The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 11

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

[159] _Ep._ 25, 5.

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

[161] _M._ 33, _t 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 tn upolambanonta buthon hemas atheotetos, an eis pathe ka dynameis ka aretas diagraphomen ekaston ton theon_.

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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 p.r.o.nounce 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."

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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 G.o.ds, and ask reason and demonstration for everything. For the ancient and ancestral faith is enough (_arkei gar he patrios ka 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 (_t bebainon autes ka nenomismenon_) be shaken and disturbed, it will be undermined and no one will trust it.... If you demand proof about each of the ancient G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds into a pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation. We live so largely by instinct, memory and a.s.sociation, 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 G.o.ds 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 h.e.l.len 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 a.s.sociated 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 p.o.o.p, 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 Illyric.u.m--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 pa.s.sage 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]

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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 munic.i.p.al 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 G.o.d, 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 appet.i.te 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 munic.i.p.al 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.ses 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 wanders pleasantly on. The Lives of Pericles and Themistocles, for instance, are little more than mere collectanea from sources widely discrepant, and often quite worthless. Of the mind of Pericles he had little {84} conception; he gathered up and pleasantly told what he had read in books. He had too little of the critical instinct and took things too easily to weigh what he quoted.

Above all, despite his "political" energy and enthusiasm, it was impossible, for a Greek of his day to have the political insight that only comes from life in a living state. How could the Telearch of Chaeronea under the Roman Empire understand Pericles? Archbishop Trench contrasts his enthusiasm about the gift of liberty to Greece by Flamininus with the reflection of Wordsworth that it is a thing

which is not to be given By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven.

Plutarch really did not know what liberty is; Wordsworth on the other hand had taken part in the French Revolution, and watched with keen and sympathetic eyes the march of events throughout a most living epoch.