The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 6

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 a.n.a.lyse and lay bare its mischiefs.

Perhaps he a.n.a.lyses 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 a.s.sailant of the faults of men," it is the faults of the unnamed that he a.s.sails; 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 pa.s.sive bucket to be pumped into." Happily the reader is not obliged to be quite so pa.s.sive.

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 Ca.s.sius 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 acc.u.mulation of books recalls the amus.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.ds 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 ash.o.r.e for water, it amuses you to pick up a sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l or plant, you are given something in the way of wife or child (_ant bolbariou ka kochlidiou gynaikarion ka 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 emo 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 prost.i.tution--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 G.o.ds 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!"

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[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 pa.s.sage on a ship--they happened to be pa.s.sing (_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 gra.s.s 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 enc.u.mberments--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 s.e.xtius 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sages 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 n.o.ble-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]

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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 ka 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. Thus Stoicism, while still a philosophy was pre-eminently a religion, and even a gospel--Good News of emanc.i.p.ation from the evil in the world and of union with the Divine.

[Sidenote: The true worship of the G.o.ds]

Stoicism gave its convert a new conception of the relation of G.o.d and man. One Divine Word was the essence of both--Reason was shared by men and G.o.ds, 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 a.s.similate, rather than in magical formulae, which lost their value when they became {57} intelligible. G.o.d and men formed a polity, and the Stoic was the fellow-citizen of the G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds, and for him the old cults pa.s.sed away, superseded by a new worship which was divine service indeed.

"How the G.o.ds are to be worshipped, men often tell us. Let us not permit a man to light lamps on the Sabbath, for the G.o.ds 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: G.o.d, he worships who knows Him. Let us forbid to take napkins and strigils to Jove, to hold the mirror to Juno. G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion: never will enough be done, unless in his mind he shall have conceived G.o.d as he ought, as in possession of all things, as giving all things freely. What cause is there that the G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds is to believe G.o.ds 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 a.s.sign penalties and sometimes punish in the form of blessing. Would you propitiate the G.o.ds? Be good! He has worshipped them enough who has imitated them."[83]

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This is not merely a statement of Stoic dogma; it was a proclamation of freedom. Line after line of this fine pa.s.sage directly counters what was a.s.serted 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 G.o.d. "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 G.o.d (_synapheis to theo_) as parts of Him and portions of Him, and can it be that G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d is given as a pedagogue, not indeed of the first rank, but of an inferior brand, of the number of those whom Ovid calls 'G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d 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] "G.o.d," 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 G.o.d is in love with the good (_bonorum amantissimus_) that he gives them fortune to wrestle with. "_There_ is a match worth G.o.d'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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds. 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.ds and no less."[97]

[Sidenote: The holy spirit within us]

In language curiously suggestive of another school of thought, Seneca speaks of G.o.d within us, of divine help given to human effort. "G.o.d 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 G.o.d.[98] Can any triumph over fortune unless helped by him? He gives counsel, splendid and manly; in every good man,

What G.o.d we know not, yet a G.o.d there dwells."[99]