Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum
concludes Lucretius, and yet it was not perhaps his last thought.
M. Patin has a fine study of the poet in which he deals with "the anti-Lucretius in Lucretius." Even in the matter of religion, his keen observation of Nature frequently suggests difficulties which are more powerfully expressed and more convincing than the arguments with which he himself tries to refute them. "When we look up to the heavenly regions of the great universe, the æther set on high above the glittering stars, and the thought comes into our mind of the sun and moon and their courses; then indeed in hearts laden with other woes that doubt too begins to wake and raise its head—can it be perchance, after all, that we have to do with some vast Divine power that wheels those bright stars each in his orbit? Again who is there whose mind does not shrink into itself with fear of the gods, whose limbs do not creep with terror, when the parched earth rocks under horrible blow of the thunderbolt, and the roar sweeps over the vast sky? ... When too the utmost fury of the wild wind scours the sea and sweeps over its waters the admiral with his stout legions and his elephants, does he not in prayer seek peace with the gods? ... but all in vain, since, full oft, caught in the whirlwind, he is driven, for all his prayers, on, on to the shoals of death. Thus does some hidden power trample on mankind.... Again, when the whole earth rocks under their feet, and towns fall at the shock or hang ready to collapse, what wonder if men despise themselves, and make over to the gods high prerogative and marvellous powers to govern all things?"[95]
That Lucretius should be so open to impressions of this kind, in spite of his philosophy, is ra measure of his greatness as a poet. It adds weight and worth to all that he says—to his hatred of the polytheism and superstition round about him, and to his judgment upon their effect in darkening and benumbing the minds of men. He understands the feelings which he dislikes—he has felt them. The spectacle of the unguessed power that tramples on mankind has moved him; and he has suffered the distress of all delicate spirits in times of bloodshed and disorder. He knows the effect of such times upon those who still worship. "Much more keenly in evil days do they turn their minds to religion."[96]
We have now to consider another poet, a disciple of Lucretius in his early years, who, under the influence of Nature and human experience, moved away from Epicureanism, and sought reconciliation with the gods, though he was too honest with himself to find peace in the systems and ideas that were yet available.
Virgil
Virgil was born in the year 70 B.C.—the son of a little self-made man in a village North of the Po. He grew up in the country, with a spirit that year by year grew more sensitive to every aspect of the world around him. No Roman poet had a more gentle and sympathetic love of Nature; none ever entered so deeply and so tenderly into the sorrows of men. He lived through forty years of Civil War, veiled and open. He saw its effects in broken homes and aching hearts, in coarsened minds and reckless lives. He was driven from his own farm, and had, like Æneas, to rescue an aged and blind father. Under such experience his early Epicureanism dissolved—it had always been too genial to be the true kind. The Epicurean should never go beyond friendship, and Virgil loved. His love of the land in which he was born showed it to him more worthy to be loved than men had yet realized. Virgil was the pioneer who discovered the beauty, the charm and the romance of Italy. He loved the Italians and saw poetry in their hardy lives and quiet virtues, though they were not Greeks. His love of his father and of his land opened to him the significance of all love, and the deepening and widening of his experience is to be read in the music, stronger and profounder, that time reveals in his poetry.
Here was a poet who loved Rome more than ever did Augustus or Horace, and he had no such speedy cure as they for "the woes of sorrowful Hesperia." The loss of faith in the old gods meant more to him than to them, so his tone in speaking of them is quieter, a great deal, than that of Horace. He took the decline of morals more seriously and more inwardly, and he saw more deeply into the springs of action; he could never lightly use the talk of rapid and sweeping reformation, as his friend did in the odes which the Emperor inspired. He had every belief in Augustus, who was dearer to him personally than to Horace, and he hoped for much outcome from the new movement in the State. But with all his absorbing interest in his own times—and how deep that interest was, only long and minute study of his poems will reveal—he was without scheme or policy. He came before his countrymen, as prophets and poets do in all ages—a child in affairs, but a man in inward experience; he had little or nothing to offer but the impressions left upon his soul by human life. He had the advantage over most prophets in being a "lord of language"; he drew more music from Latin words than had ever been achieved before or was ever reached again.
He told men of a new experience of Nature. It is hardly exaggeration to say that he stands nearer Wordsworth in this feeling than any other poet. He had the same "impulses of deeper birth"; he had seen new gleams and heard new voices; he had enjoyed what no Italian had before, and he spoke in a new way, unintelligible then, and unintelligible still, to those who have not seen and heard the same things. The gist of it all he tried to give in the language of Pantheism, which the Stoics had borrowed from Pythagoras:—"The Deity, they tell us, pervades all, earth and the expanse of sea, and the deep vault of heaven; from Him flocks, herds, men, wild beasts of every sort, each creature at its birth draws the bright thread of life; further, to Him all things return, are restored and reduced—death has no place among them; but they fly up alive into the ranks of the stars and take their seats aloft in the sky." So John Conington did the passage into English. But in such cases it may be said with no disrespect to the commentator who has done so much for his poet, the original words stand to the translation, as Virgil's thought did to the same thought in a Stoic's brain.
Deum namque ire per omnis
Terrasque tractusque maris cælumque profundum;
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas;
Scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri
Omnia, nec morti esse locum, sed viva volare
Sideris in numerum atque alto succedere cælo.
(Georgics, iv, 221.)
The words might represent a fancy, or a dogma of the schools and many no doubt so read them, because they had no experience to help them. But to others it is clear that the passage is one of the deepest import, for it is the key to Virgil's mind and the thought is an expression of what we can call by no other name than religion. Around him men and women were seeking communion with gods; he had had communion with what he could not name—he had experienced religion in a very deep, abiding and true way. There is nothing for it—at least for Englishmen—but to quote the "lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"—
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Virgil's experience did not stop here; like Wordsworth, he found
Nature's self
By all varieties of human love
Assisted.
He had been a son and a brother; and such relations of men to men impressed him—they took him into the deepest and most beautiful regions of life; and one of the charms of Italy was that it was written all over with the records of human love and helpfulness. The clearing, the orchard, the hilltop town, the bed of flowers, all spoke to him "words that could not be uttered." His long acquaintance with such scripts brought it about that he found
in man an object of delight,
Of pure imagination and of love—
and he came to the Roman people with a deep impression of human worth—something unknown altogether in Roman poetry before or after. Lucretius was impressed with man's insignificance in the universe; Horace, with man's folly. Virgil's poetry throbbed with the sense of man's grandeur and his sanctity.
This human greatness, which his poetry brought home to the sympathetic reader, was not altogether foreign to the thought of the day. Homo sacra res homini[97] was the teaching of the Stoics, but man was a more sacred thing to the poet than to the philosopher, for what the philosopher conceived to be a flaw and a weakness in man, the poet found to be man's chief significance. The Stoic loudly proclaimed man to be a member of the universe. The poet found man knit to man by a myriad ties, the strength of which he realized through that pain against which the Stoic sought to safeguard him. Man revealed to the poet his inner greatness in the haunting sense of his limitations—he could not be self-sufficient (autárkês) as the Stoic urged; he depended on men, on women and children, on the beauty of grass and living creature, of the sea and sky. And even all these things could not satisfy his craving for love and fellowship; he felt a "hunger for the infinite." Here perhaps is the greatest contribution of Virgil to the life of the age.
He, the poet to whom man and the world were most various and meant most, came to his people, and, without any articulate expression of it in direct words, made it clear to them that he had felt a gap in the heart of things, which philosophy could never fill. Philosophy could remove this sense of incompleteness, but only at the cost of love; and love was to Virgil, as his poetry shows, the very essence of life. Yet he gave, and not altogether unconsciously, the impression that in proportion as love is apprehended, its demands extend beyond the present. The sixth book of the Æneid settles nothing and proves nothing, but it expresses an instinct, strong in Virgil, as the result of experience, that love must reach beyond the grave. Further, the whole story of Æneas is an utterance of man's craving for God, of the sense of man's incompleteness without a divine complement. These are the records of Virgil's life, intensely individual, but not peculiar to himself. In the literature of his century, there is little indication of such instincts, but the history of four hundred years shows that they were deep in the general heart of man.
These impressions Virgil brought before the Roman world. As such things are, they were a criticism, and they meant a change of values. In the light of them, the restoration of religion by Augustus became a little thing; the popular superstition of the day was stamped as vulgar and trivial in itself, while it became the sign of deep and unsatisfied craving in the human heart; and lastly the current philosophies, in the face of Virgil's poetry, were felt to be shallow and cold, talk of the lip and trick of the brain. Of course this is not just to the philosophers who did much for the world, and without whom Virgil would not have been what he was. None the less, it was written in Virgil's poetry that the religions and philosophies of mankind must be thought over anew.
This is no light contribution to an age or to mankind. In this case it carries with it the whole story that lies before us. Such an expression of a common instinct gave new force to that instinct; it added a powerful impulse to the deepest passion that man knows; and, in spite of the uncertainties which beset the poet himself, it gave new hope to mankind that the cry of the human heart for God was one that should receive an answer.
Chapter I Footnotes:
[1] Cic. ad fam. x, 16, 2, Ipse tibi sis senatus.
[2] Georgic i, 505-514 (Conington's translation, with alterations).
[3] Polybius, vi, 56, Shuckburgh's Translation.
[4] Polybius, xviii, 35.
[5] Sextus Empiricus, Adv. mathematicos, ix, 54.
[6] Cicero, N.D. i, 42, 118.
[7] Diodorus Siculus, i, 2.
[8] Quoted by Augustine, C.D. iv, 27; vi, 5; also referred to by Tertullian, ad Natt. ii, 1.
[9] Suetonius, Augustus, 31, 75, 93; Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 344.
[10] Suet. Aug. 90, 92.
[11] Horace, Odes, iii, 24, 9-20, Gladstone's version.
[12] Horace, Odes, iii, 6, Delicta maiorum.
[13] De Haruspicum Responsis, 9, 19; N.D. ii, 3, 8.
[14] E.g. Apol. 25, with a serious criticism of the contrast between Roman character before and after the conquest of the world,—before and after the invasion of Rome by the images and idols of Etruscans and Greeks.
[15] Augustine C.D. vi, 2.
[16] On Æneid, xi, 785.
[17] Propertius, v, 1, 69.
[18] Ovid, Fasti, i, 7.
[19] Livy, i, 19.
[20] Livy, iv, 30.
[21] Plutarch, Romulus, 21; Cæsar, 61, Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 310 f.
[22] Suetonius, Aug. 31, Warde Fowler, op. cit. p. 190.
[23] Mommsen, History, i, p. 231, who translates the hymn.
[24] Quintilian, i, 6, 40. See specimen in Varro, L.L. vii, 26.
[25] Epp. ii, 1, 20-27, 86.
[26] Cicero, ad fam. xiv, 4, 1.
[27] Hor. Sat. i, 9, 69: Porphyrion is the authority for the comedies.
[28] Prudentius, contra Symmachum, i, 197-218.
[29] Tibullus, i, 10, 15.
[30] C.D. iv, 8. "To an early Greek," says Mr Gilbert Murray, "the earth, water and air were full of living eyes: of theoi, of daimones, of Kêres. One early poet says emphatically that the air is so crowded full of them that there is no room to put in the spike of an ear of corn without touching one."—Rise of Greek Epic, p. 82.
[31] de Spect. 5; cf. de Idol. 16; de cor. mil. 13, gods of the door; de Anima, 39, goddesses of child-birth.
[32] Lucr. iv, 580 f. Virg. Æn. viii, 314.
[33] Cic. N.D. ii, 2, 6: cf. De Div. i, 45, 101. Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals, pp. 256 ff. on the Fauni.
[34] Pliny, N.H. viii, 151; xxx, 84.
[35] Plutarch, Numa, 15; de facie in orbe lunæ, 30; Ovid, Fasti, iii, 291.
[36] Horace's ode attests the power of the Fauns over crops and herds.
[37] Dionys. Hal. v, 16.
[38] Pliny, N.H. xii, 3.
[39] Ovid, Fasti, iii, 267. Licia dependent longas velantia sæpes, et posita est meritæ multa tabella deæ.
[40] Virgil, Æn. x, 423.
[41] Horace, Odes, iii, 13.
[42] W. Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 240.
[43] Cf. Tertullian, de Baptismo, 5. Annon et alias sine ullo Sacramento immundi spiritus aquis incubant, adfectantes illam in primordio divini spiritus gestationem? Sciunt opaci quique fontes, et avii quique rivi, et in balneis piscinæ et euripi in domibus, vel cisternæ et putei, qui rapere dicuntur, scilicet per vim spiritus nocentis. Nympholeptos et lymphaticos et hydrophobos vocant quos aquæ necaverunt aut amentia vel formidine exercuerunt. Quorsum ista retulimus? Ne quis durius credat angelum dei sanctum aquis in salutem hominis temperandis adesse.
[44] Ovid, Fasti, vi, 155 f.
[45] Cf. (Lucian) Asinus, 24. poî badixeis aôría talaipôre; oudè tà daimónia dédoikas.
[46] Pliny, N.H. xxxvi, 204.
[47] Lampridius, Alex. Sev. 29. 2.
[48] Fasti, v. 145. Cf. Prudentius, adv. Symm, ii, 445 f.
[49] Odes, iii, 23. Farre pio.
[50] On Georgic i, 302, See Varro, ap. Aug. C.D. vii, 13. Also Tert. de Anima, 39, Sic et omnibus genii deputantur, quod dæmonum nomen est. Adeo nulla ferme nativitas munda, utique ethnicorum.
[51] Hor. Ep. ii. 2, 187 f. Howes' translation. Cf. Faerie Queene, II, xii, 47.
[52] See J. H. Moulton in Journal of Theological Studies, III, 514.
[53] Burkitt, Early Eastern Christianity, p. 222.
[54] Fasti, iii, 57; Seneca, Ep. 18. 1, December est mensis: cum maxime civitas sudat, ius luxuries publicæ datum est ... ut non videatur mihi errasse qui dixit: olim mensem Decembrem fuisse nunc annum.
[55] Cf. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, lect. xi.
[56] Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals, pp. 106 f.
[57] Ovid, Fasti, ii, 409 f. Warde Fowler, op. cit. pp. 306 f.
[58] Ovid, Fasti, v, 490.
[59] De Divinatione, i, 1, 2.
[60] ib. i, 3, 5.
[61] ib. i, 39, 84.
[62] De Divinatione, i, 38, 82, 83. Cf. Tertullian, de Anima, 46. Sed et Stoici deum malunt providentissimum humanæ institutioni inter cetera præsidia divinatricum artium et disciplinarum somnia quoque nobis indidisse, peculiare solatium naturalis oraculi.
[63] Panaetius and Seneca should be excepted from this charge.
[64] Cic. de Div. ii, 72, 149, 150. Cf. de Legg. ii, 13, 32. Plutarch also has the same remark about sleep and superstition.
[65] Cf. Odes, iii, 27.
[66] Tusculans, i, 21, 48.
[67] Hor. Ep. ii, 2, 208; Howes.
[68] Tertullian, de Idol. 9, seimus magiæ et astrologiæ inter se societatem.
[69] Pliny the elder on Magic, N.H. xxx, opening sections; N.H. xxviii, 10, on incantations, polleantne aliquid verba et incantamenta carminum.
[70] Livy, xxix, 11, 14; Ovid, fasti, iv, 179 f. The goddess was embodied in a big stone.
[71] Lucretius, ii, 608 f.
[72] Cf. Strabo, c. 470; Juvenal, vi, 511 f.
[73] See Ramsay, Church in the Roman Empire, p. 397. The Latins used the word divinus in this way—Seneca, de teata vita, 26, 8.
[74] (Lucian) Asinus, 37. The same tale is amplified in Apuleius' Golden Ass, where the episode of these priests is given with more detail, in the eighth book. Seneca hints that a little blood might make a fair show; see his picture of the same, de beata vita, 26, 8.
[75] Tertullian, ad Natt. i, 10; Apel. 6. He has the strange fancy that Serapis was originally the Joseph of the book of Genesis, ad Natt. ii, 8.
[76] Valerius Maximus, i, 3, 4.
[77] Dio C. xlvii, 15.
[78] Tibullus, i, 3, 23 f. Cf. Propertius, ii, 28, 45; Ovid, A.A. iii, 635.
[79] Juvenal, vi, 522 f.
[80] Lucan, viii, 831, Isin semideosque canes.
[81] Ovid, Am. ii, 13, 7.
[82] Unless Isiaci coniectores is Cicero's own phrase, de Div. i, 58, 132.
[83] Cicero, Div. ii, 59, 121. For egkolmesis or incubatio see Mary Hamilton, Incubation (1906)
[84] Clem. Alex. Pædag. iii, 28, to the same effect. Tertullian on the temples, de Pud. c. 5. Reference may be made to the hierodules of the temples in ancient Asia and in modern India.
[85] Corp. Inscr. Lai. ii, 3386. The enumeration of the jewels was a safeguard against theft.
[86] Flinders Petrie, Religion of Ancient Egypt, p. 44; Hamilton, Incubation, pp. 174, 182 f.
[87] Julian, Or. iv, 136 B.
[88] Lucr. v, 1194.
[89] Lucr. i, 62-79.
[90] See Patin, La Poésie Latine, i, 120.
[91] Lucr. iii, 60 f.
[92] Pliny, N.H. xxx, 12, 13. Warde Fowler, Roman Festivals, pp. 111 f. on the Argei and the whole question of human sacrifice. For Plutarch's explanation of it as due not to gods but to evil demons who enforced it, see p. 107.
[93] Pliny, N.H. xxviii, 12; Plutarch, Marcellus, 3, where, however, the meaning may only be that the rites are done in symbol; he refers to the actual sacrifice of human beings in the past. See Tertullian, Apol. 9 on sacrifice of children in Africa in the reign of Tiberius.
[94] Strabo, c. 239. Strabo was a contemporary of Augustus. Cf. J. G. Frazer, Adonis Attis Osiris, p. 63, for another instance in this period.
[95] Lucr. v, 1204-1240. We may compare Browning's Bp. Blougram on the instability of unbelief:—
Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides—
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—
The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly.
[96] Lucr. iii, 53.
[97] Seneca, Ep. 95, 33.
"I am entering," writes Tacitus,[1] "upon the history of a period, rich in disasters, gloomy with wars, rent with seditions, nay, savage in its very hours of peace. Four Emperors perished by the sword; there were three civil wars; there were more with foreigners—and some had both characters at once.... Rome was wasted by fires, its oldest temples burnt, the very Capitol set in flames by Roman hands. There was defilement of sacred rites; adulteries in high places; the sea crowded with exiles; island rocks drenched with murder. Yet wilder was the frenzy in Rome; nobility, wealth, the refusal of office, its acceptance—everything was a crime, and virtue the surest ruin. Nor were the rewards of informers less odious than their deeds; one found his spoils in a priesthood or a consulate; another in a provincial governorship; another behind the throne; and all was one delirium of hate and terror; slaves were bribed to betray their masters, freedmen their patrons. He who had no foe was destroyed by his friend."
It was to this that Virgil's hope of a new Golden Age had come—Redeunt Saturnia regna. Augustus had restored the Republic; he had restored religion; and after a hundred years here is the outcome. Tacitus himself admits that the age was not "barren of virtues," that it "could show fine illustrations" of family love and friendship, and of heroic death. It must also be owned that the Provinces at large were better governed than under the Republic; and, further, that, when he wrote Tacitus thought of a particular period of civil disorder and that not a long one. Yet the reader of his Annals will feel that the description will cover more than the year 69; it is essentially true of the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, and it was to be true again of the reign of Domitian—of perhaps eighty years of the first century of our era. If it was not true of the whole Mediterranean world, or even of the whole of Rome, it was true at least of that half-Rome which gave its colour to the thinking of the world.
The Imperial court
Through all the elaborate pretences devised by Augustus to obscure the truth, through all the names and phrases and formalities, the Roman world had realized the central fact of despotism.[2] The Emperors themselves had grasped it with pride and terror. One at least was insane, and the position was enough to turn almost any brain. "Monarchy," in Herodotus' quaint sentence,[3] "would set the best man outside the ordinary thoughts." Plato's myth of Gyges was fulfilled—of the shepherd, who found a ring that made him invisible, and in its strength seduced a queen, murdered a king and became a tyrant. Gaius banished his own sisters, reminding them that he owned not only islands but swords; and he bade his grandmother remember that he could "do anything he liked and do it to anybody."[4] Oriental princes had been kept at Rome as hostages and had given the weaker-minded members of the Imperial family new ideas of royalty. The very word was spoken freely—in his treatise "On Clemency" Seneca uses again and again the word regnum without apology.
But what gave Despotism its sting was its uncertainty. Augustus had held a curiously complicated set of special powers severally conferred on him for specified periods, and technically they could be taken from him. The Senate was the Emperor's partner in the government of the world, and it was always conceivable that the partnership might cease, for it was not a definite institution—prince followed prince, it is true, but there was an element of accident about it all. The situation was difficult; Senate and Emperor eyed each other with suspicion—neither knew how far the other could go, or would go; neither knew the terms of the partnership. Tiberius wrote despatches to the Senate and he was an artist in concealing his meaning. The Senate had to guess what he wished; if it guessed wrong, he would resent the liberty; if it guessed right, he resented the appearance of servility. The solitude of the throne grew more and more uneasy.
Again, the republican government had been in the hands of free men, who ruled as magistrates, and the imperial government had no means of replacing them, for one free-born Roman could not take service with another. The Emperor had to fall back upon his own household. His Secretaries of State were slaves and freedmen—men very often of great ability, but their past was against them. If it had not depraved them, none the less it left upon them a social taint, which nothing could remove. They were despised by the men who courted them, and they knew it. It was almost impossible for such men not to be the gangrene of court and state. And as a fact we find that the freedman was throughout the readiest agent for all evil that Rome knew, and into the hands of such men the government of the world drifted. Under a weak, or a careless, or even an absent, Emperor Rome was governed by such men and such methods as we suppose to be peculiar to Sultanates and the East.
The honour, the property, the life of every Roman lay in the hands of eunuchs and valets, and, as these quarrelled or made friends, the fortunes of an old nobility changed with the hour. It had not been so under Augustus, nor was it so under Vespasian, nor under Trajan or his successors; but for the greater part of the first century A.D. Rome was governed by weak or vicious Emperors, and they by their servants. The spy and the informer were everywhere.
To this confusion fresh elements of uncertainty were added by the astrologer and mathematician, and it became treason to be interested in "the health of the prince." Superstition ruled the weakling—superstition, perpetually re-inforced by fresh hordes of Orientals, obsequious and unscrupulous. Seneca called the imperial court, which he knew, "a gloomy slave-gaol" (triste ergastulum).[5]
Reduced to merely registering the wishes of their rulers, the Roman nobility sought their own safety in frivolity and extravagance. To be thoughtful was to be suspected of independence and to invite danger. We naturally suppose moralists and satirists to exaggerate the vices of their contemporaries, but a sober survey of Roman morals in the first century—at any rate before 70 A.D.—reveals a great deal that is horrible. (Petronius is not exactly a moralist or a satirist, and there is plenty of other evidence.) Marriage does not thrive alongside of terror, nor yet where domestic slavery prevails, and in Rome both militated against purity of life. The Greek girl's beauty, her charm and wit, were everywhere available. For amusements, there were the gladiatorial shows,—brutal, we understand, but their horrible fascination we fortunately cannot know. The reader of St Augustine's Confessions will remember a famous passage on these games. The gladiators were the popular favourites of the day. They toured the country, they were modelled and painted. Their names survive scratched by loafers on the walls of Pompeii. The very children played at being gladiators, Epictetus said—"sometimes athletes, now monomachi, now trumpeters." The Colosseum had seats for 80,000 spectators of the games, "and is even now at once the most imposing and the most characteristic relic of pagan Rome."[6]
"Despotism tempered by epigrams"
Life was terrible in its fears and in its pleasures. If the poets drew Ages of Gold in the latter days of the Republic, now the philosophers and historians looked away to a "State of Nature," to times and places where greed and civilization were unknown. In those happy days, says Seneca, they enjoyed Nature in common; the stronger had not laid his hand upon the weaker; weapons lay unused, and human hands, unstained by human blood, turned all the hatred they felt upon the wild beasts; they knew quiet nights without a sigh, while the stars moved onward above them and the splendid pageant of Night; they drank from the stream and knew no water-pipes, and their meadows were beautiful without art; their home was Nature and not terrible; while our abodes form the greatest part of our terror.[7] In Germany, writes Tacitus, the marriage-bond is strict; there are no shows to tempt virtue; adultery is rare; none there makes a jest of vice, nec corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur; none but virgins marry and they marry to bear big children and to suckle them, sera invenum venus eoque inexhausta pubertas; and the children inherit the sturdy frames of their parents.[8]
But whatever their dreams of the Ideal, the actual was around them, and men had to accommodate themselves to it. In France before the Revolution, men spoke of the government as "despotism tempered by epigrams," and the happy phrase is as true of Imperial Rome. "Verses of unknown authorship reached the public and provoked" Tiberius,[9] who complained of the "circles and dinner-parties." Now and again the authors were discovered and were punished sufficiently. The tone of the society that produced them lives for ever in the Annals of Tacitus. It is worth noting how men and women turned to Tacitus and Seneca during the French Revolution and found their own experience written in their books.[10]
Others unpacked their hearts with words in tyrannicide declamations and imitations of Greek tragedy. Juvenal laughs at the crowded class-room busy killing tyrants,—waiting himself till they were dead. The tragedies got nearer the mark. Here are a few lines from some of Seneca's own:—
Who bids all pay one penalty of death
Knows not a tyrant's trade. Nay, vary it—
Forbid the wretch to die, and slay the happy. (H.F. 515.)
And is there none to teach them stealth and sin?
Why! then the throne will! (Thyestes 313.)
Let him who serves a king, fling justice forth,
Send every scruple packing from his heart;
Shame is no minister to wait on kings. (Phædra 436.)
But bitterness and epigram could not heal; and for healing and inward peace men longed more and more,[11] as they felt their own weakness, the power of evil and the terror of life; and they found both in a philosophy that had originally come into being under circumstances somewhat similar. They needed some foundation for life, some means of linking the individual to something that could not be shaken, and this they found in Stoicism. The Stoic philosopher saw a unity in this world of confusion—it was the "Generative Reason"—the spermatikós logos, the Divine Word, or Reason, that is the seed and vital principle, whence all things come and in virtue of which they live. All things came from fiery breath, pneûma diapuron, and returned to it. The whole universe was one polity—politeia tou kósmou—in virtue of the spirit that was its origin and its life, of the common end to which it tended, of the absolute and universal scope of the laws it obeyed—mind, matter, God, man, formed one community. The soul of the individual Roman partook of the very nature of God—divinæ particula auræ[12]—and in a way stood nearer to the divine than did anything else in the world, every detail of which, however, was some manifestation of the same divine essence. All men were in truth of one blood, of one family,—all and each, as Seneca says, sacred to each and all.[13] (Unum me donavit [sc. Natura rerum] omnibus, uni mihi omnes.)
Harmony with nature
Taught by the Stoic, the troubled Roman looked upon himself at once as a fragment of divinity,[14] an entity self-conscious and individual, and as a member of a divine system expressive of one divine idea, which his individuality subserved. These thoughts gave him ground and strength. If he seemed to be the slave and plaything of an Emperor or an imperial freedman, none the less a divine life pulsed within him, and he was an essential part of "the world." He had two havens of refuge—the universe and his own soul—both quite beyond the reach of the oppressor. Over and over we find both notes sounded in the writings of the Stoics and their followers—God within you and God without you. "Jupiter is all that you see, and all that lives within you."[15] There is a Providence that rules human and all other affairs; nothing happens that is not appointed; and to this Providence every man is related. "He who has once observed with understanding the administration of the world, and learnt that the greatest and supreme and most comprehensive community is the system (systema) of men and God, and that from God come the seeds whence all things, and especially rational beings, spring, why should not that man call himself a citizen of the world [Socrates' word kosmios], why not a son of God?"[16] And when we consider the individual, we find that God has put in his power "the best thing of all, the master thing"—the rational faculty. What is not in our power is the entire external world, of which we can alter nothing, but the use we make of it and its "appearances"[17] is our own. Confine yourself to "what is in your power" (tà epí soi), and no man can hurt you. If you can no longer endure life, leave it; but remember in doing so to withdraw quietly, not at a run; yet, says the sage, "Men! wait for God; when He shall give you the signal and release you from this service, then go to Him; but for the present endure to dwell in this place where He has set you."[18]
To sum up; the end of man's being and his true happiness is what Zeno expressed as "living harmoniously," a statement which Cleanthes developed by adding the words "with Nature." Harmony with Nature and with oneself is the ideal life; and this the outside world of Emperors, freedmen, bereavements and accidents generally, can neither give nor take away. "The end," says Diogenes Laertius, "is to act in conformity with nature, that is, at once with the nature which is in us and with the nature of the universe, doing nothing forbidden by that common law which is the right reason that pervades all things, and which is, indeed, the same in the Divine Being who administers the universal system of things. Thus the life according to nature is that virtuous and blessed flow of existence, which is enjoyed only by one who always acts so as to maintain the harmony between the dæmon (daimôn) within the individual and the will of the power that orders the universe."[19]
This was indeed a philosophy for men, and it was also congenial to Roman character, as history had already shown. It appealed to manhood, and whatever else has to be said of Stoics and Stoicism, it remains the fact that Stoicism inspired nearly all the great characters of the early Roman Empire, and nerved almost every attempt that was made to maintain the freedom and dignity of the human soul.[20] The government was not slow to realise the danger of men with such a trust in themselves and so free from fear.
On paper, perhaps, all religions and philosophies may at first glance seem equally good, and it is not till we test them in life that we can value them aright. And even here there is a wide field for error. Every religion has its saints—men recognizable to everyone as saints in the beauty, manhood and tenderness of their character—and it is perhaps humiliating to have to acknowledge that very often they seem to be so through some happy gift of Nature, quite independently of any effort they make, or of the religion to which they themselves generally attribute anything that redeems them from being base. We have to take, if possible, large masses of men, and to see how they are affected by the religion which we wish to study—average men, as we call them—for in this way we shall escape being led to hasty conclusions by happy instances of natural endowment, or of virtues carefully acquired in favourable circumstances of retirement or helpful environment. Side by side with such results as we may reach from wider study, we have to set our saints and heroes, for while St Francis would have been tender and Thrasea brave under any system of thought, it remains that the one was Christian and the other Stoic. We need the individual, if we are to avoid mere rough generalities; but we must be sure that he is representative in some way of the class and the system under review.
As representatives of the Stoicism of the early Roman Empire, two men stand out conspicuous—men whose characters may be known with a high degree of intimacy. The one was a Roman statesman, famous above all others in his age, and a man of letters—one of those writers who reveal themselves in every sentence they write and seem to leave records of every mood they have known. The other was an emancipated slave, who lived at Nicopolis in Epirus, away from the main channels of life, who wrote nothing, but whose conversations or monologues were faithfully recorded by a disciple.
"Notable Seneca," writes Carlyle, "so wistfully desirous to stand well with Truth and yet not ill with Nero, is and remains only our perhaps niceliest proportioned half-and-half, the plausiblest Plausible on record; no great man, no true man, no man at all... 'the father of all such as wear shovel-hats.'" This was in the essay on Diderot written in 1833; and we find in his diary for 10th August 1832, when Carlyle was fresh from reading Seneca, an earlier judgment to much the same effect—"He is father of all that work in sentimentality, and, by fine speaking and decent behaviour, study to serve God and mammon, to stand well with philosophy and not ill with Nero. His force had mostly oozed out of him, or corrupted itself into benevolence, virtue, sensibility. Oh! the everlasting clatter about virtue! virtue!! In the Devil's name be virtuous and no more about it."
Even in his most one-sided judgments Carlyle is apt to speak truth, though it is well to remember that he himself said that little is to be learnt of a man by dwelling only or mainly on his faults. That what he says in these passages is in some degree true, every candid reader must admit; but if he had written an essay instead of a paragraph we should have seen that a great deal more is true of Seneca. As it is, we must take what Carlyle says as representing a judgment which has often been passed upon Seneca, though seldom in such picturesque terms. It is in any case truer than Mommsen's description of Cicero.
Seneca's early life
Seneca was born at Cordova in Spain about the Christian era—certainly not long before it. His father was a rich man of equestrian rank, a rhetorician, who has left several volumes of rhetorical compositions on imaginary cases. He hated philosophy, his son tells us.[21] Seneca's mother seems to have been a good woman, and not the only one in the family; for his youth was delicate and owed much to the care of a good aunt at Rome; and his later years were spent with a good wife Pompeia Paulina, who bore him two little short-lived boys.
In one of his letters (108) Seneca tells us of his early life in Rome. He went to the lectures of Attalus, a Stoic teacher, who laid great stress on simplicity of life and independence of character and was also interested in superstition and soothsaying. The pupil was a high-minded and sensitive youth, quick then, as he remained through life, to take fire at an idea.[22] "I used to be the first to come and the last to go; and as he walked I would lead him on to further discussions, for he was not only ready for those who would learn, but he would meet them." "When I heard Attalus declaim against the vices, errors and evils of life, I would often pity mankind; and as for him I thought of him as one on high, far above human nature's highest. He himself used to say he was a king [a Stoic paradox at which Horace had laughed]; but he seemed to me more than king,—the judge of kings. When he began to commend poverty, and to show that whatever is more than need requires, is a useless burden to him that has it, I often longed to leave the room a poor man. When he attacked our pleasures and praised the chaste body, the sober table, the pure mind, I delighted to refrain, not merely from unlawful pleasures, but from needless ones too. Some of it has stuck by me, Lucilius, for I made a good beginning." All his life long, in fact, he avoided the luxuries of table and bath, and drank water. He continues, "Since I have begun to tell you how much more keenly I began philosophy in my youth than I persevere with it in my old age, I am not ashamed to own what love of Pythagoras Sotion waked in me." Sotion recommended vegetarianism on the grounds which Pythagoras had laid down. "But you do not believe," he said, "that souls are allotted to one body after another, and that what we call death is transmigration? You don't believe that in beasts and fishes dwells the mind (animum) that was once a man's? ... Great men have believed it; so maintain your own opinion, but keep the matter open. If it is true, then to have abstained from animal food will be innocence; if it is false, it will still be frugality."[23] So for a year Seneca was a vegetarian with some satisfaction and he fancied that his mind was livelier than when he was "an eater of beef."[24] It is as well not to quote some contemporary methods of preparing meat.[25] However, after a while some scandal arose about foreign religions, and vegetarianism was counted a "proof of superstition," and the old rhetorician, more from dislike of philosophy than from fear of calumny, made it an excuse to put a little pressure on his philosophic son, who obediently gave up the practice. Such is the ardour of youth, he concludes,—a good teacher finds idealists ready to his hand. The fault is partly in the teachers, who train us to argue and not to live, and partly in the pupils too, whose aim is to have the wits trained and not the mind. "So what was philosophy becomes philology—the love of words."[26]
There is a certain gaiety and good humour about these confessions, which is closely bound up with that air of tolerance and that sense of buoyant ease[27] which pervade all his work. Here the tone is in keeping with the matter in hand, but it is not always. Everything seems so easy to him that the reader begins to doubt him and to wonder whether he is not after all "The plausiblest Plausible on record." We associate experience with a style more plain, more tense, more inevitable; and the extraordinary buoyancy of Seneca's writing suggests that he can hardly have known the agony and bloody sweat of the true teacher. Yet under the easy phrases there lay a real sincerity. From his youth onward he took life seriously, and, so far as is possible for a man of easy good nature, he was in earnest with himself.
Like other youths of genius, he had had thoughts of suicide, but on reflexion, he tells us, he decided to live, and his reason was characteristic. While for himself he felt equal to dying bravely, he was not so sure that his "kind old father" would be quite so brave in doing without him. It was to philosophy, he says, that he owed his resolution.[28]
Apart from philosophy, he went through the ordinary course of Roman education. He "wasted time on the grammarians,"[29] whom he never forgave, and at whom, as "guardians of Latin speech"[30] he loved to jest,—and the greatest of all Roman Grammarians paid him back in the familiar style of the pedagogue. Rhetoric came to him no doubt by nature, certainly by environment; it conspicuously haunted his family for three generations.[31] He duly made his appearance at the bar—making more speeches there than Virgil did, and perhaps not disliking it so much. But he did not like it, and, when his father died, he ceased to appear, and by and by found that he had lost the power to plead as he had long before lost the wish.[32]
On the accession of Claudius to the Imperial throne in 41 A.D., Seneca, now in middle life, was for some reason banished to Corsica, and there for eight weary years he remained, till the Empress Messalina fell. A little treatise, which he wrote to console his mother, survives—couched in the rhetoric she knew so well. If the language is more magnificent than sons usually address to their mothers, it must be remembered that he wrote to console her for misfortunes which he was himself enduring. The familiar maxim that the mind can make itself happy and at home anywhere is rather like a platitude, but it loses something of that character when it comes from the lips of a man actually in exile. Another little work on the subject, which he addressed later on to Polybius, the freedman of Claudius, stands on a different footing, and his admirers could wish he had not written it. There is flattery in it of a painfully cringing tone. "The Emperor did not hurl him down so utterly as never to raise him again; rather he supported him when evil fortune smote him and he tottered; he gently used his godlike hand to sustain him and pleaded with the Senate to spare his life.... He will see to his cause.... He best knows the time at which to show favour.... Under the clemency of Claudius, exiles live more peacefully than princes did under Gaius."[33] But a little is enough of this.
It is clear that Seneca was not what we call a strong man. A fragile youth, a spirit of great delicacy and sensibility, were no outfit for exile. Nor is it very easy to understand what exile was to the educated Roman. Some were confined to mere rocks, to go round and round them for ever and never leave them. Seneca had of course more space, but what he endured, we may in some measure divine from the diaries and narratives that tell of Napoleon's life on St Helena. The seclusion from the world, the narrow range, the limited number of faces, the red coats, the abhorred monotony, told heavily on every temper, on gaoler and prisoner alike, even on Napoleon; and Seneca's temperament was not of stuff so stern. We may wish he had not broken down, but we cannot be surprised that he did. It was human of him. Perhaps the memory of his own weakness and failure contributed to make him the most sympathetic and the least arrogant of all Stoics.
Nero
At last Messalina reached her end, and the new Empress, Agrippina, recalled the exile in 49 A.D., and made him tutor of her son, Nero; and from now till within two years of his death Seneca lived in the circle of the young prince. When Claudius died in 54, Seneca and Burrus became the guardians of the Emperor and virtually ruled the Empire. It was a position of great difficulty. Seneca grew to be immensely rich, and his wealth and his palaces and gardens[34] weakened his influence, while they intensified the jealousy felt for a minister so powerful. Yet perhaps none of his detractors guessed the limits of his power as surely as he came to feel them himself. Some measure of the situation may be taken from what befell when the freedwoman Claudia Acte became the mistress of Nero. "His older friends did not thwart him," says Tacitus, "for here was a girl, who, without harm to anyone, gratified his desires, since he was utterly estranged from his wife Octavia."[35] Later on, we learn, Seneca had to avail himself of Acte's aid to prevent worse scandals.
In February 55 A.D. the young prince Britannicus was poisoned at Nero's table. He was the son of Claudius and the brother of Octavia—a possible claimant therefore to the Imperial throne. Nero, not more than eighteen years old, told the company quite coolly that it was an epileptic seizure, and the feast went on, while the dead boy was carried out and buried there and then in the rain—in a grave prepared before he had entered the dining-hall.[36] Ten months later Seneca wrote his tractate on Clemency. Nero should ask himself "Am I the elected of the gods to be their vice-gerent on earth? The arbiter of life and death to the nations?" and so forth. He is gently reminded of the great light that fronts the throne; that his anger would be as disastrous as war; that "Kings gain from kindness a greater security, while their cruelty swells the number of their enemies." Seneca wanders a good deal, but his drift is clear—and the wretchedness of his position.
That Burrus and he had no knowledge of Nero's design to do away with his mother, is the verdict of Nero's latest historian, but to Seneca fell the horrible task of writing the explanatory letter which Nero sent to the Senate when the murder was done. Perhaps to judge him fairly, one would need to have been a Prime Minister. It may have been a necessary thing to do, in order to maintain the world's government, but the letter imposed on nobody, and Thrasea Pætus at once rose from his seat and walked conspicuously out.
From the year 59 Nero was more than ever his own master. His guardians' repeated condonations had set him free, and the lad, who had "wished he had never learned writing" when he had to sign his first death-warrant, began from now to build up that evil fame for which the murders of his brother and his mother were only the foundation. For three years Seneca and Burrus kept their places—miserably enough. Then Burrus found a happy release in death, and with him died the last of Seneca's influence.[37] Seneca begged the Emperor's leave to retire from the Court, offering him the greater part of his wealth, and it was refused. It had long been upon his mind that he was too rich. In 58 a furious attack was made upon him by "one who had earned the hate of many," Publius Suillius; this man asked in the Senate "by what kind of wisdom or maxims of philosophy" Seneca had amassed in four years a fortune equal to two and a half millions sterling; and he went on to accuse him of intrigue with princesses, of hunting for legacies, and of "draining Italy and the provinces by boundless usury."[38] There was probably a good deal of inference in these charges, if one may judge by the carelessness of evidence which such men show in all ages. Still Seneca felt the taunt, and in a book "On the Happy Life," addressed to his brother Gallic, he dealt with the charge. He did not claim to be a sage (17, 3); his only hope was day by day to lessen his vices—he was still in the thick of them; perhaps he might not reach wisdom, but he would at least live for mankind "as one born for others,"[39] would do nothing for glory, and all for conscience, would be gentle and accessible even to his foes; as for wealth, it gave a wise man more opportunity, but if his riches deserted him, they would take nothing else with them; a philosopher might have wealth, "if it be taken forcibly from no man, stained with no man's blood, won by no wrong done to any, gained without dishonour; if its spending be as honest as its getting, if it wake no envy but in the envious."[40] The treatise has a suggestion of excitement, and there is a good deal of rhetoric in it. Now he proposed to the Emperor to put his words into action, and Nero would not permit him—he was not ready for the odium of despoiling his guardian, and the old man's name might still be of use to cover deeds in which he had no share. Seneca was not to resign his wealth nor to leave Rome. Nero's words as given by Tacitus are pleasant enough, but we hardly need to be told their value.[41]