Lucian’s picture of the death of Peregrinus, whatever we may think of its fairness and discernment, is immensely valuable for many things besides the light which it casts on Lucian’s attitude to all forms of extravagance and superstition. In spite of his contempt for them, he himself reveals that the Cynics were a great popular force. We see also that Cynicism was, in spite of its generally deistic spirit, sometimes leagued with real or affected religious sentiment. As to the real character of Peregrinus, there is reason to believe that Lucian did not read it aright. The impression which the Cynic made on Aulus Gellius was very different. When Gellius was at Athens in his student days, he used often to visit Peregrinus, who was then living in a little hut in the suburbs, and he found the Cynic’s discourses profitable and high-toned. In particular, Peregrinus used to tell his hearers that the chance of apparent evasion or concealment would never tempt the wise man to sin. Concealment was really impossible, for, in the words of Sophocles, “Time, the all-seeing, the all-hearing, lays bare all secrets.” Evidently Peregrinus had other admirers besides the Cynic brethren who hailed his apotheosis at Olympia.1902 Who can draw the line, in such an age, between the fanatic and the impostor?

The bitterness with which Lucian assails the Cynics [pg 359]of his day, while it was justified by the scandalous morals of a certain number, is also a testimony to the world-wide influence of the sect. The ranks of these rude field-preachers would not have attracted so many impostors if the profession had not commanded great power and influence over the masses. The older Cynicism, which sprang from the simpler and more popular aspect of the Socratic teaching, had long disappeared. Its place was taken by the Stoic system, which gave a broad and highly elaborated scientific basis to the doctrine of the freedom and independence of the virtuous will. The rules of conduct were deduced from a well-articulated theory of the universe and human nature, and they were expounded with all the dexterity of a finished dialectic. The later Stoicism, as we have seen, like the other schools, tended to neglect theory, in the effort to form the virtuous character—a tendency which is seen at its height in Musonius and Epictetus. But, as Stoicism became less scientific, it inclined to return more and more to the spirit and method of the older Cynicism. The true, earnest Cynic seems to be almost the philosophic ideal of Epictetus. Thus it was that, in the first century after Christ, Cynicism emerged from its long obscurity to take up the part of a rather one-sided popular Stoicism. It was really pointed or sensational preaching of a few great moral truths, common to all the schools, which the condition of society urgently called for.1903

The ideal of the Cynic life has been painted with gentle enthusiasm by Epictetus.1904 The true Cynic is a messenger from Zeus, to tell men that they have wandered far from the right way, that they are seeking happiness in regions where happiness is not to be found. It is not to be found in the glory of consulships, or in the Golden House of Nero.1905 It lies close to us, yet in the last place where we ever seek it, in ourselves, in the clear vision of the ruling faculty, in freedom from the bondage to imagined good, to the things of sense.1906 This preaching was also to be preaching by example. [pg 360]The gospel of renunciation has been discredited from age to age when it has come from the lips of a man lapped in downy comfort, who never gave up anything in his life, and who indolently points his flock to the steep road which he never means to tread with his own feet. But the Cynic of Epictetus, with a true vocation, could point to himself, without home or wife or children, without a city, without possessions, having forsaken all for moral freedom.1907 He has done it at the call of God, not from mere caprice, or a fancy to wander lawlessly on the outskirts of society.1908 He has done it because the condition of the world demands such stern self-restraint in the chief who would save the discipline of an army engaged in desperate battle. It is a combat like the Olympian strife which he has to face, and woe to him who enters the lists untrained and unprepared.1909 The care of wife and children is not for one who has laid upon him the care of the family of man, who has to console and admonish, and guide them into the right way.1910 All worldly loves and entanglements must be put aside by one who claims to be the “spy and herald of God.” The Cynic is the father of all men; the men are his sons, the women his daughters.1911 When he rebukes them, it is as a father in God, a minister of Zeus. Nor may he take a part in the government of any earthly state, which is a petty affair in comparison with the ministry with which he is charged. How should he meddle with the administration of Athens or Corinth, who has to deal with the moral fortunes of the whole commonwealth of man.1912 Possessing in himself the secret of happiness and woe, he never descends into the vulgar contest, where he may be overcome by the vilest and poorest spirits, for objects which he has trained himself to regard as absolutely indifferent or worthless. And so, he is proof against the spitefulness of fortune and the baseness or violence of man. He will calmly suffer blows or insults as sent by Zeus, just as Heracles bore cheerfully and triumphantly the toils which were laid on him by Eurystheus. The true Cynic will even love those who buffet and insult him.1913 He will also resemble his patron hero [pg 361]in the fresh comely strength of his body, which is the gift of temperance and long days passed under the open sky.1914 Above all, he will have a conscience clearer than the sun, so that, at peace with himself and having assurance of the friendship of the gods, he may be able to speak with all boldness to his brothers and his children.1915 This was the kind of moral ministry which was needed by the age, and, in spite of both undeserved calumny, and the real shame of many corrupt impostors in its ranks, the missionary movement of Cynicism was one of undoubted power and range. The resemblance, in many points, of the Cynics to the early Christian monks and ascetics has been often noticed, and men sometimes passed from the one camp to the other without any violent wrench.1916 The rhetor Aristides, in a fierce attack on the Cynic sect, makes it a reproach that they have much in common with “the impious in Palestine.” Tatian, and others of the Gnostic ascetics, were in close connection with leading Cynics.1917 How easily they were absorbed into the bosom of the Church we can see from the tale of Maximus, an Egyptian Cynic of the fourth century, who continued to wear the distinctive marks of the philosophic brotherhood, till he was installed as bishop of Constantinople.1918 And the contemporary eulogies of Cynic virtue by John Chrysostom and Themistius testify at once to the importance of a movement the strength of which was not spent till after the fall of the Western Empire, and to its affinities for the kindred movement of Christian asceticism.

These “ambassadors of God,” as they claimed to be, cared little, like S. Paul, for “the wisdom of the world,” or for the figments of the poets, and those great cosmic theories which enabled Seneca to sustain or rekindle his moral faith. With rare exceptions, such as Oenomaus of Gadara, they seldom committed their ideas to writing.1919 For the serried dialectic of the Stoics they substituted the sharp biting epigram and lively repartee, in which even the gentle Demonax indulged.1920 Demetrius, who saw the reigns of both Caligula and Domitian,1921 was a man of real power and distinction. He was revered by [pg 362]Seneca as a moral teacher of remarkable influence, “a great man even if compared with the greatest,”1922 who lived up to the severest counsels which he addressed to others. He would bear cold and nakedness and hard lodging with cheerful fortitude, he was a man whom not even the age of Nero could corrupt. His poverty was genuine, and he would never beg.1923 He set little store by philosophical theory, in comparison with diligent application of a few tried and well-conned precepts.1924 Yet he had the brand of culture, and once, when his taste was offended by a bad, tactless reader, who was ruining a passage in the Bacchae, he snatched the book from his hands and tore it in pieces.1925 Although he disdained the trimmed, artificial eloquence of the schools, he had the fire and impetus of the true orator.1926 With little taste for abstract musings, he consoled the last hours of Thrasea in prison with a discourse on the nature of the soul and the mystery of its severance from the body at death.1927 He formed a close alliance for a time with that roaming hierophant of philosophy, Apollonius of Tyana, the bond between them being probably a common asceticism and a common hatred of the imperial tyranny.1928 For Demetrius, if not a revolutionary, was a leader of the philosophic opposition, which assailed the emperors, not so much in their political capacity, as because they too often represented and stimulated the moral lawlessness and materialism of the age. Our sympathies must be with Demetrius when he boldly faced the dangerous scowl of Nero with the mot, “You threaten me with death, but nature threatens you.”1929 But our sympathies will be rather with Vespasian, the plain old soldier, who, when Demetrius openly insulted him, treated the “Cynic bark” with quiet contempt.1930 In truth, the Flavian emperors, till the expulsion of the philosophers by Domitian, seem to have been on the whole indulgent to the outspoken freedom of the Cynics.1931 Occasionally, however, the daring censor had, in the interests of [pg 363]authority, to be restrained. Once, when Titus was in the theatre, with the Jewess Berenice by his side, a Cynic, bearing the name of the founder of the sect, gave voice in a long bitter oration to popular feeling against what was regarded as a shameful union. This Cynic John the Baptist, got off with a scourging.1932 A comrade named Heros, however, repeated the offensive expostulation, and lost his head. Peregrinus, for a similar attack on Antoninus Pius, was quietly warned by the prefect to leave the precincts of Rome. In the third century there was a great change in the political fortunes and attitude of the sect; Cynics are even found basking in imperial favour, and lending their support to the imperial power.1933

The Cynics, from the days of Antisthenes, had poured contempt on the popular religion and the worship of material images of the Divine. They were probably the purest monotheists that classical antiquity produced.1934 Demetrius is almost Epicurean in his belief in eternal Fate, and his contempt for the wavering wills and caprices which mythological fancy ascribed to the Olympian gods.1935 Demonax, the mildest and most humane member of the school in imperial times, refused to offer sacrifices or even to seek initiation in the Mysteries of Eleusis.1936 When he was impeached for impiety before the Athenian courts, he replied that, as for sacrifices, the Deity had no need of them, and that touching the Mysteries, he was in this dilemma: if they contained a revelation of what was good for men, he must in duty publish it; if they were bad and worthless, he would feel equally bound to warn the people against the deception. But the most fearless and trenchant assailant of the popular theology among the Cynics was Oenomaus of Gadara, in the reign of Hadrian.1937 Oenomaus rejected, with the frankest scorn, the anthropomorphic fables of heathenism. In particular, he directed his fiercest attacks against the revival of that faith in oracles and divination which was a marked characteristic of the Antonine age. Plutarch, in a charming walk [pg 364]round the sights of Delphi, in which he acts as cicerone, describes a Cynic named Didymus as assailing the influence of oracles on human character.1938 But Oenomaus, as we know him from Eusebius, was a far more formidable and more pitiless iconoclast than Didymus. He constructed an elaborate historical demonstration to show that the oracles were inspired neither by the gods nor by daemons, but were a very human contrivance to dupe the credulous. And in connection with the subject of oracles, he dealt with the question of free-will, and asserted man’s inalienable liberty, and the responsibility for all his actions which is the necessary concomitant of freedom. Oenomaus treated Dodona and Delphi with such jaunty disrespect that, at the distance of a century and a half, his memory aroused the anger of Julian to such a degree, that the imperial champion of paganism could hardly find words strong enough to express his feelings.1939 Oenomaus is a wretch who is cutting at the roots, not only of all reverence for divine things, but of all those moral instincts implanted in our souls by God, which are the foundation of all right conduct and justice. For such fellows no punishment could be too severe; they are worse than brigands and wreckers.1940

The resolute rejection of the forms of popular worship, and of the claims of divination, is hardly less marked in the mild and tolerant Demonax.1941 Demonax, whose life extended probably from 50 to 150 A.D.,1942 sprang from a family in Cyprus of some wealth and distinction, and had a finished literary culture.1943 But he had conceived from childhood a passion for the philosophic life, according to the ideal of that age. His teachers were Cynics or Stoics, but in speculative opinion he was broadly Eclectic. In his long life he had associated with Demetrius and Epictetus, Apollonius and Herodes Atticus.1944 When asked once who was his favourite philosopher, he replied that he reverenced Socrates, admired Diogenes, and loved Aristippus.1945 His tone had perhaps the greatest affinity for the simplicity of [pg 365]the Socratic teaching. But he did not adopt the irony of the master, which, if it was a potent arm of dialectic, often left the subject of it in an irritated and humiliated mood. Demonax was a true Cynic in his contempt for ordinary objects of greed and ambition,1946 in the simple, austere fashion of his daily life, and in the keen epigrammatic point, often, to our taste, verging on rudeness, with which he would expose pretence and rebuke any kind of extravagance.1947 But although he cultivated a severe bodily discipline, so as to limit to the utmost his external wants, he carefully avoided any ostentatious singularity of manner to win a vulgar notoriety. He had an infinite charity for all sorts of men, excepting only those who seemed beyond the hope of amendment.1948 His counsels were given with an Attic grace and brightness which sent people away from his company cheered and improved, and hopeful for the future. Treating error as a disease incident to human nature, he attacked the sin, but was gentle to the sinner.1949 He made it his task to compose the feuds of cities and to stimulate unselfish patriotism; he reconciled the quarrels of kinsmen; he would, on occasion, chasten the prosperous, and comfort the failing and unfortunate, by reminding both alike of the brief span allotted to either joy or sorrow, and the long repose of oblivion which would soon set a term to all the agitations of sorrow or of joy.1950

But there was another side to his teaching. Demonax was no supple, easy-going conformist to usages which his reason rejected. Early in his career, as has been said, he had to face a prosecution before the tribunals of Athens, because he was never seen to sacrifice to the gods, and declined initiation at Eleusis. In each case, he defended his nonconformity in the boldest tone.1951 To a prophet whom he saw plying his trade for hire, he put the dilemma: “If you can alter the course of destiny, why do you not demand higher fees? If everything happens by the decree of God, where is the value of your art?”1952 When asked if he believed the soul to be immortal, he answered, “It is as immortal as everything else.”1953 He derided, in almost brutal style, the effeminacy of the sophist Favorinus, and the extravagant grief of Herodes Atticus for his son.1954 He ruth[pg 366]lessly exposed the pretences of sham philosophy wherever he met it. When a youthful Eclectic professed his readiness to obey any philosophic call, from the Academy, the Porch, or the Pythagorean discipline of silence, Demonax cried out, “Pythagoras calls you.”1955 He rebuked the pedantic archaism of his day by telling an affected stylist that he spoke in the fashion of Agamemnon’s time.1956 When Epictetus advised him to marry and become the father of a line of philosophers, he asked the celibate preacher to give him one of his daughters.1957 The Athenians, from a vulgar jealousy of Corinth, proposed to defile their ancient memories by establishing gladiatorial shows under the shadow of the Acropolis. Demonax, in the true spirit of Athens from the time of Theseus, advised them first to sweep away the altar of Pity.1958

Demonax lived to nearly a hundred years. He is said never to have had an enemy. He was the object of universal deference whenever he appeared in public. In his old age he might enter any Athenian house uninvited, and they welcomed him as their good genius. The children brought him their little presents of fruit and called him father, and as he passed through the market, the baker-women contended for the honour of giving him their loaves. He died a voluntary death, and wished for no tomb save what nature would give him. But the Athenians were aware that they had seen in him a rare apparition of goodness; they honoured him with a splendid and imposing burial and mourned long for him. And the bench on which he used to sit when he was weary they deemed a sacred stone, and decked it with garlands long after his death.1959

Demonax, by a strange personal charm, attained to an extraordinary popularity and reverence. But the great mass of philosophic preachers had to face a great deal of obloquy and vulgar contempt. Apart from the coarseness, arrogance, and inconsistency of many of them, which gave just offence, their very profession was an irritating challenge to a pleasure-loving and worldly age. Men who gloried in the splendour of their civic life, and were completely absorbed in it, who [pg 367]were flattered and cajoled by their magistrates and popular leaders, could hardly like to be told by the vagrant, homeless teacher, in beggar’s garb, that they were ignorant and perverted and lost in a maze of deception. They would hardly be pleased to hear that their civilisation was an empty show, without a solid core of character, that their hopes of happiness from a round of games and festivals, from the splendour of art in temples and statues, were the merest mirage. The message Beati pauperes spiritu—Beati qui lugent, will never be a popular one. That was the message to his age of the itinerant Cynic preacher, and his unkempt beard and ragged cloak and the fashion of his life made him the mark of cheap and abundant ridicule. Sometimes the contempt was deserved; no great movement for the elevation of humanity has been free from impostors. Yet the severe judgment of the Cynic missionaries on their age is that of the polished orator, who had as great a scorn as Lucian for the sensual or mercenary Cynic, and yet took up the scrip and staff himself, to propagate the same gospel as the Cynics.1960

Dion Chrysostom was certainly not a Cynic in the academic sense, but he belonged to the same great movement. He sprang from a good family at Prusa in Bithynia.1961 He was trained in all the arts of rhetoric, and taught and practised them in the early part of his life. A suspected friendship led to his banishment in the reign of Domitian, and in his exile, with the Phaedo and the De Falsa Legatione as his companions, he wandered over many lands, supporting himself often by menial service.1962 He at last found himself in his wanderings in regions where wild tribes of the Getae for a century and a half had been harrying the distant outposts of Hellenic civilisation on the northern shores of the Euxine.1963 The news of the death of Domitian reached a camp on the Danube when Dion was there. The soldiery, faithful to their emperor, were excited and indignant, but, under the spell of Dion’s eloquence, they were brought to acquiesce in the accession of the blameless Nerva. Dion at length returned to Rome, and rose to high favour at court. Trajan often [pg 368]invited him to his table, and used to take him as companion in his state carriage, although the honest soldier did not pretend to appreciate Dion’s rhetoric.1964

During his exile, as he tells us, Dion had been converted to more serious views of life. The triumphs of conventional declamation before fashionable audiences lost their glamour. Dion became conscious of a loftier mission to the dim masses of that far-spreading empire through whose cities and wildernesses he was wandering.1965 As to the eyes of Seneca, men seemed to Dion, amid all their fair, cheerful life, to be holding out their hands for help. Wherever he went, he found that, in his beggar’s dress, he was surrounded by crowds of people eager to hear any word of comfort or counsel in the doubts and troubles of their lives. They assumed that the poor wanderer was a philosopher. They plied him with questions on the great problem, How to live; and the elegant sophist was thus compelled to find an answer for them and for himself.1966

Dion never quite shook off the traditions and tone of the rhetorical school. The ambition to say things in the most elegant and attractive style, the love of amplifying, in leisurely and elaborate development, a commonplace and hackneyed theme still clings to him. His eighty orations are many of them rather essays than popular harangues. They range over all sorts of subjects, literary, mythological, and artistic, political and social, as well as purely ethical or religious. But, after all, Dion is unmistakably the preacher of a great moral revival and reform. He cannot be classed definitely with any particular school of philosophy. He is the apostle of Greek culture, yet he admires Diogenes, the founder of the Cynics.1967 If he had any philosophic ancestry, he would probably have traced himself to the Xenophontic Socrates.1968 But he is really the rhetorical apostle [pg 369]of the few great moral principles which were in the air, the common stock of Platonist, Stoic, Cynic, even the Epicurean. Philosophy to him is really a religion, the science of right living in conformity to the will of the Heavenly Power. But it is also the practice of right living. No Christian preacher has probably ever insisted more strongly on the gulf which separates the commonplace life of the senses from the life devoted to a moral ideal.1969 The only philosophy worth the name is the earnest quest of the path to true nobility and virtue, in obedience to the good genius, the unerring monitor within the breast of each of us, in whose counsels lies the secret of happiness properly so called.1970 Hence Dion speaks with the utmost scorn alike of the coarse Cynic impostor, who disgraces his calling by buffoonery and debauchery,1971 and the philosophic exquisite who tickles the ears of a fashionable audience with delicacies of phrase, but never thinks of trying to make them better men. He feels a sincere indignation at this dilettante trifling, in view of a world which is in urgent need of practical guidance.1972 For Dion, after all his wanderings through the Roman world, has no illusions as to its moral condition. He is almost as great a pessimist as Seneca or Juvenal. In spite of all its splendour and outward prosperity, society in the reign of Trajan seemed to Dion to be in a perilous state. Along with his own conversion came the revelation of the hopeless bewilderment of men in the search for happiness. Dimly conscious of their evil plight, they are yet utterly ignorant of the way to escape from it. They are swept hither and thither in a vortex of confused passions and longings for material pleasures.1973 Material civilisation, without any accompanying moral discipline, has produced the familiar and inevitable result, in an ever-increasing appetite for wealth and enjoyment and showy distinction, which ends in perpetual disillusionment. Dion warns the people of Tarsus that they are all [pg 370]sunk in a deep sensual slumber, and living in a world of mere dreams, in which the reality of things is absolutely inverted. Their famous river, their stately buildings, their wealth, even their religious festivals, on which they plume themselves, are the merest show of happiness.1974 Its real secret, which lies in temperance, justice, and true piety, is quite hidden from their eyes. When that secret is learnt, their buildings may be less stately, gold and silver will perhaps not be so abundant, there will be less soft and delicate living, there may be even fewer costly sacrifices as piety increases; but there will be a clearer perception of the true values of things, and a chastened temperance of spirit, which are the only security for the permanence of society. And the moralist points his audience to the splendid civilisations of the past that have perished because they were without a soul. Assyria and Lydia, the great cities of Magna Graecia which lived in a dream of luxury, what are they now? And, latest example of all, Macedon, who pushed her conquests to the gates of India, and came into possession of the hoarded treasures of the great Eastern Empires, is gone, and royal Pella, the home of the race, is now a heap of bricks.1975

It needed a courage springing from enthusiasm and conviction to preach such unpalatable truths to an age which gloried in its material splendour. Dion is often conscious of the difficulty of his task; and he exerts all his trained dexterity to appease opposition, and gain a hearing for his message.1976 As regards the reform of character, Dion has no new message to deliver. His is the old gospel of renunciation for the sake of freedom, the doctrine of a right estimate of competing objects of desire and of the true ends of life. Dion, like nearly all Greek moralists from Socrates downwards, treats moral error and reform as rather a matter of the intellect than of emotional impulse. Vice is the condition of a besotted mind, which has lost the power of seeing things as they really are;1977 [pg 371]conversion must be effected, not by appeals to the feelings, but by clarifying the mental vision. There is but little reference to religion as a means of reform, although Dion speaks of the love of God as a support of the virtuous character. As an experienced moral director, Dion knew well the necessity of constant iteration of the old truths. Just as the sick man will violate his doctor’s orders, well knowing that he does so to his hurt, so the moral patient may long refuse to follow a principle of life which his reason has accepted.1978 And so the preacher, instead of apologising for repeating himself, will regard it as a duty and a necessity to do so.

But Dion did not aim at the formation of any cloistered virtue, concentrated on personal salvation. He has a fine passage in which he shows that retreat, (ἀναχώρησις) detachment of spirit, is quite possible without withdrawing from the noises of the world.1979 And he felt himself charged with a mission to bring the higher principles of conduct into the civic life of the time. We know from Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan, that the great cities of Bithynia, and not least Dion’s birthplace,1980 were then suffering from unskilful administration and wasteful finance. Dion completes the picture by showing us their miserable bickerings and jealousies about the most trivial things. He denounces the unscrupulous flattery of the masses by men whose only object was the transient distinction of municipal office, the passion for place and power, without any sober wish to serve or elevate the community. He also exposes the caprice, the lazy selfishness, and the petulant ingratitude of the crowd.1981 Dion, it is true, is an idealist, and his ideals of society are perhaps not much nearer realisation in some of our great cities than they were then. He often delivered his message to the most unpromising audiences. Some of his finest conceptions of social reorganisation were expounded before rude gatherings on the very verge of civilisation.1982 Once, in his wanderings, he found himself under the walls of a half-ruined Greek town, which had been attacked, the day before, by a horde of Scythian barbarians. There, on the steps of the temple of Zeus, he [pg 372]expounded to an eager throng of mean Greek traders, with all the worst vices, and only some faded traces of the culture of their race, the true meaning of city life.1983 It is a society of men under the kingship of law, from which all greed, intemperance, and violence have been banished; a little world which, in its peaceful order and linked harmonies, should be modelled on the more majestic order of the great city of the universe, the city of gods and men.

How far from their ideal were the cities of his native land, Dion saw only too well. The urban life of Asia, as the result of the Greek conquests, has perhaps never been surpassed in external splendour and prosperity, and even in a diffusion of intellectual culture. The palmy days of the glorious spring-time of Hellenic vigour and genius in Miletus, Phocaea, and Rhodes, seemed to be reproduced even in inland places, which for 1500 years have returned to waste.1984 Agriculture and trade combined to produce an extraordinary and prosperous activity. Education was endowed and organised, and literary culture became almost universal.1985 Nowhere did the wandering sophist find more eager audiences, and no part of the Roman world in that age contributed so great a number of teachers, physicians, and philosophers. The single province of Bithynia, within half a century, could boast of such names as Arrian, Dion Cassius, and Dion Chrysostom himself. But moral and political improvement did not keep pace with an immense material and intellectual progress. The life of the cities indeed was very intense; but, in the absence of the wider interests of the great days of freedom, they wasted their energies in futile contests for visionary distinctions and advantages. A continual struggle was going on for the “primacy” of the province, and the name of metropolis. Ephesus, the real capital, was challenged by Smyrna, which on its coins describes itself as “first in greatness and beauty.”1986 The feuds between Nicomedia and its near neighbour Nicaea caused Dion particular anxiety, and his speech [pg 373]to the people of Nicomedia is the best picture of the evils which we are describing.1987

The two cities have much in common. Their families have intermarried; they are constantly meeting in their markets and great religious festivals. They are bound together by innumerable ties of private friendship.1988 The primacy for which they contend is the merest figment; there are no material advantages at stake. Rather, these dissensions give a corrupt Roman governor, who trades upon them, the power to injure both the rival claimants.1989 The same is true of other cities. Tarsus is engaged in bitter contention with Mallus for a mere line of sandhills on their frontiers.1990 Dion’s native Prusa has an exasperated quarrel with Apamea for no solid reason whatever, although the two towns are closely linked by nature to one another, and mutually dependent through their trade and manufactures. All this miserable and foolish jealousy Dion exposes with excellent skill and sense; and he employs an abundant wealth of illustration in painting the happiness which attends harmony and good-will. It is the law of the universe, from the tiny gregarious insect whose life is but for a day, to the eternal procession of the starry spheres. The ant, in the common industry of the Lilliputian commonwealth, yields to his brother toiler, or helps him on his way.1991 The primal elements of the Cosmos are tempered to a due observance of their several bounds and laws. The sun himself hides his splendour each night to give place to the lesser radiance of the stars. This is rhetoric, of course, but it is rhetoric with a moral burden. And it is impossible not to admire the lofty tone of this heathen sophist, preaching the duty of forgiveness, of mutual love and deference, the blessing of the quiet spirit “which seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.”1992 There is a certain pathos in remembering that, within the very walls where these elevated orations were delivered, there were shy companies of men and women meeting in the early dawn to sing hymns to One who, three generations before in Galilee, had taught a similar gospel of love [pg 374]and self-suppression, but with a strange mystic charm, denied to the pagan eloquence, and that Dion seems never to have known those with whom he had so close a kindred.1993

In many another oration Dion strove to raise the moral tone of his age. His speech to the Alexandrians is probably his most gallant protest against the besetting sins of a great population. Alexandria was a congeries of many races, in which probably the Hellenic type of the Ptolemies had succumbed to the enduring Egyptian morale.1994 It was a populace at once sensual and superstitious, passionately devoted to all excitement, whether of games or orgiastic religious festival, with a jeering irreverent vein, which did not spare even the greatest Emperors. It was a curious medley—the seat of the most renowned university of the ancient world, the gathering-place and seed-ground of ideas which united the immemorial mysticism of the East with the clear, cold reason of Hellas—and yet a seething hot-bed of obscenity, which infected the Roman world, a mob who gave way to lunatic excitement over the triumph of an actor, or a singer, or the victor in a chariot-race.1995 It required no ordinary courage to address such a crowd, and to charge them with their glaring faults. The people of Alexandria are literally intoxicated with a song. The music which, according to old Greek theory, should regulate the passions, here only maddens them.1996 And in the races all human dignity seems to be utterly lost in the futile excitement of the spectators over some low fellow contending for a prize in solid cash.1997 Such a mob earns only the contempt of its rulers, and men say that the Alexandrians care for nothing but the “big loaf” and the sight of a race.1998 All the dignity which should surround a great people is forgotten in the theatre. It is useless to boast of the majestic and bounteous river, the harbours and markets crowded with the merchandise of Western or Indian seas, of the visitors from every land, from Italy, Greece, and Syria, from the Borysthenes, the Oxus, and the Ganges.1999 They come to witness the shame of the second [pg 375]city in the world, which, in the wantonness of prosperity, has lost the temperate dignity and orderly calm that are the real glory of a great people.

As a foil to the feverish life of luxury, quarrelsome rivalry, and vulgar excitement which prevailed in the great towns, Dion has left a prose idyll to idealise the simple pleasures and virtues of the country.2000 It is also a dirge over the decay of Greece, when crops were being reaped in the agora of historic cities, and the tall grasses grew around the statues of gods and heroes of the olden time.2001 A traveller, cast ashore in the wreck of his vessel on the dreaded Hollows of Euboea, was sheltered, in a rude, warm-hearted fashion, by some peasants. Their fathers had been turned adrift in the confiscation of the estate of a great noble in some trouble with the emperor, and they had made themselves a lonely home on a pastoral slope, close to a stream, with the neighbouring shade of trees. They had taken into tillage a few fields around their huts; they drove their cattle to the high mountain pastures in summer time, and in the winter they turned to hunting the game along the snowy tracks. Of city life they know hardly anything. One of them, indeed, had been twice in the neighbouring town, and he tells what he saw there in a lively way. It is all a mere shadow or caricature of the old civic life of Greece. There are the rival orators, patriot or demagogue, the frivolous and capricious crowd, the vote of the privilege of dining in the town-hall. The serious purpose of the piece, however, is to idealise the simple virtue and happiness of the country folk, and to discuss the disheartening problem of the poor in great cities.2002 It is in the main the problem of our modern urban life, and Dion had evidently thought deeply about it, and was an acute observer of the social misery which is the same from age to age. Fortified by the divine Homer and ordinary experience, he points out that the poor are more generous and helpful to the needy than are the rich out of their ample store. Too often the seeming bounty of the wealthy benefactor is of the nature of a loan, which is to be returned with due interest.2003 The struggles and temptations of the poor in great cities suggest a [pg 376]discussion of the perpetual problem of prostitution, which probably no ancient writer ever faced so boldly. The double degradation of humanity, which it involved in the ancient world, is powerfully painted;2004 and the plea that the indulgence in venal immorality is the only alternative to insidious attacks on family virtue is discussed with singular firmness and yet delicacy of touch.2005 The same detachment from contemporary prejudice is shown in Dion’s treatment of slavery. He sees its fell effects on the masters, in producing sensuality, languor, and helpless dependence on others for the slightest services. He points out that there is no criterion afforded by nature to distinguish slave and free. The so-called free man of the highest rank may be the offspring of a servile amour, and the so-called slave may be ingenuous in every sense, condemned to bondage by an accident of fortune.2006 Just as external freedom does not imply moral worth, so legal enslavement does not imply moral degradation.2007 If moral justice always fixed the position of men in society by their deserts, master and slave would often have to change places.2008 In Dion’s judgment as to the enervating effects of slavery on the slave-owning class, and the absence of any moral or mental distinction to justify the institution, he is in singular harmony with Seneca.

The similarity of tone between Seneca and Dion is perhaps even more marked in their treatment of monarchy. Inherited, like so much else, from the great Greek thinkers of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the ideal of a beneficent and unselfish prince, the true “shepherd of the people,” the antithesis of the lawless and sensual tyrant, had become, partly, no doubt, through the influence of the schools of rhetoric, a common possession of cultivated minds. Vespasian gave it a certain reality, if his son Domitian showed how easily the king might pass into the tyrant. The dream of an earthly providence, presiding over the Roman world, dawned in more durable splendour with the accession of Trajan, and Pliny, his panegyrist, has left us a sketch of the patriot prince, [pg 377]which is almost identical with the lines of Dion’s ideal.2009 Both Dion and Pliny were favourites of Trajan, and some of Dion’s orations were delivered before his court. As a court preacher, he justly boasts that he is no mere flatterer, although we may suspect that his picture of the ideal monarch might have been interpreted as drawn from the character of Trajan, just as his picture of the tyrant was probably suggested by Domitian.2010 Still, we may well believe the orator when he says that the man who had bearded the one at the cost of long exile and penury, was not likely to flatter the other for the gold or honours which he despised. And in these discourses, Dion seems full of the sense of a divine mission. Once, on his wanderings, he lost his way somewhere on the boundaries of Arcadia, and, ascending a knoll to recover the track, he found himself before a rude, ruined shrine of Heracles, hung with votive offerings of the chase.2011 An aged woman sat by them who told him that she had a spirit of divination from the gods. The shepherds and peasants used to come to her with questions about the fate of their flocks and crops. And she now entrusted Dion with a message to the great ruler of many men whom she prophesied Dion was soon to meet.2012 It was a tale of Heracles, the great benefactor of men from the rising to the setting sun, who, by his simple strength, crushed all lawless monsters and gave the world an ordered peace. His father inspired him with noble impulse for his task by oracle and omen, and sent Hermes once, when Heracles was still a boy at Thebes, to show him the vision of the Two Peaks, and strengthen him in his virtue.2013 They rose from the same rocky roots, amid precipitous crags and deep ravines, and the noise of many waters. At first they seemed to be one mountain mass, but they soon parted wide asunder, the one being sacred to Zeus, the other to the lawless Typhon. On the one crest, rising into the cloudless ether, Kingship sits enthroned, in the likeness of a fair, stately woman, clad in robes of glistening white, and wielding a sceptre of brighter and purer metal than any silver or gold. Under her steady gaze of radiant dignity, the good felt a [pg 378]cheerful confidence, the bad quailed and shrank away. She was surrounded by handmaidens of a beauty like her own, Justice and Peace and Order. The paths to the other peak were many and secret, and skirted an abyss, streaming with blood or choked with corpses. Its top was wrapped in mist and cloud, and there sat Tyranny on a far higher and more pompous throne, adorned with gold and ivory and many a gorgeous colour, but a throne rocking and unstable. She strove to make herself like to Kingship, but it was all mere hollow pretence. Instead of the gracious smile, there was a servile, hypocritical leer; instead of the glance of dignity, there was a savage scowl. And around her sat a throng bearing ill-omened names, Cruelty and Lust, Lawlessness and Flattery and Sedition. On a question from Hermes, the youthful Heracles made his choice, and his father gave him his commission to be the saviour of men.

In this fashion Dion, like Aeschylus, recasts old myth to make it the vehicle of moral instruction, just as he finds in Homer the true teacher of kings.2014 The theory of ideal monarchy is developed at such length as may have somewhat wearied the emperor. But it really is based on a few great principles. True kings, in Homer’s phrase, are sons of Zeus, and they are shepherds of the people. All genuine political power rests on virtue, and ultimately on the favour of Heaven. A king is appointed by God to work the good of his subjects. And, as his authority is divine, an image on earth of the sovereignty of Zeus, the monarch will be a scrupulously religious man in the highest sense,2015 not merely by offering costly sacrifices, but by righteousness, diligence, and self-sacrifice in performing the duties of his solemn charge. The many titles addressed to Father Zeus represent so many aspects of royal activity and virtue. The true prince will be the father of his people, surrounded and guarded by a loving reverence, which never degenerates into fear. His only aim will be their good. He will keep sleepless watch over the weak, the careless, those who are heedless for themselves. Commanding infinite resources, he will know less of mere pleasure than any man within his realm. With such immense responsibilities, he will be the most laborious of all. His only advantage over the private citizen is in his boundless [pg 379]command of friendship; for all men must be well-wishers to one wielding such a beneficent power, with whom, from his conception of his mission, they must feel an absolute identity of interest. And the king’s greatest need is friendship, to provide him with myriads of hands and eyes in the vast work of government.2016 Herein lies the sharpest contrast between the true king and the tyrant, a contrast which was a commonplace in antiquity, but which was stamped afresh by the juxtaposition of the reign of Domitian and the reign of Trajan. The universal hatred which pursued a bad Caesar even beyond the grave, which erased his name from monuments and closed its eyes even to intervals of serious purpose for the general weal, was a terrible illustration of the lonely friendlessness of selfish power.2017 Instead of loyal and grateful friendship, the despot was mocked by a venal flattery which was only its mimicry. The good monarch will treat flatterers as false coiners who cause the genuine currency to be suspected. This counsel and others of Dion were often little regarded by succeeding emperors. Yet even the last shadowy princes of the fifth century professed themselves the guardians of the human race, and are oppressed by an ideal of universal beneficence which they are impotent to realise.2018

Hitherto we have been occupied with the preaching of Dion on personal conduct, the reform of civic life, or the duties of imperial power. It cannot be said that he discusses these subjects without reference to religious beliefs and aspirations.2019 But religion is rather in the background; the reverence for the Heavenly Powers is rather assumed as a necessary basis for human life rightly ordered. There is one oration, however, of supreme interest to the modern mind, in which Dion goes to the root of all religion, and examines the sources of belief in God and the justification of anthropomorphic imagery in representing Him. This utterance was called forth by a visit to Olympia when Dion was advanced in years.2020 The games of Olympia were a dazzling and [pg 380]inspiring spectacle, and the multitude which gathered there from all parts of the world was a splendid audience. But, with the sound of the sacred trumpet, and the herald’s voice, proclaiming the victor, in his ears, Dion turns away from all the glory of youthful strength and grace, even from the legendary splendour of the great festival,2021 to the majestic figure of the Olympian Zeus, which had been graved by the hand of Pheidias more than 500 years before, and to the thoughts of the divine world which it suggested. That greatest triumph of idealism in plastic art, inspired by famous lines in the Iliad, was, by the consent of all antiquity, the masterpiece of Pheidias. Ancient writers of many ages are lost in admiration of the mingled majesty and benignity which the divine effigy expressed. To the eyes of Lucian it seemed “the very son of Kronos brought down to earth, and set to watch over the lonely plain of Elis.”2022 There it sat watching for more than 800 years, till it was swept away in the fierce, final effort to dethrone the religion of the past. Yet the majestic image, which attracted the fury of the iconoclasts of the reign of Theodosius, inspired Dion with thoughts of the Divine nature which travelled far beyond the paganism either of poetry or of the crowd. It was not merely the masterpiece of artistic and constructive skill which had fascinated the gaze, and borne the vicissitudes, of so many centuries, that moved his admiration; it was also, and more, the moral effect of that miracle of art on the spectator. The wildest and fiercest of the brute creation might be calmed and softened by the air of majestic peace and kindness which floated around the gold and ivory. “Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life.”2023

But the thoughts of Dion, in presence of the majestic figure at Olympia, take a wider range. His theme is nothing [pg 381]less than the sources of our idea of God, and the place of art in religion. He pours his scorn upon hedonistic atheism. Our conception of God is innate, original, universal among all the races of men.2024 It is the product of the higher reason, contemplating the majestic order, minute adaptation, and beneficent provision for human wants in the natural world. In that great temple, with its alternations of gloom and splendour, its many voices of joy or of terror, man is being perpetually initiated in the Great Mysteries, on a grander scale than at Eleusis, with God Himself to preside over the rites. The belief in God depends in the first instance on no human teaching, any more than does the love of child to parent. But this original intuition and belief in divine powers finds expression through the genius of inspired poets; it is reinforced by the imperative prescriptions of the founders and lawgivers of states; it takes external form in bronze or gold and ivory or marble, under the cunning hand of the great artist; it is developed and expounded by philosophy.2025 Like all the deepest thinkers of his time, Dion is persuaded of the certainty of God’s existence, but he is equally conscious of the remoteness of the Infinite Spirit, and of the weakness of all human effort to approach, or to picture it to the mind of man. We are to Dion like “children crying in the night, and with no language but a cry.”2026 Yet the child will strive to image forth the face of the Father, although it is hidden behind a veil which will never be withdrawn in this world. The genius of poetry, commanding the most versatile power of giving utterance to the religious imagination, is first in order and in power. Law and institution follow in its wake. The plastic arts, under cramping limitations, come later still to body forth the divine dreams of the elder bards. Dion had thought much on the relative power of poetry and the sculptor’s art to give expression to the thoughts and feelings of man about the Divine nature. The boundless power or licence of language to find a symbol for every thought or image on the phantasy is seen at its height in Homer, who [pg 382]riots in an almost lawless exercise of his gifts.2027 But the chief importance of the discussion lies in an arraignment of Pheidias for attempting to image in visible form the great Soul and Ruler of the universe, Whom mortal eye has never seen and can never see. His defence is very interesting, both as a clear statement of the limitations of the plastic arts, and as a justification of material images of the Divine.