Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius Part 1

Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius.

by Samuel Dill.

PREFACE

There must always be something arbitrary in the choice and isolation of a period of social history for special study. No period can, from one point of view, be broken off and isolated from the immemorial influences which have moulded it, from the succession of coming ages which it will help to fashion. And this is specially true of the history of a race at once so aggressive, yet so tenacious of the past, as the Roman. The national fibre was so tough, and its tone and sentiment so conservative under all external changes, that when a man knows any considerable period of Roman social history, he may almost, without paradox, be said to know a great deal of it from Romulus to Honorius.

Yet, as in the artistic drama there must be a beginning and an end, although the action can only be ideally severed from what has preceded and what is to follow in actual life, so a limited s.p.a.ce in the collective history of a people may be legitimately set apart for concentrated study.

But as in the case of the drama, such a period should possess a certain unity and intensity of moral interest. It should be a crisis and turning-point in the life of humanity, a period pregnant with momentous issues, a period in which the old order and the new are contending for mastery, or in which the old is melting into the new. Above all, it should be one in which the great social and spiritual movements are incarnate in some striking personalities, who may give a human interest to dim forces of spiritual evolution.

Such a period, it seems to the writer of this book, is that which he now presents to the reader. It opens with the self-destruction of lawless and intoxicated power; it closes with the realisation of Plato's dream of a reign of the philosophers. The revolution in the ideal of the princ.i.p.ate, which gave the world a Trajan, a Hadrian, and a Marcus Aurelius in place of a Caligula and a Nero, may not have been accompanied by any change of corresponding depth in the moral condition of the ma.s.ses. But the world enjoyed for nearly a century an almost unexampled peace and prosperity, under skilful and humane government. The civic splendour and social charities of the Antonine age can be revived by the imagination from the abundant remains and records of the period. Its materialism and social vices will also sadden the thoughtful student of its literature and inscriptions. But if that age had the faults of a luxurious and highly organised civilisation, it was also dignified and elevated by a great effort for reform of conduct, and a pa.s.sion, often, it is true, sadly misguided, to rise to a higher spiritual life and to win the succour of unseen Powers. To the writer of this book, this seems to give the Antonine age its great distinction and its deepest interest for the student of the life of humanity. The influence of philosophy on the legislation of the Antonines is a commonplace of history. But its practical effort to give support and guidance to moral life, and to refashion the old paganism, so as to make it a real spiritual force, has perhaps hardly yet attracted the notice which it deserves. It is one great object of this book to show how the later Stoicism and the new Platonism, working in eclectic harmony, strove to supply a rule of conduct and a higher vision of the Divine world.

But philosophy failed, as it will probably fail till some far-off age, to find an anodyne for the spiritual distresses of the ma.s.s of men. It might hold up the loftiest ideal of conduct; it might revive the ancient G.o.ds in new spiritual power; it might strive to fill the interval between the remote Infinite Spirit and the life of man with a host of mediating and succouring powers. But the effort was doomed to failure. It was an esoteric creed, and the ma.s.ses remained untouched by it. They longed for a Divine light, a clear, authoritative voice from the unseen world. They sought it in ever more blind and pa.s.sionate devotion to their ancient deities, and in all the curiosity of superst.i.tion. But the voice came to them at last from the regions of the East. It came through the worships of Isis and Mithra, which promised a hope of immortality, and provided a sacramental system to soothe the sense of guilt and prepare the trembling soul for the great ordeal on the verge of another world. How far these eastern systems succeeded, and where they failed, it is one great purpose of this book to explain.

The writer, so far as he knows himself, has had no _arriere pensee_ in describing this great moral and spiritual movement. As M. Boissier has pointed out, the historian of the Antonine age is free to treat paganism apart from the growth of the Christian Church. The pagan world of that age seems to have had little communication with the loftier faith which, within a century and a half from the death of M. Aurelius, was destined to seize the sceptre. To Juvenal, Tacitus, and Pliny, to Plutarch, Dion Chrysostom, Lucian, and M. Aurelius, the Church is hardly known, or known as an obscure off-shoot of Judaism, a little sect, worshipping a "crucified Sophist" in somewhat suspicious retirement, or more favourably distinguished by simple-minded charity. The modern theologian can hardly be content to know as little of the great movement in the heathen world which prepared or deferred the victory of the Church.

It will be evident to any critical reader that the scope of this book is strictly limited. As in a former work on the Society of the later Empire, attention has been concentrated on the inner moral life of the time, and comparatively little s.p.a.ce has been given to its external history and the machinery of government. The relation of the Senate to the Emperor in the first century, and the organisation of the munic.i.p.al towns have been dwelt on at some length, because they affected profoundly the moral character of the age. On the particular field which the writer has surveyed, Dean Merivale, Dr. Mahaffy, Professor Bury, and Mr. Capes have thrown much light by their learning and sympathy. But these distinguished writers have approached the period from a different point of view from that of the present author, and he believes that he has not incurred the serious peril of appearing to compete with them. He has, as a first duty, devoted himself to a complete survey of the literature and inscriptions of the period. References to the secondary authorities and monographs which he has used will be found in the notes. But he owes a special obligation to Friedlander, Zeller, Reville, Schiller, Boissier, Martha, Peter, and Marquardt, for guidance and suggestion. He must also particularly acknowledge his debt to M. c.u.mont's exhaustive work on the monuments of Mithra. Once more he has to offer his warmest grat.i.tude to his learned friend, the Rev. Charles Plummer, Fellow of C.C.C., Oxford, for the patience and judgment with which he has revised the proof sheets. His thanks are also due to the Messrs. R. and R. Clark's reader, for the scrupulous accuracy which has saved the author much time and labour.

_September 19, 1904._

BOOK I.

INFESTA VIRTUTIBUS TEMPORA

CHAPTER I

THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR

The period of social history which we are about to study is profoundly interesting in many ways, but not least in the many contrasts between its opening and its close. It opens with the tyranny of one of the worst men who ever occupied a throne; it ends with the mild rule of a Stoic saint.

It begins in ma.s.sacre and the carnage of civil strife; it closes in the apparent triumph of the philosophic ideal, although before the end of the reign of the philosophers the shadows have begun to fall. The contrast of character between the two princes is generally supposed to find a correspondence in the moral character and ideals of the men over whom they ruled. The accession of Vespasian which, after a deadly struggle, seemed to bring the orgies of a brutal despotism to a close, is regarded as marking not only a political, but a moral, revolution. It was the dawn of an age of repentance and amendment, of beneficent administration, of a great moral revival. We are bound to accept the express testimony of a contemporary like Tacitus,(1) who was not p.r.o.ne to optimist views of human progress, that along with the exhaustion of the higher cla.s.s from ma.s.sacre and reckless extravagance, the sober example of the new emperor, and the introduction of fresh blood and purer manners from the provinces, had produced a great moral improvement. Even among the old n.o.blesse, whose youth had fallen on the age of wild licence, it is probable that a better tone a.s.serted itself at the beginning of what was recognised by all to be a new order. The crushed and servile, who had easily learnt to imitate the wasteful vices of their oppressors, would probably, with equal facility, at least affect to conform to the simpler fashions of life which Vespasian inherited from his Sabine ancestors and the old farm-house at Reate.(2) The better sort, represented by the circles of Persius, of Pliny and Tacitus, who had nursed the ideal of Stoic or old Roman virtue in some retreat on the northern lakes or in the folds of the Apennines, emerged from seclusion and came to the front in the reign of Trajan.

Yet neither the language of Tacitus nor the testimony from other sources justify the belief in any sudden moral revolution. The Antonine age was undoubtedly an age of conscientious and humane government in the interest of the subject; it was even more an age of religious revival. But whether these were accompanied by a corresponding elevation of conduct and moral tone among the ma.s.ses may well be doubted. On the other hand the pessimism of satirist and historian who had lived through the darkness of the Terror has probably exaggerated the corruption of the evil days. If society at large had been half as corrupt as it is represented by Juvenal, it would have speedily perished from mere rottenness. The Inscriptions, the Letters of the younger Pliny, even the pages of Tacitus himself, reveal to us another world from that of the satirist. On countless tombs we have the record or the ideal of a family life of sober, honest industry, and pure affection. In the calm of rural retreats in Lombardy or Tuscany, while the capital was frenzied with vicious indulgence, or seething with conspiracy and desolated by ma.s.sacre, there were many families living in almost puritan quietude, where the moral standard was in many respects as high as among ourselves. The worst period of the Roman Empire was the most glorious age of practical Stoicism. The men of that circle were ready, at the cost of liberty or life, to brave an immoral tyranny; their wives were eager to follow them into exile, or to die by their side.(3) And even in the palace of Nero there was a spotless Octavia, and slave-girls who were ready to defend her honour at the cost of torture and death.(4) In the darkest days, the violence of the bad princes spent itself on their n.o.bles, on those whom they feared, or whom they wished to plunder. The provinces, even under a Tiberius, a Nero, or a Domitian, enjoyed a freedom from oppression which they seldom enjoyed under the Republic.(5) Just and upright governors were the rule and not the exception, and even an Otho or a Vitellius, tainted with every private vice, returned from their provincial governments with a reputation for integrity.(6) Munic.i.p.al freedom and self-government were probably at their height at the very time when life and liberty in the capital were in hourly peril. The great Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood and equality of men, as members of a world-wide commonwealth, which was destined to inspire legislation in the Antonine age, was openly preached in the reigns of Caligula and Nero. A softer tone-a modern note of pity for the miserable and succour for the helpless-makes itself heard in the literature of the first century.(7) The moral and mental equality of the s.e.xes was being more and more recognised in theory, as the capacity of women for heroic action and self-sacrifice was displayed so often in the age of the tyranny and of the Stoic martyrs.

The old cruelty and contempt for the slave will not give way for many a generation; but the slave is now treated by all the great leaders of moral reform as a being of the same mould as his master, his equal, if not his superior, in capacity for virtue.

The peculiar distinction of the Antonine age is not to be sought in any great difference from the age preceding it in conduct or moral ideals among the great ma.s.s of men. Nor can it claim any literary distinction of decided originality, except in the possession of the airy grace and half-serious mockery of Lucian. Juvenal, Tacitus, and the younger Pliny, Suetonius and Quintilian, Plutarch and Dion Chrysostom, were probably all dead before Antoninus Pius came to the throne. After Hadrian's reign pure Roman literature, in any worthy sense, is extinct; it dies away in that Sahara of the higher intellect which stretches forward to the Fall of the Empire. There is no great historian after Tacitus; there is no considerable poet after Statius and Juvenal, till the meteor-like apparition of Claudian in the ominous reign of Honorius.

The material splendour and munic.i.p.al life of the Antonine age are externally its greatest glory. It was pre-eminently a sociable age, an age of cities. From the wall of Hadrian to the edge of the Sahara towns sprang up everywhere with as yet a free civic life. It was an age of engineers and architects, who turned villages into cities and built cities in the desert, adorned with temples and stately arches and basilicas, and feeding their fountains from the springs of distant hills. The rich were powerful and popular; and never had they to pay so heavily for popularity and power. The cost of civic feasts and games, of forums and temples and theatres, was won by flattery, or extorted by an inexorable force of public opinion from their coffers. The poor were feasted and amused by their social superiors who received a deference and adulation expressed on hundreds of inscriptions. And it must be confessed that these records of ambitious munificence and expectant grat.i.tude do not raise our conception of either the economic or the moral condition of the age.

The glory of cla.s.sic art had almost vanished; and yet, without being able to produce any works of creative genius, the inexhaustible vitality of the h.e.l.lenic spirit once more a.s.serted itself. After a long eclipse, the rhetorical culture of Greece vigorously addressed itself in the reign of Hadrian to the conquest of the West. Her teachers and spiritual directors indeed had long been in every family of note. Her sophists were now seen haranguing crowds in every town from the Don to the Atlantic. The influence of the sophistic discipline in education will be felt in the schools of Gaul, when Visigoth and Burgundian will be preparing to a.s.sume the heritage of the falling Empire.(8) From the early years of the second century can be traced that great combined movement of the Neo-Pythagorean and Platonist philosophies and the renovated paganism which made a last stand against the conquering Church in the reigns of Julian and Theodosius. Philosophy became a religion, and devoted itself not only to the private direction of character and the preaching of a higher life, but to the justification and unification of pagan faith. In spite of its rather bourgeois ideal of material enjoyment and splendour, the Antonine age, at least in its higher minds, was an age of a purified moral sense and religious intuition. It was, indeed, an age of spiritual contradictions. On the one hand, not only was the old ritual of cla.s.sical polytheism scrupulously observed even by men like Plutarch and M.

Aurelius, but religious imagination was appropriating the deities of every province, almost of every canton, embraced by the Roman power. At the same time the fecundity of superst.i.tion created hosts of new divinities and genii who peopled every scene of human life.(9) On the other hand syncretism was in the air. Amid all the confused ferment of devotion a certain principle of unity and comprehension was a.s.serting itself, even in popular religion. The old G.o.ds were losing their sharp-cut individuality; the provinces and attributes of kindred deities tended to fade into one another, and melt into the conception of a single central Power. The religions of Egypt and the remoter East, with their inner monotheism, supported by the promise of sacramental grace and the hope of immortality, came in to give impetus to the great spiritual movement. The simple peasant might cling to his favourite G.o.d, as his Neapolitan descendant has his favourite saint. But an Apuleius, an Apollonius, or an Alexander Severus(10) sought a converging spiritual support in the G.o.ds and mysteries of every clime.

Platonist philosophy strove to give rational expression to this movement, to reconcile cultivated moral sense with the worships of the past, to find a bond between the vagrant religious fancies of the crowd and the remote esoteric faith of the philosophic few. On the higher minds, from whatever quarter, a spiritual vision had opened, which was strange to the ancient world, the vision of One who is no longer a mere Force, but an infinite Father, Creator, Providence and Guardian, from whom we come, to whom we go at death. Prayer to Him is a communion, not the means of winning mere temporal blessings; He is not gratified by b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice; He is dishonoured by immoral legend.(11) He cannot be imaged in gold or ivory graven by the most cunning hand, although the idealised human form may be used as a secondary aid to devotion. These were some of the religious ideas current among the best men, Dion Chrysostom, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, which the Neo-Platonic school strove to harmonise with the rites and legends of the past. The means by which they tried to do so, and the measure of their success, it is one purpose of this book to explain.

The Antonine age saw for a brief s.p.a.ce the dream of Plato realised, when kings should be philosophers, and philosophers should be kings. Philosophy had given up its detached and haughty reserve, or outspoken opposition to imperial power. In the second century it lent all its forces to an authority which in the hands of the Antonine princes seemed to answer to its ideals.(12) The votaries of the higher life, after their persecution under the last cruel despot, rose to an influence such as they had never wielded save in the Pythagorean aristocracies of southern Italy.

Philosophy now began to inspire legislation and statesmanship.(13) Its professors were raised to the consulship and great prefectures. Above all, it was incarnate, as it were, in the ruler who, whatever we may think of his practical success, brought to the duties of government a loftiness of spiritual detachment which has never been equalled by any ruler of men.

Whether there was any corresponding elevation of conduct or moral tone in the ma.s.s of men may well be doubted by any one who has studied the melancholy thoughts of the saintly emperor. Lucian and M. Aurelius seem to be as hopeless about the moral condition of humanity as Seneca and Petronius were in the darkest days of Nero's tyranny.(14) Such opinions, indeed, have little scientific value. They are often the result of temperament and ideals, not of trustworthy observation. But it would be rash to a.s.sume that heightened religious feeling and the efforts of philosophy had within a hundred years worked any wide-spread transformation of character. It was, however, a great step in advance that the idea of the princ.i.p.ate, expounded by Seneca, and the younger Pliny, as a clement, watchful, infinitely laborious earthly providence had been realised since the accession of Trajan. It was easier to be virtuous in the reign of M. Aurelius than in the reign of Nero, and it was especially easier for a man of the highest social grade. The example of the prince for good or evil must always powerfully influence the cla.s.s who are by birth or office nearest to the throne. And bad example will be infinitely more corrupting when it is reinforced by terror. A fierce, capricious tyranny generates a cla.s.s of vices which are perhaps more degrading to human dignity, and socially more dangerous, than the vices of the flesh.

And the reign of such men as Caligula, Nero, and Domitian not only stimulated the grossness of self-indulgence, but superadded the treachery and servility of cowardice. In order to appreciate fully what the world had gained by the mild and temperate rule of the princes of the second century, it is necessary to revive for a moment the terrors of the Claudian Caesars.

The power of Seneca as a moral teacher has, with some reservations, been recognised by all the ages since his time. But equal recognition has hardly been given to the lurid light which he throws, in random flashes, on the moral conditions of his cla.s.s under the tyranny of Caligula and Nero. This may be due, perhaps, to a distrust of his artificial declamation, and that falsetto note which he too often strikes even in his most serious moments. Yet he must be an unsympathetic reader who does not perceive that, behind the moral teaching of Seneca, there lies an awful experience, a lifelong torture, which turns all the fair-seeming blessings of life, state and luxury and lofty rank, into dust and ashes. There is a haunting shadow over Seneca which never draws away, which sometimes deepens into a horror of darkness. In whatever else Seneca may have been insincere, his veiled references to the terrors of the imperial despotism come from the heart.

Seneca's life almost coincides with the Julio-Claudian tyranny. He had witnessed in his early manhood the gloomy, suspicious rule of Tiberius, when no day pa.s.sed without an execution,(15) when every accusation was deadly, when it might be fatal for a poet to a.s.sail Agamemnon in tragic verse, or for a historian to praise Brutus and Ca.s.sius,(16) when the victims of delation in crowds antic.i.p.ated the mockery of justice by self-inflicted death, or drank the poison even in the face of the judges.

Seneca incurred the jealous hatred of Caligula by a too brilliant piece of rhetoric in the Senate,(17) and he has taken his revenge by d.a.m.ning the monster to eternal infamy.(18) Not even in Suetonius is there any tale more ghastly than that told by Seneca of the Roman knight whose son had paid with his life for a foppish elegance which irritated the tyrant.(19) On the evening of the cruel day, the father received an imperial command to dine. With a face betraying no sign of emotion, he was compelled to drink to the Emperor, while spies were eagerly watching every expression of his face. He bore the ordeal without flinching. "Do you ask why? He had another son." Exiled to Corsica in the reign of Claudius,(20) Seneca bore the sentence with less dignity than he afterwards met death. He witnessed the reign of the freedmen, the infamies of Messalina, the intrigues of Agrippina, and the treacherous murder of Britannicus; he knew all the secrets of that ghastly court. Installed as the tutor of the young Nero, he doubtless, if we may judge by the treatise on Clemency, strove to inspire him with a high ideal of monarchy as an earthly providence. He probably at the same time discovered in the son of Cn. Domitius Ahen.o.barbus and Agrippina the fatal heritage of a vicious blood and the omens of a ghastly reign. The young tiger was held on leash for the famous quinquennium by Burrus and Seneca. It seemed only the device of a divine tragic artist, by a brief s.p.a.ce of calm and innocence, to deepen the horror of the catastrophe. And, for Seneca, life darkened terribly towards its close. With high purposes for the commonweal, he had probably lent himself to doubtful means of humouring his wayward pupil, perhaps even to crime.(21) His enormous wealth, whether won from imperial favour, or gained by usury and extortion,(22) his power, his literary brilliance, aroused a host of enemies, who blackened his character and excited the fears or the jealousy of Nero. He had to bear the unenviable distinction of a possible pretender to the princ.i.p.ate.(23) He withdrew into almost monastic seclusion, and even offered to resign his wealth.(24) He strove to escape the evil eyes of calumny and imperial distrust by the most abject renunciation. But he could not descend from the precipice on which he hung; his elevation was a crucifixion.(25) Withdrawn to a remote corner of his palace, which was crowded with the most costly products of the East, and surrounded by gardens which moved the envy of Nero,(26) the fallen statesman sought calm in penning his counsels to Lucilius, and bracing himself to meet the stealthy stroke which might be dealt at any moment.(27) In reading many pa.s.sages of Seneca, you feel that you are sitting in some palace on the Esquiline, reading the _Phaedo_ or listening to the consolations of a Stoic director, while the centurion from the palace may at any moment appear with the last fateful order.

Seneca, like Tacitus, has a remarkable power of moral diagnosis. He had acquired a profound, sad knowledge of the pathology of the soul. It was a power which was almost of necessity acquired in that time of terror and suspicion, when men lived in daily peril from seeming friends. There never was a period when men more needed the art of reading the secrets of character. Nor was there ever a time when there were greater facilities for the study. Life was sociable almost to excess. The Roman n.o.ble, unless he made himself deliberately a recluse, spent much of his time in those social meeting-places of which we hear so often,(28) where gossip and criticism dealt mercilessly with character, where keen wits were pitted against one another, sometimes in a deadly game, and where it might be a matter of life or death to pierce the armour of dissimulation.(29) Seneca had long shone in such circles. In his later years, if he became a recluse, he was also a spiritual director. And his Letters leave little doubt that many a restless or weary spirit laid bare its secret misery to him, for advice or consolation. Knowing well the wildest excesses of fantastic luxury, all the secrets of the philosophic confessional, the miseries of a position oscillating between almost princely state and monastic renunciation, the minister of Nero, with a self-imposed cure of souls, had unrivalled opportunities of ascertaining the moral condition of his cla.s.s.

Seneca is too often a rhetorician, in search of striking effects and vivid phrase. And, like all rhetoricians, he is often inconsistent. At times he appears to regard his own age as having reached the very climax of insane self-indulgence. And yet, in a calmer mood, he declares his belief that the contemporaries of Nero were not worse than the contemporaries of Clodius or Lucullus, that one age differs from another rather in the greater prominence of different vices.(30) His pessimism extends to all ages which have been allured by the charm of ingenious luxury from the simplicity of nature. In the fatal progress of society, the artificial multiplication of human wants has corrupted the idyllic innocence of the far-off Eden, where the cope of heaven or the cave was the only shelter, and the skin-clad savage made his meal on berries and slaked his thirst from the stream.(31) It is the revolutionary dream of Rousseau, revolting from the oppression and artificial luxury of the _Ancien Regime_. Seneca's state of nature is the ant.i.thesis of the selfish and materialised society in which he lived. Our early ancestors were not indeed virtuous in the strict sense.(32) For virtue is the result of struggle and philosophic guidance. But their instincts were good, because they were not tempted.

They enjoyed in common the natural bounties of mother earth.(33) Their fierceness of energy spent itself on the beasts of the chase. They lived peaceably in willing obedience to the gentle paternal rule of their wisest and best, with no l.u.s.t of gold or power, no jealousy and hatred, to break a contented and unenvious harmony. The great disturbers of this primeval peace were avarice and luxury.(34) The moment when the first nugget flashed its baleful temptations on the eyes of the roaming hunter was the beginning of all human guilt and misery.(35) Selfish greed, developing into insatiable appet.i.te, is the original sin which turned the garden into wilderness. In individualist cravings men lost hold on the common wealth of nature. Luxury entered on its downward course, in the search for fresh food and stimulus for appet.i.te, till merely superfluous pleasures led on to those from which untainted nature recoils.(36) Man's boasted conquests over nature, the triumphs of his perverted ingenuity, have bred an illimitable l.u.s.t, ending in wearied appet.i.te; they have turned those who were brothers into cunning or savage beasts.

Such a theory of society has, of course, no value or interest in itself.

Its interest, like that of similar _a priori_ dreams, lies in the light which it sheds on the social conditions which gave it birth. Like the Germany of Tacitus, and the Social Contract of Rousseau, Seneca's theory of the evolution of humanity is an oblique satire on the vices of his own age. And not even in Tacitus or Suetonius are to be found more ghastly revelations of a putrescent society, and the ennui and self-loathing which capricious sensualism generates in spirits born for something higher. It may be worth noting that the vices which Seneca treats as most prevalent and deadly are not so much those of s.e.xual impurity, although they were rife enough in his day, as those of greed, gross luxury, treacherous and envious cruelty, the weariness of jaded nerves and exhausted capacities of indulgence.(37) It is not the coa.r.s.e vices of the Suburra, but the more deadly and lingering maladies of the Quirinal and the Esquiline which he is describing. There is a universal l.u.s.t of gold:(38) riches are the one ornament and stay of life. And yet in those days a great fortune was only a splendid servitude.(39) It had to be guarded amid perpetual peril and envy. The universal greed and venality are worthily matched by the endless anxiety of those who have won the prize. Human life has become a scene of cruel and selfish egotism, a ferocious struggle of beasts of prey, eager for rapine, and heedless of those who go down in the obscene struggle.(40) It is an age when men glorify the fortunate and trample on the fallen. The cunning and cruelty of the wild beast on the throne have taught a lesson of dissimulation to the subject. At such a court it is a miracle to reach old age, and the feat can only be accomplished by accepting insult and injury with a smiling face.(41) For him who goes undefended by such armour of hypocrisy there is always ready the rack, the poisoned cup, the order for self-murder. It is characteristic of the detachment of Seneca that he sees the origin of this hateful tyranny. No modern has more clearly discerned the far-reaching curse of slavery.(42) Every great house is a miniature of the Empire under a Caligula or Nero, a nursery of pretenders capable of the same enormities. The unchecked power of the master, which could, for the slightest faults, an ill-swept pavement, an unpolished dish, or a sullen look, inflict the most brutal torture,(43) produced those cold hearts which gloated over the agony of gallant men in the arena, and applauded in the Senate the tyrant's latest deed of blood. And the system of household slavery enervated character while it made it heartless and cruel. The Inscriptions confirm Seneca's picture of the minute division of functions among the household, to antic.i.p.ate every possible need or caprice of the master.(44) Under such a system the master became a helpless dependent. There is real truth, under some ludicrous exaggeration, in the tale of a Roman n.o.ble, taking his seat in his sedan after the bath, and requiring the a.s.surance of his slave that he was really seated.(45)

It is little wonder that on such lives an utter weariness should settle, the disgust of oversated appet.i.te, which even the most far-fetched luxuries of the orient, the most devilish ingenuity of morbid vice, could hardly arouse. Yet these jaded souls are tortured by an aimless restlessness, which frets and chafes at the slow pa.s.sing of the hours,(46) or vainly hopes to find relief in change of scene.(47) The more energetic spirits, with no wholesome field for energy, developed into a cla.s.s which obtained the name of "Ardeliones." Seneca,(48) Martial,(49) and the younger Pliny(50) have left us pictures of these idle busybodies, hurrying round the forums, theatres, and great houses, in an idle quest of some trivial object of interest, waiting on patrons who ignore their existence, following some stranger to the grave, rushing pell-mell to the wedding of a much-married lady, or to a scene in the law courts, returning at nightfall, worn out with these silly labours, to tread the same weary round next day. Less innocent were they who daily gathered in the _circuli_,(51) to hear and spread the wildest rumours about the army on the frontier, to kill a woman's reputation with a hint, to find a sinister meaning in some imperial order, or to gloat in whispers over the last highly-coloured tale of folly or dark guilt from the palace. It was a perilous enjoyment, for, with a smiling face, some seeming friend was probably noting every hint which might be tortured into an accusation before the secret tribunal on the Palatine, or angling for a sneer which might cost its author a fortune, or send him to the rocks of Gyarus.

In reading Seneca's writings, especially those of his last years, you are conscious of a horror which hardly ever takes definite shape, a thick stifling air, as it were, charged with lightning. Again and again, you feel a dim terror closing in silently and stealthily, with sudden glimpses of unutterable torture, of cord and rack and flaming tunic.(52) You seem to see the sage tossing on his couch of purple under richly panelled ceilings of gold, starting at every sound in the wainscot,(53) as he awaits the messenger of death. It is not so much that Seneca fears death itself, although we may suspect that his nerves sometimes gave the lie to his principles. He often hails death as welcome at any age, as the deliverer who strikes off the chain and opens the prison door, the one harbour on a tempestuous and treacherous sea.(54) He is grateful for having always open this escape from life's long torture, and boldly claims the right to antic.i.p.ate the executioner. The gloom of Seneca seems rather to spring from a sense of the terrible contrast between wealth and state and an ignominious doom which was ever ready to fall. And to his fevered eye all stately rank seems at last but a precipice overhanging the abyss, a mark for treacherous envy or the spitefulness of Fortune.(55) "A great fortune is a great servitude,"(56) which, if it has been hard to win, is harder still to guard. And all life is full of these pathetic contrasts.

Pleasure is nearest neighbour to pain; the summer sea in a moment is boiling in the tempest; the labour of long years is scattered in a day; there is always terror lurking under our deepest peace. And so we reach the sad gospel of a universal pessimism; "nothing is so deceitful and treacherous as the life of man."(57) No one would knowingly accept such a fatal gift, of which the best that can be said is that the torture is short, that our first moment of existence is the first stage to the grave.(58) Thus to Seneca, with all his theoretical indifference to things external to the virtuous will, with all his admiration for the invulnerable wisdom, withdrawn in the inner citadel of the soul, and defying the worst that tyrants or fortune could inflict, the _taedium vitae_ became almost unendurable. The interest of all this lies, not in Seneca's inconsistency, but in the nightmare which brooded on such minds in the reign of Nero.

Something of the gloom of Seneca was part of the evil heritage of a cla.s.s, commanding inexhaustible wealth and a.s.sailed by boundless temptations to self-indulgence, which had been offered by the conquest of East and West.

The weary senses failed to respond to the infinite sensual seductions which surrounded the Roman n.o.ble from his earliest years. If he did not succeed in squandering his fortune, he often exhausted too early his capacity for healthy joy in life, and the nemesis of sated appet.i.te and disillusionment too surely cast its shadow over his later years. Prurient slander was rife in those days, and we are not bound to accept all its tales about Seneca. Yet there are pa.s.sages in his writings which leave the impression that, although he may have cultivated a Pythagorean asceticism in his youth,(59) he did not altogether escape the taint of his time.(60) His enormous fortune did not all come by happy chance or the bounty of the emperor.(61) His gardens and palace, with all its priceless furniture, must have been acquired because at one time he felt pleasure in such luxuries. A soul so pa.s.sionate in its renunciation may, according to laws of human nature, have been once as pa.s.sionate in indulgence. In his case, as so often in the history of the Church, the saint may have had a terrible repentance.

It is probable, however, that this pessimism is more the result of the contrast between Seneca's ideal of the princ.i.p.ate, and the degradation of its power in the hands of his pupil Nero. Seneca may have been regarded once as a possible candidate for the throne, but he was no conspirator or revolutionary.(62) He would have condemned the visionaries whose rudeness provoked even the tolerant Vespasian.(63) In a letter, which must have been written during the Neronian terror, he emphatically repudiates the idea that the votaries of philosophy are refractory subjects. Their great need is quiet and security. They should surely reverence him who, by his sleepless watch, guards what they most value, just as, on a merchantman, the owner of the most precious part of the cargo will be most grateful for the protection of the G.o.d of the sea.(64) Seneca would have his philosophic brethren give no offence by loud self-a.s.sertion or a parade of superior wisdom.(65) In that deceitful dawn of his pupil's reign, Seneca had written a treatise in which he had striven to charm him by the ideal of a paternal monarchy, in the consciousness of its G.o.d-like power ever delighting in mercy and pity, tender to the afflicted, gentle even to the criminal. It is very much the ideal of Pliny and Dion Chrysostom under the strong and temperate rule of Trajan.(66) Addressed to one of the worst emperors, it seems, to one looking back, almost a satire. Yet we should remember that, strange as it may seem, Nero, with all his wild depravity, appears to have had a strange charm for many, even to the end. The men who trembled under the sombre and hypocritical Domitian, regretted the wild gaiety and bonhomie of Nero, and each spring, for years after his death, flowers were laid by unknown hands upon his grave.(67) The charm of boyhood, with glimpses of some generous instincts, may for a time have deceived even the experienced man of the world and the brooding a.n.a.lyst of character. But it is more probable that the piece is rather a warning than a prophecy. Seneca had watched all the caprices of an imperial tyrant, drunk with a sense of omnipotence, having in his veins the maddening taint of ancestral vice,(68) with nerves unstrung by maniacal excesses, brooding in the vast solitudes of the Palatine till he became frenzied with terror, striking down possible rivals, at first from fear or greed,(69) in the end from the wild beast's l.u.s.t for blood, and the voluptuary's delight in suffering. The prophecy of the father as to the future of Agrippina's son(70) found probably an echo in the fears of his tutor. But, in spite of his forebodings, Seneca thought the attempt to save him worth making. He first appeals to his imagination. Nero has succeeded to a vicegerency of G.o.d on earth.(71) He is the arbiter of life and death, on whose word the fortunes of citizens, the happiness or misery of whole peoples depend.

His innocence raises the highest hopes.(72) But the imperial task is heavy, and its perils are appalling. The emperor is the one bond by which the world-empire is held together;(73) he is its vital breath. Man, the hardest of all animals to govern,(74) can only be governed long by love, and love can only be won by beneficence and gentleness to the frowardness of men. In his G.o.d-like place, the prince should imitate the mercy of the G.o.ds.(75) Wielding illimitable power, he is yet the servant of all, and cannot usurp the licence of the private subject. He is like one of the heavenly orbs, bound by inevitable law to move onward in a fixed orbit, unswerving and unresting. If he relies on cruel force, rather than on clemency, he will sink to the level of the tyrant and meet his proper fate.(76) Cruelty in a king only multiplies his enemies and envenoms hatred. In that fatal path there is no turning back. The king, once dreaded by his people, loses his nerve and strikes out blindly in self-defence.(77) The atmosphere of treachery and suspicion thickens around him, and, in the end, what, to his maddened mind, seemed at first a stern necessity becomes a mere l.u.s.t for blood.

It has been suggested that Seneca was really, to some extent, the cause of the grotesque or tragic failure of Nero.(78) The rhetorical spirit, which breathes through all Seneca's writings, may certainly be an evil influence in the education of a ruler of men. The habit of playing with words, of aiming at momentary effect, with slight regard to truth, may inspire the excitable vanity of the artist, but is hardly the temper for dealing with the hard problems of government. And the dazzling picture of the boundless power of a Roman emperor, which Seneca put before his pupil, in order to heighten his sense of responsibility, might intoxicate a mind naturally p.r.o.ne to grandiose visions, while the sober lesson would be easily forgotten. The spectacle of "the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of them" at his feet was a dangerous temptation to a temperament like Nero's.(79) Arrogance and cruelty were in the blood of the Domitii. Nero's grandfather, when only aedile, had compelled the censor to give place to him; he had produced Roman matrons in pantomime, and given gladiatorial shows with such profusion of cruelty, as to shock that not very tender-hearted age.(80) The father of the emperor, in addition to crimes of fraud, perjury, and incest, had, in the open forum, torn out the eye of a Roman knight, and deliberately trampled a child under his horse's feet on the Appian Way.(81) Yet such is the strange complexity of human nature, that Nero seems by nature not to have been dest.i.tute of some generous and amiable qualities. We need not lay too much stress on the innocence ascribed to him by Seneca.(82) Nor need we attribute to Nero's initiative the sound or benevolent measures which characterised the beginning of his reign. But he showed at one time some industry and care in performing his judicial work.(83) He saw the necessity, in the interests of public health and safety, of remodelling the narrow streets and mean insanitary dwellings of Rome.(84) His conception of the Isthmian ca.n.a.l, if the engineering problem could have been conquered, would have been an immense boon to traders with the Aegean. Even his quinquennial festival, inspired by the Greek contests in music and gymnastic,(85) represented a finer ideal of such gatherings, which was much needed by a race devoted to the coa.r.s.e realism of pantomime and the butchery of the arena. Fierce and incalculably capricious as he could be, Nero, at his best, had also a softer side. He had a craving for love and appreciation(86); some of his cruelty was probably the revenge for the denial of it. He was singularly patient of lampoons and invective against himself.(87) Although he could be brutal in his treatment of women, he also knew how to inspire real affection, and perhaps in a few cases return it. He seems to have had something of real love for Acte, his mistress. His old nurses consoled him in his last hour of agony, and, along with the faithful Acte, laid the last of his race in the vault of the Domitii.(88) Nero must have had something of that charm which leads women in every age to forget faults, and even crimes in the men whom they have once loved. And the strange, lingering superst.i.tion, which disturbed the early Church, and which looked for his reappearance down to the eleventh century, could hardly have gathered around an utterly mean and mediocre character.(89)

When Nero uttered the words "Qualis artifex pereo,"(90) he gave not only his own interpretation of his life, he also revealed one great secret of its ghastly failure. It may be admitted that Nero had a certain artistic enthusiasm, a real ambition to excel.(91) He painted with some skill, he composed verses not without a certain grace. In spite of serious natural defects, he took endless pains to acquire the technique of a singer. Far into the night he would sit in rapt enthusiasm listening to the effects of Terpnus, and trying to copy them.(92) His artistic tour in Greece, which lowered him so much in the eyes of the West, was really inspired by the pa.s.sion to find a sympathetic audience which he could not find at Rome.

And, in spite of his arrogance and vanity, he had a wholesome deference for the artistic judgment of Greece. Yet it is very striking that in the records of his reign, the most d.a.m.ning accusation is that he disgraced the purple by exhibitions on the stage. His songs to the lyre, his impersonation of the parturient Canace or the mad Hercules, did as much to cause his overthrow as his murders of Britannicus and Agrippina.(93) The stout Roman soldier and the Pythagorean apostle have the same scorn for the imperial charioteer and actor. A false literary ambition, born of a false system of education, was the bane of Roman culture for many ages.

The dilettante artist on the throne in the first century had many a successor in the literary arts among the grand seigneurs of the fifth.

They could play with their ingenious tricks of verse in sight of the Gothic camp-fires. He could contend for the wreath at Olympia when his faithful freedman was summoning him back by the news that the West was seething with revolt.(94)

Nero's mother had dissuaded him from the study of philosophy; his tutor debarred him from the study of the manly oratory of the great days.(95) The world was now to learn the meaning of a false artistic ambition, divorced from a sense of reality and duty. Aestheticism may be only a love of sensational effects, with no glimpse of the ideal. It may be a hypocritical materialism, screening itself under divine names. In this taste Nero was the true representative of his age. It was deeply tainted with that mere pa.s.sion for the grandiose and startling, and for feverish intellectual effects, which a true culture spurns as a desecration of art.(96) Mere magnitude and portentousness, the realistic expression of physical agony, the coa.r.s.e flush of a half-sensual pleasure, captivated a vulgar taste, to which c.r.a.pulous excitement and a fever of the senses took the place of the purer ardours and visions of the spirit.(97) Nero paid the penalty of outraging the conventional prejudices of the Roman. And yet he was in some respects in thorough sympathy with the ma.s.ses. His lavish games and spectacles atoned to some extent for his aberrations of h.e.l.lenism. He was generous and wasteful, and he encouraged waste in others,(98) and waste is always popular till the bill has to be paid. He was a "cupitor incredibilium."(99) The province of Africa was ransacked to find the fabled treasure of Dido.(100) Explorers were sent to pierce the mysterious barrier of the Caucasus, and discover the secret sources of the Nile. He had great engineering schemes which might seem baffling even to modern skill, and which almost rivalled the wildest dreams of the lunatic brain of Caligula.(101) His Golden House, in a park stretching from the Palatine to the heights of the Esquiline, was on a scale of more than oriental magnificence. At last the master of the world was properly lodged. With colonnades three miles long, with its lakes and pastures and sylvan glades, it needed only a second Nero in Otho to dream of adding to its splendour.(102) To such a prince the astrologers might well predict another monarchy enthroned on Mount Zion, with the dominion of the East.(103) The materialist dreamer was, like Napoleon I., without a rudimentary moral sense. Stained with the foulest enormities himself, he had a rooted conviction that virtue was a pretence, and that all men were equally depraved.(104) His surroundings gave him some excuse for thinking so. He was born into a circle which believed chiefly in "the l.u.s.t of the eye and the pride of life." He formed a circle many of whom perished in the carnage of Bedriac.u.m. With a treasury drained by insane profusion, Nero resorted to rapine and judicial murder to replenish it.(105) The spendthrift seldom has scruples in repairing his extravagance. The temples were naturally plundered by the man who, having no religion, was at least honest enough to deride all religions.(106) The artistic treasures of Greece were carried off by the votary of Greek art; the gold and silver images of her shrines were sent to the melting-pot.(107) Ungrateful testators paid their due penalty after death; and delation, watching every word or gesture, skilfully supplied the needed tale of victims for plunder. It is all a hackneyed story. Yet it is perhaps necessary to revive it once more to explain the suppressed terror and lingering agony of the last days of Seneca.

The impressions of the Terror which we receive from Seneca are powerful and almost oppressive. A thick atmosphere of gloom and foreboding seems to stifle us as we turn his pages. But Seneca deals rather in shadowy hint and veiled suggestion than in definite statement. For the minute picture of that awful scene of degradation we must turn to Tacitus. He wrote in the fresh dawn of an age of fancied freedom, when the gloom of the tyranny seemed to have suddenly vanished like an evil dream. Yet he cannot shake off the sense of horror and disgust which fifteen years of ign.o.ble compliance or silent suffering have burnt into his soul. Even under the manly, tolerant rule of Trajan, he hardly seems to have regained his breath.(108) He can scarcely believe that the light has come at last. His att.i.tude to the tyranny is essentially different from that of Seneca. The son of the provincial from Cordova views the scene rather as the cosmopolitan moralist, imperilled by his huge fortune and the neighbourhood of the terrible palace. Tacitus looks at it as the Roman Senator, steeped in all old Roman tradition, caring little for philosophy, but caring intensely for old Roman dignity and the prestige of that great order, which he had seen humbled and decimated.(109) The feeling of Seneca is that of a Stoic monk, isolated in a corner of his vast palace, now trembling before the imperial jealousy, which his wealth and celebrity may draw down upon him, and again seeking consolation in thoughts of G.o.d and eternity which might often seem to belong to Thomas a Kempis. The tone of Tacitus is sometimes that of a man who should have lived in the age of the Samnite or the Carthaginian wars, before luxury and factious ambition had sapped the moral strength of the great aristocratic caste, while his feelings are divided between grim anger at a cruel destiny, and scornful regret for the weakness and the self-abandonment of a cla.s.s which had been once so great. The feelings of Seneca express themselves rather in rhetorical self-pity. The feelings of Tacitus find vent in words which sometimes veil a pathos too proud for effusive utterance, sometimes cut like lancet points, and which, in their concentrated moral scorn, have left an eternal brand of infamy on names of historic renown.

More than forty years had pa.s.sed between the date of Seneca's last letters to Lucilius and the entry of Tacitus on his career as a historian.(110) He was a child when Seneca died.(111) His life is known to us only from a few stray glimpses in the Letters of Pliny,(112) eked out by the inferences of modern erudition. As a young boy, he must have often heard the tales of the artistic follies and the orgies of Nero, and the ghastly cruelties of the end of his reign. As a lad of fifteen, he may have witnessed something of the carnival of blood and l.u.s.t which appropriately closed the regime of the Julio-Claudian line. He entered on his _cursus honorum_ in the reign of Vespasian, and attained the praetorship under Domitian.(113) A military command probably withdrew him from Rome for three years during the tyranny of the last Flavian.(114) He was consul suffectus in 97, and then held the proconsulship of Asia. It cannot be doubted from his own words that, as a senator, he had to witness tamely the Curia beset with soldiery, the n.o.blest women driven into exile, and men of the highest rank and virtue condemned to death on venal testimony in the secret tribunal of the Alban Palace. His hand helped to drag Helvidius to the dungeon, and was stained with the blood of Senecio. He lived long enough under a better prince to leave an unfading picture of the tragedy of solitary and remorseless power, but not long enough to forget the horrors and degradation through which he had pa.s.sed.

The claim of Tacitus to have been uninfluenced by pa.s.sion or partiality(115) has been disputed by a modern school of critics.(116) Sometimes, from a love of Caesarism and strong government, sometimes from the scholarly weakness for finding a new interpretation of history, the great historic painter of the Julio-Claudian despotism has been represented as an acrid rhetorician of the Senatorial reaction, a dreamer who looks back wistfully to the old Republic, belonging to one of those haughty circles of the old regime which were always in chronic revolt, which lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and poisonous gossip, and nourished its dreams and hatreds till fiction and fact melted into one another in gloomy retrospect.(117) He is the great literary avenger of the Senate after its long sanguinary conflict with the princ.i.p.ate, using the freedom of the new order to blacken the character of princes who had been forced, in the interests of the world-wide empire, to fight and to crush a selfish and narrow-minded caste.(118)

The weakness of all such estimates of Tacitus lies in their failure to recognise the complex nature of the man, the mingled and crossing influences of training, official experience, social environment, and lofty moral ideals(119); it lies even more in a misconception of his aims as a historian. Tacitus was a great orator, and the spirit of the rhetorical school, combined with the force and dexterity of style which it could communicate, left the greatest Roman historians with a less rigorous sense of truth than their weakest modern successors often possess.(120) No Roman ever rose to the Thucydidean conception of history. Moreover Tacitus, although originally not of the highest social rank,(121) belonged to the aristocratic cla.s.s by sympathy and a.s.sociations. Like Suetonius, he necessarily drew much of his information from the memories of great houses and the tales of the elders who had lived through the evil days.(122) He acquired thus many of the prejudices of a cla.s.s which, from its history, and still more from its education, sought its ideals in the past rather than in the future. He mingled in those circles, which in every age disguise the meanness and bitterness of gossip by the airy artistic touch of audacious wit, polished in many social encounters. He had himself witnessed the triumph of delation and the cold cruelty of Domitian. He had shared in the humiliation of the Senate which had been cowed into acquiescence in his worst excesses. And the spectacle had inspired him with a horror of unchecked power in the hands of a bad man, and a gloomy distrust of that human nature which could sink to such ign.o.ble servility.(123) Yet on the other hand Tacitus had gained practical experience in high office, both as soldier and administrator, which has always a sobering effect on the judgment. He realised the difficulties of government and the unreasonableness of ordinary men. Hence he has no sympathy with a doctrinaire and chimerical opposition even under the worst government.(124) However much he might respect the high character of the philosophic enthusiasts of the day, he distrusted their theatrical defiance of power, and he threw his shield over a discreet reserve, which could forget that it was serving a tyrant in serving the commonwealth.(125) Tacitus may at times express himself with a stern melancholy bitterness, which might at first seem to mark him as a revolutionary dreamer, avenging an outraged political ideal. Such an interpretation would be a grave mistake, which he would himself have been the first to correct. The ideal which he is avenging is not a political, but a moral ideal.(126) The bitter sadness is that of the profound a.n.a.lyst of character, with a temperament of almost feverish intensity and nervous force. The interest of history to Thucydides and Polybius lies in the political lessons which it may teach posterity. Its interest to Tacitus lies in the discovery of hidden motives and the secret of character, in watching the stages of an inevitable degeneracy, the moral preparation for a dark, inglorious end. And the a.n.a.lyst was a curiously vivid painter of character, the character of individuals, of periods, and of peoples. His portraits burn themselves into the imaginative memory, so that the impression, once seized, can never be lost. Tiberius and Claudius and Nero, Messalina and Agrippina, in spite of the most mordant criticism, will live for ever as they have been portrayed by the fervid imagination of Tacitus. Nor is he less searching and vivid in depicting the collective feeling and character of ma.s.ses of men. We watch the alternating fury and repentance of the mutinous legions of Germanicus,(127) or the mingled fierceness and sorrow with which they wandered among the bleaching bones on the lost battlefield of Varus,(128) or the pa.s.sion of grief and admiration with which the praetorian cohorts kissed the self-inflicted wounds of Otho.(129) Or, again, we follow the changing moods of the Roman populace, pa.s.sing from anger and grief to short-lived joy, and then to deep silent sorrow, at the varying rumours from the East about the health of Germanicus.(130) In Tacitus events are nearly always seen in their moral setting. The misery and shame of the burning of the Capitol by the Vitellians are heightened by the thought that the catastrophe is caused by the madness of civil strife.(131) In the awful conflict which raged from street to street, the horror consists in the mixture of cruelty and licence. The baths and brothels and taverns are crowded at the very hour when the neighbouring ways are piled with corpses and running with blood; the rush of indulgence paused not for a moment; men seemed to revel in the public disasters. There was bloodshed enough in the days of Cinna and Sulla, but the world was at least spared such a carnival of l.u.s.t.(132) Even in reporting or imagining the speech of Galgacus to his warriors on the Grampians,(133) even in the pictures of the German tribes,(134) the ethical interest is always foremost. The cruel terror of the prince, the effeminacy and abandoned adulation of the n.o.bles, the grossness and fierceness of the ma.s.ses, contrasted with the loyalty, chast.i.ty, and hardihood of the German clans, seem to have dimly foreshadowed to Tacitus a danger from which all true Romans averted their eyes till the end.(135)