distant ages
and remote lands.  His idealized picture of the blessedness of savage
life is not unlike Rousseau's, and in both cases the inspiration was
the same--discontent with an environment complicated, extravagant and
corrupt.

  Better with nomad Scythians roam,
  Whose travelling cart is all their home,
  Or where the ruder Getae spread
  From steppes unmeasured raise their bread.

{7}

  There with a single year content
  The tiller shifts his tenement;
  Another, when that labour ends,
  To the self-same condition bends.

  The simple step-dame there will bless
  With care the children motherless:
  No wife by wealth command procures,
  None heeds the sleek adulterer's lures.[11]


Other poets also imagined Golden Ages of quiet ease and idleness, but
the conclusion which Horace drew was more robust.  He appealed to the
Emperor for laws, and effective laws, to correct the "unreined license"
of the day, and though his poem declines into declamation of a very
idle kind about "useless gold," as his poems are apt to decline on the
first hint of rhetoric, the practical suggestion was not rhetorical--it
was perhaps the purpose of the piece.  In another famous poem, the last
of a sequence of six, all dedicated to the higher life of Rome and all
reaching an elevation not often attained by his odes, he points more
clearly to the decline of religion as the cause of Rome's
misfortunes.[12]

The idea that Rome's Empire was the outcome of her piety was not first
struck out by Horace.  Cicero uses it in one of his public speeches
with effect and puts it into the mouth of his Stoic in the work on the
Nature of the Gods.[13]  Later on, one after another of the Latin
Apologists for Christianity, from Tertullian[14] to Prudentius, has to
combat the same idea.  It was evidently popular, and the appeal to the
ruined shrine and the neglected image touched--or was supposed to
touch--the popular imagination.

Mankind are apt to look twice at the piety of a ruler, and the old
question of Satan comes easily, "Doth Job serve God for naught?"  Why
does an Emperor wish to be called "the eldest son of the church?"  We
may be fairly sure in the case of Augustus that, if popular sentiment
had been strongly against {8} the restoration of religion, he would
have said less about it.  We have to go behind the Emperor and Horace
to discover how the matter really stood between religion and the Roman
people.

We may first of all remark that, just as the French Revolution was in
some sense the parent of the Romantic movement, the disintegration of
the old Roman life was accompanied by the rise of antiquarianism.
Cicero's was the last generation that learnt the Twelve Tables by heart
at school _ut carmen necessarium_; and Varro, Cicero's contemporary,
was the first and perhaps the greatest of all Roman antiquaries.  So at
least St Augustine held.  Sixteen of his forty-one books of Antiquities
Varro gave to the gods, for "he says he was afraid they would perish,
not by any hostile invasion, but by the neglect of the Roman citizens,
and from this he says they were rescued by himself, as from a fallen
house, and safely stored and preserved in the memory of good men by
books like his; and that his care for this was of more service than
that which Metellus is said to have shown in rescuing the sacred
emblems of Vesta from the fire or AEneas in saving the penates from the
Fall of Troy."[15]  He rescued a good deal more than a later and more
pious age was grateful for; Augustine found him invaluable, but
Servius, the great commentator on Virgil, called him "everywhere the
foe of religion."[16]  The poets, too, felt to the full the charm of
antiquity.  Propertius[17] and Ovid both undertook to write of olden
days--of sacred things ("rooted out of ancient annals"[18]), and of the
names of long ago.  Virgil himself was looked upon as a great
antiquary.  Livy wrote of Rome's early history and told how Numa "put
the fear of the gods" upon his people "as the most effective thing for
an ignorant and rough multitude";[19] his history abounds in portents
and omens, but he is not altogether a believer.  As early as a
generation before Rome was burnt by the Gauls it was remarked, he says,
that foreign religion had invaded the city, brought by prophets who
made money out of the superstitions they roused and the alien and
unusual means they employed to procure the peace of the gods.[20]

{9}

[Sidenote: Primitive Roman ritual]

Nowhere perhaps is antiquarianism more fascinating than in the sphere
of religion.  The _Lupercalia_ had once a real meaning.  The sacrifice
of goats and young dogs, and of sacred cakes that the Vestals made of
the first ears of the last year's harvest; the _Luperci_, with blood on
their brows, naked but for the skins of the slaughtered goats; the
_februa_ of goatskin, the touch of which would take sterility from a
woman--all this is intelligible to the student of primitive religion;
but when Mark Antony, Consul though he was, was one of the runners at
the Lupercalia, it was not in the spirit of the ancient Latin.  It was
an antiquarian revival of an old festival of the countryside, which had
perhaps never died out.  At all events it was celebrated as late as the
fifth century A.D., and it was only then abolished by the substitution
of a Christian feast by Pope Gelasius.[21] Augustus took pains to
revive such ceremonies.  Suetonius mentions the "augury of safety," the
"flaminate of Juppiter," the "Lupercal rite," and various sacred
games.[22]  Varro in one of his books, speaks of the Arval Brothers;
and Archaeology and the spade have recovered for us the _acta_ of
ninety-six of the annual meetings which this curious old college held
at the end of May in the grove of Dea Dia.  It is significant that the
oldest of these _acta_ refer to the meeting in 14 A.D., the year of
Augustus' death.  The hymn which they sang runs as follows:--

  _Enos Lases iuvate
  Neve lue rue Marmar sins incurrere in pleores
  Satur fu fere Mars limen sali sta berber
  Semunis Alternis advocapit conctos
  Enos Marmor iuvato
  Triumpe._

The first five lines were repeated thrice, and _Triumpe_ five
times.[23]  Quintilian tells us that "the hymns of the Salii were
hardly intelligible to the priests themselves,"[24] yet they found
admirers who amused Horace with their zeal for mere age and
obscurity.[25]

{10}

But an antiquarian interest in ritual is not inconsistent with
indifference to religion.  Varro, as we have seen, was criticized as an
actual enemy of religion in spite of the services he claimed to have
rendered to the gods--and the very claim justifies the criticism.  So
far as the literature of the last century B.C. and the stories current
about the leading men in Rome allow us to judge, it is hard to suppose
there has ever been an age less interested in religion.  Cicero, for
example, wrote--or, perhaps, compiled--three books "On the Nature of
the Gods."  He casts his matter into the form of a dialogue, in which
in turn an Epicurean and a Stoic give their grounds for rejecting and
for accepting the gods, and an Academic points out the inadequacy of
the reasoning in both cases.  He has also written on the immortality of
the soul.  But Cicero's correspondence is a more reliable index to his
own beliefs and those of the society in which he moved.  No society
could be more indifferent to what we call the religious life.  In
theory and practice, in character and instinct, they were thoroughly
secular.  One sentence will exhibit Cicero's own feeling.  He wrote to
his wife from Brundusium on 30th April 58 B.C., when he was on his way
to foreign exile: "If these miseries are to be permanent, I only wish,
my dearest (_mea vita_), to see you as soon as possible and to die in
your arms, since neither gods, whom _you_ have worshipped with such
pure devotion, nor men, whom _I_ have always served, have made us any
return."[26]  Even when his daughter Tullia died, no sign of any hope
of re-union escaped him in his letters, nor did Servius Sulpicius, who
wrote him a beautiful letter of consolation, do more than merely hint
at such a thing.  "If the dead have consciousness, would she wish you
to be so overcome of sorrow?"  Horace, whose odes, as we have seen, are
now and then consecrated to the restoration of religion, was every whit
as secular-minded.  He laughed at superstition and ridiculed the idea
of a divine interest in men, when he expressed his own feeling.  No one
was ever more thoroughly Epicurean in the truest sense of the word; no
one ever urged more pleasantly the Epicurean theory _Carpe diem_; no
one ever had more deeply ingrained in him the belief _Mors ultima linea
rerum est_.  His candour, his humour, his friendliness, combine to give
him a very human charm, but in all that is associated with the {11}
religious side of man's thought and experience, he is sterile and
insufficient.  And Horace, like Cicero, represents a group.  Fuscus
Aristius, it is true, declined to rescue the poet from the bore on the
ground that "it was the thirtieth Sabbath--and Horace could not wish to
offend the Jews?" but we realize that this scruple was dramatic.
Fuscus is said to have been a writer of comedies.[27]

[Sidenote: The childhood of a pagan]

But the jest of Fuscus was the earnest of many.  If men were conscious
of decay in the sanction which religion had once given to morality,
there was still a great deal of vague religious feeling among the
uneducated and partially educated classes.  Again and again we read
complaints of the folly of grandmothers and nurses, and it was from
them that the first impressions of childhood came.  Four centuries
later than the period now under discussion it was still the same.
"When once vain superstition obsessed the heathen hearts of our
fathers, unchecked was its course through a thousand generations.  The
tender hope of the house shuddered, and worshipped whatever venerable
thing his hoary grandsires showed him.  Infancy drank in error with its
mother's milk.  Amid his cries the sacred meal was put between the
baby's lips.  He saw the wax dripping upon the stones, the black
_Lares_ trickling with unguent.  A little child he saw the image of
Fortune with her horn of wealth, and the sacred stone that stood by the
house, and his mother pale at her prayers before it.  Soon himself too,
raised high on his nurse's shoulders, he pressed his lips to the stone,
poured forth his childish prayers, and asked riches for himself from
the blind rock, and was sure that, whatever one wished, that was where
to ask.  Never did he lift his eyes and his mind to turn to the citadel
of reason, but he believed, and held to the foolish custom, honouring
with blood of lambs the gods of his family.  And then when he went
forth from his home, how he marvelled at the public festivals, the holy
days and the games, and gazed at the towering Capitol, and saw the
laurelled servants of the gods at the temples while the Sacred Way
echoed to the lowing of the victims."  So wrote Prudentius.[28]  So too
wrote Tibullus--"Keep me, _Lares_ of my fathers; for ye bred me to
manhood when a tender child I played at your feet."[29]

{12}

How crowded the whole of life was with cult and ritual and usage, how
full of divinities, petty, pleasing or terrible, but generally vague
and ill-defined, no one will readily realize without special study, but
some idea of the complexity of the Roman's divine environment can be
gained from even a cursory survey of Ovid's _Fasti_, for example, or
Tertullian's _Apology_, or some of the chapters of the fourth book of
Augustine's _City of God_.  "When," asks Augustine, "can I ever mention
in one passage of this book all the names of gods and goddesses, which
they have scarcely been able to compass in great volumes, seeing that
they allot to every individual thing the special function of some
divinity?"  He names a few of the gods of agriculture--Segetia,
Tutilina, Proserpina, Nodutus, Volutina, Patelana, Lacturnus, Matuta,
etc.  "I do not mention all."[30]  "Satan and his angels have filled
the whole world," said Tertullian.[31]

[Sidenote: Fauns, trees, and wells]

Gods of this type naturally make little figure in literature though
Proserpina, in consequence of her identification with the Greek
Persephone, achieved a great place and is indeed the subject of the
last great poem written under the Roman Empire.  But there were other
gods of countryside and woodland, whom we know better in art and
poetry.  "Faunus lover of fugitive Nymphs" is charming enough in
Horace's ode, and Fauns, Pans and Satyrs lend themselves readily to
grotesque treatment in statue and gem and picture.  But the country
people took them seriously.  Lucretius, speaking of echoes among the
hills, says:--"These spots the people round about fancy that
goat-footed Satyrs and nymphs inhabit; they say that they are the
Fauns, whose noise and sportive play breaks the still silence of the
night as they move from place to place....  They tell us that the
country people far and wide full oft hear Pan, when, nodding the
pine-cap on his half-bestial head, he runs over the gaping reeds with
curved lip....  And of other like monsters and marvels they tell us,
that they may not be thought to inhabit lonely places, abandoned even
by the gods."[32]  Cicero {13} makes his Stoic say their voices are
often to be heard.[33]  Pliny, in his _Natural History_, says that
certain dogs can actually see Fauns; he quotes a prescription,
concocted of a dragon's tongue, eyes and gall, which the Magi recommend
for those who are "harassed by gods of the night and by Fauns";[34] for
they did not confine themselves to running after nymphs, but would
chase human women in the dark.

Plutarch has a story of King Numa drugging a spring from which "two
daemons, Picus and Faunus," drank--"creatures who must be compared to
Satyrs or Pans in some respects and in others to the Idaean Dactyli,"
beings of great miraculous power.[35]  A countryside haunted by
inhabitants of more or less than human nature, part beasts and part
fairies or devils, is one thing to an unbeliever who is interested in
art or folk-lore, but quite another thing to the uneducated man or
woman who has heard their mysterious voices in the night solitude and
has suffered in crop, or house, or herd from their ill-will.[36]  What
the Greek called "Panic" fears were attributed in Italy to Fauns.[37]

"Trees," says Pliny, "were temples of divinities, and in the old way
the simple country folk to this day dedicate any remarkable tree to a
god.  Nor have we more worship for images glittering with gold and
ivory than for groves and the very silence that is in them."[38]  The
country people hung rags and other offerings on holy trees--the hedge
round the sacred grove at Aricia is specially mentioned by Ovid as thus
honoured.[39]  The river-god of the Tiber had his sacred oak hung with
spoils of fallen foes.[40]

Holy wells too were common, which were honoured with models of the
limbs their waters healed, and other curious gifts, thrown into
them--as they are still in every part of the Old World.  Horace's fount
of Bandusia is the most famous of these in literature.[41]  It was an
old usage to throw garlands into springs and to crown wells on October
13th.[42]  Streams and {14} wells alike were haunted by mysterious
powers, too often malevolent.[43]

Ovid describes old charms to keep off vampires, _striges_, from the
cradles of children.[44]

In fact the whole of Nature teemed with beings whom we find it hard to
name.  They were not pleasant enough, and did not appeal enough to the
fancy, to merit the name "fairies"--at least since _The Midsummer
Night's Dream_ was written.  Perhaps they are nearer "The little
People"--the nameless "thim ones."[45] They were neither gods nor
demons in our sense of the words, though Greek thinkers used the old
Homeric word _daimon_ to describe them or the diminutive of it, which
allowed them to suppose that Socrates' _daimonion_ was something of the
kind.

[Sidenote: The genius]

But these Nature-spirits, whatever we may call them, were far from
being the only superhuman beings that encompassed man.  Every house had
its _Lares_ in a little shrine (_lararium_) on the hearth, little twin
guardian gods with a dog at their feet, who watched over the family,
and to whom something was given at every meal, and garlands on great
days.  Legend said that Servius Tullius was the son of the family
_Lar_.[46]  The _Lares_ may have been spirits of ancestors.  The
Emperor Alexander Severus set images of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham and
Orpheus, "and others of that sort" in his _lararium_.[47]  Not only
houses but streets and cross-roads had _Lares_; the city had a
thousand, Ovid said, besides the _genius_ of the Prince who gave
them;[48] for Augustus restored two yearly festivals in their honour in
Spring and Autumn.  There were also the _Penates_ in every home, whom
it would perhaps be hard to distinguish very clearly from the _Lares_.
Horace has a graceful ode to "Phidyle" on the sufficiency of the
simplest sacrifices to these little gods of home and hearth.[49]  The
worship of these family gods was almost the only {15} part of Roman
religion that was not flooded and obscured by the inrush of Oriental
cults.

"The Ancients," said Servius, "used the name _Genius_ for the natural
god of each individual place or thing or man,"[50] and another
antiquary thought that the _genius_ and the _Lar_ might be the same
thing.  For some reason men of letters laid hold upon the _genius_, and
we find it everywhere.  Why there should be such difference even
between twin brothers,

  _He_ only knows whose influence at our birth
  O'errules each mortal's planet upon earth,
  The attendant genius, temper-moulding pow'r,
  That stamps the colour of man's natal hour.[51]

The idea of this spiritual counterpart pervades the ancient world.  It
appears in Persia as the _fravashi_.[52]  It is in the Syrian Gnostic's
Hymn of the Soul, as a robe in the form and likeness of a man.--

  It was myself that I saw before me as in a mirror;
  Two in number we stood, but only one in appearance.[53]

It is also probable that the "Angel" of Peter and the "Angels of the
little children" in the New Testament represent the same idea.  The
reader of Horace hardly needs to be reminded of the birthday feast in
honour of the _genius_,--_indulge genio_.  December, as the month of
Larentalia and Saturnalia, is the month welcome to every _genius_, Ovid
says.[54]

The worship of all or most of these spirits of the country and of the
home was joyful, an affair of meat and drink.  The primitive sacrifice
brought man and god near one another in the blood and flesh of the
victim, which was of one race with them both.[55]  It was on some such
ground that the Jews would not "eat with blood," lest the soul of the
beast should pass into the {16} man.  There were feasts in honour of
the dead, too, which the church found so dear to the people that it
only got rid of them by turning them into festivals of the Martyrs.  It
was not idly that St Paul spoke of "meat offered to idols" and said
that the Kingdom of God was not eating or drinking.

In addition to all these spirits of living beings, of actions and of
places, we have to reckon the dead.  There were _Manes_--a name
supposed to mean "the kindly ones," a caressing name given with a
purpose and betraying a real fear.  There were also ghosts, _larvae_ and
_lemures_.[56]  It was the thought of these that made burial so serious
a thing, and all the ritual for averting the displeasure of the dead.
The Parentalia were celebrated on the 13th of February in their
honour,[57] and in May the _Lemuria_.  It is, we are told, for this
reason that none will marry in May.[58]  Closely connected with this
fear of ghosts and of the dead is that terror of death which Lucretius
spends so much labour in trying to dissipate.

"I see no race of men," wrote Cicero, "however polished and educated,
however brutal and barbarous, which does not believe that warnings of
future events are given and may be understood and announced by certain
persons,"[59] and he goes on to remark that Xenophanes and Epicurus
were alone among philosophers in believing in no kind of
Divination.[60]  "Are we to wait till beasts speak?  Are we not content
with the unanimous authority of mankind?"[61]  The Stoics, he says,
summed up the matter as follows:--

"If there are gods and they do not declare the future to men; then
_either_ they do not love men; _or_ they are ignorant of what is to
happen; _or_ they think it of no importance to men to know it; _or_
they do not think it consistent with their majesty to tell men; _or_
the gods themselves are unable to indicate it.  But _neither_ do they
not love men, for they are benefactors and friends to mankind; _nor_
are they ignorant of what they themselves appoint and ordain; _nor_ is
it of no importance to us to know the future--for we shall be more
careful if we do; _nor_ do they count it alien to their majesty, for
there is nothing nobler than kindness; _nor_ are they unable to
foreknow.  _Therefore_ no {17} gods, no foretelling; but there are
gods; therefore they foretell.  Nor, if they foretell, do they fail to
give us ways to learn what they foretell; nor, if they give us such
ways, is there no divination; therefore, there is divination."[62]

[Sidenotes: Omens]

All this reasoning comes after the fact.  The whole world believed in
divination, and the Stoics found a reason for it.[63] The flight of
birds, the entrails of beasts, rain, thunder, lightning, dreams,
everything was a means of Divination.  Another passage from the same
Dialogue of Cicero will suffice.  Superstition, says the speaker,
"follows you up, is hard upon you, pursues you wherever you turn.  If
you hear a prophet, or an omen; if you sacrifice; if you catch sight of
a bird; if you see a Chaldaean or a _haruspex_; if it lightens, if it
thunders, if anything is struck by lightning; if anything like a
portent is born or occurs in any way--something or other of the kind is
bound to happen, so that you can never be at ease and have a quiet
mind.  The refuge from all our toils and anxieties would seem to be
sleep.  Yet from sleep itself the most of our cares and terrors
come."[64]  How true all this is will be seen by a moment's reflexion
on the abundance of signs, omens and dreams that historians so
different as Livy and Plutarch record.  Horace uses them pleasantly
enough in his Odes--like much else such things are charming, if one
does not believe in them.[65]  But it is abundantly clear that it took
an effort to be rid of such belief.  A speaker in Cicero's _Tusculans_
remarks on the effrontery of philosophers, who _boast_ that by
Epicurus' aid "they are freed from those most cruel of tyrants, eternal
terror and fear by day and by night."[66] When a man boasts of moral
progress, of his freedom from avarice, what, asks Horace, of other like
matters?

  You're not a miser.  Good--but prithee say,
  Is every vice with avarice flown away? ...
  Does Superstition ne'er your heart assail
  Nor bid your soul with fancied horrors quail?

{18}

  Or can you smile at magic's strange alarms,
  Dreams, witchcraft, ghosts, Thessalian spells and charms?[67]


Horace's "conversion" is recorded in one of his odes, but it may be
taken too seriously.

That superstition so gross was accompanied by paralysing belief in
magic, enchantment, miracle, astrology[68] and witchcraft generally, is
not surprising.  The historians of the Early Empire have plenty to say
on this.  It should be remembered that the step between magic and
poisoning is a very short one.  Magic, says Pliny, embraces the three
arts that most rule the human mind, medicine, religion and
mathematics--a triple chain which enslaves mankind.[69]

We have thus in Roman society a political life of a highly developed
type, which has run through a long course of evolution and is now
degenerating; we have a literature based upon that of Greece and
implying a good deal of philosophy and of intellectual freedom; and,
side by side with all this, a religious atmosphere in which the
grossest and most primitive of savage conceptions and usages thrive in
the neighbourhood of a scepticism as cool and detached as that of
Horace.  It is hard to realize that a people's experience can be so
uneven, that development and retardation can exist at once in so
remarkable a degree in the mind of a nation.  The explanation is that
we judge peoples and ages too much by their literature, and by their
literature only after it has survived the test of centuries.  In all
immortal literature there is a common note; it deals with the deathless
and the vital; and superstition, though long enough and tenacious
enough of life, is outlived and outgrown by "man's unconquerable mind."
But the period before us is one in which, under a rule that robbed men
of every liberating interest in life, and left society politically,
intellectually and morally sterile and empty, literature declined, and
as it declined, it sank below the level of that flood of vulgar
superstition, which rose higher and higher, as in each generation men
were less wishful to think and less capable of thought.

{19}

[Sidenote: Universal religions]

But our theme is religion, and so far we have discussed nothing but
what we may call superstition--and even Plutarch would hardly quarrel
with the name.  That to people possessed by such beliefs in non-human
powers, in beings which beset human life with malignity, the
restoration of ancient cult and ritual would commend itself, is only
natural.  To such minds the purpose of all worship is to induce the
superhuman being to go peaceably away, and sacrifice implies not human
sin, but divine irritation, which may be irrational.  To the religious
temperament, the essential thing is some kind of union, some communion,
with the Divine; and sacrifice becomes the means to effect the relation
of life to a higher will,--to a holier will, we might say, if we allow
to the word "holy" a width of significance more congenial to ancient
than to modern thought.  And this higher will implies a divinity of
wider reach than the little gods of primitive superstition, a power
which may even be less personal if only it is great.  Religion asks for
the simplification of man's relations with his divine environment, for
escape from the thousand and one petty marauders of the spirit-world
into the empire of some strong and central authority, harsh, perhaps,
or even cruel, but at least a controlling force in man's experience.
If this power is moral, religion is at once fused with morality; if it
is merely physical, religion remains non-moral, and has a constant
tendency to decline into superstition, or at least to make terms with
it.

In the hereditary religion of Rome, the only power that could possibly
have been invested with any such character was Jupiter Capitolinus, but
he had too great a likeness to the other gods of Italy--the gods with
names, that is, for some of the more significant had none--Bona Dea and
Dea Dia for example.  Jupiter had his functions, but on the whole they
were local, and there was very little or nothing in him to quicken
thought or imagination.  It was not till the Stoics made him more or
less the embodiment of monotheism, that he had a chance of becoming the
centre of a religion in the higher sense of the word, and even then it
was impossible; for first, he was at best little more than an
impersonal dogma, and, secondly, the place was filled by foreign
goddesses of far greater warmth and colour and activity.  _Stat magni
nominis umbra_.

{20}

[Sidenote: Cybele and her priests]

It was during the second Punic War that Cybele was brought from Asia
Minor to Rome and definitely established as one of the divinities of
the City.[70]  The Great Mother of the gods, she represented the
principle of life and its reproduction, and her worship appealed to
every male and female being in the world.  It inspired awe, and it
prompted to joy and merriment; it was imposing and it was mysterious.
Lucretius has a famous description of her pageant:--

"Adorned with this emblem (the mural crown), the image of the divine
Mother is carried nowadays through wide lands in awe-inspiring state.
Different nations after old-established ritual name her Idaean Mother,
and give for escort Phrygian bands....  Tight-stretched tambourines and
hollow cymbals thunder all round to the stroke of their open hands, and
horns menace with hoarse-sounding music, and the hollow pipe stirs
their minds with its Phrygian strain.  They carry weapons before them,
emblems of furious rage, meet to fill the thankless souls and godless
breasts of the rabble with terror for the Divinity of the Goddess.  So,
when first she rides in procession through great cities and mutely
enriches mortals with a blessing not expressed in words, they straw all
her path with brass and silver, presenting her with bounteous alms, and
scatter over her a snow-shower of roses, over-shadowing the mother and
her troops of attendants.  Here an armed band, to which the Greeks give
the names of Phrygian Curetes, join in the game of arms and leap in
measure, all dripping with blood, and the awful crests upon their heads
quiver and shake."[71]

The invariable features of the worship of Cybele are mentioned here,
the eunuch priests, the tambourines, the shouting and leaping and
cutting with knives, and the collection of money.[72]  There is no
indication of any control being exercised over these priests of Cybele
by a central authority, and little bands of them strolled through the
Mediterranean lands, making their living by exhibiting themselves and
their goddess and gathering petty offerings.  They had a bad name and
they seem to have deserved it.  In the book called _The Ass_, {21} once
ascribed to Lucian, is a short account of such a band.  The ass, who is
really a man transformed, is the speaker.  "The next day they packed up
the goddess and set her on my back.  Then we drove out of the city and
went round the country.  When we entered any village, I, the god-bearer
(a famous word, _theophoretos_[73]) stood still, and the crowd of
flutists blew like mad, and the others threw off their caps and rolled
their heads about, and cut their arms with the swords and each stuck
his tongue out beyond his teeth and cut it too, so that in a moment
everything was full of fresh blood.  And, I, when I saw this for the
first time, stood trembling in case the goddess might need an ass'
blood too.  When they had cut themselves about in this way, they
collected from the bystanders obols and drachmas; and one or another
would give them figs and cheeses and a jar of wine, and a medimnus of
wheat and barley for the ass.  So they lived upon these and did service
to the goddess who rode on my back."[74]

The _Attis_ of Catullus gives a vivid picture of the frenzy which this
worship could excite.  Juvenal complains of the bad influence which the
priests of Cybele, among others, had upon the minds of Roman ladies.
St Augustine long afterwards says that "till yesterday" they were to be
seen in the streets of Carthage "with wet hair, whitened face and
mincing walk."  It is interesting to note in passing that the land
which introduced the Mother of the Gods to the Roman world, also gave
the name _Theotokos_ (Mother of God) to the church.

Egypt also contributed gods to Rome, who forced themselves upon the
state.  The Senate forbade them the Capitol and had their statues
thrown down, but the people set them up again with violence.[75]
Gabinius, the Consul of 58 B.C., stopped the erection of altars to
them, but eight years later the Senate had to pass a decree for the
destruction of their shrines.  No {22} workman dared lay hand to the
work, so the consul Paullus stripped off his consular toga, took an axe
and dealt the first blow at the doors.[76]  Another eight years passed,
and the Triumvirs, after the death of Caesar, built a temple to Isis and
Serapis to win the goodwill of the masses.[77]  The large foreign and
Eastern element in the city populace must be remembered.  When Octavian
captured Alexandria, he forgave the guilty city "in honour of Serapis,"
but on his return to Rome he destroyed all the shrines of the god
within the city walls.  In time Isis laid hold of the month of
November, which had otherwise no festivals of importance.

[Sidenote: Isis and Serapis]

Isis seems to have appealed to women.  Tibullus complains of Delia's
devotion to her, and her ritual.  There were baths and purifications;
the worshippers wore linen garments and slept alone.  Whole nights were
spent sitting in the temple amid the rattling of the sistrum.  Morning
and evening the votary with flowing hair recited the praises of the
goddess.[78] Isis could make her voice heard on occasion, or her snake
of silver would be seen to move its head, and penance was required to
avert her anger.  She might bid her worshippers to stand in the Tiber
in the winter, or to crawl, naked and trembling, with blood-stained
knees, round the Campus Martius--the Iseum stood in the Campus as it
was forbidden within the City Walls; or to fetch water from Egypt to
sprinkle in the Roman shrine.  They were high honours indeed that
Anubis claimed, as, surrounded by shaven priests in linen garments, he
scoured the city and laughed at the people who beat their breasts as he
passed.[79]  The "barking" Anubis might be despised by Virgil and
others, but the vulgar feared him as the attendant of Isis and
Serapis.[80]  Isis began to usurp the functions of Juno Lucina, and
women in childbed called upon her to deliver them.[81]  She gave
oracles, which were familiar perhaps even so early as Ennius' day,[82]
and men and women slept in the temples of Isis and Serapis, as they did
in those of AEsculapius, to obtain in dreams the knowledge they needed
to appease the god, or to {23} recover their health, or what not.[83]
It is not surprising that the shrines of Isis are mentioned by Ovid and
Juvenal as the resorts of loose women.[84]

The devotion of the women is proved by the inscriptions which are found
recording their offerings to Isis.  One woman, a Spaniard, may be taken
as an illustration.  In honour of her daughter she dedicated a silver
statue to Isis, and she set forth how the goddess wore a diadem
composed of one big pearl, six little pearls, emeralds, rubies, and
jacinths; earrings of emeralds and pearls; a necklace of thirty-six
pearls and eighteen emeralds (with two for clasps); bracelets on her
arms and legs; rings on her fingers; and emeralds on her sandals.[85]
There is evidence to show that the Madonna in Southern Italy is really
Isis re-named.  Isis, like the Madonna, was painted and sculptured with
a child in her arms (Horus, Harpocrates).  Their functions coincide as
closely as this inscription proves that their offerings do.[86]

  Die Mutter Gottes zu Kevlaar
    Traegt heut' ihr bestes Kleid.


At first, it is possible that Egyptian religion, as it spread all over
the world, was little better than Phrygian, but it had a better future.
With Plutarch's work upon it we shall have to deal later on.  Apuleius,
at the end of the second century worshipped an Isis, who identified all
the Divinities with herself and was approached through the most
imposing sacraments.  She was the power underlying all nature, but
there was a spiritual side to her worship.  Two centuries or so later,
Julian "the Apostate" looks upon Serapis as Catholics have done upon St
Peter--he is "the kindly and gentle god, who set souls utterly free
from becoming or birth (_geneseos_) and does not, when once they are
free, nail them down to other bodies in punishment, but conveys them
upward and brings them into the {24} ideal world."[87]  It is possible
that some hint of this lurked in the religion from the first, and, if
it did, we need not be surprised that it escaped Juvenal's notice.

It was not merely gods that came from the East, but a new series of
religious ideas.  Here were religions that claimed the whole of life,
that taught of moral pollution and of reconciliation, that gave anew
the old sacramental value to rituals,--religions of priest and devotee,
equalizing rich and poor, save for the cost of holy rites, and giving
to women the consciousness of life in touch with the divine.  The
eunuch priests of Cybele and the monks of Serapis introduced a new
abstinence to Western thought.  It is significant that Christian
monasticism and the coenobite life began in Egypt, where, as we learn
from papyri found in recent years, great monasteries of Serapis existed
long before our era.  Side by side with celibacy came vegetarianism.

No polytheistic religion can exclude gods from its pantheon; all
divinities that man can devise have a right there.  Thus Cybele and
Isis made peace with each other and with all the gods and goddesses
whom they met in their travels--and with all the _daemonia_ too.  Their
cults were steeped in superstition, and swung to and fro between
continence and sensuality.  They orientalized every religion of the
West and developed every superstitious and romantic tendency.  In the
long run, they brought Philosophy to its knees, abasing it to be the
apologist of everything they taught and did, and dignifying themselves
by giving a philosophic colouring to their mysticism.  But this is no
strange thing.  A religion begins in magic with rites and symbols that
belong to the crudest Nature-worship--to agriculture, for instance, and
the reproductive organs--and gradually develops or absorbs higher
ideas, till it may reach the unity of the godhead and the immortality
of the soul; but the ultimate question is, will it cut itself clear of
its past?  And this the religions of Cybele and Isis never
satisfactorily achieved.

In the meantime they promised little towards a moral regeneration of
society.  They offered men and women emotions, but they scarcely
touched morality.  To the terrors of life, already many enough, they
added crowning fears, and cramped and dwarfed the minds of men.

{25}

[Sidenote: Lucretius]

"O hapless race of men!" cried Lucretius, "when they attributed such
deeds to the gods and added cruel anger thereto! what groanings did
they then beget for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our
children's children!  No act of piety is it to be often seen with
veiled head turning toward a stone, to haunt every altar, to lie
prostrate on the ground with hands outspread before the shrines of
gods, to sprinkle the altars with much blood of beasts and link vow to
vow--no! rather to be able to look on all things with a mind at
peace."[88] And a mind at peace was the last thing that contemporary
religion could offer to any one.  "Human life," he says, "lay visibly
before men's eyes foully crushed to earth under the weight of Religion,
who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect
lowering upon men," till Epicurus "dared first to uplift mortal eyes
against her face and first to withstand her....  The living force of
his soul gained the day; on he passed far beyond the flaming walls of
the world and traversed in mind and spirit the immeasurable universe.
And thence he returns again a conqueror, to tell us what can and what
cannot come into being; in short on what principle each thing has its
powers defined, its deep-set boundary mark.  So Religion is put under
our feet and trampled upon in its turn; while as for us, his victory
sets us on a level with heaven."[89]

It was the establishment of law which brought peace to Lucretius.  In
the ease of mind which we see he gained from the contemplation of the
fixity of cause and effect, in the enthusiasm with which he emphasizes
such words as _rationes_, _faedera_, _leges_, with which he celebrates
_Natura gubernans_, we can read the horrible weight upon a feeling soul
of a world distracted by the incalculable caprices of a myriad of
divine or daemonic beings.[90]  The force with which he flings himself
against the doctrine of a future life shows that it is a fight for
freedom.  If men would rid themselves of "the dread of something after
death"--and they could if they would, for reason will do it--they could
live in "the serene temples of the wise"; the gods would pass from
their minds; bereavement would lose its sting, and life would no longer
be brutalized by the cruelties of terror.  Avarice, treachery, murder,
civil war, suicide--all these things are the fruit of this fear of
death.[91]

{26}

Religion, similarly, "often and often has given birth to sinful and
unholy deeds."  The illustration, which he uses, is the sacrifice of
Iphigenia, and it seems a little remote.  Yet Pliny says that in 97
B.C. in the consulship of Lentulus and Crassus, a decree of the Senate
forbade human sacrifice--_ne homo immolaretur_.  "It cannot be
estimated," he goes on, "what a debt is owed to the Romans who have
done away (in Gaul and Britain) with monstrous rites, in which it was
counted the height of religion to kill a man, and a most healthful
thing to eat him."[92]  Elsewhere he hints darkly at his own age having
seen something of the kind, and there is an obscure allusion in
Plutarch's life of Marcellus to "unspeakable rites, that none may see,
which are performed (?) upon Greeks and Gauls."[93]  "At the temple of
Aricia," says Strabo, "there is a barbarian and Scythian practice.  For
there is there established a priest, a runaway slave, who has killed
with his own hand his predecessor.  There he is, then, ever sword in
hand, peering round about, lest he should be attacked, ready to defend
himself."  Strabo's description of the temple on the lake and the
precipice overhanging it adds to the impressiveness of the scene he
thus pictures.[94]  If human sacrifice was rare in practice, none the
less it was in the minds of men.

  _Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum_

concludes Lucretius, and yet it was not perhaps his last thought.

M. Patin has a fine study of the poet in which he deals with "the
anti-Lucretius in Lucretius."  Even in the matter of religion, his keen
observation of Nature frequently suggests difficulties which are more
powerfully expressed and more convincing than the arguments with which
he himself tries to refute them.  "When we look up to the heavenly
regions of the great universe, the aether set on high above the
glittering stars, and the {27} thought comes into our mind of the sun
and moon and their courses; then indeed in hearts laden with other woes
that doubt too begins to wake and raise its head--can it be perchance,
after all, that we have to do with some vast Divine power that wheels
those bright stars each in his orbit?  Again who is there whose mind
does not shrink into itself with fear of the gods, whose limbs do not
creep with terror, when the parched earth rocks under horrible blow of
the thunderbolt, and the roar sweeps over the vast sky? ... When too
the utmost fury of the wild wind scours the sea and sweeps over its
waters the admiral with his stout legions and his elephants, does he
not in prayer seek peace with the gods? ... but all in vain, since,
full oft, caught in the whirlwind, he is driven, for all his prayers,
on, on to the shoals of death.  Thus does some hidden power trample on
mankind....  Again, when the whole earth rocks under their feet, and
towns fall at the shock or hang ready to collapse, what wonder if men
despise themselves, and make over to the gods high prerogative and
marvellous powers to govern all things?"[95]

That Lucretius should be so open to impressions of this kind, in spite
of his philosophy, is ra measure of his greatness as a poet.  It adds
weight and worth to all that he says--to his hatred of the polytheism
and superstition round about him, and to his judgment upon their effect
in darkening and benumbing the minds of men.  He understands the
feelings which he dislikes--he has felt them.  The spectacle of the
unguessed power that tramples on mankind has moved him; and he has
suffered the distress of all delicate spirits in times of bloodshed and
disorder.  He knows the effect of such times upon those who still
worship.  "Much more keenly in evil days do they turn their minds to
religion."[96]

{28}

We have now to consider another poet, a disciple of Lucretius in his
early years, who, under the influence of Nature and human experience,
moved away from Epicureanism, and sought reconciliation with the gods,
though he was too honest with himself to find peace in the systems and
ideas that were yet available.

[Sidenote: Virgil]

Virgil was born in the year 70 B.C.--the son of a little self-made man
in a village North of the Po.  He grew up in the country, with a spirit
that year by year grew more sensitive to every aspect of the world
around him.  No Roman poet had a more gentle and sympathetic love of
Nature; none ever entered so deeply and so tenderly into the sorrows of
men.  He lived through forty years of Civil War, veiled and open.  He
saw its effects in broken homes and aching hearts, in coarsened minds
and reckless lives.  He was driven from his own farm, and had, like
AEneas, to rescue an aged and blind father.  Under such experience his
early Epicureanism dissolved--it had always been too genial to be the
true kind.  The Epicurean should never go beyond friendship, and Virgil
loved.  His love of the land in which he was born showed it to him more
worthy to be loved than men had yet realized.  Virgil was the pioneer
who discovered the beauty, the charm and the romance of Italy.  He
loved the Italians and saw poetry in their hardy lives and quiet
virtues, though they were not Greeks.  His love of his father and of
his land opened to him the significance of all love, and the deepening
and widening of his experience is to be read in the music, stronger and
profounder, that time reveals in his poetry.

Here was a poet who loved Rome more than ever did Augustus or Horace,
and he had no such speedy cure as they for "the woes of sorrowful
Hesperia."  The loss of faith in the old gods meant more to him than to
them, so his tone in speaking of them is quieter, a great deal, than
that of Horace.  He took the decline of morals more seriously and more
inwardly, and he saw more deeply into the springs of action; he could
never lightly use the talk of rapid and sweeping reformation, as his
friend did in the odes which the Emperor inspired.  He had every belief
in Augustus, who was dearer to him personally than to Horace, and he
hoped for much outcome from the new movement in the State.  But with
all his absorbing interest in {29} his own times--and how deep that
interest was, only long and minute study of his poems will reveal--he
was without scheme or policy.  He came before his countrymen, as
prophets and poets do in all ages--a child in affairs, but a man in
inward experience; he had little or nothing to offer but the
impressions left upon his soul by human life.  He had the advantage
over most prophets in being a "lord of language"; he drew more music
from Latin words than had ever been achieved before or was ever reached
again.

He told men of a new experience of Nature.  It is hardly exaggeration
to say that he stands nearer Wordsworth in this feeling than any other
poet.  He had the same "impulses of deeper birth"; he had seen new
gleams and heard new voices; he had enjoyed what no Italian had before,
and he spoke in a new way, unintelligible then, and unintelligible
still, to those who have not seen and heard the same things.  The gist
of it all he tried to give in the language of Pantheism, which the
Stoics had borrowed from Pythagoras:--"The Deity, they tell us,
pervades all, earth and the expanse of sea, and the deep vault of
heaven; from Him flocks, herds, men, wild beasts of every sort, each
creature at its birth draws the bright thread of life; further, to Him
all things return, are restored and reduced--death has no place among
them; but they fly up alive into the ranks of the stars and take their
seats aloft in the sky."  So John Conington did the passage into
English.  But in such cases it may be said with no disrespect to the
commentator who has done so much for his poet, the original words stand
to the translation, as Virgil's thought did to the same thought in a
Stoic's brain.

        _Deum namque ire per omnis
  Terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum;
  Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
  Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas;
  Scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri
  Omnia, nec morti esse locum, sed viva volare
  Sideris in numerum atque alto succedere caelo_.
                                  (Georgics, iv, 221.)


The words might represent a fancy, or a dogma of the schools and many
no doubt so read them, because they had no {30} experience to help
them.  But to others it is clear that the passage is one of the deepest
import, for it is the key to Virgil's mind and the thought is an
expression of what we can call by no other name than religion.  Around
him men and women were seeking communion with gods; he had had
communion with what he could not name--he had experienced religion in a
very deep, abiding and true way.  There is nothing for it--at least for
Englishmen--but to quote the "lines composed a few miles above Tintern
Abbey"--

              I have felt
  A presence that disturbs me with the joy
  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean, and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
  And rolls through all things.

Virgil's experience did not stop here; like Wordsworth, he found

              Nature's self
  By all varieties of human love
  Assisted.

He had been a son and a brother; and such relations of men to men
impressed him--they took him into the deepest and most beautiful
regions of life; and one of the charms of Italy was that it was written
all over with the records of human love and helpfulness.  The clearing,
the orchard, the hilltop town, the bed of flowers, all spoke to him
"words that could not be uttered."  His long acquaintance with such
scripts brought it about that he found

            in man an object of delight,
  Of pure imagination and of love--

and he came to the Roman people with a deep impression of human
worth--something unknown altogether in Roman poetry before or after.
Lucretius was impressed with man's insignificance in the universe;
Horace, with man's folly.  Virgil's {31} poetry throbbed with the sense
of man's grandeur and his sanctity.

This human greatness, which his poetry brought home to the sympathetic
reader, was not altogether foreign to the thought of the day.  _Homo
sacra res homini_[97] was the teaching of the Stoics, but man was a
more sacred thing to the poet than to the philosopher, for what the
philosopher conceived to be a flaw and a weakness in man, the poet
found to be man's chief significance.  The Stoic loudly proclaimed man
to be a member of the universe.  The poet found man knit to man by a
myriad ties, the strength of which he realized through that pain
against which the Stoic sought to safeguard him.  Man revealed to the
poet his inner greatness in the haunting sense of his limitations--he
could not be self-sufficient (_autarkes_) as the Stoic urged; he
depended on men, on women and children, on the beauty of grass and
living creature, of the sea and sky.  And even all these things could
not satisfy his craving for love and fellowship; he felt a "hunger for
the infinite."  Here perhaps is the greatest contribution of Virgil to
the life of the age.

He, the poet to whom man and the world were most various and meant
most, came to his people, and, without any articulate expression of it
in direct words, made it clear to them that he had felt a gap in the
heart of things, which philosophy could never fill.  Philosophy could
remove this sense of incompleteness, but only at the cost of love; and
love was to Virgil, as his poetry shows, the very essence of life.  Yet
he gave, and not altogether unconsciously, the impression that in
proportion as love is apprehended, its demands extend beyond the
present.  The sixth book of the _AEneid_ settles nothing and proves
nothing, but it expresses an instinct, strong in Virgil, as the result
of experience, that love must reach beyond the grave.  Further, the
whole story of AEneas is an utterance of man's craving for God, of the
sense of man's incompleteness without a divine complement.  These are
the records of Virgil's life, intensely individual, but not peculiar to
himself.  In the literature of his century, there is little indication
of such instincts, but the history of four hundred years shows that
they were deep in the general heart of man.

These impressions Virgil brought before the Roman world.  {32} As such
things are, they were a criticism, and they meant a change of values.
In the light of them, the restoration of religion by Augustus became a
little thing; the popular superstition of the day was stamped as vulgar
and trivial in itself, while it became the sign of deep and unsatisfied
craving in the human heart; and lastly the current philosophies, in the
face of Virgil's poetry, were felt to be shallow and cold, talk of the
lip and trick of the brain.  Of course this is not just to the
philosophers who did much for the world, and without whom Virgil would
not have been what he was.  None the less, it was written in Virgil's
poetry that the religions and philosophies of mankind must be thought
over anew.

This is no light contribution to an age or to mankind.  In this case it
carries with it the whole story that lies before us.  Such an
expression of a common instinct gave new force to that instinct; it
added a powerful impulse to the deepest passion that man knows; and, in
spite of the uncertainties which beset the poet himself, it gave new
hope to mankind that the cry of the human heart for God was one that
should receive an answer.


Chapter I Footnotes:

[1] Cic. _ad fam._ x, 16, 2, _Ipse tibi sis senatus_.

[2] _Georgic_ i, 505-514 (Conington's translation, with alterations).

[3] Polybius, vi, 56, Shuckburgh's Translation.

[4] Polybius, xviii, 35.

[5] Sextus Empiricus, _Adv. mathematicos_, ix, 54.

[6] Cicero, _N.D._ i, 42, 118.

[7] Diodorus Siculus, i, 2.

[8] Quoted by Augustine, _C.D._ iv, 27; vi, 5; also referred to by
Tertullian, _ad Natt._ ii, 1.

[9] Suetonius, _Augustus_, 31, 75, 93; Warde Fowler, _Roman Festivals_,
p. 344.

[10] Suet. Aug. 90, 92.

[11] Horace, _Odes_, iii, 24, 9-20, Gladstone's version.

[12] Horace, _Odes_, iii, 6, Delicta maiorum.

[13] _De Haruspicum Responsis_, 9, 19; _N.D._ ii, 3, 8.

[14] E.g. _Apol._ 25, with a serious criticism of the contrast between
Roman character before and after the conquest of the world,--before and
after the invasion of Rome by the images and idols of Etruscans and
Greeks.

[15] _Augustine C.D._ vi, 2.

[16] On _AEneid_, xi, 785.

[17] Propertius, v, 1, 69.

[18] Ovid, _Fasti_, i, 7.

[19] Livy, i, 19.

[20] Livy, iv, 30.

[21] Plutarch, _Romulus_, 21; _Caesar_, 61, Warde Fowler, _Roman
Festivals_, p. 310 f.

[22] Suetonius, _Aug._ 31, Warde Fowler, _op. cit._ p. 190.

[23] Mommsen, _History_, i, p. 231, who translates the hymn.

[24] Quintilian, i, 6, 40.  See specimen in Varro, _L.L._ vii, 26.

[25] _Epp._ ii, 1, 20-27, 86.

[26] Cicero, _ad fam._ xiv, 4, 1.

[27] Hor. _Sat._ i, 9, 69: Porphyrion is the authority for the comedies.

[28] Prudentius, _contra Symmachum_, i, 197-218.

[29] Tibullus, i, 10, 15.


[30] _C.D._ iv, 8.  "To an early Greek," says Mr Gilbert Murray, "the
earth, water and air were full of living eyes: of _theoi_, of
_daimones_, of _Keres_.  One early poet says emphatically that the air
is so crowded full of them that there is no room to put in the spike of
an ear of corn without touching one."--_Rise of Greek Epic_, p. 82.

[31] _de Spect._ 5; cf. _de Idol._ 16; _de cor. mil._ 13, gods of the
door; _de Anima_, 39, goddesses of child-birth.

[32] Lucr. iv, 580 f.  Virg. _AEn._ viii, 314.

[33] Cic. _N.D._ ii, 2, 6: cf. _De Div._ i, 45, 101.  Warde Fowler,
_Roman Festivals_, pp. 256 ff. on the Fauni.

[34] Pliny, _N.H._ viii, 151; xxx, 84.

[35] Plutarch, _Numa_, 15; _de facie in orbe lunae_, 30; Ovid, _Fasti_,
iii, 291.

[36] Horace's ode attests the power of the Fauns over crops and herds.

[37] Dionys.  Hal. v, 16.

[38] Pliny, _N.H._ xii, 3.

[39] Ovid, _Fasti_, iii, 267.  _Licia dependent longas velantia saepes,
et posita est meritae multa tabella deae_.

[40] Virgil, AEn. x, 423.

[41] Horace, _Odes_, iii, 13.

[42] W. Warde Fowler, _Roman Festivals_, p. 240.

[43] Cf. Tertullian, _de Baptismo_, 5.  _Annon et alias sine ullo
Sacramento immundi spiritus aquis incubant, adfectantes illam in
primordio divini spiritus gestationem?  Sciunt opaci quique fontes, et
avii quique rivi, et in balneis piscinae et euripi in domibus, vel
cisternae et putei, qui rapere dicuntur, scilicet per vim spiritus
nocentis.  Nympholeptos et lymphaticos et hydrophobos vocant quos aquae
necaverunt aut amentia vel formidine exercuerunt.  Quorsum ista
retulimus?  Ne quis durius credat angelum dei sanctum aquis in salutem
hominis temperandis adesse._

[44] Ovid, _Fasti_, vi, 155 f.

[45] Cf. (Lucian) _Asinus_, 24.  _poi badixeis aoria talaipore; oude ta
daimonia dedoikas_.

[46] Pliny, _N.H._ xxxvi, 204.

[47] Lampridius, _Alex. Sev._ 29. 2.

[48] _Fasti_, v. 145.  Cf. Prudentius, _adv. Symm_, ii, 445 f.

[49] _Odes_, iii, 23.  _Farre pio_.

[50] On _Georgic_ i, 302, See Varro, _ap._ Aug. _C.D._ vii, 13.  Also
_Tert. de Anima_, 39, _Sic et omnibus genii deputantur, quod daemonum
nomen est.  Adeo nulla ferme nativitas munda, utique ethnicorum_.

[51] Hor. _Ep._ ii. 2, 187 f. Howes' translation.  Cf. _Faerie Queene_,
II, xii, 47.

[52] See J. H. Moulton in _Journal of Theological Studies_, III, 514.

[53] Burkitt, _Early Eastern Christianity_, p. 222.

[54] _Fasti_, iii, 57; Seneca, _Ep._ 18. 1, _December est mensis: cum
maxime civitas sudat, ius luxuries publicae datum est ... ut non
videatur mihi errasse qui dixit: olim mensem Decembrem fuisse nunc
annum_.

[55] Cf. Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, lect. xi.

[56] Warde Fowler, _Roman Festivals_, pp. 106 f.

[57] Ovid, _Fasti_, ii, 409 f.  Warde Fowler, _op. cit._ pp. 306 f.

[58] Ovid, _Fasti_, v, 490.

[59] _De Divinatione_, i, 1, 2.

[60] _ib._ i, 3, 5.

[61] _ib._ i, 39, 84.

[62] _De Divinatione_, i, 38, 82, 83.  Cf. Tertullian, _de Anima_, 46.
_Sed et Stoici deum malunt providentissimum humanae institutioni inter
cetera praesidia divinatricum artium et disciplinarum somnia quoque
nobis indidisse, peculiare solatium naturalis oraculi_.

[63] Panaetius and Seneca should be excepted from this charge.

[64] Cic. _de Div._ ii, 72, 149, 150.  Cf. _de Legg._ ii, 13, 32.
Plutarch also has the same remark about sleep and superstition.

[65] Cf. _Odes_, iii, 27.

[66] _Tusculans_, i, 21, 48.

[67] Hor. _Ep._ ii, 2, 208; Howes.

[68] Tertullian, de _Idol._ 9, _seimus magiae et astrologiae inter se
societatem_.

[69] Pliny the elder on Magic, _N.H._ xxx, opening sections; _N.H._
xxviii, 10, on incantations, _polleantne aliquid verba et incantamenta
carminum_.

[70] Livy, xxix, 11, 14; Ovid, fasti, iv, 179 f.  The goddess was
embodied in a big stone.

[71] Lucretius, ii, 608 f.

[72] Cf. Strabo, c. 470; Juvenal, vi, 511 f.

[73] See Ramsay, _Church in the Roman Empire_, p. 397.  The Latins used
the word _divinus_ in this way--Seneca, _de teata vita_, 26, 8.

[74] (Lucian) Asinus, 37.  The same tale is amplified in Apuleius'
_Golden Ass_, where the episode of these priests is given with more
detail, in the eighth book.  Seneca hints that a little blood might
make a fair show; see his picture of the same, _de beata vita_, 26, 8.

[75] Tertullian, _ad Natt._ i, 10; Apel. 6.  He has the strange fancy
that Serapis was originally the Joseph of the book of Genesis, _ad
Natt._ ii, 8.

[76] Valerius Maximus, i, 3, 4.

[77] Dio C. xlvii, 15.

[78] Tibullus, i, 3, 23 f.  Cf. Propertius, ii, 28, 45; Ovid, _A.A._
iii, 635.

[79] Juvenal, vi, 522 f.

[80] Lucan, viii, 831, _Isin semideosque canes_.

[81] Ovid, _Am._ ii, 13, 7.

[82] Unless _Isiaci coniectores_ is Cicero's own phrase, _de Div._ i,
58, 132.

[83] Cicero, _Div._ ii, 59, 121.  For _egkolmesis_ or _incubatio_ see
Mary Hamilton, _Incubation_ (1906)

[84] Clem. Alex. Paedag. iii, 28, to the same effect.  Tertullian on the
temples, _de Pud._ c. 5.  Reference may be made to the hierodules of
the temples in ancient Asia and in modern India.

[85] _Corp. Inscr. Lai._ ii, 3386.  The enumeration of the jewels was a
safeguard against theft.

[86] Flinders Petrie, _Religion of Ancient Egypt_, p. 44; Hamilton,
_Incubation_, pp. 174, 182 f.

[87] Julian, _Or._ iv, 136 B.

[88] Lucr. v, 1194.

[89] Lucr. i, 62-79.

[90] See Patin, _La Poesie Latine_, i, 120.

[91] Lucr. iii, 60 f.

[92] Pliny, _N.H._ xxx, 12, 13.  Warde Fowler, _Roman Festivals_, pp.
111 f. on the _Argei_ and the whole question of human sacrifice.  For
Plutarch's explanation of it as due not to gods but to evil demons who
enforced it, see p. 107.

[93] Pliny, _N.H._ xxviii, 12; Plutarch, _Marcellus_, 3, where,
however, the meaning may only be that the rites are done in symbol; he
refers to the actual sacrifice of human beings in the past.  See
Tertullian, _Apol._ 9 on sacrifice of children in Africa in the reign
of Tiberius.

[94] Strabo, c. 239.  Strabo was a contemporary of Augustus.  Cf. J. G.
Frazer, _Adonis Attis Osiris_, p. 63, for another instance in this
period.

[95] Lucr. v, 1204-1240.  We may compare Browning's _Bp. Blougram_ on
the instability of unbelief:--

  Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
  A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
  A chorus-ending from Euripides--
  And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
  As old and new at once as nature's self,
  To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
  Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
  Round the ancient idol, on his base again,--
  The grand Perhaps!  We look on helplessly.

[96] Lucr. iii, 53.

[97] Seneca, _Ep._ 95, 33.




{33}

CHAPTER II

THE STOICS

"I am entering," writes Tacitus,[1] "upon the history of a period, rich
in disasters, gloomy with wars, rent with seditions, nay, savage in its
very hours of peace.  Four Emperors perished by the sword; there were
three civil wars; there were more with foreigners--and some had both
characters at once....  Rome was wasted by fires, its oldest temples
burnt, the very Capitol set in flames by Roman hands.  There was
defilement of sacred rites; adulteries in high places; the sea crowded
with exiles; island rocks drenched with murder.  Yet wilder was the
frenzy in Rome; nobility, wealth, the refusal of office, its
acceptance--everything was a crime, and virtue the surest ruin.  Nor
were the rewards of informers less odious than their deeds; one found
his spoils in a priesthood or a consulate; another in a provincial
governorship; another behind the throne; and all was one delirium of
hate and terror; slaves were bribed to betray their masters, freedmen
their patrons.  He who had no foe was destroyed by his friend."

It was to this that Virgil's hope of a new Golden Age had
come--_Redeunt Saturnia regna_.  Augustus had restored the Republic; he
had restored religion; and after a hundred years here is the outcome.
Tacitus himself admits that the age was not "barren of virtues," that
it "could show fine illustrations" of family love and friendship, and
of heroic death.  It must also be owned that the Provinces at large
were better governed than under the Republic; and, further, that, when
he wrote Tacitus thought of a particular period of civil disorder and
that not a long one.  Yet the reader of his Annals will feel that the
description will cover more than the year 69; it is essentially true of
the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, and it was to be true
again of the reign of Domitian--of perhaps eighty years of the first
century of our era.  If it was not true {34} of the whole Mediterranean
world, or even of the whole of Rome, it was true at least of that
half-Rome which gave its colour to the thinking of the world.

[Sidenote: The Imperial court]

Through all the elaborate pretences devised by Augustus to obscure the
truth, through all the names and phrases and formalities, the Roman
world had realized the central fact of despotism.[2]  The Emperors
themselves had grasped it with pride and terror.  One at least was
insane, and the position was enough to turn almost any brain.
"Monarchy," in Herodotus' quaint sentence,[3] "would set the best man
outside the ordinary thoughts."  Plato's myth of Gyges was
fulfilled--of the shepherd, who found a ring that made him invisible,
and in its strength seduced a queen, murdered a king and became a
tyrant.  Gaius banished his own sisters, reminding them that he owned
not only islands but swords; and he bade his grandmother remember that
he could "do anything he liked and do it to anybody."[4]  Oriental
princes had been kept at Rome as hostages and had given the
weaker-minded members of the Imperial family new ideas of royalty.  The
very word was spoken freely--in his treatise "On Clemency" Seneca uses
again and again the word _regnum_ without apology.

But what gave Despotism its sting was its uncertainty.  Augustus had
held a curiously complicated set of special powers severally conferred
on him for specified periods, and technically they could be taken from
him.  The Senate was the Emperor's partner in the government of the
world, and it was always conceivable that the partnership might cease,
for it was not a definite institution--prince followed prince, it is
true, but there was an element of accident about it all.  The situation
was difficult; Senate and Emperor eyed each other with
suspicion--neither knew how far the other could go, or would go;
neither knew the terms of the partnership.  Tiberius wrote despatches
to the Senate and he was an artist in concealing his meaning.  The
Senate had to guess what he wished; if it guessed wrong, he would
resent the liberty; if it guessed right, he resented the appearance of
servility.  The solitude of the throne grew more and more uneasy.

{35}

Again, the republican government had been in the hands of free men, who
ruled as magistrates, and the imperial government had no means of
replacing them, for one free-born Roman could not take service with
another.  The Emperor had to fall back upon his own household.  His
Secretaries of State were slaves and freedmen--men very often of great
ability, but their past was against them.  If it had not depraved them,
none the less it left upon them a social taint, which nothing could
remove.  They were despised by the men who courted them, and they knew
it.  It was almost impossible for such men not to be the gangrene of
court and state.  And as a fact we find that the freedman was
throughout the readiest agent for all evil that Rome knew, and into the
hands of such men the government of the world drifted.  Under a weak,
or a careless, or even an absent, Emperor Rome was governed by such men
and such methods as we suppose to be peculiar to Sultanates and the
East.

The honour, the property, the life of every Roman lay in the hands of
eunuchs and valets, and, as these quarrelled or made friends, the
fortunes of an old nobility changed with the hour.  It had not been so
under Augustus, nor was it so under Vespasian, nor under Trajan or his
successors; but for the greater part of the first century A.D. Rome was
governed by weak or vicious Emperors, and they by their servants.  The
spy and the informer were everywhere.

To this confusion fresh elements of uncertainty were added by the
astrologer and mathematician, and it became treason to be interested in
"the health of the prince."  Superstition ruled the
weakling--superstition, perpetually re-inforced by fresh hordes of
Orientals, obsequious and unscrupulous.  Seneca called the imperial
court, which he knew, "a gloomy slave-gaol" (_triste ergastulum_).[5]

Reduced to merely registering the wishes of their rulers, the Roman
nobility sought their own safety in frivolity and extravagance.  To be
thoughtful was to be suspected of independence and to invite danger.
We naturally suppose moralists and satirists to exaggerate the vices of
their contemporaries, but a sober survey of Roman morals in the first
century--at any rate before 70 A.D.--reveals a great deal that {36} is
horrible.  (Petronius is not exactly a moralist or a satirist, and
there is plenty of other evidence.)  Marriage does not thrive alongside
of terror, nor yet where domestic slavery prevails, and in Rome both
militated against purity of life.  The Greek girl's beauty, her charm
and wit, were everywhere available.  For amusements, there were the
gladiatorial shows,--brutal, we understand, but their horrible
fascination we fortunately cannot know.  The reader of St Augustine's
_Confessions_ will remember a famous passage on these games.  The
gladiators were the popular favourites of the day.  They toured the
country, they were modelled and painted.  Their names survive scratched
by loafers on the walls of Pompeii.  The very children played at being
gladiators, Epictetus said--"sometimes athletes, now monomachi, now
trumpeters."  The Colosseum had seats for 80,000 spectators of the
games, "and is even now at once the most imposing and the most
characteristic relic of pagan Rome."[6]

[Sidenote: "Despotism tempered by epigrams"]

Life was terrible in its fears and in its pleasures.  If the poets drew
Ages of Gold in the latter days of the Republic, now the philosophers
and historians looked away to a "State of Nature," to times and places
where greed and civilization were unknown.  In those happy days, says
Seneca, they enjoyed Nature in common; the stronger had not laid his
hand upon the weaker; weapons lay unused, and human hands, unstained by
human blood, turned all the hatred they felt upon the wild beasts; they
knew quiet nights without a sigh, while the stars moved onward above
them and the splendid pageant of Night; they drank from the stream and
knew no water-pipes, and their meadows were beautiful without art;
their home was Nature and not terrible; while our abodes form the
greatest part of our terror.[7]  In Germany, writes Tacitus, the
marriage-bond is strict; there are no shows to tempt virtue; adultery
is rare; none there makes a jest of vice, _nec corrumpere et corrumpi
seculum vocatur_; none but virgins marry and they marry to bear big
children and to suckle them, _sera invenum venus eoque inexhausta
pubertas_; and the children inherit the sturdy frames of their
parents.[8]

But whatever their dreams of the Ideal, the actual was {37} around
them, and men had to accommodate themselves to it.  In France before
the Revolution, men spoke of the government as "despotism tempered by
epigrams," and the happy phrase is as true of Imperial Rome.  "Verses
of unknown authorship reached the public and provoked" Tiberius,[9] who
complained of the "circles and dinner-parties."  Now and again the
authors were discovered and were punished sufficiently.  The tone of
the society that produced them lives for ever in the _Annals_ of
Tacitus.  It is worth noting how men and women turned to Tacitus and
Seneca during the French Revolution and found their own experience
written in their books.[10]

Others unpacked their hearts with words in tyrannicide declamations and
imitations of Greek tragedy.  Juvenal laughs at the crowded class-room
busy killing tyrants,--waiting himself till they were dead.  The
tragedies got nearer the mark.  Here are a few lines from some of
Seneca's own:--

  Who bids all pay one penalty of death
  Knows not a tyrant's trade.  Nay, vary it--
  Forbid the wretch to die, and slay the happy.  (_H.F._ 515.)

  And is there none to teach them stealth and sin?
  Why! then the throne will!  (_Thyestes_ 313.)

  Let him who serves a king, fling justice forth,
  Send every scruple packing from his heart;
  Shame is no minister to wait on kings.  (_Phaedra_ 436.)


But bitterness and epigram could not heal; and for healing and inward
peace men longed more and more,[11] as they felt their own weakness,
the power of evil and the terror of life; and they found both in a
philosophy that had originally come into being under circumstances
somewhat similar.  They needed some foundation for life, some means of
linking the individual to something that could not be shaken, and this
they found in Stoicism.  The Stoic philosopher saw a unity in this
world of confusion--it was the "Generative Reason"--the _spermatikos
logos_, the Divine Word, or Reason, that is the seed and vital
principle, whence all things come and in virtue of which they {38}
live.  All things came from fiery breath, _pneuma diapuron_, and
returned to it.  The whole universe was one polity--_politeia tou
kosmou_--in virtue of the spirit that was its origin and its life, of
the common end to which it tended, of the absolute and universal scope
of the laws it obeyed--mind, matter, God, man, formed one community.
The soul of the individual Roman partook of the very nature of
God--_divinae particula aurae_[12]--and in a way stood nearer to the
divine than did anything else in the world, every detail of which,
however, was some manifestation of the same divine essence.  All men
were in truth of one blood, of one family,--all and each, as Seneca
says, sacred to each and all.[13]  (_Unum me donavit_ [_sc. Natura
rerum_] _omnibus, uni mihi omnes_.)

[Sidenote: Harmony with nature]

Taught by the Stoic, the troubled Roman looked upon himself at once as
a fragment of divinity,[14] an entity self-conscious and individual,
and as a member of a divine system expressive of one divine idea, which
his individuality subserved.  These thoughts gave him ground and
strength.  If he seemed to be the slave and plaything of an Emperor or
an imperial freedman, none the less a divine life pulsed within him,
and he was an essential part of "the world."  He had two havens of
refuge--the universe and his own soul--both quite beyond the reach of
the oppressor.  Over and over we find both notes sounded in the
writings of the Stoics and their followers--God within you and God
without you.  "Jupiter is all that you see, and all that lives within
you."[15]  There is a Providence that rules human and all other
affairs; nothing happens that is not appointed; and to this Providence
every man is related.  "He who has once observed with understanding the
administration of the world, and learnt that the greatest and supreme
and most comprehensive community is the system (_systema_) of men and
God, and that from God come the seeds whence all things, and especially
rational beings, spring, why should not that man call himself a citizen
of the world [Socrates' word _kosmios_], why not a son of God?"[16]
And when we consider the individual, we find that God {39} has put in
his power "the best thing of all, the master thing"--the rational
faculty.  What is not in our power is the entire external world, of
which we can alter nothing, but the use we make of it and its
"appearances"[17] is our own.  Confine yourself to "what is in your
power" (_ta epi soi_), and no man can hurt you.  If you can no longer
endure life, leave it; but remember in doing so to withdraw quietly,
not at a run; yet, says the sage, "Men! wait for God; when He shall
give you the signal and release you from this service, then go to Him;
but for the present endure to dwell in this place where He has set
you."[18]

To sum up; the end of man's being and his true happiness is what Zeno
expressed as "living harmoniously," a statement which Cleanthes
developed by adding the words "with Nature."  Harmony with Nature and
with oneself is the ideal life; and this the outside world of Emperors,
freedmen, bereavements and accidents generally, can neither give nor
take away.  "The end," says Diogenes Laertius, "is to act in conformity
with nature, that is, at once with the nature which is in us and with
the nature of the universe, doing nothing forbidden by that common law
which is the right reason that pervades all things, and which is,
indeed, the same in the Divine Being who administers the universal
system of things.  Thus the life according to nature is that virtuous
and blessed flow of existence, which is enjoyed only by one who always
acts so as to maintain the harmony between the daemon (_daimon_) within
the individual and the will of the power that orders the universe."[19]

This was indeed a philosophy for men, and it was also congenial to
Roman character, as history had already shown.  It appealed to manhood,
and whatever else has to be said of Stoics and Stoicism, it remains the
fact that Stoicism inspired nearly all the great characters of the
early Roman Empire, and nerved almost every attempt that was made to
maintain the freedom and dignity of the human soul.[20]  The government
was not slow to realise the danger of men with such a trust in
themselves and so free from fear.

On paper, perhaps, all religions and philosophies may at first glance
seem equally good, and it is not till we test them in life {40} that we
can value them aright.  And even here there is a wide field for error.
Every religion has its saints--men recognizable to everyone as saints
in the beauty, manhood and tenderness of their character--and it is
perhaps humiliating to have to acknowledge that very often they seem to
be so through some happy gift of Nature, quite independently of any
effort they make, or of the religion to which they themselves generally
attribute anything that redeems them from being base.  We have to take,
if possible, large masses of men, and to see how they are affected by
the religion which we wish to study--average men, as we call them--for
in this way we shall escape being led to hasty conclusions by happy
instances of natural endowment, or of virtues carefully acquired in
favourable circumstances of retirement or helpful environment.  Side by
side with such results as we may reach from wider study, we have to set
our saints and heroes, for while St Francis would have been tender and
Thrasea brave under any system of thought, it remains that the one was
Christian and the other Stoic.  We need the individual, if we are to
avoid mere rough generalities; but we must be sure that he is
representative in some way of the class and the system under review.

As representatives of the Stoicism of the early Roman Empire, two men
stand out conspicuous--men whose characters may be known with a high
degree of intimacy.  The one was a Roman statesman, famous above all
others in his age, and a man of letters--one of those writers who
reveal themselves in every sentence they write and seem to leave
records of every mood they have known.  The other was an emancipated
slave, who lived at Nicopolis in Epirus, away from the main channels of
life, who wrote nothing, but whose conversations or monologues were
faithfully recorded by a disciple.

"Notable Seneca," writes Carlyle, "so wistfully desirous to stand well
with Truth and yet not ill with Nero, is and remains only our perhaps
niceliest proportioned half-and-half, the plausiblest Plausible on
record; no great man, no true man, no man at all... 'the father of all
such as wear shovel-hats.'"  This was in the essay on Diderot written
in 1833; and we find in his diary for 10th August 1832, when Carlyle
was fresh from reading Seneca, an earlier judgment to much the same
effect--"He is father of all that work in sentimentality, and, by fine
speaking {41} and decent behaviour, study to serve God and mammon, to
stand well with philosophy and not ill with Nero.  His _force_ had
mostly oozed out of him, or corrupted itself into _benevolence_,
virtue, sensibility.  Oh! the everlasting clatter about virtue!
virtue!!  In the Devil's name be virtuous and no more about it."

Even in his most one-sided judgments Carlyle is apt to speak truth,
though it is well to remember that he himself said that little is to be
learnt of a man by dwelling only or mainly on his faults.  That what he
says in these passages is in some degree true, every candid reader must
admit; but if he had written an essay instead of a paragraph we should
have seen that a great deal more is true of Seneca.  As it is, we must
take what Carlyle says as representing a judgment which has often been
passed upon Seneca, though seldom in such picturesque terms.  It is in
any case truer than Mommsen's description of Cicero.

[Sidenote: Seneca's early life]

Seneca was born at Cordova in Spain about the Christian era--certainly
not long before it.  His father was a rich man of equestrian rank, a
rhetorician, who has left several volumes of rhetorical compositions on
imaginary cases.  He hated philosophy, his son tells us.[21]  Seneca's
mother seems to have been a good woman, and not the only one in the
family; for his youth was delicate and owed much to the care of a good
aunt at Rome; and his later years were spent with a good wife Pompeia
Paulina, who bore him two little short-lived boys.

In one of his letters (108) Seneca tells us of his early life in Rome.
He went to the lectures of Attalus, a Stoic teacher, who laid great
stress on simplicity of life and independence of character and was also
interested in superstition and soothsaying.  The pupil was a
high-minded and sensitive youth, quick then, as he remained through
life, to take fire at an idea.[22]  "I used to be the first to come and
the last to go; and as he walked I would lead him on to further
discussions, for he was not only ready for those who would learn, but
he would meet them."  "When I heard Attalus declaim against the vices,
errors and evils of life, I would often pity mankind; and as for him I
thought of him as one on high, far above human nature's highest.  He
himself used to say he was a king [a Stoic {42} paradox at which Horace
had laughed]; but he seemed to me more than king,--the judge of kings.
When he began to commend poverty, and to show that whatever is more
than need requires, is a useless burden to him that has it, I often
longed to leave the room a poor man.  When he attacked our pleasures
and praised the chaste body, the sober table, the pure mind, I
delighted to refrain, not merely from unlawful pleasures, but from
needless ones too.  Some of it has stuck by me, Lucilius, for I made a
good beginning."  All his life long, in fact, he avoided the luxuries
of table and bath, and drank water.  He continues, "Since I have begun
to tell you how much more keenly I began philosophy in my youth than I
persevere with it in my old age, I am not ashamed to own what love of
Pythagoras Sotion waked in me."  Sotion recommended vegetarianism on
the grounds which Pythagoras had laid down.  "But you do not believe,"
he said, "that souls are allotted to one body after another, and that
what we call death is transmigration?  You don't believe that in beasts
and fishes dwells the mind (_animum_) that was once a man's? ... Great
men have believed it; so maintain your own opinion, but keep the matter
open.  If it is true, then to have abstained from animal food will be
innocence; if it is false, it will still be frugality."[23]  So for a
year Seneca was a vegetarian with some satisfaction and he fancied that
his mind was livelier than when he was "an eater of beef."[24]  It is
as well not to quote some contemporary methods of preparing meat.[25]
However, after a while some scandal arose about foreign religions, and
vegetarianism was counted a "proof of superstition," and the old
rhetorician, more from dislike of philosophy than from fear of calumny,
made it an excuse to put a little pressure on his philosophic son, who
obediently gave up the practice.  Such is the ardour of youth, he
concludes,--a good teacher finds idealists ready to his hand.  The
fault is partly in the teachers, who train us to argue and not to live,
and partly in the pupils too, whose aim is to have the wits trained and
not the mind.  "So what was philosophy becomes philology--the love of
words."[26]

There is a certain gaiety and good humour about these {43} confessions,
which is closely bound up with that air of tolerance and that sense of
buoyant ease[27] which pervade all his work.  Here the tone is in
keeping with the matter in hand, but it is not always.  Everything
seems so easy to him that the reader begins to doubt him and to wonder
whether he is not after all "The plausiblest Plausible on record."  We
associate experience with a style more plain, more tense, more
inevitable; and the extraordinary buoyancy of Seneca's writing suggests
that he can hardly have known the agony and bloody sweat of the true
teacher.  Yet under the easy phrases there lay a real sincerity.  From
his youth onward he took life seriously, and, so far as is possible for
a man of easy good nature, he was in earnest with himself.

Like other youths of genius, he had had thoughts of suicide, but on
reflexion, he tells us, he decided to live, and his reason was
characteristic.  While for himself he felt equal to dying bravely, he
was not so sure that his "kind old father" would be quite so brave in
doing without him.  It was to philosophy, he says, that he owed his
resolution.[28]

Apart from philosophy, he went through the ordinary course of Roman
education.  He "wasted time on the grammarians,"[29] whom he never
forgave, and at whom, as "guardians of Latin speech"[30] he loved to
jest,--and the greatest of all Roman Grammarians paid him back in the
familiar style of the pedagogue.  Rhetoric came to him no doubt by
nature, certainly by environment; it conspicuously haunted his family
for three generations.[31]  He duly made his appearance at the
bar--making more speeches there than Virgil did, and perhaps not
disliking it so much.  But he did not like it, and, when his father
died, he ceased to appear, and by and by found that he had lost the
power to plead as he had long before lost the wish.[32]

On the accession of Claudius to the Imperial throne in 41 A.D., Seneca,
now in middle life, was for some reason banished to Corsica, and there
for eight weary years he remained, till the Empress Messalina fell.  A
little treatise, which he wrote {44} to console his mother,
survives--couched in the rhetoric she knew so well.  If the language is
more magnificent than sons usually address to their mothers, it must be
remembered that he wrote to console her for misfortunes which he was
himself enduring.  The familiar maxim that the mind can make itself
happy and at home anywhere is rather like a platitude, but it loses
something of that character when it comes from the lips of a man
actually in exile.  Another little work on the subject, which he
addressed later on to Polybius, the freedman of Claudius, stands on a
different footing, and his admirers could wish he had not written it.
There is flattery in it of a painfully cringing tone.  "The Emperor did
not hurl him down so utterly as never to raise him again; rather he
supported him when evil fortune smote him and he tottered; he gently
used his godlike hand to sustain him and pleaded with the Senate to
spare his life....  He will see to his cause....  He best knows the
time at which to show favour....  Under the clemency of Claudius,
exiles live more peacefully than princes did under Gaius."[33]  But a
little is enough of this.

It is clear that Seneca was not what we call a strong man.  A fragile
youth, a spirit of great delicacy and sensibility, were no outfit for
exile.  Nor is it very easy to understand what exile was to the
educated Roman.  Some were confined to mere rocks, to go round and
round them for ever and never leave them.  Seneca had of course more
space, but what he endured, we may in some measure divine from the
diaries and narratives that tell of Napoleon's life on St Helena.  The
seclusion from the world, the narrow range, the limited number of
faces, the red coats, the abhorred monotony, told heavily on every
temper, on gaoler and prisoner alike, even on Napoleon; and Seneca's
temperament was not of stuff so stern.  We may wish he had not broken
down, but we cannot be surprised that he did.  It was human of him.
Perhaps the memory of his own weakness and failure contributed to make
him the most sympathetic and the least arrogant of all Stoics.

[Sidenote: Nero]

At last Messalina reached her end, and the new Empress, Agrippina,
recalled the exile in 49 A.D., and made him tutor of her son, Nero; and
from now till within two years of his death Seneca lived in the circle
of the young prince.  When Claudius died in 54, Seneca and Burrus
became the guardians of the {45} Emperor and virtually ruled the
Empire.  It was a position of great difficulty.  Seneca grew to be
immensely rich, and his wealth and his palaces and gardens[34] weakened
his influence, while they intensified the jealousy felt for a minister
so powerful.  Yet perhaps none of his detractors guessed the limits of
his power as surely as he came to feel them himself.  Some measure of
the situation may be taken from what befell when the freedwoman Claudia
Acte became the mistress of Nero.  "His older friends did not thwart
him," says Tacitus, "for here was a girl, who, without harm to anyone,
gratified his desires, since he was utterly estranged from his wife
Octavia."[35]  Later on, we learn, Seneca had to avail himself of
Acte's aid to prevent worse scandals.

In February 55 A.D. the young prince Britannicus was poisoned at Nero's
table.  He was the son of Claudius and the brother of Octavia--a
possible claimant therefore to the Imperial throne.  Nero, not more
than eighteen years old, told the company quite coolly that it was an
epileptic seizure, and the feast went on, while the dead boy was
carried out and buried there and then in the rain--in a grave prepared
before he had entered the dining-hall.[36]  Ten months later Seneca
wrote his tractate on Clemency.  Nero should ask himself "Am I the
elected of the gods to be their vice-gerent on earth?  The arbiter of
life and death to the nations?" and so forth.  He is gently reminded of
the great light that fronts the throne; that his anger would be as
disastrous as war; that "Kings gain from kindness a greater security,
while their cruelty swells the number of their enemies."  Seneca
wanders a good deal, but his drift is clear--and the wretchedness of
his position.

That Burrus and he had no knowledge of Nero's design to do away with
his mother, is the verdict of Nero's latest historian, but to Seneca
fell the horrible task of writing the explanatory letter which Nero
sent to the Senate when the murder was done.  Perhaps to judge him
fairly, one would need to have been a Prime Minister.  It may have been
a necessary thing to do, in order to maintain the world's government,
but the letter imposed on nobody, and Thrasea Paetus at once rose from
his seat and walked conspicuously out.

From the year 59 Nero was more than ever his own master.  {46} His
guardians' repeated condonations had set him free, and the lad, who had
"wished he had never learned writing" when he had to sign his first
death-warrant, began from now to build up that evil fame for which the
murders of his brother and his mother were only the foundation.  For
three years Seneca and Burrus kept their places--miserably enough.
Then Burrus found a happy release in death, and with him died the last
of Seneca's influence.[37]  Seneca begged the Emperor's leave to retire
from the Court, offering him the greater part of his wealth, and it was
refused.  It had long been upon his mind that he was too rich.  In 58 a
furious attack was made upon him by "one who had earned the hate of
many," Publius Suillius; this man asked in the Senate "by what kind of
wisdom or maxims of philosophy" Seneca had amassed in four years a
fortune equal to two and a half millions sterling; and he went on to
accuse him of intrigue with princesses, of hunting for legacies, and of
"draining Italy and the provinces by boundless usury."[38]  There was
probably a good deal of inference in these charges, if one may judge by
the carelessness of evidence which such men show in all ages.  Still
Seneca felt the taunt, and in a book "On the Happy Life," addressed to
his brother Gallic, he dealt with the charge.  He did not claim to be a
sage (17, 3); his only hope was day by day to lessen his vices--he was
still in the thick of them; perhaps he might not reach wisdom, but he
would at least live for mankind "as one born for others,"[39] would do
nothing for glory, and all for conscience, would be gentle and
accessible even to his foes; as for wealth, it gave a wise man more
opportunity, but if his riches deserted him, they would take nothing
else with them; a philosopher might have wealth, "if it be taken
forcibly from no man, stained with no man's blood, won by no wrong done
to any, gained without dishonour; if its spending be as honest as its
getting, if it wake no envy but in the envious."[40]  The treatise has
a suggestion of excitement, and there is a good deal of rhetoric in it.
Now he proposed to the Emperor to put his words into action, and Nero
would not permit him--he was not ready for the odium of despoiling his
guardian, and the old man's name might still be of use to cover deeds
in which he had no share.  Seneca was not to resign his {47} wealth nor
to leave Rome.  Nero's words as given by Tacitus are pleasant enough,
but we hardly need to be told their value.[41]

[Sidenote: Seneca's last days]

It was merely a reservation of the death sentence, and Seneca must have
known it.  The only thing now was to wait till he should receive the
order to die, and Seneca occupied the time in writing.  If what he
wrote has a flushed and excited air, it is not surprising.  The
uncertainty of his position had preyed upon him while he was still
Minister--"there are many," he had written, "who must hold fast to
their dizzy height; it is only by falling that they can leave it."[42]
He had fallen, and still he had to live in uncertainty; he had always
been a nervous man.

The end came in 65, in connexion with the conspiracy of Piso.  Tacitus
is not altogether distinct as to the implication of Seneca in this
plot, but modern historians have inclined to believe in his guilt--if
guilt it was.[43]  Mr Henderson, in particular, is very severe on him
for this want of "gratitude" to his benefactor and pupil, but it is
difficult to see what Nero had done for him that he would not have
preferred undone.[44]  Perhaps at the time, and certainly later on,
Seneca was regarded as a possible substitute for Nero upon the
throne;[45] but he was well over sixty and frail, nor is it clear that
the world had yet decided that a man could be Emperor without being a
member of the Julian or Claudian house.  Seneca, in fact any man, must
have felt that any one would be better than Nero, but he had himself
conspicuously left the world, and, with his wife, was living the
philosophic life--a vegetarian again, and still a water-drinker.[46]
Seneca was ready for the death-summons and at once opened his veins.
Death came slowly, but it came; and he died, eloquent to the
last--_novissimo quoque momenta suppeditante eloquentia_.

Such is the story of Seneca.  Even in bare outline it shows something
of his character--his kindliness and sensibility, his weakness and
vanity; but there are other features revealed in his books and his many
long letters to Lucilius.  No Roman, perhaps, ever laid more stress on
the duty of gentleness and forgiveness.[47]  "Look at the City of
Rome," he says, "and the {48} crowds unceasingly pouring through its
broad streets--what a solitude, what a wilderness it would be, were
none left but whom a strict judge would acquit.  We have all done wrong
(_peccavimus_), some in greater measure, some in less, some on purpose,
some by accident, some by the fault of others; we have not stood
bravely enough by our good resolutions; despite our will and our
resistance, we have lost our innocence.  Nor is it only that we have
acted amiss; we shall do so to the end."[48]  He is anxious to make
Stoicism available for his friends; he tones down its gratuitous
harshness, accommodates, conciliates.  He knows what conscience is; he
is recognized as a master in dealing with the mind at variance with
itself, so skilfully does he analyse and lay bare its mischiefs.
Perhaps he analyses too much--the angel, who bade Hermas cease to ask
concerning sins and ask of righteousness, might well have given him a
word.  But he is always tender with the man to whom he is writing.  If
he was, as Quintilian suggests, a "splendid assailant of the faults of
men," it is the faults of the unnamed that he assails; his friends'
faults suggest his own, and he pleads and sympathizes.  His style
corresponds with the spirit in which he thinks.  "You complain," he
writes to Lucilius, "that my letters are not very finished in style.
Who talks in a finished style unless he wishes to be affected?  What my
talk would be, if we were sitting or walking together, unlaboured and
easy, that is what I wish my letters to be, without anything precious
or artificial in them."[49] And he has in measure succeeded in giving
the air of talk to his writing--its ease, its gaiety, even its rambling
and discursiveness.  He always sees the friend to whom he writes, and
talks to him--sometimes at him--and not without some suggestion of
gesticulation.  He must have talked well--though one imagines that,
like Coleridge on Highgate Hill, he probably preferred the listener who
sat "like a passive bucket to be pumped into."  Happily the reader is
not obliged to be quite so passive.

But we shall not do him justice if we do not recognize his high
character.  In an age when it was usual to charge every one with
foulness, natural and unnatural, Dio Cassius alone among writers
suggests it of Seneca; and, quite apart from his particular bias in
this case, Dio is not a high authority,--more {49} especially as he
belonged to a much later generation.  If his talk is of "virtue!
virtue!" Seneca's life was deliberately directed to virtue.  In the
midst of Roman society, and set in the highest place but one in the
world, he still cherished ideals, and practised self-discipline, daily
self-examination.  "This is the one goal of my days and of my nights:
this is my task, my thought--to put an end to my old faults."[50]  His
whole philosophy is practical, and directed to the reformation of
morals.  The Stoic paradoxes, and with them every part of philosophy
which has no immediate bearing upon conduct, he threw aside.  His
language on the accumulation of books recalls the amusement of St
Francis at the idea of possessing a breviary.  And further, we may note
that whatever be charged against him as a statesman, not his own
master, and as a writer, not always quite in control of his rhetoric,
Seneca was fundamentally truthful with himself.  He never hid his own
weakness; he never concealed from himself the difficulty of his ideals;
he never tried to delude himself with what he could not believe.  The
Stoics had begun long since to make terms with popular religion, but
Seneca is entirely free from delusions as to the gods of popular
belief.  He saw clearly enough that there was no truth in them, and he
never sought help from anything but the real.  He is a man, trained in
the world,[51] in touch with its problems of government, with the
individual and his questions of character, death and eternity,--a man
tender, pure and true--too great a man to take the purely negative
stand of Thrasea, or to practise the virtue of the schools in "arrogant
indolence."  But he has hardly reached the inner peace which he sought.

The story of Epictetus can be more briefly told, for there is very
little to tell.[52]  He was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia:--he was the
slave of Nero's freedman Epaphroditus, and somehow managed to hear the
lectures of the Stoic Musonius.  Eventually he was set free, and when
Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, he went to Nicopolis in
Epirus,[53] where he lived and taught--lame, neat, poor and old.  How
{50} he taught is to be seen in the discourses which Arrian took down
in the reign of Trajan,--"Whatever I heard him say, I tried to write
down exactly, and in his very words as far as I could--to keep them as
memorials for myself of his mind and of his outspokenness.  So they
are, as you would expect, very much what a man would say to another on
the spur of the moment--not what he would write for others to read
afterwards....  His sole aim in speaking was to move the minds of his
hearers to the best things.  If then these discourses should achieve
this, they would have the effect which I think a philosopher's words
should have.  But if they do not, let my readers know that, when he
spoke them, the hearer could not avoid being affected as Epictetus
wished him to be.  If the discourses do not achieve this, perhaps it
will be my fault, or perhaps it may be inevitable.  Farewell."

[Sidenote: Epictetus on children and women]

Such, save for a sentence or two omitted, is Arrian's
preface,--thereafter no voice is heard but that of Epictetus.  To
place, time or persons present the barest allusions only are made.
"Someone said ... And Epictetus spoke."  The four books of Arrian give
a strong impression of fidelity.  We hear the tones of the old man, and
can recognize "the mind and the outspokenness," which Arrian cherished
in memory--we understand why, as we read.  The high moral sense of the
teacher, his bursts of eloquence, his shrewdness, his abrupt turns of
speech, his apostrophes--"Slave!" he cries, as he addresses the
weakling--his diminutives of derision, produce the most lively sense of
a personality.  There is wit, too, but like Stoic wit in general it is
hard and not very sympathetic; it has nothing of the charm and delicacy
of Plato's humour, nor of its kindliness.

Here and there are words and thoughts which tell of his life.  More
than once he alludes to his age and his lameness--"A lame old man like
me."  But perhaps nowhere in literature are there words that speak so
loud of a man without experience of woman or child.  "On a voyage," he
says, "when the ship calls at a port and you go ashore for water, it
amuses you to pick up a shell or a plant by the way; but your thoughts
ought to be directed to the ship, and you must watch lest the captain
call, and then you must throw away all those things, that you may not
be flung aboard, tied like the sheep.  So in life, suppose {51} that
instead of some little shell or plant, you are given something in the
way of wife or child (_anti bolbariou kai kochlidiou gynaikarion kai
paidion_) nothing need hinder.  But, if the captain call, run to the
ship letting them all go and never looking round.  If you are old, do
not even go far from the ship, lest you fail to come when called."[54]
He bids a man endure hunger; he can only die of it.  "But my wife and
children also suffer hunger, (_ohi emoi peineousi_).  What then? does
their hunger lead to any other place?  Is there not for them the same
descent, wherever it lead?  Below, is it not the same for them as for
you?"[55]  "If you are kissing your child, or brother, or friend, never
give full licence to the appearance (_ten phantasian_); check your
pleasure ... remind yourself that you love a mortal thing, a thing that
is not your own (_ouden ton sautou_)....  What harm does it do to
whisper, as you kiss the child, 'To-morrow you will die'?"  This is a
thought he uses more than once,[56] though he knows the attractiveness
of lively children.[57]  He recommends us to practise
resignation--beginning on a broken jug or cup, then on a coat or puppy,
and so up to oneself and one's limbs, children, wife or brothers.[58]
"If a man wishes his son or his wife not to do wrong, he really wishes
what is another's not to be another's."[59]

As to women, a few quotations will show his detachment.  He seems
hardly to have known a good woman.  "Do not admire your wife's beauty,
and you are not angry with the adulterer.  Learn that a thief and an
adulterer have no place among the things that are yours, but among
those which are not yours and not in your power,"[60] and he
illustrates his philosophy with an anecdote of an iron lamp stolen from
him, which he replaced with an earthenware one.  From fourteen years
old, he says, women think of nothing and aim at nothing {52} but lying
with men.[61]  Roman women liked Plato's Republic for the licence they
wrongly supposed it gave.[62]  He constantly speaks of women as a
temptation, nearly always using a diminutive _korasion_,
_korasidion_--little girls--and as a temptation hardly to be resisted
by young men.  He speaks of their "softer voices."[63]  A young
philosopher is no match for a "pretty girl"; let him fly
temptation.[64]  "As to pleasure with women, abstain as far as you can,
before marriage; but if you do indulge in it, do it in the way
conformable to custom.  Do not, however, be disagreeable to those who
take such pleasures, nor apt to rebuke them or to say often that you do
not."[65]  All this may be taken as the impression left by Rome and the
household of Epaphroditus upon a slave's mind.  It may be observed that
he makes nothing like Dio Chrysostom's condemnation of prostitution--an
utterance unexampled in pagan antiquity.

It is pleasanter to turn to other features of Epictetus.  He has a very
striking lecture on personal cleanliness.[66]  In proportion as men
draw near the gods by reason, they cling to purity of soul and body.
Nature has given men hands and nostrils; so, if a man does not use a
handkerchief, "I say, he is not fulfilling the function of a man."
Nature has provided water.  "It is impossible that some impurity should
not remain in the teeth after eating.  'So wash your teeth,' says
Nature.  Why?  'That you may be a man and not a beast--a pig.'"  If a
man would not bathe and use the strigil and have his clothes
washed--"either go into a desert where you deserve to go, or live alone
and smell yourself."  He cannot bear a dirty man,--"who does not get
out of his way?"  It gives philosophy a bad name, he says; but it is
quite clear that that was not his chief reason.  He would sooner a
young man came to him with his hair carefully trimmed than with it
dirty and rough; such care implied "some conception of the beautiful,"
which it was only necessary to direct towards the things of the mind;
"but if a man comes to me filthy and dirty, with a moustache down to
his knees--what _can_ I say to him?"  "But whence am I to get a fine
cloak?  Man! you have water; wash it!"

{53}

[Sidenote: Fame of Epictetus]

Pupils gathered round him and he became famous, as we can see in the
reminiscences of Aulus Gellius.[67]  Sixty or seventy years after his
death a man bought his old earthenware lamp for three thousand
drachmas.[68]  Even in his lifetime men began to come about "the
wonderful old man" who were hardly serious students.  They wished, he
says, to occupy the time while waiting to engage a passage on a
ship--they happened to be passing (_parodos estin_) and looked in to
see him as if he were a statue.  "We can go and see Epictetus
too.--Then you go away and say; Oh!  Epictetus was nothing! he talked
bad Greek--oh! barbarous Greek!"[69]  Others came to pick up a little
philosophic language for use in public.  Why could they not
philosophize and say nothing? he asked.  "Sheep do not vomit up their
grass to show the shepherd how much they have eaten--no! they digest it
inside, and then produce wool and milk outside."[70]  He took his
teaching seriously as a matter of life, and he looked upon it as a
service done to mankind--quite equivalent to the production of "two or
three ugly-nosed children."[71]  He has a warm admiration for the Cynic
philosopher's independence of encumberments--how can he who has to
teach mankind go looking after a wife's confinement--or "something to
heat the water in to give the baby a bath?"[72]

These then are the two great teachers of Stoicism, the outstanding
figures, whose words and tones survive, whose characters are familiar
to us.  They are clearly preachers, both of them, intent on the
practical reformation of their listeners or correspondents.  For them
conduct is nine-tenths of life.  Much of their teaching is of course
the common property of all moral teachers--the deprecation of anger, of
quarrelsomeness, of self-indulgence, of grumbling, of impurity, is
peculiar to no school.  Others have emphasized that life is a campaign
with a general to be obeyed, if you can by some instinct divine what he
is signalling.[73]  But {54} perhaps it was a new thing in the Western
World, when so much accent was laid on conduct.  The terror of
contemporary life, with its repulsiveness, its brutality and its
fascination, drove men in search of the moral guide.  The philosopher's
school was an infirmary, not for the glad but for the sorry.[74]  "That
man," says Seneca, "is looking for salvation--_ad salutem spectat_."

[Sidenote: Self-examination]

Men sought the help of the philosopher, and relapsed.  "He thinks he
wishes reason.  He has fallen out with luxury, but he will soon make
friends with her.  But he says he is offended with his own life!  I do
not deny it; who is not?  Men love their vices and hate them at the
same time."[75]  So writes Seneca of a friend of Lucilius and his
fugitive thoughts of amendment, and Epictetus is no less emphatic on
the crying need for earnestness.  The Roman world was so full of
glaring vice that every serious man from Augustus onward had insisted
on some kind of reformation, and now men were beginning to feel that
the reformation must begin within themselves.  The habit of daily
self-examination became general among the Stoics, and they recommended
it warmly to their pupils.  Here is Seneca's account of himself.

"When the day was over and Sextius had gone to his night's rest, he
used to ask his mind (_animum_): 'what bad habit of yours have you
cured to-day? what vice have you resisted? in what respect are you
better?'  Anger will cease and will be more moderate, when it knows it
must daily face the judge.  Could anything be more beautiful than this
habit of examining the whole day?  What a sleep is that which follows
self-scrutiny!  How calm, how deep and free, when the mind is either
praised or admonished, when it has looked into itself, and like a
secret censor makes a report upon its own moral state.  I avail myself
of this power and daily try my own case.  When the light is removed
from my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, is silent, I survey my
whole day and I measure my words again.  I hide nothing from myself; I
pass over nothing.  For why should I be afraid of any of my errors,
when I can say: 'See that you do it no more, now I forgive you.  In
that discussion, you spoke too pugnaciously; after this do not engage
with the ignorant; they will not learn who have never {55} learned.
That man you admonished too freely, so you did him no good; you
offended him.  For the future, see not only whether what you say is
true, but whether he to whom it is said will bear the truth.'"[76]

Similar passages might be multiplied.  "Live with yourself and see how
ill-furnished you are," wrote Persius (iv, 52) the pupil of Cornutus.
"From heaven comes that word 'know thyself,'" said Juvenal.  A rather
remarkable illustration is the letter of Serenus, a friend of Seneca's,
of whose life things are recorded by Tacitus that do not suggest
self-scrutiny.  In summary it is as follows:--

"I find myself not quite free, nor yet quite in bondage to faults which
I feared and hated.  I am in a state, not the worst indeed, but very
querulous and uncomfortable, neither well nor ill.  It is a weakness of
the mind that sways between the two, that will neither bravely turn to
right nor to wrong.  Things disturb me, though they do not alter my
principles.  I think of public life; something worries me, and I fall
back into the life of leisure, to be pricked to the will to act by
reading some brave words or seeing some fine example.  I beg you, if
you have any remedy to stay my fluctuation of mind, count me worthy to
owe you peace.  To put what I endure into a simile, it is not the
tempest that troubles me, but sea-sickness."[77]

Epictetus quotes lines which he attributes to Pythagoras--

  Let sleep not come upon thy languid eyes
  Ere thou has scanned the actions of the day--
  Where have I sinned?  What done or left undone?
  From first to last examine all, and then
  Blame what is wrong, in what is right, rejoice.[78]

These verses, he adds, are for use, not for quotation.  Elsewhere he
gives us a parody of self-examination--the reflections of one who would
prosper in the world--"Where have I failed in flattery?  Can I have
done anything like a free man, or a noble-minded?  Why did I say that?
Was it not in my power to lie?  Even the philosophers say nothing
hinders a man from telling a lie."[79]

{56}

But self-examination may take us further.[80]  We come into the world,
he says, with some innate idea (_emphutos ennoia_) of good and evil, as
if Nature had taught us; but we find other men with different
ideas,--Syrians and Egyptians, for instance.  It is by a comparison of
our ideas with those of other men that philosophy comes into being for
us.  "The beginning of philosophy--with those at least who enter upon
it aright--by the door--is a consciousness of one's own weakness and
insufficiency in necessary things (_astheneias kai adunamias_)."  We
need rules or canons, and philosophy determines these for us by
criticism.[81]

This reference to Syrians and Egyptians is probably not idle.  The
prevalence of Syrian and Egyptian religions, inculcating ecstatic
communion with a god and the soul's need of preparation for the next
world, contributed to the change that is witnessed in Stoic philosophy.
The Eastern mind is affecting the Greek, and later Stoicism like later
Platonism has thoughts and ideals not familiar to the Greeks of earlier
days.  It was with religions, as opposed to city cults, that Stoicism
had now to compete for the souls of men; and while it retains its Greek
characteristics in its intellectualism and its slightly-veiled contempt
for the fool and the barbarian, it has taken on other features.  It was
avowedly a rule of life rather than a system of speculation; and it was
more, for the doctrine of the Spermaticos Logos (the Generative Reason)
gave a new meaning to conduct and opened up a new and rational way to
God.  Thus Stoicism, while still a philosophy was pre-eminently a
religion, and even a gospel--Good News of emancipation from the evil in
the world and of union with the Divine.

[Sidenote: The true worship of the gods]

Stoicism gave its convert a new conception of the relation of God and
man.  One Divine Word was the essence of both--Reason was shared by men
and gods, and by pure thought men came into contact with the divine
mind.  Others sought communion in trance and ritual--the Stoic when he
was awake, at his highest and best level, with his mind and not his
hand, in thoughts, which he could understand and assimilate, rather
than in magical formulae, which lost their value when they became {57}
intelligible.  God and men formed a polity, and the Stoic was the
fellow-citizen of the gods, obeying, understanding and adoring, as they
did, one divine law, one order--a partaker of the divine nature, a
citizen of the universe, a free man as no one else was free, because he
knew his freedom and knew who shared it with him.  He stood on a new
footing with the gods, and for him the old cults passed away,
superseded by a new worship which was divine service indeed.

"How the gods are to be worshipped, men often tell us.  Let us not
permit a man to light lamps on the Sabbath, for the gods need not the
light, and even men find no pleasure in the smoke.  Let us forbid to
pay the morning salutation and to sit at the doors of the temples; it
is human interest that is courted by such attentions: God, he worships
who knows Him.  Let us forbid to take napkins and strigils to Jove, to
hold the mirror to Juno.  God seeks none to minister to him; nay!
himself he ministers to mankind; everywhere he is, at the side of every
man.  Let a man hear what mode to keep in sacrifices, how far to avoid
wearisomeness and superstition: never will enough be done, unless in
his mind he shall have conceived God as he ought, as in possession of
all things, as giving all things freely.  What cause is there that the
gods should do good?  Nature.  He errs, who thinks they _can_ not do
harm; they _will_ not.  They cannot receive an injury nor do one.  To
hurt and to be hurt are one thing.  Nature, supreme and above all most
beautiful, has exempted them from danger and from being dangerous.  The
beginning of worship of the gods is to believe gods are; then to
attribute to them their own majesty, to attribute to them goodness,
without which majesty is not, to know it is they who preside over the
universe, who rule all things by their might, who are guardians of
mankind; at times[82] thoughtful of individuals.  They neither give nor
have evil; but they chastise, they check, they assign penalties and
sometimes punish in the form of blessing.  Would you propitiate the
gods?  Be good!  He has worshipped them enough who has imitated
them."[83]

{58}

This is not merely a statement of Stoic dogma; it was a proclamation of
freedom.  Line after line of this fine passage directly counters what
was asserted and believed throughout the world by the adherents of the
Eastern religions.  Hear Seneca once more.

[Sidenote: Providence]

"We understand Jove to be ruler and guardian of the whole, mind and
breath of the Universe (_animum spiritumque mundi_), lord and artificer
of this fabric.  Every name is his.  Would you call him fate?  You will
not err.  He it is on whom all things depend, the cause of causes.
Would you call him Providence?  You will speak aright.  He it is whose
thought provides for the universe that it may move on its course unhurt
and do its part.  Would you call him Nature? you will not speak amiss.
He it is of whom all things are born, by whose breath (_spiritu_) we
live.  Would you call him Universe?  You will not be deceived.  He
himself is this whole that you see, fills his own parts, sustains
himself and what is his."[84]

Some one asked Epictetus one day how we can be sure that all our
actions are under the inspection of God.  "Do you think," said
Epictetus, "that all things are a unity?" (_i.e._ in the polity of the
cosmos).  "Yes."  "Well then, do you not think that things earthly are
in sympathy (_sympathein_) with things heavenly?"  "Yes."  Epictetus
reminded his listener of the harmony of external nature, of flowers and
moon and sun.  "But are leaves and our bodies so bound up and united
with the whole, and are not our souls much more? and are our souls so
bound up and in touch with God (_synapheis to theo_) as parts of Him
and portions of Him, and can it be that God does not perceive every
motion of these parts as being His own motion cognate with Himself
(_symphyous_)?"[85]  He bade the man reflect upon his own power of
grasping in his mind ten thousand things at once under divine
administration; "and is not God able to oversee all things, and to be
present with them, and to receive from all a certain communication?"
The man replied that he could not comprehend all these things at once.
"And who tells you this--that you have equal power with Zeus?
Nevertheless, he has placed by every man a guardian (_epitropon_), each
man's {59} Daemon, to whom he has committed the care of the man, a
guardian who never sleeps, is never deceived.  For to what better and
more careful watch (_phylaki_) could He have entrusted each of us?
When then you (plural) have shut your doors and made darkness within,
remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not; but God is
within and your Daemon (Greek: _ho hymeteros daimon_); and what need
have they of light to see what you are doing?"[86]

Here another feature occurs--the question of the daemons.  Seneca once
alludes to the idea--"for the present," he writes to Lucilius, "set
aside the view of some people, that to each individual one of us a god
is given as a pedagogue, not indeed of the first rank, but of an
inferior brand, of the number of those whom Ovid calls 'gods of the
lower order' (_de plebe deos_); yet remember that our ancestors who
believed this were so far Stoics, for to every man and woman they gave
a _Genius_ or a _Juno_.  Later on we shall see whether the gods have
leisure to attend to private people's business."[87]  But before we
pursue a side issue, which we shall in any case have to examine at a
later point, let us look further at the central idea.

The thoughtful man finds himself, as we have seen, in a polity of gods
and men, a cosmos, well-ordered in its very essence.  "In truth," says
Epictetus, "the whole scheme of things (_ta hola_) is badly managed, if
Zeus does not take care of his own citizens, so that they may be like
himself, happy."[88] The first lesson of philosophy is that "there is a
God and that he provides for the whole scheme of things, and that it is
not possible to conceal from him our acts--no, nor our intentions or
thoughts."[89]  "God," says Seneca, "has a father's mind towards the
good, and loves them stoutly--'let them,' he says, 'be exercised in
work, pain and loss, that they may gather true strength.'"  It is
because God is in love with the good (_bonorum amantissimus_) that he
gives them fortune to wrestle with.  "_There_ is a match worth God's
sight (_pardeo dignum_)--a brave man paired with evil
fortune--especially if he is himself the challenger."[90] He goes on to
show that what appear to be evils are not so; that misfortunes are at
once for the advantage of those whom {60} they befall and of men in
general or the universe (_universis_), "for which the gods care more
than for individuals"; that those who receive them are glad to have
them--"and deserve evil if they are not"; that misfortunes come by fate
and befall men by the same law by which they are good.  "Always to be
happy and to go through life without a pang of the mind (_sine morsu
animi_) is to know only one half of Nature."[91]  "The fates lead us:
what time remains for each of us, the hour of our birth determined.
Cause hangs upon cause....  Of old it was ordained whereat you should
rejoice or weep; and though the lives of individuals seem marked out by
a great variety, the sum total comes to one and the same
thing--perishable ourselves we receive what shall perish."[92]  "The
good man's part is then to commit himself to fate--it is a great
comfort to be carried along with the universe.  Whatever it is that has
bidden us thus to live and thus to die, by the same necessity it binds
the gods.  An onward course that may not be stayed sweeps on human and
divine alike.  The very founder and ruler of all things has written
fate, but he follows it: he ever obeys, he once commanded."[93]  To the
good, God says, "To you I have given blessings sure and enduring; all
your good I have set within you.  Endure! herein you may even
out-distance God; he is outside the endurance of evils and you above
it.[94]  Above all I have provided that none may hold you against your
will; the door is open; nothing I have made more easy than to die; and
death is quick."[95]

Epictetus is just as clear that we have been given all we need.  "What
says Zeus?  Epictetus, had it been possible, I would have made both
your little body and your little property free, and not exposed to
hindrance....  Since I was not able to do this, I have given you a
little portion of us, this faculty of pursuing or avoiding an object,
the faculty of desire and {61} aversion and in a word the faculty of
using the appearances of things."[96]  "Must my leg then be lamed?
Slave! do you then on account of one wretched leg find fault with the
cosmos?  Will you not willingly surrender it for the whole? ... Will
you be vexed and discontented with what Zeus has set in order, with
what he and the Moirae, who were there spinning thy nativity
(_genesin_), ordained and appointed?  I mean as regards your body; for
so far as concerns reason you are no worse than the gods and no
less."[97]

[Sidenote: The holy spirit within us]

In language curiously suggestive of another school of thought, Seneca
speaks of God within us, of divine help given to human effort.  "God is
near you, with you, within you.  I say it, Lucilius; a holy spirit sits
within us (_sacer intra nos spiritus sedet_), spectator of our evil and
our good, and guardian.  Even as he is treated by us, he treats us.
None is a good man without God.[98]  Can any triumph over fortune
unless helped by him?  He gives counsel, splendid and manly; in every
good man,

  What god we know not, yet a god there dwells."[99]

"The gods," he says elsewhere, "are not scornful, they are not envious.
They welcome us, and, as we ascend, they reach us their hands.  Are you
surprised a man should go to the gods?  God comes to men, nay! nearer
still! he comes _into_ men.  No mind (_mens_) is good without God.
Divine seeds are sown in human bodies," and will grow into likeness to
their origin if rightly cultivated.[100]  It should be noted that the
ascent is by the route of frugality, temperance and fortitude.  To this
we must return.

Man's part in life is to be the "spectator and interpreter" of
"God"[101] as he is the "son of God";[102] to attach himself to
God;[103] to be his soldier, obey his signals, wait his call to {62}
retreat; or (in the language of the Olympian festival) to "join with
him in the spectacle and the festival for a short time"
(_sympompeusonta auto kai syneortasonta pros oligon_), to watch the
pomp and the panegyris, and then go away like a grateful and modest
man;[104] to look up to God and say "use me henceforth for what thou
will.  I am of thy mind; I am thine."[105] "If we had understanding,
what else ought we to do, but together and severally, hymn God, and
bless him (_euphemein_) and tell of his benefits?  Ought we not, in
digging or ploughing or eating, to sing this hymn to God?  'Great is
God who has given us such tools with which to till the earth; great is
God who has given us hands, the power of swallowing, stomachs, the
power to grow unconsciously, and to breathe while we sleep.' ... What
else can I do, a lame old man, but hymn God?  If I were a nightingale,
I would do the part of a nightingale ... but I am a rational creature,
and I ought to hymn God; this is my proper work; I do it; nor will I
quit my post so long as it is given me; and you I call upon to join in
this same song."[106] Herakles in all his toils had nothing dearer to
him than God, and "for that reason he was believed to be the son of God
and he was."[107]  "Clear away from your thoughts sadness, fear,
desire, envy, avarice, intemperance, etc.  But it is not possible to
eject all these things, otherwise than by looking away to God alone
(_pros monon ton theon apobleponta_) by fixing your affections on him
only, by being dedicated to his commands."[108] This is "a peace not of
Caesar's proclamation (for whence could he proclaim it?) but of
God's--through reason."[109]

[Sidenote: Humanity]

The man, who is thus in harmony with the Spermaticos, Logos, who has
"put his 'I' and 'mine'"[110] in the things of the will, has no quarrel
with anything external.  He takes a part in the affairs of men without
aggression, greed or meanness.  He submits to what is laid upon him.
His peace none can take away, and none can make him angry.  There is a
fine passage in Seneca's ninety-fifth letter, following his account of
right worship already quoted, in which he proceeds to deduce from this
the right attitude to men.  A sentence or two {63} must suffice.  "How
little it is not to injure him, whom you ought to help!  Great praise
forsooth, that man should be kind to man!  Are we to bid a man to lend
a hand to the shipwrecked, point the way to the wanderer, share bread
with the hungry? ... This fabric which you see, wherein are divine and
human, is one.  We are members of a great body.  Nature has made us of
one blood, has implanted in us mutual love, has made us for society
(sociabiles).  She is the author of justice and equity....  Let that
verse be in your heart and on your lip.

  _Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto_"[111]

"Unhappy man! will you ever love? (_ecquando amabis_)" he says to the
irritable.[112]  A little before, he said, "Man, a sacred thing to man,
is slain for sport and merriment; naked and unarmed he is led forth;
and the mere death of a man is spectacle enough."[113]  This was the
Stoic's condemnation of the gladiatorial shows.  Nor was it only by
words that Stoicism worked for humanity, for it was Stoic lawyers who
softened and broadened and humanized Roman law.[114]

Yet Stoicism in Seneca and Epictetus had reached its zenith.  From now
onward it declined.  Marcus Aurelius, in some ways the most attractive
of all Stoics, was virtually the last.  With the second century
Stoicism ceased to be an effective force in occupying and inspiring the
whole mind of men, though it is evident that it still influenced
thinkers.  Men studied the Stoics and made fresh copies of their books,
as they did for a thousand years; they borrowed and adapted; but they
were not Stoics.  Stoicism had passed away as a system first and then
as a religion; and for this we have to find some reason or reasons.

It may well be true that the environment of the Stoics was not fit for
so high and pure a philosophy.  The broad gulf between the common Roman
life and Stoic teaching is evident enough.  The intellectual force of
the Roman world moreover was ebbing, and Stoicism required more
strength of mind and character than was easily to be found.  That a
religion or a philosophy {64} fails to hold its own is not a sure sign
that it is unfit or untrue; it may only be premature, and it may be
held that at another stage of the world's history Stoicism or some
similar scheme of thought,--or, better perhaps, some central idea round
which a system and a life develop--may yet command the assent of better
men in a better age.  At the same time, it is clear that when Stoicism
re-emerges,--if it does,--it will be another thing.  Already we have
seen in Wordsworth, and (so far as I understand him) in Hegel, a great
informing conception which seems to have clear affinity with the
Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics.  The passage from the "Lines written
above Tintern Abbey" (quoted in the previous chapter) may be
supplemented by many from the "Prelude" and other poems to illustrate
at once the likeness and the difference between the forms the thought
has taken.  It is, however, a certain condemnation of a philosophic
school when we have to admit that, whatever its apprehension of truth,
it failed to capture its own generation, either because of some error
of presentment, or of some fundamental misconception.  When we find,
moreover, that there is not only a refusal of Stoicism but a reaction
from it, conscious or unconscious, we are forced to inquire into the
cause.

[Sidenote: The individual will]

We shall perhaps be right in saying, to begin with, that the doctrine
of the Generative Reason, the Spermaticos Logos, is not carried far
enough.  The immense practical need, which the Stoic felt, of
fortifying himself against the world, is not unintelligible, but it led
him into error.  He employed his doctrine of the Spermaticos Logos to
give grandeur and sufficiency to the individual, and then, for
practical purposes, cut him off from the world.  He manned and
provisioned the fortress, and then shut it off from supplies and from
relief.  It was a necessary thing to assert the value and dignity of
the mere individual man against the despotisms, but to isolate the man
from mankind and from the world of nature was a fatal mistake.  Of
course, the Stoic did not do this in theory, for he insisted on the
polity of gods and men, the "one city,"[115] and the duty of the
"citizen of the universe" (_kosmios_)--a man is not an independent
object; like the foot in the body he is essentially {65} a "part."[116]
In practice, too, Stoics were human.  Seneca tells us to show clemency
but not to feel pity, but we may be sure that the human heart in him
was far from observing the distinction--he "talked more boldly than he
lived," he says--he was "among those whom grief conquered,"[117] and,
though he goes on to show why he failed in this way, he is endeared to
us by his failure to be his own ideal Stoic.  Yet it remains that the
chapters, with which his book on Clemency ends, are a Stoic protest
against pity, and they can be re-inforced by a good deal in Epictetus.
If your friend is unhappy, "remember that his unhappiness is his own
fault, for God has made all men to be happy, to be free from
perturbations."[118] Your friend has the remedy in his own hands; let
him "purify his dogmata."[119]  Epictetus would try to heal a friend's
sorrow "but not by every means, for that would be to fight against God
(_theomachein_)," and would involve daily and nightly punishment to
himself[120]--and "no one is nearer me than myself."[121]  In the
_Manual_ the same thought is accentuated.  "Say to yourself 'It is the
opinion about this thing that afflicts the man.'  So far as words go,
do not hesitate to show sympathy, and even, if it so happen, to lament
with him.  Take care, though, that you do not lament internally also
(_me kai esothen stenaxes_)."[122]  We have seen what he has to say of
a lost child.  In spite of all his fine words, the Stoic really knows
of nothing between the individual and the cosmos, for his practical
teaching deadens, if it does not kill, friendship and family love.

Everything with the Stoic turns on the individual.  _ta epi soi_, "the
things in your own power," is the refrain of Epictetus' teaching.  All
is thrown upon the individual will, upon "the universal" working in the
individual, according to Stoic theory, "upon me" the plain man would
say.  If the gods, as Seneca says, lend a hand to such as climb, the
climber has to make his own way by temperance and fortitude.  The "holy
spirit within us" is after all hardly to be distinguished from
conscience, intellect and will.[123]  God, says Epictetus, ordains "if
you wish good, get it from yourself."[124]  Once the will
(_proairesis_) is right, {66} all is achieved.[125]  "You must exercise
the will (_thelesai_)--and the thing is done, it is set right; as on
the other hand, only fall a nodding and the thing is lost.  For from
within (_esothen_) comes ruin, and from within comes help."[126]  "What
do you want with prayers?" asks Seneca, "make yourself happy."[127]
The old Stoic paradox about the "folly" of mankind, and the
worthlessness of the efforts of all save the sage, was by now chiefly
remembered by their enemies.[128]

All this is due to the Stoic glorification of reason, as the embodiment
in man of the Spermaticos Logos.  Though Nous with the Stoics is not
the pure dry light of reason, they tended in practice to distinguish
reason from the emotions or passions (_pathe_), in which they saw
chiefly "perturbations," and they held up the ideal of freedom from
them in consequence (_apatheia_).[129] To be godlike, a man had to
suppress his affections just as he suppressed his own sensations of
pain or hunger.  Every human instinct of paternal or conjugal love, of
friendship, of sympathy, of pity, was thus brought to the test of a
Reason, which had two catch-words by which to try them--the "Universe"
and "the things in your own power"--and the sentence was swift and
summary enough.  They did not realize that for most men--and probably
it is truest of the best men--Life moves onward with all its tender and
gracious instincts, while Analysis limps behind.  The experiment of
testing affection and instinct by reason has often been tried, and it
succeeds only where the reason is willing to be a constitutional
monarch, so to say, instead of the despot responsible only to the vague
concept of the Universe, whom the Stoics wished to enthrone.  They
talked of living according to Nature, but they were a great deal too
quick in deciding what was Nature.  If the centuries have taught us
anything, it is to give Nature more time, more study and more respect
than even yet we do.  There are words {67} at the beginning of the
thirteenth book of the "Prelude" wiser and truer than anything the
Stoics had to say of her with their "excessive zeal" and their "quick
turns of intellect."  Carried away by their theories (none, we must
remember as we criticize them, without some ground in experience and
observation), the Stoics made solitude in the heart and called it
peace.  The price was too high; mankind would not pay it, and sought a
religion elsewhere that had a place for a man's children.

[Sidenote: Sin and salvation]

Again, in their contempt for the passions the Stoics underestimated
their strength.  How strong the passions are, no man can guess for
another, even if he can be sure how strong his own are.  Perhaps the
Stoics could subordinate their passions to their reason;--ancient
critics kept sharp eyes on them and said they were not always
successful.[130]  But there is no question that for the mass of men,
the Stoic account of reason is absurd.  "I see another law in my
members," said a contemporary of Seneca's, "warring against the law of
my mind and bringing me into captivity."  Other men felt the same and
sought deliverance in the sacraments of all the religions.  That
Salvation was not from within, was the testimony of every man who
underwent the _taurobolium_.  So far as such things can be, it is
established by the witness of every religious mind that, whether the
feeling is just or not the feeling is invincible that the will is
inadequate and that religion begins only when the Stoic's ideal of
saving oneself by one's own resolve and effort is finally abandoned.
Whether this will permanently be true is another question, probably for
us unprofitable.  The ancient world, at any rate, and in general the
modern world, have pronounced against Stoic Psychology--it was too
quick, too superficial.  The Stoics did not allow for the sense of
sin.[131]  They recognized the presence of evil in the world; they felt
that "it has its seat within us, in our inward part";[132] and they
remark the effect of evil in the blunting of the faculties--let the
guilty, says Persius, "see virtue, and pine that they have lost her
forever."[133]  While Seneca finds himself "growing better and becoming
changed," he still feels there may be much more needing amendment.[134]
He often {68} expresses dissatisfaction with himself.[135]  But the
deeper realization of weakness and failure did not come to the Stoics,
and what help their teaching of strenuous endeavour could have brought
to men stricken with the consciousness of broken willpower, it is hard
to see.  "Filthy Natta," according to Persius, was "benumbed by vice"
(_stupet hic vitio_).[136]  "When a man is hardened like a stone
(_apolithothe_), how shall we be able to deal with him by argument?"
asks Epictetus, arguing against the Academics, who "opposed evident
truths"--what are we to do with necrosis of the soul?[137]  But the
Stoics really gave more thought to fancies of the sage's equality with
God and occasional superiority--so confident were they in the powers of
the individual human mind.  Plutarch, indeed, forces home upon them as
a deduction from their doctrine of "the common nature" of gods and men
the consequence that sin is not contrary to the Logos of Zeus--and yet
they say God punishes sin.[138]

Yet even the individual, much as they strove to exalt his capabilities,
was in the end cheapened in his own eyes.[139]  As men have deepened
their self-consciousness, they have yielded to an instinctive craving
for the immortality of the soul.[140] Whether savages feel this or not,
it is needless to argue.  No religion apart from Buddhism has
permanently held men which had no hopes of immortality; and how far the
corruptions of Buddhism have modified its rigour for common people, it
is not easy to say.  In one form or another, in spite of a terrible
want of evidence, men have clung to eternal life.  The Stoics
themselves used this consensus of opinion as evidence for the truth of
the belief.[141]  "It pleased me," writes Seneca, "to inquire of the
eternity of souls (_de aeternitate animarum_)--nay! to believe in it.  I
surrendered myself to that great hope."[142] {69} "How natural it is!"
he says, "the human mind is a great and generous thing; it will have no
bounds set to it unless they are shared by God."[143]  "When the day
shall come, which shall part this mixture of divine and human, here,
where I found it, I will leave my body, myself I will give back to the
gods.  Even now I am not without them."  He finds in our birth into
this world an analogy of the soul passing into another world, and in
language of beauty and sympathy he pictures the "birthday of the
eternal," the revelation of nature's secrets, a world of light and more
light.  "This thought suffers nothing sordid to dwell in the mind,
nothing mean, nothing cruel.  It tells us that the gods see all, bids
us win their approval, prepare for them, and set eternity before
us."[144]  Beautiful words that wake emotion yet!

[Sidenote: Immortality]

But is it clear that it is eternity after all?  In the _Consolation_
which Seneca wrote for Marcia, after speaking of the future life of her
son, he passed at last to the Stoic doctrine of the first
conflagration, and described the destruction of the present scheme of
things that it may begin anew.  "Then we also, happy souls who have
been assigned to eternity (_felices animae et aeterna sortitae_), when God
shall see fit to reconstruct the universe, when all things pass
(_labentibus_), we too, a little element in a great catastrophe, shall
be resolved into our ancient elements.  Happy is your son, Marcia, who
already knows this."[145]  Elsewhere he is still less certain.  "Why am
I wasted for desire of him, who is either happy or non-existent?  (_qui
aut beatus aut nullus est_)."[146]

That in later years, in his letters to Lucilius, Seneca should lean to
belief in immortality, is natural enough.  Epictetus' language, with
some fluctuations, leans in the other direction: "When God does not
supply what is necessary, he is sounding the signal for retreat--he has
opened the door and says to you, Come!  But whither?  To nothing
terrible, but whence you came, to the dear and kin [both neuters], the
elements.  What in you was fire, shall go to fire, earth to earth,
spirit to spirit [perhaps, breath _hoson pneumation eis pneumation_],
water to water; {70} no Hades, nor Acheron, nor Cocytus, nor
Pyriphlegethon; but all things full of gods and daemons.  When a man has
such things to think on, and sees sun and moon and stars, and enjoys
earth and sea, he is not solitary or even helpless."[147]  "This is
death, a greater change, not from what now is into what is not, but
into what now is not.  Then shall I no longer be?  You will be, but
something else, of which now the cosmos has no need.  For you began to
be (_egenou_), not when you wished, but when the cosmos had need."[148]

On the whole the Stoic is in his way right, for the desire for
immortality goes with the instincts he rejected--it is nothing without
the affections and human love.[149]  But once more logic failed, and
the obscure grave witnesses to man's instinctive rejection of Stoicism,
with its simple inscription _taurobolio in aeternum renatus_.

[Sidenote: The question of the gods]

Lastly we come to the gods themselves, and here a double question meets
us.  Neither on the plurality nor the personality of the divine does
Stoicism give a certain note.  In the passages already quoted it will
have been noticed how interchangeably "God," "the gods" and "Zeus" have
been used.  It is even a question whether "God" is not an identity with
fate, providence, Nature and the Universe.[150]  Seneca, as we have
seen, dismisses the theory of daemons or _genii_ rather abruptly--"that
is what some think."  Epictetus definitely accepts them, so far as
anything here is definite, and with them, or in them, the ancestral
gods.  Seneca, as we have seen, is contemptuous of popular ritual and
superstition.  Epictetus inculcates that "as to piety about the gods,
the chief thing is to have right opinions about them," but, he
concludes, "to make libations and to sacrifice according to the custom
of our fathers, purely and not meanly, nor carelessly, nor scantily,
nor above our ability, is a thing which belongs to all to do."[151]
"Why do you," he asks, "act the part of a Jew, when you are a
Greek?"[152]  He also accepts the {71} fact of divination.[153]
Indeed, aside perhaps from conspicuous extravagances, the popular
religion suffices.  Without enthusiasm and without clear belief, the
Stoic may take part in the ordinary round of the cults.  If he did not
believe himself, he pointed out a way to the reflective polytheist by
which he could reconcile his traditional faith with philosophy--the
many gods were like ourselves manifestations of the Spermaticos Logos;
and he could accept tolerantly the ordinary theory of daemons, for
Chrysippus even raised the question whether such things as the
disasters that befall good men are due to negligence on the part of
Providence, or to evil daemons in charge of some things.[154] While for
himself the Stoic had the strength of mind to shake off superstition,
the common people, and even the weaker brethren of the Stoic school,
remained saddled with polytheism and all its terrors and follies.  Of
this compromise Seneca is guiltless.[155]  It was difficult to cut the
connexion with Greek tradition--how difficult, we see in Plutarch's
case.  The Stoics, however, fell between two stools, for they had not
enough feeling for the past to satisfy the pious and patriotic, nor the
resolution to be done with it.  After all, more help was to be had from
Lucretius than from Epictetus in ridding the mind of the paralysis of
polytheism.

But the same instinct that made men demand immortality for themselves,
a feeling, dim but strong, of the value of personality and of love,
compelled them to seek personality in the divine.  Here the Stoic had
to halt, for after all it is a thing beyond the power of reason to
demonstrate, and he could not here allege, as he liked, that the facts
stare one in the face.  So, with other thinkers, impressed at once by
the want of evidence, and impelled by the demand for some available
terms, he wavered between a clear statement of his own uncertainty, and
the use of popular names.  "Zeus" had long before been adopted by
Cleanthes in his famous hymn, but this was an element of weakness; for
the wall-paintings in every great house gave another account of Zeus,
which belied every attribute with which the Stoics credited him.  The
apologists and the Stoics {72} explained the legends by the use of
allegory, but, as Plato says, children cannot distinguish between what
is and what is not allegory--nor did the common people.  The finer
religious tempers demanded something firmer and more real than
allegory.  They wanted God or Gods, immortal and eternal; and at best
the Stoic gods were to "melt like wax or tin" in their final
conflagration, while Zeus too, into whom they were to be resolved,
would thereby undergo change, and therefore himself also prove
perishable.[156]

"I put myself in the hands of a Stoic," writes Justin Martyr, "and I
stayed a long time with him, but when I got no further in the matter of
God--for he did not know himself and he used to say this knowledge was
not necessary--I left him."[157]  Other men did not, like Justin,
pursue their philosophic studies, and when they found that, while the
Stoic's sense of truth would not let him ascribe personality to God,
all round there were definite and authoritative voices which left the
matter in no doubt, they made a quick choice.  What authority means to
a man in such a difficulty, we know only too well.

The Stoics in some measure felt their weakness here.  When they tell us
to follow God, to obey God, to look to God, to live as God's sons, and
leave us not altogether clear what they mean by God, their teaching is
not very helpful, for it is hard to follow or look to a vaguely grasped
conception.  They realized that some more definite example was needed.
"We ought to choose some good man," writes Seneca, "and always have him
before our eyes that we may live as if he watched us, and do everything
as if he saw."[158]  The idea came from Epicurus.  "Do everything, said
he, as if Epicurus saw.  It is without doubt a good thing to have set a
guard over oneself, to whom you may look, whom you may feel present in
your thoughts."[159] "Wherever I am, I am consorting with the best men.
To them, in whatever spot, in whatever age they were, I send my
mind."[160] He recommends Cato, Laelius, Socrates, Zeno.  Epictetus has
the same advice.  What would Socrates do? is the canon he
recommends.[161]  "Though you are not yet a Socrates, you {73} ought to
live as one who wishes to be a Socrates."[162]  "Go away to Socrates
and see him ... think what a victory he felt he won over himself."[163]
Comte in a later day gave somewhat similar advice.  It seems to show
that we cannot do well without some sort of personality in which to
rest ourselves.

[Sidenote: Plutarch's criticism]

When once this central uncertainty in Stoicism appeared, all the fine
and true words the Stoics spoke of Providence lost their meaning for
ordinary men who thought quickly.  The religious teachers of the day
laid hold of the old paradoxes of the school and with them demolished
the Stoic Providence.  "Chrysippus," says Plutarch, "neither professes
himself, nor any one of his acquaintances and teachers, to be good
(_spoudaion_).  What then do they think of others, but precisely what
they say--that all men are insane, fools, unholy, impious,
transgressors, that they reach the very acme of misery and of all
wretchedness?  And then they say that it is by Providence that our
concerns are ordered--and we so wretched!  If the Gods were to change
their minds and wish to hurt us, to do us evil, to overthrow and
utterly crush us, they could not put us in a worse condition; for
Chrysippus demonstrates that life can admit no greater degree either of
misery or unhappiness."[164]  Of course, this attack is unfair, but it
shows how men felt.  They demanded to know how they stood with the
gods--were the gods many or one? were they persons or natural laws[165]
or even natural objects? did they care for mankind? for the individual
man?  This demand was edged by exactly the same experience of life
which made Stoicism so needful and so welcome to its followers.  The
pressure of the empire and the terrors of living drove some to
philosophy and many more to the gods--and for these certainty was
imperative and the Stoics could not give it.

It is easy, but not so profitable as it seems, to find faults in the
religion of other men.  Their generation rejected the Stoics, but they
may not have been right.  If the Stoics were too hasty in making reason
into a despot to rule over the {74} emotions, their contemporaries were
no less hasty in deciding, on the evidence of emotions and desires,
that there were gods, and these the gods of their fathers, because they
wished for inward peace and could find it nowhere else.  The Stoics
were at least more honest with themselves, and though their school
passed away, their memory remained and kept the respect of men who
differed from them, but realized that they had stood for truth.


Chapter II Footnotes:

[1] _Hist._ i, 2.

[2] Tac. _Ann._ iv, 33, _sic converso statu neque alia re Romana quam
si unus imperitet_.

[3] Hdt. iii, 80.  Cf. Tac. _A._ vi, 48, 4, _vi dominationis convulsus
et mutatus_.

[4] Suetonius, _Gaius_, 29.

[5] Sen. _de ira_, iii, 15, 3.

[6] Lecky, _European Morals_, i, 275; Epictetus, _D._ iii, 15.

[7] Seneca, _Ep._ 90, 36-43.

[8] Tacitus, _Germany_, cc. 18-20.

[9] Tac. _A._ i, 72.  Suetonius (_Tib._ 59) quotes specimens.

[10] See Boissier, _Tacite_, 188 f.; _l'opposition sous les Cesars_,
208-215.

[11] Persius, v, 73, _libertate opus est_.

[12] Horace, _Sat._ ii, 2, 79.

[13] See Edward Caird, _Evolution of Theology in the Greek
Philosophers_, vol. ii, lectures xvii to xx, and Zeller, _Eclectics_,
pp. 235-245.  Seneca, _B.V._ 20, 3.

[14] Epictetus, _D._ ii, 8, _su apospasma ei tou theou_.

[15] Lucan, ix, 564-586, contains a short summary of Stoicism, supposed
to be spoken by Cato.

[16] Epictetus, _D._ i, 9 (some lines omitted).

[17] _phantasiai_, impressions left on the mind by things or events.

[18] Epictetus, _D._ i, 9.

[19] Diogenes Laertius, vii, 1, 53; see Caird, _op. cit._ vol. ii, p.
124.

[20] See Lecky, _European Morals_, i, 128, 129.

[21] _Ep._ 108, 22, _philosophiam oderat_.

[22] With these passages compare the fine account which Persius gives
(_Sat._ v) of his early studies with the Stoic Cornutus.

[23] Plutarch, _de esu carnium_, ii, 5.

[24] Plutarch, _de esu carnium_, i, 6, on clogging the soul by eating
flesh.  Clem. Alex. _Paed._ ii, 16, says St Matthew lived on seeds, nuts
and vegetables, and without meat.

[25] Plutarch, _de esu carnium_, ii, 1.

[26] Sen. _Ep._ 108, 3, 13-23.

[27] This is a quality that Quintilian notes in his style for praise or
blame.  Others (Gellius, _N.A._ xii, 2) found in him _levis et quasi
dicax argutia_.

[28] _Ep._ 78, 2, 3, _patris me indulgentissimi senectus retinuit_.

[29] _Ep._ 58, 5.

[30] _Ep._ 95, 65

[31] His nephew Lucan, Quintilian severely says, was "perhaps a better
model for orators than for poets."

[32] _Ep._ 49, 2.  Virgil made one speech.

[33] _ad Polybium_, 13, 2, 3.

[34] Juvenal, x, 16, _magnos Seneca praedivitis hortos_.

[35] _Ann._ xiii, 12, 2.

[36] Tac. _Ann._ xiii, 15-17.

[37] Tac. _Ann._ xiv, 51.

[38] Tac. _Ann._ xiii, 42.

[39] _B.V._ 20, 3.

[40] _B.V._ 23, 1.

[41] Tac. _Ann._ xiv, 52-56.

[42] _de tranqu. animi_, 10, 6.

[43] Tac. _Ann._ xiv, 65; xv, 45-65.

[44] B. W. Henderson, _Nero_, pp. 280-3.

[45] Tac. _Ann._ xv, 65; Juvenal, viii, 212.

[46] Tac. _Ann._ xv, 45, 6.

[47] This is emphasized by Zeller, _Eclectics_, 240, and by Dill,
_Roman Society from Nero to Marcus_, 324, 326.

[48] _ae Clem._ i, 6.

[49] [Transcriber's note: this footnote missing from book]

[50] _Ep._ 61, 1.

[51] Lucian, _Nigrinus_, 19, says there is no better school for virtue,
no truer test of moral strength, than life in the city of Rome.

[52] Gellius, _N.A._ ii, 18, 10.

[53] Gell. _N.A._ xv, 11, 5.

[54] Manual, J.  I have constantly used Long's translation, but often
altered it.  It is a fine piece of work, well worth the English
reader's study.

[55] _D._ iii, 26.  Compare and contrast Tertullian, _de Idol_, 12,
_fides famem nan timet.  Scit enim famem non minus sibi contemnendam
propter Deum quam omne mortis genus_.  The practical point is the same,
perhaps; the motive, how different!

[56] _D._ iii, 24; iv, 1; _M._ 11, 26.

[57] _D._ ii, 24.  He maintains, too, against Epicurus the naturalness
of love for children; once born, we cannot help loving them, _D._ i, 23.

[58] _D._ iv, 1.

[59] _D._ iv, 5, _thelei ta allotrie me einai allotria_.

[60] _D._ i, 18.  This does not stop his condemning the adulterer, _D._
ii, 4 (man, he said, is formed for fidelity), 10.  Seneca on outward
goods, _ad Marciam_, 10.

[61] _M._ 40.

[62] Fragment, 53.

[63] _D._ i, id.

[64] _D._ iii, 12, classing the _korasidion_ with wine and cake.

[65] _M._ 33.

[66] _D._ iv, 11.

[67] Gell. _N.A._ i, 2, 6; xvii, 19, 1.

[68] Lucian, _adv. Indoct._ 13.

[69] _D._ iii, 9.

[70] _M._ 46.

[71] _D._ iii, 22, _kakorygka_.

[72] _D._ iii, 22.  Lucian says Epictetus urged Demonax to take a wife
and leave some one to represent him in posterity.  "Very well,
Epictetus," said Demonax, "give me one of your own daughters" (_v.
Demon._ 55).

[73] Epict. _D._ iii, 24.  _strateia tis estin ho bios hekastou, kai
aute makra kai toikile.  terein se dei to stratiotou prosneuma kai tou
strategou prassein hekasta, ei oion._.

[74] Epict. _D._ iii, 23.

[75] Sen. _Ep._ 112, 3.

[76] _de ira_, iii, 36, 1-4.

[77] Sen. _de tranqu. animi_, 1.

[78] Epict. _D._ iii, 10.  I have here slightly altered Mr Long's
rendering.

[79] _D._ iv, 6.

[80] Cf. Persius, iii, 66-72, causas cognoscite rerum, quid sumus aut
quidnam victuri gignimur ... quem te deus esse iussit et humana qua
parte locatus es in re.

[81] D. ii, 11.  See Davidson, Stoic Creed, pp. 69, 81, on innate
ideas.  Plutarch, _de coh. ira_, 15, on Zeno's doctrine, _to sperma
summigma kai kerasma ton tes phuches dynameon hyparchein apespasmenon_.

[82] The qualification may be illustrated from Cicero's Stoic, _de Nat.
Deor_, ii, 66, 167, _Magna di curant parva neglegunt_.

[83] _Ep._ 95, 47-50.  Cf. _Ep._ 41; _de Prov._ i, 5.  A very close
parallel, with a strong Stoic tinge, in Minucius Felix, 32, 2, 3,
ending _Sic apud nos religiosior est ille qui iustior_.

[84] _Nat. Quaest._ ii, 45.  Cf. Tertullian, _Apol._ 21, on Zeno's
testimony to the Logos, as creator, fate, God, _animus Iovis_ and
_necessitas omnium rerum_.

[85] Cf. Sen. _Ep._ 41, 1.  Prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est.
Ita dico, Lucili, sacer intra nos spiritus sedet malorum bonorumque
nostrorum observator et custos.

[86] Epict. D. i, 14.  See Clem. Alex. Strom, vii, 37, for an
interesting account of how _phthanei he theia dynamis, kathaper phos
diidein ten phychen_.

[87] _Ep._ 110, 1, paedagogam dari deum.

[88] _D._ iii, 24,

[89] _D._ ii, 14.

[90] _de providentia_, 2, 6-9.

[91] _de Prov._ 4, 1.

[92] _de Prov._ 5, 7.  See Justin Martyr's criticism of Stoic fatalism,
_Apol._ ii, 7.  It involves, he says, either God's identity with the
world of change, or his implication in all vice, or else that virtue
and vice are nothing--consequences which are alike contrary to every
sane _eeenoia_, to _logos_ and to _nous_.

[93] _de Prov._ 5, 8.

[94] Plutarch, _adv. Stoicos_, 33, on this Stoic paradox of the
equality of God and the sage.

[95] _de Prov._ 6, 5-7.  This Stoic justification of suicide was
repudiated alike by Christians and Neo-Platonists.

[96] _D._ i, 1.

[97] _D._ i, 12.  See also _D._ ii, 16 "We say 'Lord God! how shall I
not be anxious?' Fool, have you not hands, did not God make them for
you?  Sit down now and pray that your nose may not run."

[98] Cf. Cicero's Stoic, _N.D._ ii, 66, 167, _Nemo igitur vir magnus
sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit_.

[99] Ep. 41, 1, 2.  (The line is from Virgil, _Aen._ viii, 352.)  The
rest of the letter develops the idea of divine dependence.  _Sic animus
magnus ac sacer et in hoc demissus at propius quidem divina nossemus,
conversatur quidem nobiscum sed haeret origini suae, etc_.

[100] Ep. 73, 15, 16.

[101] Epictetus, _D._ i, 6.

[102] _D._ i, 9.

[103] _D._ iv, 1.

[104] _D._ iv, 1.

[105] _D._ ii, 16 end, with a variant between _sos eimi_ and _isos
eimi_, the former of which, Long says, is certain.

[106] _D._ i, 16.  Contrast the passage of Clement quoted on p. 286.

[107] _D._ ii, 16.

[108] _D._ ii, 16.

[109] _D._ iii, 13.

[110] _D._ ii, 22.

[111] _Ep._ 95, 51-53.

[112] _de ira_, iii, 28, 1.

[113] _Ep._ 95, 33, _homo sacra res homini_.

[114] See Lecky, _European Morals_, i, 294 ff.: Maine, _Ancient Law_,
p. 54 f.

[115] See, by the way, Plutarch's banter on this "polity"--the stars
its tribesmen, the sun, doubtless, councillor, and Hesperus _prytanis_
or _astynomus_, _adv. Sto._ 34.

[116] Epict. _D._ ii, 5; M. Aurelius, viii, 34.

[117] _Ep._ 63, 14.

[118] _D._ iii, 24.

[119] _D._ iv, 1.

[120] _ib._

[121] _D._ iv, 6.

[122] _M._ 16.

[123] Cf. Theophilus (the apologist of about 160 A.D.), ii, 4, who,
though not always to be trusted as to the Stoics, remarks this
identification of God and conscience.

[124] _D._ i, 29.

[125] Cf. _D._ i, 1; iii, 19; iv, 4; iv, 12, and very many other
passages.

[126] _D._ iv, 9, end.

[127] _Ep._ 31, 5.

[128] Plutarch, _Progress in Virtue_, c. 2, 76 A, on the absurdity of
there being no difference between Plato and Meletus.  Cf. also _de
repugn. Stoic._ 11, 1037 D.

[129] "Unconditional eradication," says Zeller, _Eclectics_, p. 226.
"I do not hold with those who hymn the savage and hard Apathy (_ten
agrion kai skleran_)," wrote Plutarch.  _Cons, ad Apoll._ 3, 102 C.
See Clem. Alex. _Str._ ii, 110, on _pathe_; as produced by the agency
of spirits, and note his talk of Christian Apathy.  _Str._ vi, 71-76.

[130] Justin Martyr (_Apol._ ii, 8) praises Stoic morality and speaks
of Stoics who suffered for it.

[131] Cf. Epict. _D._ iii, 25.

[132] Sen. _Ep._ 50, 4.

[133] Persius, iii, 38.

[134] _Ep._ 6, 1.

[135] e.g. _Ep._ 57, 3, he is not even _homo tolerabilis_.  On the
bondage of the soul within the body, see _Ep._ 65, 21-23.

[136] Cf. Seneca, Ep. 53, 7, 8--quo quis peius habet minus sentit.
"The worse one is, the less he notices it."

[137] _D._ i, 5.

[138] Plut. _de repugn. Stoic._ 34, 1050 C.  Cf. _Tert. de exh.
castit._ 2.

[139] Cf. Plutarch, _non suaviter_, 1104 F.  _kataphronountes eauton os
ephemeron kthe_--of the Epicureans.

[140] Cf. Plutarch, non suaviter, 1104 C.  _tes aidiotetus elpis kai ho
pothos tou einai manton epoton prespytatos on kai melstos_.  Cf. _ib._
1093 A.

[141] Sen. _Ep._ 117, 6.

[142] _Ep._ 102, 2.

[143] Ep. 102, 21; the following passages are from the same letter.
Note the Stoic significance of _naturale_.

[144] Compare _Cons. ad Marc._ 25, 1, _integer ille, etc._

[145] The last words of the "Consolation." Plutarch on resolution into
_pur noeron_, _non suaviter_, 1107 B.

[146] _ad Polyb._ 9, 3.

[147] _D._ iii, 13.  Plutarch (_non suaviter_, 1106 E) says Cocytus,
etc., are not the chief terror but _he tou me ontos apeile_.

[148] _D._ iii, 24.

[149] See Plutarch on this, _non suaviter_, 1105 E.

[150] Seneca, _N.Q._ ii, 45.

[151] Manual, 31.  Plutarch, _de repugn. Stoic._ 6, 1034 B, C, remarks
on Stoic inconsistency in accepting popular religious usages.

[152] _D._ ii, 9.  In _D._ v, 7, he refers to "Galilaeans," so that it
is quite possible he has Christians in view here.

[153] _M._ 32; _D._ iii, 22.

[154] Plut. _de repugn. Stoic._ 37, 1051 C.

[155] Tertullian, _Apol._ 12, _idem estis qui Senecam aliquem pluribus
et amarioribus de vestra superstitione perorantem reprehendistis_.

[156] See Plutarch, _de comm. not. adv. Stoicos_, c. 31, and _de def.
orac._ 420 A, c. 19; Justin M. _Apol._ ii, 7.

[157] Dial. _c. Tryphone_, 2.

[158] Sen. _Ep._ 11, 8.

[159] _Ep._ 25, 5.

[160] _Ep._ 62, 2, cf. 104, 21.

[161] _M._ 33, _ti nan epoiesen en touto Sokrates he Zenon_.

[162] _M._ 50.

[163] _D._ ii, 18.  The tone of Tertullian, _e.g._ in _de Anima_, 1, on
the Phaedo, suggests that Socrates may have been over-preached.  What
too (_ib._ 6) of barbarians and their souls, who have no "prison of
Socrates," etc?

[164] Plut. _de Stoic. repugnantiis_, 31, 1048 E.  Cf. _de comm. not._
33.

[165] Plutarch, _Amat._ 13, 757 C.  _horas depou ton upolambanonta
buthon hemas atheotetos, an eis pathe kai dynameis kai aretas
diagraphomen ekaston ton theon_.




{75}

CHAPTER III

PLUTARCH

Stoicism as a system did not capture the ancient world, and even upon
individuals it did not retain an undivided hold.  To pronounce with its
admirers to-day that it failed because the world was not worthy of it,
would be a judgment, neither quite false nor altogether true, but at
best not very illuminative.  Men are said to be slow in taking in new
thoughts, and yet it is equally true that somewhere in nearly every man
there is something that responds to ideas, and even to theories; but if
these on longer acquaintance fail to harmonize with the deeper
instincts within him, they alarm and annoy, and the response comes in
the form of re-action.

In modern times, we have seen the mind of a great people surrendered
for a while to theorists and idealists.  The thinking part of the
French nation was carried away by the inspiration of Rousseau into all
sorts of experiments at putting into hasty operation the principles and
ideas they had more or less learnt from the master.  Even theories
extemporized on the moment, it was hoped, might be made the foundations
of a new and ideal social fabric.  The absurdities of the old religion
yielded place to Reason--embodied symbolically for the hour in the
person of Mme Momoro--afterwards, more vaguely, in Robespierre's
Supreme Being, who really came from Rousseau.  And then--"avec ton Etre
Supreme tu commences a m'embeter," said Billaud to Robespierre himself.
Within a generation Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Bonald, and de la
Mennais were busy refounding the Christian faith.  "The rites of
Christianity," wrote Chateaubriand, "are in the highest degree moral,
if for no other reason than that they have been practised by our
fathers, that our mothers have watched over our cradles as Christian
women, that the Christian religion has chanted its psalms over our
parents' coffins and invoked peace upon them in their graves."

{76}

Alongside of this let us set a sentence or two of Plutarch.  "Our
father then, addressing Pemptides by name, said, 'You seem to me,
Pemptides, to be handling a very big matter and a risky one--or rather,
you are discussing what should not be discussed at all (_ta akineta
kinein_), when you question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask
reason and demonstration for everything.  For the ancient and ancestral
faith is enough (_arkei gar he patrios kai palaia pistis_), and no
clearer proof could be found than itself--

  Not though man's wisdom scale the heights of thought--

but it is a common home and an established foundation for all piety;
and if in one point its stable and traditional character (_to bebainon
autes kai nenomismenon_) be shaken and disturbed, it will be undermined
and no one will trust it....  If you demand proof about each of the
ancient gods, laying hands on everything sacred and bringing your
sophistry to play on every altar, you will leave nothing free from
quibble and cross-examination (_ouden asykophanteton oud
abasaniston_)....  Others will say that Aphrodite is desire and Hermes
reason, the Muses crafts and Athene thought.  Do you see, then, the
abyss of atheism that lies at our feet, if we resolve each of the gods
into a passion or a force or a virtue?'"[1]

Such an utterance is unmistakeable--it means a conservative re-action,
and in another place we find its justification in religious emotion.
"Nothing gives us more joy than what we see and do ourselves in divine
service, when we carry the emblems, or join in the sacred dance, or
stand by at the sacrifice or initiation....  It is when the soul most
believes and perceives that the god is present, that she most puts from
her pain and fear and anxiety, and gives herself up to joy, yes, even
as far as intoxication and laughter and merriment....  In sacred
processions and sacrifices not only the old man and the old woman, nor
the poor and lowly, but

  The thick-legged drudge that sways her at the mill,

and household slaves and hirelings are uplifted by joy and triumph.
Rich men and kings have always their own banquets and feasts--but the
feasts in the temples and at initiations, when men seem to touch the
divine most nearly in their thought, {77} with honour and worship, have
a pleasure and a charm far more exceeding.  And in this no man shares
who has renounced belief in Providence.  For it is not abundance of
wine, nor the roasting of meat, that gives the joy in the festivals,
but also a good hope, and a belief that the god is present and
gracious, and accepts what is being done with a friendly mind."[2]

[Sidenote: Continuity of religion]

One of Chateaubriand's critics says that his plea could be advanced on
behalf of any religion; and Plutarch had already made it on behalf of
his own.  He looks past the Stoics, and he finds in memory and
association arguments that outweigh anything they can say.  The
Spermaticos Logos was a mere Etre Supreme--a sublime conception
perhaps, but it had no appeal to emotion, it waked no memories, it
touched no chord of personal association.  We live so largely by
instinct, memory and association, that anything that threatens them
seems to strike at our life,

  So was it when my life began;
  So is it now I am a man;
  So be it when I shall grow old,
        Or let me die!
  The Child is father of the Man;
  And I could wish my days to be
  Bound each to each by natural piety.

Some such thought is native to every heart, and the man who does not
cling to his own past seems wanting in something essentially human.
The gods were part of the past of the ancient world, and if Reason took
them away, what was left?  There was so much, too, that Reason could
not grasp; so much to be learnt in ritual and in mystery that to the
merely thinking mind had no meaning,--that must be received.  Reason
was invoked so lightly, and applied so carelessly and harshly, that it
could take no account of the tender things of the heart.  Reason
destroyed but did not create, questioned without answering, and left
life without sanction or communion.  It was too often a mere affair of
cleverness.  It had its use and place, no doubt, in correcting
extravagances of belief, but it was by no means the sole authority in
man's life, and its function was essentially to be the handmaid of
religion.  "We must take {78} Reason from philosophy to be our
mystagogue and then in holy reverence consider each several word and
act of worship."[3]

Plutarch is our representative man in this revival of religion, and
some survey of his life and environment will enable us to enter more
fully into his thought, and through him to understand better the
beginnings of a great religious movement, of which students too often
have lost sight.

For centuries the great men of Greek letters were natives of every
region of the eastern Mediterranean except Greece, and Plutarch stands
alone in later literature a Hellen of the motherland--Greek by blood,
birth, home and instinct, proud of his race and his land, of their
history, their art and their literature.  When we speak of the
influence of the past, it is well to remember to how great a past this
man looked back, and from what a present.  Long years of faction and
war, as he himself says, had depopulated Greece, and the whole land
could hardly furnish now the three thousand hoplites that four
centuries before Megara alone had sent to Plataea.  In regions where
oracles of note had been, they were no more; their existence would but
have emphasized the solitude--what good would an oracle be at Tegyra,
or about Ptoum, where in a day's journey you might perhaps come on a
solitary shepherd?[4]  It was not only that wars and faction fights had
wasted the life of the Greek people, but with the opening of the far
East by Alexander, and the development of the West under Roman rule,
Commerce had shifted its centres, and the Greeks had left their old
homes for new regions.  Still keen on money, philosophy and art, they
thronged Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, and a thousand other cities.
The Petrie papyri have revealed a new feature of this emigration, for
the wills of the settlers often mention the names of their wives, and
these were Greek women and not Egyptian, as the names of their fathers
and homes prove.[5]  Julius Caesar had restored Corinth a century after
Mummius destroyed it, and Athens was still as she had been and was to
be for centuries, the resort of every one who loved philosophy and
literature.[6]  These were the two {79} cities of Greece; the rest were
reminders of what had been.  In one of these forsaken places Plutarch
was born, and there he was content to live and die, a citizen and a
magistrate of Chaeronea in Boeotia.

[Sidenote: His family circle]

His family was an old one, long associated with Chaeronea.  From
childhood his life was rooted in the past by the most natural and
delightful of all connexions.  His great-grandfather, Nicarchus, used
to tell how his fellow-citizens were commandeered to carry wheat on
their own backs down to Anticyra for Antony's fleet--and were quickened
up with the whip as they went; and "then when they had taken one
consignment so, and the second was already done up into loads and
ready, the news came that Antony was defeated, and that saved the city;
for at once Antony's agents and soldiers fled, and they divided the
grain among themselves."[7]  The grandfather, Lamprias, lived long and
saw the grandson a grown man.  He appears often in Plutarch's _Table
Talk_--a bright old man and a lively talker--like incense, he said, he
was best when warmed up.[8]  He thought poorly of the Jews for not
eating pork--a most righteous dish, he said.[9]  He had tales of his
own about Antony, picked up long ago from one Philotas, who had been a
medical student in Alexandria and a friend of one of the royal cooks,
and eventually medical attendant to a son of Antony's by Fulvia.[10]
Plutarch's father was a quiet, sensible man, who maintained the
practice of sacrificing,[11] kept good horses,[12] knew his Homer, and
had something of his son's curious interest in odd problems.  It is
perhaps an accident that Plutarch never mentions his name, but, though
he often speaks of him, it is always of "my father" or "our
father"--the lifelong and instinctive habit.  There were also two
brothers.  The witty and amiable Lamprias loved laughter and was an
expert in dancing--a useful man to put things right when the dance went
with more spirit than music.[13]  Of Timon we hear less, but Plutarch
sets Timon's goodness of heart among the very best gifts Fortune has
sent him.[14]  He emphasizes the bond that brothers have in the family
sacrifices, {80} ancestral rites, the common home and the common
grave.[15] That Plutarch always had friends, men of kindly nature and
intelligence, and some of them eminent, is not surprising.  Other human
relationships, to be mentioned hereafter, completed his circle.  He was
born, and grew up, and lived, in a network of love and sympathy, the
record of which is in all his books.

Plutarch was born about the year 50 A.D., and, when Nero went on tour
through Greece in 66 A.D., he was a student at Athens under
Ammonius.[16]  He recalls that among his fellow-students was a
descendant of Themistocles, who bore his ancestor's name and still
enjoyed the honours granted to him and his posterity at Magnesia.[17]
Ammonius, whom he honoured and quoted throughout life, was a
Platonist[18] much interested in Mathematics.[19]  He was a serious and
kindly teacher with a wide range of interests, not all speculative.
Plutarch records a discussion of dancing by "the good Ammonius."[20]
He was thrice "General" at Athens,[21] and had at any rate once the
experience of an excited mob shouting for him in the street, while he
supped with his friends indoors.

Plutarch had many interests in Athens, in its literature, its
philosophy and its ancient history--in its relics, too, for he speaks
of memorials of Phocion and Demosthenes still extant.  But he lingers
especially over the wonders of Pericles and Phidias, "still fresh and
new and untouched by time, as if a spirit of eternal youth, a soul that
was ageless, were in the work of the artist."[22]  Athens was a
conservative place, on the whole, and a great resort for strangers.
The Athenian love of talk is noticed by Luke with a touch of satire,
and Dio Chrysostom admitted that the Athenians fell short of the glory
of their city and their ancestors.[23]  Yet men loved Athens.[24]
Aulus Gellius in memory of his years there, called his book of
collections _Attic Nights_, and here and there he speaks of student
life--"It was from AEgina to Piraeus that some of us who were
fellow-students, Greeks and Romans, were crossing in the same ship.
{81} It was night.  The sea was calm.  It was summertime and the sky
was clear and still.  So we were sitting on the poop, all of us
together, with our eyes upon the shining stars," and fell to talking
about their names.[25]

[Sidenote: His travels]

When his student days were over, Plutarch saw something of the world.
He alludes to a visit to Alexandria,[26] but, though he was interested
in Egyptian religion, as we shall see, he does not speak of travels in
the country.  He must have known European Greece well, but he had
little knowledge, it seems, of Asia Minor and little interest in it.
He went once on official business for his city to the pro-consul of
Illyricum--and had a useful lesson from his father who told him to say
"We" in his report, though his appointed colleague had failed to go
with him.[27]  He twice went to Italy in the reigns of Vespasian and
Domitian, and he seems to have stayed for some time in Rome, making
friends in high places and giving lectures.  Of the great Latin writers
of his day he mentions none, nor is he mentioned by them.  But he tells
with pride how once Arulenus Rusticus had a letter from Domitian
brought him by a soldier in the middle of one of these lectures and
kept it unopened till the end.[28]  The lectures were given in Greek.
He confesses to his friend Sossius Senecio that, owing to the pressure
of political business and the number of people who came about him for
philosophy, when he was in Rome, it was late indeed in life that he
attempted to learn Latin; and when he read Latin, it was the general
sense of a passage that helped him to the meaning of the words.  The
niceties of the language he could not attempt, he says, though it would
have been a graceful and pleasant thing for one of more leisure and
fewer years.[29]  That this confession is a true one is shown by the
scanty use he makes of Roman books in his biographies, by his want of
acquaintance with Latin literature, poetry and philosophy, and by
blunders in detail noted by his critics.  _Sine patris_ is a poor
attempt at Latin grammar for a man of his learning, and in his life of
Lucullus he has turned the streets of Rome into villages through
inattention to the various meanings of _vicus_.[30]

{82}

But, as he says, he was a citizen of a small town, and he did not wish
to make it smaller,[31] and he went back to Chaeronea and obscurity.  A
city he held to be an organism like a living being,[32] and he never
cared for a man on whom the claims of his city sat loosely--as they did
on the Stoics.[33] The world was full of Greek philosophers and
rhetoricians, lecturing and declaiming, to their great profit and
glory, but Plutarch was content to stay at home, to be magistrate and
priest.  If men laughed to see him inspecting the measurement of tiles
and the carrying of cement and stones--"it is not for myself, I say,
that I am doing this but for my native-place."[34]  This was when he
was Telearch--an office once held by Epameinondas, as he liked to
remember.  Pliny's letters show that this official inspection of
municipal building operations by honest and capable men was terribly
needed.  But Plutarch rose to higher dignities, and as Archon Eponymos
he had to preside over feasts and sacrifices.[35]  He was also a
Boeotarch.  The Roman Empire did not leave much political activity even
to the free cities, but Plutarch loyally accepted the new era as from
God, and found in it many blessings of peace and quiet, and some
opportunities still of serving his city.  He held a priesthood at
Delphi, with some charge over the oracle and a stewardship at the
Pythian games.  He loved Delphi, and its shrine and antiquities,[36]
and made the temple the scene of some of his best dialogues.  "The kind
Apollo (_ho philos_)," he says, "seems to heal the questions of life,
and to resolve them, by the rules he gives to those who ask; but the
questions of thought he himself suggests to the philosophic
temperament, waking in the soul an appetite that will lead it to
truth."[37]

He does not seem to have gained much public renown, but he did not seek
it.  The fame in his day was for the men of rhetoric, and he was a man
of letters.  If he gave his time to municipal duties, he must have
spent the greater part of his days in reading and writing.  He says
that a biographer needs a great many books and that as a rule many of
them will not be readily accessible--to have the abundance he requires,
he ought really to be in some "famous city where learning is loved and
{83} men are many"; though, he is careful to say, a man may be happy
and upright in a town that is "inglorious and humble."[38] He must have
read very widely, and he probably made good use of his stay in Rome.
In philosophy and literature it is quite probable that he used
hand-books of extracts, though this must not imply that he did not go
to the original works of the greater writers.  But his main interest
lay in memoirs and travels.  He had an instinct for all that was
characteristic, or curious, or out-of-the-way; and all sorts of casual
references show how such things attached themselves to his memory.
Discursive in his reading, as most men of letters seem to be, with a
quick eye for the animated scene, the striking figure, the strange
occurrence, he read, one feels, for enjoyment--he would add, no doubt,
for his own moral profit; indeed he says that he began his Biographies
for the advantage of others and found them to be much to his own.[39]
He was of course an inveterate moralist; but unlike others of the
class, he never forgets the things that have given him pleasure.  They
crowd his pages in genial reminiscence and apt allusion.  There is
always the quiet and leisurely air of one who has seen and has enjoyed,
and sees and enjoys again as he writes.  It is this that has made his
Biographies live.  They may at times exasperate the modern historian,
for he is not very systematic--delightful writers rarely are.  He
rambles as he likes and avowedly passes the great things by and
treasures the little and characteristic.  "I am not writing histories
but lives," he says, "and it is not necessarily in the famous action
that a man's excellence or failure is revealed.  But some little
thing--a word or a jest--may often show character better than a battle
with its ten thousand slain."[40]

But, after all, it is the characteristic rather than the character that
interests him.  He is not among the greatest who have drawn men, for he
lacks the mind and patience to go far below the surface to find the key
to the whole nature.  When he has shown us one side of the hero, he
will present another and a very different one, and leave us to
reconcile them if we can.  The contradictions remain contradictions,
and he wande

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