The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 31

[774] See Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, p. 3 foll.

[775] _Ib._ p. 6, note 3.

[776] See above, p. 251.

[777] Cic. _N.D._ ii., end of sec. 19. He is translating the Greek [Greek: pneuma], which in Stoicism is not a spiritual conception, but a material one, in harmony with their theory of the universe as being itself material, including reason and the soul. This is one of the weak points of the Stoic idea of Unity. For the meaning of _spiritus_ see Mayor's note on the pa.s.sage; it is "the ether or warm air which penetrates and gives life to all things, and connects them together in one organic whole."

[778] Cic. _N.D._ ii. xiii. 36 _ad fin._ On all this department of the Stoic teaching see Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 135 foll.; Caird, _Gifford Lectures_, vol. ii., Lectures 16 and 17.

[779] _Marcus Aurelius and the Later Stoics_, by F. W.

Bussell p. 42.

[780] Cic. _N.D._ ii. ch. 28 (secs. 70-72), with Mayor's commentary; Zeller, _op. cit._ p. 327 foll.; Mayor, introduction to vol. ii. of his edition of Cic. _N.D._ xi. foll.; _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 334 foll. It is important to note the distinction drawn by Cicero between religion and superst.i.tion; what Lucretius called _religio_ as a whole Cicero (and Varro too, cf. Aug. _Civ. Dei_, vi. 9) thus divided. See Mayor's valuable note, vol. ii. p. 183. Some interesting remarks on the Stoic way of dealing with popular mythology will be found in Oakesmith's _Religion of Plutarch_, p. 68 foll.

[781] See above, p. 118 foll.

[782] See Mayor's note on Cic. _N.D._ ii. 15. 39 (vol.

i. p. 130), with quotation from Philodemus. Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 337 foll.

[783] Cic. _de Legibus_, i. 7. 22.

[784] _Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum_, Paris, 1883.

I have borrowed the beautiful translation of my friend Hastings Crossley, printed p. 183 foll. of his _Golden Sayings of Epictetus_, in Macmillan's Golden Treasury Series.

[785] _Gifford Lectures_, ii. p. 94.

[786] So Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, p. 61 foll. The evidence is not conclusive, and the process of argument is one of elimination; but it raises a fairly strong probability.

[787] Cic. _de Rep._ i. 21. 34.

[788] See Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 294 foll.

[789] Cic. _de Rep._ iii. 22. 33.

[790] Cic. _de Legibus_, i. 7. 22 foll.: "Est igitur, quoniam nihil est ratione melius, eaque in homine et in deo, prima homini c.u.m deo rationis societas. Inter quos autem ratio, inter eosdem etiam recta ratio communis est," etc.

[791] Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 226 foll.

[792] _Social Life at Rome_, p. 117.

[793] _Ib._ p. 118 foll.

[794] I may take this opportunity of noting that a Roman might better understand this notion of his Reason as the voice of G.o.d within him, or conscience, from his own idea of his "other soul," or genius; see above, p. 75.

But we do not know for certain that it was presented to him in this way by Panaetius, though Posidonius (_ap.

Galenum_, 469) used the word [Greek: daimon] in this sense, as did the later Stoics; see Mulder, _de Conscientiae notione_, p. 71. Seneca, _Ep._ 41. 2, uses the word _spiritus_: "Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet ...

in unoquoque virorum bonorum, quis deus incertum est, habitat deus" (from Virg. _Aen._ viii. 352). Cp. Marcus Aurelius iii. 3. Seneca uses the word genius clearly in this sense in _Ep._ 110 foll. On the Stoic daemon consult Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 332 foll.; Oakesmith, _Religion of Plutarch_, ch. vi.

[795] See, _e.g._, Zeller, p. 268.

[796] This habit of ill.u.s.trating by historical examples had an educational value of its own, but serves well to show how comparatively feeble was the appeal of Stoicism to the conscience. It may be seen well in Valerius Maximus, whose work, compiled of fact and fiction for educational purposes, is far indeed from being an inspiring one. See _Social Life at Rome_, p. 189.

[797] Arrian, _Discourses_, i. 3. 1-6 (_Golden Sayings of Epictetus_, No. 9).

[798] Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, p. 190 foll.

(Panaetius), and 244 foll. (Posidonius), Zeller 160 foll. This is the Fate or Providence on which the moral lesson of the _Aeneid_ is based; see below, p. 409 foll. Aeneas is the servant of Destiny. If he had persisted in rebelling against it by remaining at Carthage with Dido, that would not have changed the inevitable course of things, but it would have ruined him.

[799] _Gifford Lectures_, ii. 96.

[800] Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 255. This, of course, did not diminish the duty of general benevolence, _ib._ p. 310 and references, where fine pa.s.sages of Cicero and Seneca are quoted about duties to one's inferiors. But an enthusiasm of humanity was none the less wanting in Stoicism, and this was largely owing no doubt to their hard and fast distinction between virtue and vice, and their want of perception of a growth or evolution in society. See Caird, _op. cit._ ii. 99; Lecky, _Hist. of European Morals_, i. 192 foll.; Zeller 251 foll.

[801] See some excellent remarks in Lecky, _op. cit._ i.

p. 242 foll.

[802] See above, note 40.

[803] Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 229. Cic. _de Finibus_, iii, 10, 35; _Tusc. Disp._ iv. 28, 60.

LECTURE XVII

MYSTICISM--IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE

We have now reached the end of the period of the Republic; but before I go on to the age of Augustus, with which I must bring these lectures to an end, I must ask attention to a movement which can best be described by the somewhat vague term Mysticism, but is generally known to historians of philosophy as Neo-pythagoreanism. The fact is that such tendency as there ever was at Rome towards Mysticism--which was never indeed a strong one till Rome had almost ceased to be Roman[804]--seems to have taken the form of thinking known as Pythagorean. The ideas at the root of the Pythagorean doctrine, the belief in a future life, the conception of this life as only preparatory to another, the conviction of the need of purgation in another life and of the preparatory discipline and asceticism to be practised while we are here,--these are truly religious ideas; and even among Romans the religious instinct, though it might be hypnotised, could never be entirely destroyed. When it awoke from time to time in the minds of thinking men it was apt to express itself in Pythagorean tones. With the ignorant and vulgar it might find a baser expression in superst.i.tion pure and simple,--in the finding of portents, in astrology, in Dionysiac orgies; but with these Pythagoreanism must not be reckoned. These, as they appeared on the soil of Italy, were the b.a.s.t.a.r.d children of quasi-religious thought. But the movement of which I speak marks a reaction, among men who could both feel and think, against the whole tendency of Roman religious experience as we have been tracing it; against the extreme formalism, now meaningless, of the Roman State religion; against the extreme scepticism and indifference so obvious in the last century and a half of the republican era; against the purely intellectual appeal of the ethical systems of which I have been recently speaking. Stoicism indeed, as we shall see, held out a hand to the new movement, simply because Stoicism had a religious side which was wanting in Epicurism. But the thought that our senses and our reason are not after all the sole fountains of our knowledge, a thought which is the essence of mysticism, was really foreign to Stoicism; and when this thought did find a soil in the mind of a thinking Roman of this age, it was likely to spring up in a transcendental form which we may call Pythagoreanism.

South Italy was indeed the true home of the Pythagorean teaching. There its founder had established it, and there, mixed up with more popular Orphic doctrine and practice, it must have remained latent for centuries.[805] "Tenuit magnam illam Graeciam," says Cicero of Pythagoras, "c.u.m honore disciplinae, tum etiam auctoritate; multaque saecula post sic viguit Pythagoreorum nomen, ut nulli alii docti viderentur."[806] To South Italy Plato is said to have travelled to study this philosophy, and to learn the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and the story is generally accepted as true.[807] But of any missionary attempt of Pythagoreanism on Rome we know nothing--and probably there was nothing to tell--till that mysterious plot to introduce it after the Hannibalic war which I mentioned in a recent lecture.[808] That war brought Rome into close contact with Tarentum and southern Italy, and it is likely enough that the attempt to connect King Numa with the philosopher, both in the familiar legend and in the alleged discovery of the stone coffin with its forged ma.n.u.scripts, had its origin in this contact. The Senate could not object to the legend, but it promptly stamped out this grotesque attempt at propagandism. Then we hear no more of the doctrine for a century at least; but in the last century B.C. we know that there appeared a number of Pythagorean writings, falsely attributed to the founder himself or his disciples,[809]--a method of propagandism which, like that of the previous century, may perhaps be taken as marking the religious nature of the doctrine, which needed the _ipse dixit_ of the founder or something as near it as possible.[810] But of the immediate influence of these writings we know nothing. The person really responsible for the tendency to this kind of mysticism was undoubtedly the great Posidonius, philosopher, historian, traveller, who more than any other man dominated the Roman world of thought in the first half of the last century B.C., and whose writings, now surviving in a few fragments only, lie at the back of nearly all the serious Roman literature of his own and indeed of the following age.[811] Panaetius, there can be little doubt, had done something to leaven Stoicism with Platonic-Aristotelian psychology,[812]

the general tendency of which was towards a dualism of Soul and Body.

The Stoics, in the strict sense of the name, "could not be content with any philosophy which divided heaven from earth, the spiritual from the material." "They rebelled against the idea of a transcendent G.o.d and a transcendent ideal world, as modern thought has rebelled against the supernaturalism of mediaeval religion and philosophy."[813] In their pa.s.sion for unity they would not separate soul and body. But when once Panaetius had hinted at a reversion to the older mode of thought, it was natural and easy to follow his lead in a society which had long ago abandoned burial for cremation, and bidden farewell to the primitive notion that the body lived on under the earth: in a society, too, which had always believed in that "other soul," the _Genius_ of a man, as distinct from his bodily self of this earthly life.[814]

Now as soon as this dualism of body and soul was suggested, it was taken up by Posidonius into what we may call his neo-Stoic system, and at once gave mysticism,--or transcendentalism, if we choose so to call it--its chance. For in such a dualistic psychology it is the soul that gains in value, the body that loses. Life becomes an imprisonment of the soul in the body; the soul seeks to escape, death is but the beginning of a new life, and the imagination is set to work to fathom the mysteries of Man's future existence, nay, in some more fanciful minds, those of his pre-existence as well. This kind of speculation, half philosophic, half poetical, is the transcendental side of the Platonic psychology, and in the last age of the Republic was able to connect Platonism and Pythagoreanism without deserting Stoicism.[815] We can see it reflected from Posidonius in the Dream of Scipio, the beautiful myth, imitated from those of Plato, with which Cicero concluded his treatise on the State, written in the year 54 B.C., after his retirement from political life. In this, and again in the first book of his _Tusculan Disputations_, composed nearly ten years later, Cicero is beyond doubt on the tracks of Posidonius, and therefore also of Pythagoreanism.[816]

Listen to the words put into the mouth of the elder Scipio and addressed to his younger namesake: "Tu vero enitere et sic habeto, non esse te mortalem, sed corpus hoc; non enim tu es, quem forma ista declarat; sed _mens cuiusque is est quisque_, non ea figura quae digito demonstrari potest."[817] Here is the body plainly losing, the soul gaining importance. But he goes still further: "_deum igitur te scito esse_: si quidem deus est qui viget qui sent.i.t qui meminit: qui providet, qui tam regit et moderatur et movet id corpus cui propositus est, quam hunc mundum ille princeps deus, et ut mundum ex quadam parte mortalem ipse deus aeternus, sic fragile corpus animus sempiternus movet."[818]

With such a view of the soul in relation to the body, we can understand how in this myth it is described as flying upwards, released from corporeal bondage, and ascending through heavenly stations to pure aether, if at least (and here we may note the characteristic Roman touch) its abode on earth has been the body of a good citizen.[819] All that is of earth earthy, all old ideas of burial, all notions of a gloomy abode below the earth, are here fairly left behind. So too in the first book of the _Tusculans_, written after the death of his beloved daughter, Cicero would persuade himself and others that death cannot be an evil if we once allow the soul to be immortal: for from its very nature it must rise into aethereal realms, cannot sink like the body into the earth.[820] Into its experiences in the aether I do not need to go here. Enough has been said to show that, as it were, the heavens were opened, and with the psychological separation of soul from body the imaginative faculty was released also; not indeed that any Roman, or even Posidonius himself, could revel in cosmological dreams as did Plato, but they found in him all they needed, and it would seem that they made much use of it. Plato's _Timaeus_ was made by Posidonius the subject of a commentary,[821] and by Cicero himself it was in part at least translated, about the time when he was writing the _Tusculans_, and still deeply moved by his recent loss. Of this translation a fragment survives; and in the introductory sentences he indicates a second stimulus to his Pythagorean tendencies, besides Posidonius. He tells how he had met at Ephesus, when on his way to his province of Cilicia, the famous Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus, and had enjoyed conversation with him.[822] Nigidius was an old friend, who had helped Cicero in his consulship; he was one of those "polyhistores" who are characteristic of the age, like Posidonius and Varro, and wrote works on all kinds of subjects of which but few fragments remain. But his reputation as a Pythagorean survived for centuries;[823] and this mention of him by Cicero is only another proof of the direction the thoughts of the latter were taking in these last two years of his life.

Clearly, then, Cicero in his philosophical writings of these years was affected by the current of mysticism that was then running. But to me it is still more interesting to find it moving him in a practical matter of which he has himself left the truth on record; for Cicero is a real human being for whom all who are familiar with his letters must have something in the nature of affection, and with whom, too, we feel genuine sympathy in the calamity which now fell upon him. It was early in 45 B.C. that he lost his only and dearly loved daughter, and the blow to his sensitive temperament, already hardly tried by political anxiety, was severe. We still have the private letters which he wrote to Atticus after her death from his solitude at Astura on the edge of the melancholy Pomptine marshes;[824] and here, if our minds are sufficiently divested of modern ideas and trained to look on death with Roman eyes, we may be startled to find him thinking of her as still in some sense surviving, and as divine rather than human: as a deity or spirit to whom a _fanum_ could be erected. He makes it clear to Atticus, who is acting as his business agent at Rome, that he does not want a mere tomb (_sepulcrum_), but a _fanum_, which as we have seen was the general word for a spot of ground sacred to a deity. "I wish to have a _fanum_ built, and that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart. I am anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb, not so much on account of the penalty of the law, as in order to attain as nearly as possible to an _apotheosis_. This I could do if I built it in the villa itself, but ...

I dread the changes of owners. Wherever I construct it on the land, I think that I could secure that posterity should respect its sanct.i.ty."[825] The word here translated sanct.i.ty is _religio_; we may remember that all burial places were _loca religiosa_, not consecrated by the State, yet hallowed by the feeling of awe or scruple in approaching them; but Cicero is probably here using the word rather in that wider sense in which it so often expresses the presence of a deity in some particular spot.[826]

Atticus was a man of the world and probably an Epicurean, and his friend in two successive letters half apologises for this strong desire. "I should not like it to be known by any other name but _fanum_,--unreasonably, you will perhaps say." And again, "you must bear with these silly wishes (_ineptiae_) of mine."[827] But this only makes the intensity of his feeling about it the more plain and significant; he really seems to want Tullia to be thought of as having pa.s.sed into the sphere of divinity, however vaguely he may have conceived of it. Perhaps he remembered his own words in Scipio's dream, "Deum te esse scito."

The ashes of Tullia rested in the family tomb, but the G.o.dlike thing imprisoned in her mortal body was to be honoured at this _fanum_, which, strange as it may seem to us, her father wished to erect in a public and frequented place. She does not fade away into the common herd of Manes, but remains, though as a spirit, the same individual Tullia whom her father had loved so dearly.

I long ago explained the old Roman idea of Manes,[828] a vague conception of shades of the dead dwelling below the earth, and hardly, if at all, individualised. But in Tullia's case we meet with a clear conception of an individual spirit; and this alone would lead us to suspect a Pythagorean influence at work, such as that under which Virgil wrote the famous words "Quisque suos patimur Manes," which simply mean "Each individual of us must endure his own individual ghosthood."[829]

This process of individualisation must have been gradually coming on, but the steps are lost to us; we only know that the earliest sepulchral inscription which speaks to it, in the vague plural Di Manes so familiar in later times, is dateable somewhere about this very time.[830] My friend Dr. J. B. Carter would explain it, in part at least, by the Roman conception of Genius to which I alluded just now, and doubtless this must be taken into account. For myself I would rather think of it as the natural result of the growth of individualism in the living human being during the last two centuries B.C. Surely it was impossible for personality to grow as it did in that period without a corresponding growth of the idea of individual immortality in the minds of all who believed in a future life of any kind at all. The Epicureans did not so believe; but Roman Stoics instructed by Panaetius and Posidonius might not only believe in immortality but in an immortality of the individual.

Let me take this opportunity of noting that there was, of course, no sort of restriction on a man's belief about this or any other religious question. It was perfectly open to every one to hold what view best pleased him about the state of the dead: all that the State required of him was that he should fulfil his obligations at the tombs of his own kin. No dogma reigned in the necropolis, only duty, _pietas_,--and that _pietas_ implied no conviction. The Parentalia in February were originally, so far as we can discern, only a yearly renewal of the rite of burial on its anniversary;[831] this implies civilisation and some kind of calendar, but not a creed. Later on, in the Fasti of the City-state, the day was fixed for all citizens without regard of anniversaries; and here the rites become a matter of _ius_, the _ius Manium_, to the observance of which the Manes are ent.i.tled. Still there is no creed, though Cicero speaks of this _ius_ as based on the idea of a future life.[832] As a fact these rites are a survival from an age in which the dead man was believed to go on living in the grave, but that primitive idea was no longer held by the educated. Each man was free in all periods to believe what he pleased about the dead, and as the Romans began to think, this freedom becomes easy to ill.u.s.trate. Cicero himself is usually agnostic, as is in keeping with his Academic tendency in philosophy; even in one of these very letters he seems to speak of his own non-existence after death.[833] So, too, the excellent Servius Sulpicius, in the famous letter of condolence written to Cicero at this time from Athens, seems to be uncertain.[834] We all know the words of Caesar (reported by Sall.u.s.t), which are often quoted with a kind of holy horror, as though a pontifex maximus might not hold any opinion he pleased about death, and as though his doubt were not the common doubt of innumerable thinking men of the age.[835] Catullus wrote of death as "nox perpetua dormienda"; Lucretius, of course, gloried in the thought that there is no life beyond. In the following century the learned Pliny could write of death as the relapsing into the same nothingness as before we were born, and could scoff at the absurdities of the cult of the dead.[836]