The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

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,[[106 - Tac. A. i, 72. Suetonius (Tib. 59) quotes specimens.]] 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.[[107 - See Boissier, Tacite, 188 f.; l'opposition sous les Cesars, 208-215.]]

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,[[108 - Persius, v, 73, libertate opus est.]] 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[[109 - Horace, Sat. ii, 2, 79.]] – 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.[[110 - See Edward Caird, Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, vol. ii, lectures xvii to xx, and Zeller, Eclectics, pp. 235-245. Seneca, B.V. 20, 3.]] (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,[[111 - Epictetus, D. ii, 8, su apóspasma eî tou theoû.]] 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."[[112 - Lucan, ix, 564-586, contains a short summary of Stoicism, supposed to be spoken by Cato.]] 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?"[[113 - Epictetus, D. i, 9 (some lines omitted).]] 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"[[114 - phantasíai, impressions left on the mind by things or events.]] 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."[[115 - Epictetus, D. i, 9.]]

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."[[116 - Diogenes Laertius, vii, 1, 53; see Caird, op. cit. vol. ii, p. 124.]]

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.[[117 - See Lecky, European Morals, i, 128, 129.]] 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.[[118 - Ep. 108, 22, philosophiam oderat.]] 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.[[119 - With these passages compare the fine account which Persius gives (Sat. v) of his early studies with the Stoic Cornutus.]] "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."[[120 - Plutarch, de esu carnium, ii, 5.]] 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."[[121 - Plutarch, de esu carnium, i, 6, on clogging the soul by eating flesh. Clem. Alex. Pæd. ii, 16, says St Matthew lived on seeds, nuts and vegetables, and without meat.]] It is as well not to quote some contemporary methods of preparing meat.[[122 - Plutarch, de esu carnium, ii, 1.]] 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."[[123 - Sen. Ep. 108, 3, 13-23.]]

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[[124 - This is a quality that Quintilian notes in his style for praise or blame. Others (Gellius, N.A. xii, 2) found in him levis et quasi dicax argutia.]] 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.[[125 - Ep. 78, 2, 3, patris me indulgentissimi senectus retinuit.]]

Apart from philosophy, he went through the ordinary course of Roman education. He "wasted time on the grammarians,"[[126 - Ep. 58, 5.]] whom he never forgave, and at whom, as "guardians of Latin speech"[[127 - Ep. 95, 65]] 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.[[128 - His nephew Lucan, Quintilian severely says, was "perhaps a better model for orators than for poets."]] 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.[[129 - Ep. 49, 2. Virgil made one speech.]]

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."[[130 - ad Polybium, 13, 2, 3.]] 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[[131 - Juvenal, x, 16, magnos Seneca prædivitis hortos.]] 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."[[132 - Ann. xiii, 12, 2.]] 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.[[133 - Tac. Ann. xiii, 15-17.]] 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.[[134 - Tac. Ann. xiv, 51.]] 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."[[135 - Tac. Ann. xiii, 42.]] 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,"[[136 - B.V. 20, 3.]] 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."[[137 - B.V. 23, 1.]] 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.[[138 - Tac. Ann. xiv, 52-56.]]

Seneca's last days

It was merely a reservation of the death sentence, and Seneca must have known it. The only thing now was to wait till he should receive the order to die, and Seneca occupied the time in writing. If what he wrote has a flushed and excited air, it is not surprising. The uncertainty of his position had preyed upon him while he was still Minister – "there are many," he had written, "who must hold fast to their dizzy height; it is only by falling that they can leave it."[[139 - de tranqu. animi, 10, 6.]] He had fallen, and still he had to live in uncertainty; he had always been a nervous man.

The end came in 65, in connexion with the conspiracy of Piso. Tacitus is not altogether distinct as to the implication of Seneca in this plot, but modern historians have inclined to believe in his guilt – if guilt it was.[[140 - Tac. Ann. xiv, 65; xv, 45-65.]] Mr Henderson, in particular, is very severe on him for this want of "gratitude" to his benefactor and pupil, but it is difficult to see what Nero had done for him that he would not have preferred undone.[[141 - B. W. Henderson, Nero, pp. 280-3.]] Perhaps at the time, and certainly later on, Seneca was regarded as a possible substitute for Nero upon the throne;[[142 - Tac. Ann. xv, 65; Juvenal, viii, 212.]] but he was well over sixty and frail, nor is it clear that the world had yet decided that a man could be Emperor without being a member of the Julian or Claudian house. Seneca, in fact any man, must have felt that any one would be better than Nero, but he had himself conspicuously left the world, and, with his wife, was living the philosophic life – a vegetarian again, and still a water-drinker.[[143 - Tac. Ann. xv, 45, 6.]] Seneca was ready for the death-summons and at once opened his veins. Death came slowly, but it came; and he died, eloquent to the last —novissimo quoque momenta suppeditante eloquentia.

Such is the story of Seneca. Even in bare outline it shows something of his character – his kindliness and sensibility, his weakness and vanity; but there are other features revealed in his books and his many long letters to Lucilius. No Roman, perhaps, ever laid more stress on the duty of gentleness and forgiveness.[[144 - This is emphasized by Zeller, Eclectics, 240, and by Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus, 324, 326.]] "Look at the City of Rome," he says, "and the crowds unceasingly pouring through its broad streets – what a solitude, what a wilderness it would be, were none left but whom a strict judge would acquit. We have all done wrong (peccavimus), some in greater measure, some in less, some on purpose, some by accident, some by the fault of others; we have not stood bravely enough by our good resolutions; despite our will and our resistance, we have lost our innocence. Nor is it only that we have acted amiss; we shall do so to the end."[[145 - ae Clem. i, 6.]] He is anxious to make Stoicism available for his friends; he tones down its gratuitous harshness, accommodates, conciliates. He knows what conscience is; he is recognized as a master in dealing with the mind at variance with itself, so skilfully does he analyse and lay bare its mischiefs. Perhaps he analyses too much – the angel, who bade Hermas cease to ask concerning sins and ask of righteousness, might well have given him a word. But he is always tender with the man to whom he is writing. If he was, as Quintilian suggests, a "splendid assailant of the faults of men," it is the faults of the unnamed that he assails; his friends' faults suggest his own, and he pleads and sympathizes. His style corresponds with the spirit in which he thinks. "You complain," he writes to Lucilius, "that my letters are not very finished in style. Who talks in a finished style unless he wishes to be affected? What my talk would be, if we were sitting or walking together, unlaboured and easy, that is what I wish my letters to be, without anything precious or artificial in them."[[146 - [Transcriber's note: this footnote missing from book]]] And he has in measure succeeded in giving the air of talk to his writing – its ease, its gaiety, even its rambling and discursiveness. He always sees the friend to whom he writes, and talks to him – sometimes at him – and not without some suggestion of gesticulation. He must have talked well – though one imagines that, like Coleridge on Highgate Hill, he probably preferred the listener who sat "like a passive bucket to be pumped into." Happily the reader is not obliged to be quite so passive.

But we shall not do him justice if we do not recognize his high character. In an age when it was usual to charge every one with foulness, natural and unnatural, Dio Cassius alone among writers suggests it of Seneca; and, quite apart from his particular bias in this case, Dio is not a high authority, – more especially as he belonged to a much later generation. If his talk is of "virtue! virtue!" Seneca's life was deliberately directed to virtue. In the midst of Roman society, and set in the highest place but one in the world, he still cherished ideals, and practised self-discipline, daily self-examination. "This is the one goal of my days and of my nights: this is my task, my thought – to put an end to my old faults."[[147 - Ep. 61, 1.]] His whole philosophy is practical, and directed to the reformation of morals. The Stoic paradoxes, and with them every part of philosophy which has no immediate bearing upon conduct, he threw aside. His language on the accumulation of books recalls the amusement of St Francis at the idea of possessing a breviary. And further, we may note that whatever be charged against him as a statesman, not his own master, and as a writer, not always quite in control of his rhetoric, Seneca was fundamentally truthful with himself. He never hid his own weakness; he never concealed from himself the difficulty of his ideals; he never tried to delude himself with what he could not believe. The Stoics had begun long since to make terms with popular religion, but Seneca is entirely free from delusions as to the gods of popular belief. He saw clearly enough that there was no truth in them, and he never sought help from anything but the real. He is a man, trained in the world,[[148 - Lucian, Nigrinus, 19, says there is no better school for virtue, no truer test of moral strength, than life in the city of Rome.]] in touch with its problems of government, with the individual and his questions of character, death and eternity, – a man tender, pure and true – too great a man to take the purely negative stand of Thrasea, or to practise the virtue of the schools in "arrogant indolence." But he has hardly reached the inner peace which he sought.

The story of Epictetus can be more briefly told, for there is very little to tell.[[149 - Gellius, N.A. ii, 18, 10.]] He was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia: – he was the slave of Nero's freedman Epaphroditus, and somehow managed to hear the lectures of the Stoic Musonius. Eventually he was set free, and when Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, he went to Nicopolis in Epirus,[[150 - Gell. N.A. xv, 11, 5.]] where he lived and taught – lame, neat, poor and old. How he taught is to be seen in the discourses which Arrian took down in the reign of Trajan, – "Whatever I heard him say, I tried to write down exactly, and in his very words as far as I could – to keep them as memorials for myself of his mind and of his outspokenness. So they are, as you would expect, very much what a man would say to another on the spur of the moment – not what he would write for others to read afterwards… His sole aim in speaking was to move the minds of his hearers to the best things. If then these discourses should achieve this, they would have the effect which I think a philosopher's words should have. But if they do not, let my readers know that, when he spoke them, the hearer could not avoid being affected as Epictetus wished him to be. If the discourses do not achieve this, perhaps it will be my fault, or perhaps it may be inevitable. Farewell."

Epictetus on children and women

Such, save for a sentence or two omitted, is Arrian's preface, – thereafter no voice is heard but that of Epictetus. To place, time or persons present the barest allusions only are made. "Someone said … And Epictetus spoke." The four books of Arrian give a strong impression of fidelity. We hear the tones of the old man, and can recognize "the mind and the outspokenness," which Arrian cherished in memory – we understand why, as we read. The high moral sense of the teacher, his bursts of eloquence, his shrewdness, his abrupt turns of speech, his apostrophes – "Slave!" he cries, as he addresses the weakling – his diminutives of derision, produce the most lively sense of a personality. There is wit, too, but like Stoic wit in general it is hard and not very sympathetic; it has nothing of the charm and delicacy of Plato's humour, nor of its kindliness.

Here and there are words and thoughts which tell of his life. More than once he alludes to his age and his lameness – "A lame old man like me." But perhaps nowhere in literature are there words that speak so loud of a man without experience of woman or child. "On a voyage," he says, "when the ship calls at a port and you go ashore for water, it amuses you to pick up a shell or a plant by the way; but your thoughts ought to be directed to the ship, and you must watch lest the captain call, and then you must throw away all those things, that you may not be flung aboard, tied like the sheep. So in life, suppose that instead of some little shell or plant, you are given something in the way of wife or child (antì bolbaríou kaì kochlidiou gynaikárion kaì paidíon) nothing need hinder. But, if the captain call, run to the ship letting them all go and never looking round. If you are old, do not even go far from the ship, lest you fail to come when called."[[151 - Manual, J. I have constantly used Long's translation, but often altered it. It is a fine piece of work, well worth the English reader's study.]] He bids a man endure hunger; he can only die of it. "But my wife and children also suffer hunger, (ohi emoì peinéousi). What then? does their hunger lead to any other place? Is there not for them the same descent, wherever it lead? Below, is it not the same for them as for you?"[[152 - D. iii, 26. Compare and contrast Tertullian, de Idol, 12, fides famem nan timet. Scit enim famem non minus sibi contemnendam propter Deum quam omne mortis genus. The practical point is the same, perhaps; the motive, how different!]] "If you are kissing your child, or brother, or friend, never give full licence to the appearance (tèn phantasían); check your pleasure … remind yourself that you love a mortal thing, a thing that is not your own (ouden tôn sautoû)… What harm does it do to whisper, as you kiss the child, 'To-morrow you will die'?" This is a thought he uses more than once,[[153 - D. iii, 24; iv, 1; M. 11, 26.]] though he knows the attractiveness of lively children.[[154 - D. ii, 24. He maintains, too, against Epicurus the naturalness of love for children; once born, we cannot help loving them, D. i, 23.]] He recommends us to practise resignation – beginning on a broken jug or cup, then on a coat or puppy, and so up to oneself and one's limbs, children, wife or brothers.[[155 - D. iv, 1.]] "If a man wishes his son or his wife not to do wrong, he really wishes what is another's not to be another's."[[156 - D. iv, 5, thélei tà allótrie mè eînai allótria.]]

As to women, a few quotations will show his detachment. He seems hardly to have known a good woman. "Do not admire your wife's beauty, and you are not angry with the adulterer. Learn that a thief and an adulterer have no place among the things that are yours, but among those which are not yours and not in your power,"[[157 - D. i, 18. This does not stop his condemning the adulterer, D. ii, 4 (man, he said, is formed for fidelity), 10. Seneca on outward goods, ad Marciam, 10.]] and he illustrates his philosophy with an anecdote of an iron lamp stolen from him, which he replaced with an earthenware one. From fourteen years old, he says, women think of nothing and aim at nothing but lying with men.[[158 - M. 40.]] Roman women liked Plato's Republic for the licence they wrongly supposed it gave.[[159 - Fragment, 53.]] He constantly speaks of women as a temptation, nearly always using a diminutive korásion, korasidíon– little girls – and as a temptation hardly to be resisted by young men. He speaks of their "softer voices."[[160 - D. i, id.]] A young philosopher is no match for a "pretty girl"; let him fly temptation.[[161 - D. iii, 12, classing the korasidíon with wine and cake.]] "As to pleasure with women, abstain as far as you can, before marriage; but if you do indulge in it, do it in the way conformable to custom. Do not, however, be disagreeable to those who take such pleasures, nor apt to rebuke them or to say often that you do not."[[162 - M. 33.]] All this may be taken as the impression left by Rome and the household of Epaphroditus upon a slave's mind. It may be observed that he makes nothing like Dio Chrysostom's condemnation of prostitution – an utterance unexampled in pagan antiquity.

It is pleasanter to turn to other features of Epictetus. He has a very striking lecture on personal cleanliness.[[163 - D. iv, 11.]] In proportion as men draw near the gods by reason, they cling to purity of soul and body. Nature has given men hands and nostrils; so, if a man does not use a handkerchief, "I say, he is not fulfilling the function of a man." Nature has provided water. "It is impossible that some impurity should not remain in the teeth after eating. 'So wash your teeth,' says Nature. Why? 'That you may be a man and not a beast – a pig.'" If a man would not bathe and use the strigil and have his clothes washed – "either go into a desert where you deserve to go, or live alone and smell yourself." He cannot bear a dirty man, – "who does not get out of his way?" It gives philosophy a bad name, he says; but it is quite clear that that was not his chief reason. He would sooner a young man came to him with his hair carefully trimmed than with it dirty and rough; such care implied "some conception of the beautiful," which it was only necessary to direct towards the things of the mind; "but if a man comes to me filthy and dirty, with a moustache down to his knees – what can I say to him?" "But whence am I to get a fine cloak? Man! you have water; wash it!"

Fame of Epictetus

Pupils gathered round him and he became famous, as we can see in the reminiscences of Aulus Gellius.[[164 - Gell. N.A. i, 2, 6; xvii, 19, 1.]] Sixty or seventy years after his death a man bought his old earthenware lamp for three thousand drachmas.[[165 - Lucian, adv. Indoct. 13.]] Even in his lifetime men began to come about "the wonderful old man" who were hardly serious students. They wished, he says, to occupy the time while waiting to engage a passage on a ship – they happened to be passing (párodós estin) and looked in to see him as if he were a statue. "We can go and see Epictetus too. – Then you go away and say; Oh! Epictetus was nothing! he talked bad Greek – oh! barbarous Greek!"[[166 - D. iii, 9.]] Others came to pick up a little philosophic language for use in public. Why could they not philosophize and say nothing? he asked. "Sheep do not vomit up their grass to show the shepherd how much they have eaten – no! they digest it inside, and then produce wool and milk outside."[[167 - M. 46.]] He took his teaching seriously as a matter of life, and he looked upon it as a service done to mankind – quite equivalent to the production of "two or three ugly-nosed children."[[168 - D. iii, 22, kakórygka.]] He has a warm admiration for the Cynic philosopher's independence of encumberments – how can he who has to teach mankind go looking after a wife's confinement – or "something to heat the water in to give the baby a bath?"[[169 - D. iii, 22. Lucian says Epictetus urged Demonax to take a wife and leave some one to represent him in posterity. "Very well, Epictetus," said Demonax, "give me one of your own daughters" (v. Demon. 55).]]

These then are the two great teachers of Stoicism, the outstanding figures, whose words and tones survive, whose characters are familiar to us. They are clearly preachers, both of them, intent on the practical reformation of their listeners or correspondents. For them conduct is nine-tenths of life. Much of their teaching is of course the common property of all moral teachers – the deprecation of anger, of quarrelsomeness, of self-indulgence, of grumbling, of impurity, is peculiar to no school. Others have emphasized that life is a campaign with a general to be obeyed, if you can by some instinct divine what he is signalling.[[170 - Epict. D. iii, 24. strateía tís estin ho bios hekástou, kaì aute makrà kai toikile. tereîn se deî tò stratiôtou prosneuma kaì toû strategoû prássein hekasta, ei oîon..]] But perhaps it was a new thing in the Western World, when so much accent was laid on conduct. The terror of contemporary life, with its repulsiveness, its brutality and its fascination, drove men in search of the moral guide. The philosopher's school was an infirmary, not for the glad but for the sorry.[[171 - Epict. D. iii, 23.]] "That man," says Seneca, "is looking for salvation —ad salutem spectat."

Self-examination

Men sought the help of the philosopher, and relapsed. "He thinks he wishes reason. He has fallen out with luxury, but he will soon make friends with her. But he says he is offended with his own life! I do not deny it; who is not? Men love their vices and hate them at the same time."[[172 - Sen. Ep. 112, 3.]] So writes Seneca of a friend of Lucilius and his fugitive thoughts of amendment, and Epictetus is no less emphatic on the crying need for earnestness. The Roman world was so full of glaring vice that every serious man from Augustus onward had insisted on some kind of reformation, and now men were beginning to feel that the reformation must begin within themselves. The habit of daily self-examination became general among the Stoics, and they recommended it warmly to their pupils. Here is Seneca's account of himself.

"When the day was over and Sextius had gone to his night's rest, he used to ask his mind (animum): 'what bad habit of yours have you cured to-day? what vice have you resisted? in what respect are you better?' Anger will cease and will be more moderate, when it knows it must daily face the judge. Could anything be more beautiful than this habit of examining the whole day? What a sleep is that which follows self-scrutiny! How calm, how deep and free, when the mind is either praised or admonished, when it has looked into itself, and like a secret censor makes a report upon its own moral state. I avail myself of this power and daily try my own case. When the light is removed from my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, is silent, I survey my whole day and I measure my words again. I hide nothing from myself; I pass over nothing. For why should I be afraid of any of my errors, when I can say: 'See that you do it no more, now I forgive you. In that discussion, you spoke too pugnaciously; after this do not engage with the ignorant; they will not learn who have never learned. That man you admonished too freely, so you did him no good; you offended him. For the future, see not only whether what you say is true, but whether he to whom it is said will bear the truth.'"[[173 - de ira, iii, 36, 1-4.]]

Similar passages might be multiplied. "Live with yourself and see how ill-furnished you are," wrote Persius (iv, 52) the pupil of Cornutus. "From heaven comes that word 'know thyself,'" said Juvenal. A rather remarkable illustration is the letter of Serenus, a friend of Seneca's, of whose life things are recorded by Tacitus that do not suggest self-scrutiny. In summary it is as follows: —

"I find myself not quite free, nor yet quite in bondage to faults which I feared and hated. I am in a state, not the worst indeed, but very querulous and uncomfortable, neither well nor ill. It is a weakness of the mind that sways between the two, that will neither bravely turn to right nor to wrong. Things disturb me, though they do not alter my principles. I think of public life; something worries me, and I fall back into the life of leisure, to be pricked to the will to act by reading some brave words or seeing some fine example. I beg you, if you have any remedy to stay my fluctuation of mind, count me worthy to owe you peace. To put what I endure into a simile, it is not the tempest that troubles me, but sea-sickness."[[174 - Sen. de tranqu. animi, 1.]]

Epictetus quotes lines which he attributes to Pythagoras —

Let sleep not come upon thy languid eyes