ROMAN MORALS: AN IDEAL OF CIVIC DUTY
I. INSTITUTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF LIFE DETERMINING THE EARLY MORAL TYPE
[Sidenote: The Roman family:
ancestor worship and the _patria
potestas_]
The family in early Rome may more unreservedly be pronounced a seed
plot of morals than in the case of any other ancient people save
the Chinese. It was ancestor worship which made it such a nursery
of morality, for the cult of ancestors made the family a group of
co-worshipers about the domestic hearth. This worship purified and
braced morality, since the tutelary spirits were believed to watch over
the morals of the family and to punish wrongdoing. No impure act could
be committed in the presence of the chaste hearth fire, and no one
guilty of unexpiated crime dared to come into its presence.[522]
But it was in constituting the father the high priest of the family
group that this domestic worship exercised its greatest influence upon
early Roman morality. It gave a religious sanction to the father’s
authority and made the _patria potestas_ for many centuries a molding
force in the moral life of the Roman people.[523] A little further on
we shall see how, in the atmosphere of the home thus constituted, was
fostered in the youth the virtues of submission to rightful authority,
respect for law, and obedience to magistrates--virtues which were one
secret of the strength and triumphs of early Rome.
[Sidenote: The city state]
Next after the family the state was the most important agency in the
creation of the Roman type of virtue. We have to do here, as in Greece,
with the city state. This was the chief sphere of duty of the Roman
during his mature and active life. Consequently, just as it was the
nature of the city state which in Greece determined in large measure
what should constitute the supreme virtues and duties of the Greek
ideal of character, so was it the constitution of Rome as a city state
that, as we shall see a little later, determined what should be the
leading virtues and duties entering into the Roman ideal of goodness.
This made that ideal to be preëminently an ideal of civic duty.
“Never since the fall of paganism have the civic virtues shone out so
brilliantly.”[524]
[Sidenote: The occupations of
farming and war]
Alongside domestic and political institutions stands, as we have seen,
occupation as a creator and molder of the moral type of a people. The
two occupations of the early Latins were farming and war, and thus it
came about that in the primitive ethical type were united the sturdy
moral qualities of the peasant farmer and the heroic virtues of the
warrior. This blend produced one of the most admirable moral types of
the ancient world.
[Sidenote: The religion]
Aside from the cult of ancestors, religion among the Romans exercised
but little direct influence upon morality, for the reason that it was
mainly a method of obtaining prosperity, of averting calamity, and of
reading the future. There was in truth an almost complete separation
of religion and morality. It was only in later times that the Roman
philosophers sought in the moral character of the gods models for human
imitation. But though religion had so little to do in creating the
salient virtues of the moral type, it did reënforce the sentiment of
patriotism, since the temple was a state institution, and in various
other ways--as, for instance, in lending sanctity to oaths--quickened
and strengthened the sense of obligation and duty.
II. THE PRIMITIVE MORAL TYPE
[Sidenote: The ethics of the
family; the virtue of obedience]
In the bosom of the family was nourished what we may regard as the
primal virtue of the Latin race--submission to authority.[525] The
son’s subjection to the father’s authority was complete throughout
his whole existence. He could not disobey his father’s command. More
than seven centuries after the founding of Rome the Emperor Tiberius
absolved a certain person from guilt in participating in a revolt,
because it was shown that he had acted under the orders of his
father.[526]
This virtue of submission to rightful authority, of obedience to
superiors, contributed much to the military efficiency of the Roman
people. Indeed, it lay at the basis of their greatness in war. The
consul’s authority in the field was like that of the father in the
family, and obedience in the soldier was a habit, almost a religious
instinct. Thus did this virtue, which had its starting point in the
family, help largely to give the Romans the rule of the world.[527]
[Sidenote: Civic and military
virtues]
Patriotism, meaning submission, obedience, devotion to the state, was
the saving virtue in the Roman ideal of excellence. “Patriot” and “good
man” were identical terms. “Dear to us are our parents,” says Cicero,
“dear our children, our kindred and our friends; but one’s country
alone includes all our loves, for what good man would hesitate to die
if he could promote her welfare.”[528]
Since war was the normal status of society in ancient times, the moral
qualities of the Roman as of the Greek patriot were the virtues of the
soldier--obedience, courage, and self-devotion in battle. And by no
people, save perhaps the Japanese as shown in their recent history, has
the soldierly virtue of self-renunciation for the fatherland been more
exalted or more finely exemplified than by the Romans in early times.
In this ready self-devotion of the Roman hero to public interests
we have an exhibition of the altruistic sentiment in its loftiest
form, for of all forms of disinterested action, as Lecky maintains,
the self-abnegation of the ancient warrior for his city was the most
unselfish, for the reason that he made the sacrifice without any hope
of reward in another life.[529]
[Sidenote: The industrial virtues]
In early Rome there was no such prejudice against labor as unworthy
and morally degrading as we meet with at a later period. The fact that
a large body of the citizens in primitive Rome were peasant farmers
determined that the traditional virtues of this class should find a
high place in the early national ideal of character. The moral or
semi-moral qualities of the peasant, namely, simplicity, frugality,
industry, and conservatism or respect for the past, formed the
substratum of early Roman morality. It was from the primitive citizen
peasantry that came the strong, tough, moral fiber of the old Roman
character.
[Sidenote: Religious duties]
In dealing with the subject of the relation of the Roman religion to
morality we may speak of religious duties but hardly of religious
virtues, and for the reason that the aim of religion was the safety
and welfare of the state. Neglect of the temple rites and sacrifices
was believed to anger the gods, who would in their resentment bring
terrible trouble and misfortune upon the nation--for the Romans never
outgrew the conception of collective responsibility. Hence the careful
performance of religious duties was a phase of patriotism. Neglect of
these duties was antisocial conduct.[530]
In the performance of his religious duties the Roman conceived that
all that was necessary was to do the right thing, to perform the right
act, or repeat correctly the right formula; the disposition of mind and
state of heart made no difference with the result. Man’s relations to
deity were assimilated to his relations to nature. To secure a given
result in the physical world, man needs only to do the right thing, as,
for instance, to drop the seed into the ground at the right season and
the harvest follows without any regard to the state of mind or heart
of the person performing the act. This was the Roman’s conception of
his relation to the gods. Hence religion and morality were practically
separated. Religion failed to supply motives for moral action, except
in so far as it reënforced the sentiment of patriotism.
[Sidenote: Defects of the type:
(_a_) its aristocratic character]
From the foregoing brief notice of some of the chief expressions of the
moral consciousness of the early Romans we cannot fail to recognize
that their ideal of character was in many respects a very admirable
one. Its realization in actual flesh and blood gives us those heroic
characters which will live forever in Roman legend, and alongside the
Greek heroes in the pages of Plutarch. It molded men grave, earnest,
and austere, reverent toward superiors, patriotic and self-devoted to
the common good.
But the ideal had great defects. One of the most conspicuous of these
was its aristocratic character. Rome, writes Wedgwood, “accepts
consistently and logically the aristocratic theory on which ancient
society is based, and carries out the ideal of the Old World in all
its naked impressiveness.”[531] Though advancing far during a thousand
years of eventful history toward ethical universalism, pagan Rome never
actually reached this moral goal. She never recognized in practice the
moral equality of all men. There were to the very last in the pagan
Empire, classes, such as slaves and gladiators, who were practically
outside the moral sphere. Even Roman Stoicism, which was the latest
and noblest expression of the moral life of Rome, notwithstanding its
cosmopolitan tendencies, was essentially aristocratic.
[Sidenote: (_b_) Its omission of
the gentler and the intellectual
virtues]
Another defect of the old Roman type of excellence was its exclusion
of the gentler virtues--humility, tenderness, and sympathy with
suffering. The type of character fostered by the ideal was hard and
severe, even callous and cruel, proud and self-assertive. It was a type
somewhat like the Spartan, one which, when the age of reflection came,
naturally developed into the Stoic. The old Romans lacked the quality
of mercy and compassion for weakness. They seemed almost destitute of
the sentiment of pity for misfortune. Their treatment of prisoners of
war and of their slaves in the later period was marked by a repellent
brutality. The place in their amusements which the gladiatorial combats
assumed evidences their callous insensibility to suffering.
Still another defect of this ideal was that it gave little or no
place to the intellectual virtues. These ethical qualities which were
assigned so prominent a place in the Greek type of excellence, and
which since the Renaissance the Western world has come to esteem so
highly, were never greatly valued by the Romans until they came under
the influence of Greek culture, and then only by the few; hence their
intellectual life was, in general, lacking in moral impulse. Mental
self-culture was not with them, as it was with the Greeks and is coming
to be with ourselves, a moral requirement.
III. THE MORAL EVOLUTION UNDER THE REPUBLIC
[Sidenote: The maintenance of the
standard in early times]
The four essential facts in the moral life of Rome as a republic are:
first, the high standard maintained in the early period; second, the
gradual widening of the moral sympathies through the influence of
conquest and advance in civilization; third, the general decline in
morals during the two centuries preceding the establishment of the
Empire; and fourth, the modification of the moral type through contact
with Greece and the Orient.
Through the legendary haze which envelops all the earlier centuries
of Rome, the one fact which stands out with comparative clearness is
the Spartan-like loyalty of the old Roman to the ideal of character
which he had conceived as the noblest and best. The legends of this
period, invented or repeated by the men of a later age, celebrate
qualities of character which we may believe really marked early Roman
life and thought. Among these virtues were patriotic altruism, absolute
self-abnegation for the common good, as illustrated by such tales as
those of the self-devotion for the Roman people of Curtius and of the
Elder and Younger Publius Decius Mus; reverence for law, as shown by
the consul Lucius Junius Brutus in the condemnation of his sons to
death for taking part in a conspiracy; and incorruptible integrity, as
illustrated by the tales of Fabricius.
Even though all these stories of the heroic age of Rome be the
invention of a later time, they at least show what at this later
(though still comparatively early) period were highly esteemed
qualities of character, just as the stories celebrating the filial
piety of Chinese heroes of the olden time show how high a place this
moral trait held in the ideal of the age that invented or repeated
these tales with a didactic purpose.
[Sidenote: The widening of the
moral sympathies]
The gradual broadening of the moral sympathies was a very important
phase of the moral evolution in Roman society up to the end of the
Republic. These sympathies embraced at first hardly more than the
patrician class, which formed the nucleus of the early Roman community.
The enlarging of the area covered by the ethical feelings was simply
one phase, and, from the viewpoint of the student of morals, the most
important phase of that political evolution which in the course of
centuries brought within the sacred pale of Roman citizenship first
the Plebeians, then the Latins, next the Italians, and finally all the
freemen of the extended Roman dominions. That is to say, this central
fact in Roman history, the expansion of the city into the world state,
was in its deepest significance, in its remote consequences, as much a
moral as a political movement. Conquest, it is true, prepared the way
for the revolution, and the concessions made by the ruling class to
the demands of the disfranchised classes and peoples were motived in
the main by political prudence and expediency. But it is equally true
that ethical sentiment worked with these other causes in determining
the course and progress of the revolution, and that one of its most
important results was the imparting of a great impulse to the widening
moral movement going on in the ancient world, and the bringing to
recognition of the principles of the moral equality and brotherhood of
men.
This great all-embracing movement in the Roman world can, we believe,
best be understood in its significance for the moral evolution of
mankind only when translated into terms of the similar movement in
modern times. We recognize the moral character, in a final analysis,
of the revolution which, during the past century, has by successive
enfranchisements admitted to a share in government and to the
enjoyment of political rights the masses in modern civilized states.
The movement has been largely ethical in its causes and still more
largely ethical in its effects. The struggle of the people has had
for aim to do away with unjust privilege and to establish equality
and justice. The most important permanent effects of the revolution
are indisputably to be looked for in the moral sphere. The incoming
of democracy, meaning as it does the investing of the individual with
dignity and worth, means the ennobling of the moral life of the world.
It is this that constitutes the real significance of the democratic
revolution and which gives it its important place in the moral history
of humanity.[532]
The same is true of that phase of the modern movement which looks
toward the formation of the world state. The forces at work here are
admittedly varied and complex, but prominent among these agencies
are the ethical. It is the broadening of the moral sympathies, the
development of a true cosmopolitanism, a deepening consciousness of
the brotherhood of men, the growth of a new social and international
conscience--it is this slow evolution in the moral realm that has laid
or is laying the true basis of the future world union. The universal
state, once created,--this need not be argued,--would inevitably react
powerfully and favorably upon the moral feelings and sympathies of men.
It was the same in the ancient world. The admission to full Roman
citizenship, through successive enfranchisements, of all the freemen of
the Roman dominions was at once the sign and the cause of a vast moral
development. As fellow citizens with equal rights and privileges, men
came to know and feel their ethical kinship. Likewise the establishment
of the world state registered a great moral advance and supplied the
conditions of a still greater progress. Had not the moral forces worked
with the Roman legions, the world union could never have been formed,
or, at least, if once formed, could never have been maintained for the
long period that it was. It is probably true that the bringing by Rome
of such a wide reach of lands under her rule did as much to awaken the
sense of the brotherhood of man as did the teachings of Hebrew prophet
or the culture and philosophy of Greece. It was certainly the political
union of the civilized world that helped to awaken in Cicero and in
the later philosophers of the Empire the conviction that the reach of
the moral sympathies should be as extended as the human race. Thus the
wide empire created by Rome was a potent influence making for ethical
universalism. Never since the unification of the ancient world by Rome
have the moral feelings of men been quite so narrow as before; never
since has the conception of human brotherhood, the ideal of a united
world, seemed so entirely a dream.
[Sidenote: Causes of the decline
in morals under the later
Republic: (_a_) the passing of the
city state]
Notwithstanding this broadening movement in the moral domain, the
last century of the Republic was marked by a great lowering of the
earlier high moral standard and by a loss of some of the chief virtues
of the primitive Roman type. There were many causes contributing to
this moral degeneracy. Among these was the decay of institutions that
had created or fostered the primitive moral type, and the growth of
others, such as slavery and the gladiatorial games, which exercised a
pernicious influence upon morality. Besides causes of this nature there
were others which were the natural outcome of the career of conquest
the Romans had led. The conquest of the world had imported into the
Roman political and social system many alien elements unfavorable to
morality, and had brought Roman civilization, on one side, into hurtful
contact with the older and morally corrupt cultures of the Orient. In
what follows we shall speak in some detail of the more important of
these agencies, which in the later preimperial period undermined the
originally sound morality of the Roman people.
A first cause of the moral deterioration was the decay of the city
constitution. We have seen that the free city state was the chief
nursery of those patriotic virtues which constituted the cardinal moral
qualities of the Roman ideal of character. But by the beginning of
the last century preceding the Christian era various causes, chiefly,
however, the mere widening of the Roman territory through conquest, had
undermined the political institutions of Rome and had converted into
mobs of the proletariat the public assemblies of citizens. The original
constitution of the city had become an empty form, and the way had been
paved for the setting up of monarchical government.
With the passing of the city state those civic patriotic virtues
which the discipline of the democratic city constitution had trained
and developed, disappeared.[533] As the Christian Church, which was
destined in the fullness of time to take the place of the city in the
minds and hearts of men and become the object and inspirer of moral
enthusiasm, had not yet come in with its new ideal of virtue, there
ensued a sort of moral interregnum, such as usually marks transition
periods in the history of states and races.
[Sidenote: (_b_) The economic
decay of the rural class]
A second cause of the moral decline is to be found in the decay of the
Italian peasantry. This economic revolution had its real starting point
in the Hannibalic War. That protracted struggle, carried on largely in
Italy itself, practically ruined the peasant class in many districts,
and their little farms were absorbed by the growing estates of the
great landholders--those _latifundia_ which Pliny later declared to
have been the ruin of Italy.
The practical disappearance of the Italian peasant farmer meant the
disappearance of those simple robust virtues, bred in thousands of
homes of the countryside, like the little Sabine farm of the Elder
Cato, which had contributed so largely to determine the type of Roman
character.
[Sidenote: (_c_) Growth of the
slave system]
The decay of the Italian peasantry was accompanied by the development
of the slave system, so that at the same time that the peasant home,
a nursery of sterling if crude virtues, was being destroyed, the
slave estate with its chain gangs and its ergastula, a very hotbed
of degrading vices, was being created. Of all the institutions that
contributed to the moral degradation of the later Republic, slavery as
it developed here must be assigned the first place of evil preëminence.
Its effects were equally debasing upon the master, the slave, and the
poor farmer. It tended to render more callous and cruel the spirit
of the master,[534] to destroy the moral character of the slave, to
undermine family morals,[535] and, by placing a stigma upon labor, to
degrade the free laborer. Thus did the institution tend to develop
in different classes of the population feelings, sentiments, and
a disposition of mind wholly unfavorable to the existence or the
development of a sound moral life in society at large.
[Sidenote: (_d_) The disesteem of
the industrial virtues]
In placing a stigma upon labor, slavery did not create a new prejudice,
but merely intensified and made more inclusive a prejudice already
existing. As we have seen, there existed in classical antiquity a
deep-rooted feeling against manual labor as morally unworthy of a
freeman. Agriculture was the only occupation which escaped this general
condemnation, and which was regarded as becoming a gentleman.[536]
Cicero declares all mechanical laborers to be by virtue of their
profession mean, the gains of hired workmen to be ungenteel, and says
that all retailers of merchandise should be despised.[537] Even buying
and selling on a large scale did not entirely escape the taint of
retail merchandizing; it was merely a little less despicable.
This general contempt for the occupations of the artisan and merchant
rendered impossible the development of industrial virtues in the
Roman masses. Torn from the soil and swept into the cities by the
movement cityward in this period, the free poor, too proud to engage
in occupations which were looked upon as degrading, were stranded in
idleness and exposed to all the demoralizing influences of city life.
Crowds of them became the dependents of the rich and formed that
despicable client class of the later Republic and the early Empire
whose abominable vices roused the anger and provoked the scorn of the
satirists and moralists of the time.
[Sidenote: (_e_) Free distribution
of corn]
A direct outgrowth of the presence in Rome of this great multitude of
the idle free poor was the evil of the corn laws. The indiscriminate
public free distribution of corn to the poorer citizens--prompted, for
the most part, not by genuine humanitarian feelings but by unworthy
political and personal motives--had a most debauching effect upon
morals. It intensified the very evil it was supposed to ameliorate. It
attracted still greater crowds of the idle to the capital, depressed to
a still greater degree agriculture in Italy,--grain for distribution
being imported in the main from Egypt and North Africa,--and
checked every tendency toward the formation of habits of industry,
self-reliance, and thrift in the lower classes. The evil attained its
climax when the largesses became an undisguised bid by the corrupt
demagogue for popular favor--the naked price paid by rich plotters
against the commonwealth for the support of the morally debauched and
fickle proletariat.
[Sidenote: (_f_) Gladiatorial
games]
The idle population of Rome had not only to be fed but to be amused.
The same motives that had led to the enormous increase in the largesses
of grain to the free poor contributed also to the multiplication
of the spectacles of the circus and the amphitheater, particularly
of the gladiatorial games, which, introduced at Rome in the third
century B.C., had now become the favorite amusement of the Roman
populace. “That not only men, but women in an advanced period of
civilization,--men and women who not only professed but very frequently
acted upon a high code of morals,--should have made the carnage of
men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for
centuries, with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts
in moral history.”[538]
But this fact is by no means an isolated or unique one in the ethical
history of mankind. The student of the history of morals is often
brought face to face with similar facts in the annals of every race and
of every age. The fact with which the moralist is here confronted is
hardly more startling than the hideously barbarous treatment of their
enemies by the deeply pious Jews; the heartless massacre at times of
their prisoners by the naturally humane Greeks; the savage severity of
the medieval inquisitors toward heretics, while in general showing the
greatest compassion and sympathy for those in pain and distress; the
atrocious cruelty of the punishments meted out to offenders against
society by the Christian governments of Europe down almost to the last
century; the callous insensibility, until just now, of modern society
to “the bitter cry of the children” of its city slums; and, above all,
the glorification of war by the professed followers of Him whose most
distinctive title is the Prince of Peace.
But just as all these startling inconsistencies and aberrations in
moral conduct may be explained, in part at least, by reference to the
effect upon the moral sympathies of tribal religion, of political
rancor and fanaticism, of false theological dogmas, and of bad bequests
of practices and conventions unreflectingly adopted by an advanced
civilization from ages of barbarism and savagery, so is it possible
in the same way to explain and render in a measure comprehensible
to ourselves the existence without protest among the comparatively
cultured Romans of such an institution as that of the gladiatorial
combats. The system was fostered by slavery and the Romans’ occupation
of war. The Roman people were originally stern and just; slavery and
war tended to make them hard and callous. Slavery created a sort of
caste morality, which excluded from the moral sphere large classes as
completely as though they belonged to the dumb-animal creation. It was
these pariah classes that contributed a large portion of the victims
of the cruel sport. The enormous quantities of human flesh and blood
required to nourish the system could have been found in no society
except in one where a considerable part of the population had been
degraded to a mere animal plane of existence and thus put practically
beyond the range and reach of the moral feelings.
Like slavery, the constant wars in which the Romans were engaged tended
to indurate their feelings and to destroy all sense of the sanctity of
human life. In what way the military life of the Romans reacted upon
their feelings and sentiments and molded even their ethical theories is
shown by the fact that the Roman moral philosophers in general defended
and approved the combats of the amphitheater on the ground that they
inured the soldier to the sight of blood and taught him contempt of
death.[539]
The effect of these inhuman spectacles upon morality was most
lamentable. They hindered the growth of humane feelings in the men,
deadened every tender sensibility of the women, habituated the
young to scenes of cruelty,[540] and developed finally the normal
impassiveness of the Roman temperament into a fierce delight in human
suffering.[541]
[Sidenote: (_g_) Decay of
religious faith]
The influence of religion upon Roman morality was never great;
still, as we have seen, the Roman’s sense of duty was in some degree
strengthened by his belief in the gods and in their general watch over
the conduct of men. Hence that growth of philosophic doubt among the
learned class which characterized the later period of the Republic,
and the transformation of religion into gross superstition among the
debased population of the cities, contributed to hasten and render more
decisive the moral decline we are tracing.
[Sidenote: (_h_) Extremes of
wealth and poverty]
The apparent teaching of history is that there is an antithesis between
wealth and morality. It is a commonplace of the records of civilization
that as a community has advanced in material prosperity and waxed rich
it has gone backward in morals. The growth in great riches of a people
has usually been the prelude to their moral degeneracy and loss of
place in the competition of races and cultures.
There ought certainly to be no antithesis between riches and morality,
any more than between intellectual culture and morality. To suppose
that there is any natural and necessary incompatibility between these
two elements of civilization is to suppose that there exists a fatal
antinomy at the very heart of the cosmic evolution.
That moral degeneracy should be the common accompaniment of a
community’s growth in wealth, springs not from the mere possession of
wealth, but in the main from its inequitable distribution. Thus far in
history, as a society has grown in riches it has become divided into
two sharply contrasted classes, the very rich and the very poor. Now
each of these extremes is unfavorable to morality. Excessive fortune
gives birth to luxury, to gross, extravagant, and unethical uses of
wealth. Particularly is this likely to be true if the elevation to
affluence has been sudden and from comparative poverty. The reason
of this is, as was long ago pointed out, that men before they have
learned self-control have placed in their hands means for the unlimited
satisfaction of every appetite and desire, and generally the desire
of such men is for indulgence in gross sensuous and sensual forms of
pleasure. On the other hand, extreme poverty is equally disastrous to
morals; for poverty means almost inevitably undue nutrition of body
and soul, and generally squalid and insanitary conditions of life that
destroy at once physical and moral health, and breed in the young and
old alike the most repellent and contagious forms of vice.
Now while at every period of Roman history we find two classes, the
rich and the poor, the extremes of wealth and poverty do not appear
until about a century before the establishment of the Empire.[542] And
unfortunately all the conditions which tend to render such inequality
of fortune especially pernicious to morals were existent at this time
in Roman society. The men into whose control came the great fortunes of
the period were generally men of servile origin, because law and public
sentiment prevented the senatorial order from engaging in trade or
commerce. These men, who had not yet outgrown the grossness and vices
of the slave class from which they had sprung, with unlimited wealth
at their command, and “without the restraint of traditions or ideals,”
were naturally prone to indulge in vulgar luxury, in ostentatious
extravagance, and in orgies of sensuality.
At the same time at the other end of the social scale were the very
poor, subjected to the debasing influences of idleness, of a grossly
immoral stage, and of the brutalizing spectacles of the amphitheater.
The relations of the large number of propertyless clients to their
wealthy patrons bred in this class the hateful vices of servility and
hypocrisy.[543]
Thus the division of Roman society into two classes, the overrich and
the very poor,--a division which is always the sign and register of
social maladjustment and injustice,--became one of the most potent
causes of that moral degeneracy which relaxed the fiber of the Roman
race and preluded the downfall of the Republic.
[Sidenote: (_i_) Demoralizing
influence of Eastern luxury and
vice]
After the conquest of the East the national character of the Romans
was subjected to a great variety of influences from Greece and the
half-Hellenized countries of the Orient. Many of these influences,
as we shall notice a little later, had a strengthening and uplifting
effect upon Roman life, especially in the upper circles of society, but
in general the new elements now imported into Roman civilization from
the Hellenistic East were hurtful to morals. Rome “sucked poison from
the Attic bloom decayed.”
It is a commonplace of history that at the time of the Roman conquest
of the East the great semi-Hellenized cities of the Orient were sinks
of moral corruption. Brought into close contact with these morally
debased communities, Roman civilization was at once infected with the
fatal virus. Streams of impurity overflowed every country of the once
moral West. The Orontes emptied into the Tiber. Oriental vices and
luxury came in as a flood. The primitive Roman virtues of frugality
and simplicity disappeared. Greek cooks, we are told, brought a higher
price than Greek philosophers.
Almost every element of the Greco-Oriental culture seemed to bear
within it the seeds of moral deterioration and decay. Greek philosophy,
pervaded in general by a spirit of skepticism, tended to unsettle
still more positively the already shaken faith of the Romans in their
ancestral gods. Roman morality, in so far as it was supported by
religious belief, was thus fatally impaired. The Epicurean philosophy,
if not--as taught by most of the Sophists--a direct incentive to
vice, afforded at least a ready apology for indulgence in coarse and
gluttonous pleasures.
The plays presented on the Roman comic stage were mostly pieces of the
Greek drama, which, in the process of adaptation to a Roman audience,
had been made coarse and dissolute. Thus the theater became one of the
most effective agencies of social corruption. In the words of Mommsen,
it was “the great school at once of Hellenism and of vice.”[544]
[Sidenote: Modifications in the
moral type itself]
A much more important fact in the moral history of the later Republic
than this lowering of the standard of conduct is the change which was
being effected in the moral ideal itself. While certain causes were
at work depressing the moral standard to the lowest point, perhaps,
that it ever touched in the long history of Rome, there were other
causes in operation which were slowly modifying the old Roman type of
character and creating a new type made up largely of new virtues. We
speak of this change in the ideal as a fact of greater significance
than that of moral degeneracy, for the reason that a decline in actual
morality, the failure of a people to live up to the best they know, is
always a superficial and transient phenomenon compared with the changes
effected by different influences in the moral type itself, since these
changes constitute the very essence of the ethical evolution.
The causes at work modifying the old Roman ideal of character were
various; but more vital than all other influences were those that came
through the contact of Rome with Greek culture and the civilizations
of the Orient. At the heart of these ancient cultures were ethical
elements of inestimable value. Among these were the Greek humanitarian
spirit and the various intellectual virtues which characterized the
Greek type of excellence; and, in the Oriental theosophic cultures,
a deeply religious spirit and the religious virtues which marked the
moral ideals of the Eastern nations, particularly the Egyptian, the
Persian, and the Hebrew. We recognize the supreme importance for the
later moral history of Rome, as well as for that of the whole Western
world, of the ethical products of the religious culture of Judea, but
we do not recognize as fully the importance of the ethical elements of
the secular culture of Greece and of the theosophic civilizations of
Egypt and Persia. But Rome’s ethical debt to these older cultures was
also indisputably great.
But since these Greco-Oriental influences which were at work modifying
the old Roman type of character had not wrought their full effects
before the close of the third century of the imperial period, we shall
reserve further comment on them, and on the new composite type they
were contributing to create, for the next division of this chapter, in
which we shall follow the trend of the moral evolution under the pagan
Empire.
IV. THE MORAL EVOLUTION UNDER THE PAGAN EMPIRE
[Sidenote: The bad bequest]
Roman society throughout the first century of the pagan Empire, as
mirrored in the literature of the period, presents a picture of
frightful moral degeneracy. This state of things was largely an
inheritance from the Republic. It was the continuation of that moral
decline which began in the second century B.C., and some of the
contributing causes of which, such as slavery, the spectacles of the
amphitheater, the free distribution of corn, together with contact with
the dissolute civilizations of the Orient, were considered briefly in
the preceding pages. Since all these causes of moral degradation were
still at work in the society of the early Empire, and as fresh agencies
of malign influence were added to them, it was inevitable that the
moral anarchy should not only continue but should grow worse.
The definitive establishment of the Empire and the passing of the
liberal institutions of the Republic changed wholly the atmosphere in
which had been nourished the virtues of Republican Rome. Political
liberty was dead, and all true civic activity, which had been the very
breath of life to the citizen of the ancient city, had come to an end.
In the new world that was forming there was no room for the exercise
of those patriotic virtues which had made the early history of Rome so
great, and had given her the rule of the world.[545]
One wholly fresh cause of moral debasement was the personal character
of several of the occupants of the imperial throne during the first
century of the Empire. The Oriental extravagancies and coarse
debaucheries which disgraced the court of a Claudius, a Caligula, or
a Nero, communicated their virus to every part of the social body.
Never did the proverb, “As court, so people,” have such justification.
At the same time the tyranny which marked the rule of more than one
of the emperors instituted a demoralizing terror like that of the
proscriptions of the Civil Wars. Under the influence of the frightful
persecutions of their order, the senatorial aristocracy, with moral
fiber now relaxed and corroded by effeminate luxury, lost seemingly
all those virtues which earlier had characterized their class, and
was transformed into a body at times sycophantic, cringing, and base
almost beyond belief. But it is doubtful if any other aristocracy which
history has known would have stood the test any better. The French
nobility of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, excluded from
participation in political affairs by the divine-right monarchy, and
made servile dependents of the court, exhibited almost as depressing a
spectacle of moral degeneracy as did the higher Roman classes under the
more frightful tyranny of the early Cæsars.
[Sidenote: The old and the new]
But we may here profitably call to mind the words of Wedgwood to the
effect that the phenomenon of moral decay, although the most striking,
is not the most significant fact in the moral history of a race or of
an age. “The fact that an old ideal is perishing,” remarks this writer,
“must always be a stronger or at least a more obvious moral influence
than the fact that a new one is coming into life.... A death is more
impressive than a birth.”[546]
What in this reflection claims our attention here is the implied truth
that the passing of the old means the coming of the new. At the base of
the falling leaf there is always a new-forming bud. It is not otherwise
in the moral world. Unless the forces of the moral life have become
fatally impaired, the decay of an old ideal of excellence is ever
accompanied by the growth of a new and better one. And it was so in the
Rome of the early Cæsars. The Roman ancestral ideal of character, with
its attractive civic and heroic virtues, was indeed falling into decay
and passing away, but a new and better ideal of goodness was slowly
forming and winning the allegiance of the select spirits of the age.
[Sidenote: The three periods in
the moral history of Rome]
Lecky distinguishes in the moral history of pagan Rome three periods
characterized “by the successive ascendancy of the Roman, the Greek,
and the Egyptian spirit.” Up to near the end of the Republic the moral
ideal was essentially Roman; during the first and second centuries of
the Empire it was characterized by the dominance of the humanitarian
and cosmopolitan spirit of Greece; while in the third and last century
of the pagan Empire it was marked by the ascendency of the Egyptian
spirit of religious reverence.[547] In the immediately following pages
we shall consider the second of these periods.
[Sidenote: Modifying influence
on the Roman ideal of the Greek
spirit]
Already at the time of the establishment of the Empire the two great
civilizations of classical antiquity had been in close contact for a
hundred years and more. The elements of Greek culture which reacted
most powerfully upon Roman society were the purely intellectual and
the ethical. History has fully recognized the debt of Rome to Greek
intellectualism, but it has not so fully recognized her ethical debt
to Hellenism. Yet it was the contribution made by Greece to the
new-forming moral ideal of the Roman world which was probably the most
historically important element of the Hellenic bequest. This ethical
inheritance of Rome from Greece was second only to her ethical heritage
from Judea.
It was largely through the medium of Greek literature and Greek
philosophy, particularly the Platonic and the Stoic, that the ethical
Greek spirit, characterized by its humanitarian and cosmopolitan
sympathies, exerted its modifying influence upon the Roman moral
consciousness and gradually changed it into something very different
from what it was at first. This influence can best be traced in Roman
literature and the imperial legislation.
[Sidenote: Evidences in literature
of the softening of the moral
feelings]
The two great changes in the moral type consisted, as Lecky observes,
in the greater prominence accorded the benevolent or amiable virtues,
and in the broadening of the moral sympathies.[548] The effect of the
action of the humanitarian Greek spirit upon the old Roman ideal of
character was to soften its harsher features and to cause the heroic
virtues to yield place, in a measure, to the benevolent qualities, that
is to say, to those virtues which in the course of three centuries
or more, largely under Hebrew-Christian influences, were destined to
assume a dominant place in the accepted ideal of moral excellence.[549]
Cicero, Vergil, Juvenal, and Seneca may be considered the truest
representatives of this new-forming social conscience. Cicero,
writing just at the end of the Republic and after Rome for more than
three generations had been under the influence of Greek culture and
philosophy, exhibits unmistakably the effect upon the Roman character
of the comparatively humane and gentle spirit of Hellas. In his
treatise _De Officiis_, “concerning duties,” in which he interprets
and enlarges for the benefit of his son Marcus the ethical work of the
Greek philosopher Panætius, he gives his sanction to moral doctrines
which could hardly have been approved by a Roman moralist before Rome
had felt the influence of the ethical spirit of Greece. The work is a
glorification of the virtues of pity, gentleness, and benevolence.
The softening movement finds another representative in Vergil. His
great poem is in its ethical spirit more Greek than Roman. In the
“transformation of the goddess of lawless self-pleasing love into a
goddess of a maternal compassionate love,” Wedgwood would have us see
summed up the change in moral feeling of the classical world during
the centuries that separated the age of the _Iliad_ from that of the
_Æneid_.[550]
Juvenal,[551] too, applauds the moral qualities of pity and tenderness.
“His moral tone appears to unite the spirit of two different
ages.”[552] Seneca denounced the gladiatorial games as inhuman and
degrading. He constantly lays emphasis upon those amiable virtues
which belong rather to the Greek than to the Roman ideal of moral
excellence.
[Sidenote: Ethical theory finds
embodiment in practice]
Nor was this moral evolution confined to ethical theory; these precepts
of the moralists found generous embodiment in practice. Especially
was the age of the Antonines a benevolent age, one in which all kinds
of charities abounded. Respecting private benefactions in this period
Professor Samuel Dill asserts that we may well doubt whether they were
less numerous and generous than at the present day, and that “there has
probably seldom been a time when wealth was more generally regarded
as a trust, a possession in which the community at large has a right
to share.”[553] These numerous gifts and legacies assumed the form of
baths, theaters, libraries, markets, colonnades, aqueducts, fountains,
temples, basilicas, and other monuments of utility or adornment.
The motives which led to all this public giving were of course mixed,
just as are the motives of givers of to-day, but we may without much
hesitation assume with the historian Dill that they sprang largely
from genuine altruistic feeling, from a recognition of the true uses
of wealth, and from a sense of the duty of the rich to the poor and
dependent--from the same motives, in a word, that a century or two
later were to cover these same lands with churches and monasteries and
oratories.[554]
[Sidenote: The broadening
movement: ethical universalism as
the outcome of the world empire
and of Stoicism]
The second important ethical movement in the pre-Christian Roman world
consisted, as we have seen, in the widening of the moral sympathies.
The two most efficient causes of this movement were the establishment
of the world empire and the ascendancy at Rome of Greek philosophy,
particularly the philosophy of the Stoics.
Never before in the history of the world down to our own day were there
so many forces and circumstances making for cosmopolitanism in life
and thought as in the age of the early Cæsars. The growth of the little
city state of Rome into a world state had made all freemen actually or
potentially citizens of the world. The political unity of the world had
awakened the consciousness of a moral unity. In thought and feeling
many select souls recognized themselves as brothers of all other men.
It was not merely the world-wide reach of the Roman rule that promoted
the growth of this cosmopolitanism, but contributing largely to it
were the policies of the imperial government, many of whose agencies
and institutions made directly and powerfully for the development of
a sentiment of universal human kinship. The unification of the world
on its physical side, by the creation of the splendid Roman roads and
the facilities thus provided for world-wide trade and travel, had the
same broadening effect upon the moral feelings that modern railways,
steamboats, and telegraphs have upon the ethical sympathies of our own
day. Furthermore, the practically autocratic authority of the Emperor
tended to destroy class distinctions by reducing all to the same level
of servitude, to obliterate national boundaries, and to weaken race
prejudices. Then also, as the capital of the world, Rome had become,
as a center and creator of cosmopolitan life, a second Alexandria.
The character, too, of the slaves, drawn now largely from the East,
and often superior in culture to their masters, tended to blur the
distinctions between classes based on outer conditions, and to suggest
the doctrine of equality in the sphere of the spirit. The army, also,
recruited from every race and land in the Empire, and from the outside
barbarian world as well, with the legions raised in one country serving
in another, was a liberalizing agency, and a most effective one in
breaking down race barriers and in widening the mental outlook and the
moral sympathies of the traveled legionaries.
The second great cause of the enlarging of the moral feelings was the
influence of the Greek spirit. Indeed, this broadening movement was in
large measure the effect of the action of the cosmopolitan spirit of
the Stoic philosophy upon the originally narrow spirit of Rome.[555]
Evidences in literature of this widening of the moral horizon multiply
from Terence in the second century B.C. to the age of the Antonines.
The familiar sentiment of the poet, “I am a man and nothing human is
alien to me,”[556] although we know nothing as to the response this
evoked in the readers of Terence, may fairly be accepted as evidence
that the new spirit of cosmopolitanism was already at work in Roman
society. But the first clear sustained note of universalistic morality
comes from Cicero in his treatise _De Officiis_,[557] to which we
have already referred. The author says much about the Law of Nature
and of the society and community of the human race. One should, in
imitation of Hercules, even at the cost of great labor and pain, give
succor and aid to every one, whoever he may be, for this is consonant
with nature.[558] In destroying Corinth Rome was guilty of a great
crime.[559] The human race forms a universal society, by virtue of the
bond of reason and speech; therefore we are to do good to all men--but
liberality should begin at home.[560] “The love of humanity,” he says,
“which has its beginnings in the love of parents for their offspring,
binds together first the members of the family; then, gradually
reaching out beyond the domestic circle, embraces successively
relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens; next broadens to
include allied nations; and finally comes to embrace the whole human
race.”[561]
Two generations later, in the reign of Nero, Seneca enjoined the
same cosmopolitan morality. He declared all men to be citizens of a
universal commonwealth, and inculcated the lofty sentiment, “Man should
be sacred to his fellow man.” Epictetus in the same age preached a
like doctrine of human fraternity, and taught that a man should regard
himself not as a citizen of this or of that city, but as a citizen of
the world.
But it is in the _Meditations_ of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius that we
find the most emphatic declaration of this Stoic doctrine of the unity
of mankind and the universal reach of the moral law. As envisioned by
the emperor-philosopher the whole world is a single state and all men
are fellow citizens. “My city and country,” he says, “so far as I am
Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man, it is the world.”[562]
Again he muses: “The poet says, Dear city of Cecrops; and wilt not thou
say, Dear city of Zeus?”[563] Every man, he declares, should remember
that every rational being is his kinsman, and that “to care for all men
is according to man’s nature;”[564] for “men exist for the sake of one
another.”[565]
In what measure these moralists and philosophers whom we have quoted
really represented their times it is of course impossible to say; but
probably we would not be wrong in assuming that they appealed to a
certain public sentiment, and that the doctrines they taught evoked
consenting response from the moral consciousness of more than a few in
every rank of Roman society.
[Sidenote: The Stoic doctrine of
the Law of Nature and its ethical
influence]
The doctrine of the Law of Nature, upon which such emphasis was laid
by the Stoic philosophers, had such consequences for the evolution of
Roman morals and so great an influence upon the moral philosophers of
later times, particularly upon the speculations of the philosophers of
the eighteenth century, that we must in the present connection endeavor
to gain some idea of what the Stoics meant by this phrase, and the
ethical value of the conception.[566]
The Law of Nature is merely the Stoic designation of a law which,
under other names, all the ages have revered as the supreme law of
the universe. It is practically the law of conscience, the inner law
written on the hearts of men.[567] It is that law which is in the
background of our consciousness when we say, “We must obey God rather
than man.” It is that holy law which came to Hebrew prophet as the
word of Jehovah. It is that inviolable law which Antigone feared to
break, “a law not proclaimed by men, and which lives not for to-day
nor yesterday, but evermore.”[568] It is what the Supreme Court of the
United States in a recent decision calls “the rule of reason,” that
inborn sense of what is reasonable and just.
This Law of Nature being thus the expression of what is most
constituent and essential in man as man, it necessarily results that
there is a large common element in the customs and the rules of conduct
of all peoples who are in the same or nearly the same stage of culture;
hence the substantial conformity between the Law of Nature and the Laws
of Nations. The conformity, however, is not perfect. The moral task of
humanity is to make it perfect.
It is of course the ethical imperative of the Law of Nature which has
rendered it such a revolutionary and reconstructive force in history.
During the medieval period it was seldom invoked because the Church
and not the normal human reason was regarded as the supreme authority
in the domain of morals. But after the Renaissance and the Reformation
had proclaimed the autonomy of the individual spirit and the ultimate
authority of the individual conscience in the realm of moral right and
wrong, then came naturally an appeal from the rules and conventions of
society to the unwritten Law of Nature; hence the prominence it assumed
in the writings of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who
prepared the way for the French Revolution.
But what it concerns us now to notice is merely the influence of this
conception of a Law of Nature on the moral development in the later
period of the Roman Empire. A fundamental principle of the law, as
apprehended by the Stoics, is that men are born free and equal. If
this teaching be received as axiomatic, it is easy to understand
its importance for morality. Tried by this touchstone, many social
institutions, such for instance as slavery, are shown at once to
be contrary to nature, and hence opposed to natural justice. The
acceptance of this Stoic doctrine by the Roman jurists caused the
Roman law, as we shall see immediately, to be molded in opposition to
servitude and in the interest of freedom.[569]
[Sidenote: Influence of Stoicism
as an ethical force on Roman
government and law]
In its moral influence Stoicism worked in the Roman world more like a
religion than a philosophy. In truth it was a missionary philosophy.
It created in a remarkable measure moral enthusiasm. “In the Roman
Empire,” declares Lecky, “almost every great character, almost
every effort in the cause of liberty, emanated from the ranks of
Stoicism.”[570]
In the first place it presented an ideal of monarchy which powerfully
influenced Roman imperialism.[571] It made the prince “the shepherd of
his people.” It taught that the sole aim of the ruler should be “the
good of his subjects.” The effects of these teachings were evident in
the rule of more than one of the pagan emperors. The blessings which
the reigns of Pius and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and others of the
“good emperors” brought to the Roman world are to be attributed in
large measure to the influence upon these rulers of the doctrines and
ideals of Stoicism. In the beneficent rule of these Stoic emperors the
ideal of Plato and Dion was realized; the philosopher was upon the
throne. Only in the effects of the teachings of the philosophers of
the eighteenth century upon the Enlightened Despots of that period do
we find a like illustration of the influence of philosophy upon the
possessors of absolute power.
The enlightened and humane spirit of Stoicism was felt especially
in the law.[572] It was the Stoic doctrine of the natural equality
of all men that worked most effectively in this domain. Many of the
disabilities placed upon woman by the earlier law were removed;
children were emancipated in a measure from the now unreasonable
authority of the father;[573] and the slave was placed under the
protection of the law and safeguarded against the worst brutalities of
a cruel master.
[Sidenote: Amelioration of slavery
under the pagan emperors]
The mitigation of the lot of the slave constitutes so important a
phase of the moral evolution of the pre-Christian period that we must
consider it here apart and in some detail. The causes of this moral
reform were various. Among the most efficient agencies were Stoicism
and the other Greek philosophies.[574] Then the character of many of
the slaves themselves, the equal or superior often of their master in
intelligence and culture, won for the class respect and consideration.
Furthermore, the great number of freedmen, who constituted a very large
element of the free population of the Empire,[575] tended to create a
public sentiment favorable to the slave. Having had, like Epictetus the
Stoic, acquaintance with the bitterness of bondage, they knew how to
pity the bondsman.
Already in the first century of the Empire all the chief leaders of
moral reform taught that the slave is the equal of his master in
capacity for virtue.[576] Dion Chrysostom condemned hereditary slavery
as contrary to the Law of Nature and hence wrong. He is thought to have
been the earliest writer in the Roman Empire to take this advanced
moral ground.[577] Seneca proclaimed the obligations of the higher law:
“Although our laws,” he says, “permit a master to treat his slave with
every degree of cruelty, still there are some things that the common
law of life forbids being done to a human being.”[578] Cruel masters,
he adds, are hated and detested.
The growing sentiment of tenderness for the slave found significant
popular expression in the reign of Nero. A certain prefect of the
city having been murdered by a slave, the Senate, in accordance with
ancient usage, adjudged to death the entire household of slaves, four
hundred in number. Sentiment in the Senate itself was divided, some of
the senators voting against the proposal, while the people gathering
in seditious crowds threatened to prevent by force the carrying out of
the edict. A body of soldiers was necessary to overawe the populace and
secure the execution of the slaves.[579]
A little later we see these growing humanitarian feelings reflected in
the imperial legislation. Hadrian took away from masters the ancient
right willfully to kill their slaves; and Antoninus Pius made the
killing of a slave, _sine causa_, murder. The edicts of other emperors
effected further mitigations of the law, so that the slave code of
the later pagan Empire is characterized by a humaneness of spirit
that places it in strong contrast with the callousness of the code of
earlier times.
Additional evidence of the increased humanity of the age is afforded
by the numerous manumissions of slaves.[580] The motives that prompted
such action were undoubtedly mixed, one self-regarding motive being
the ambition to have a great retinue of clients;[581] but the dominant
motive is unquestionably to be sought in the growing humanity of the
age.
It is noteworthy that the greatest alleviations of slavery were
effected before the influence of Christianity was felt. The Christian
emperors added almost nothing to the laws of the pagan Empire
ameliorating the lot of the slave, and the Christian bishops in general
fell behind Seneca in advocacy of the cause of the bondsman. The
emphasis laid by the Church upon a future life where the poor and the
oppressed of this world should receive compensation for their wrongs
and sufferings here, caused the Christian teachers to regard earthly
rank and outer conditions of life as of little moment.[582]
[Sidenote: Ethics of the
persecution of the Christians by
the pagan emperors]
While considering the steady expansion of the moral sympathies and the
growth of humanitarian sentiment in the pagan Empire, we are confronted
by the startling fact that the best of the emperors, those most closely
identified with the legislation embodying the new spirit of humanity
and justice, were among the most severe and persistent persecutors of
the Christians.
This apparent moral paradox is the same as will again confront us in
the medieval age in connection with the Inquisition and the cruel
persecution of heretics and dissenters by a Church which was based on
the principle of universal love, and which exalted to the highest place
in its ideal of goodness the qualities of gentleness and pity.
The paradox in each case is, however, such only in seeming. The
persecution of Christians by pagans, and of heretics by Christians,
was practically the inevitable issue of certain ideas and beliefs
which became the premises of moral conclusions. In neither case does
the act of the persecutor necessarily imply moral turpitude.[583]
The persecution of the Christians by the pagan emperors sprang in
the main from the belief--in connection with the idea of corporate
responsibility--that the welfare of the state was bound up with the
careful observance of the rites of the temple.[584] It was thought that
the neglect of the temple service by any single member of the community
awakened the resentment of the gods toward all the members alike. If
the Tiber overflowed its banks, the people were ready to believe that
the calamity had been brought upon the city by the neglect of the new
sect to offer the customary sacrifices to the gods, and the cry arose,
“The Christians to the lions!” In a word, the refusal of the Christians
to participate in the common worship was looked upon as a crime, as a
species of treason against the state, and was punished as such.[585]
[Sidenote: Stoic teachings
Christian in tone and sentiment]
As we are now approaching the time when a new moral ideal, that of
Christianity, is to displace the old classical ideal of character,
it will be both instructive and interesting to note to what degree
this ideal which was passing away had, in theory if not in practice,
under the varied influences to which it had been subjected through the
centuries, become assimilated to this new ideal of excellence.[586]
The nobility of forgiveness was taught by many of the pagan
philosophers with Christian insistence. Cicero regarded repentance as
perhaps sufficient to stay the hand of chastisement, and declares that
nothing is more laudable than clemency and willingness to forgive.[587]
Marcus Aurelius would repress even the first risings of resentment
for injury: “When one is trying to do thee harm, continue to be of a
kind disposition toward him, gently admonish him, and calmly correct
his error, saying, ‘Not so, my child; we are constituted by nature for
something else; I shall certainly not be injured, but thou art injuring
thyself, my child,’--and show him by gentle tact and by general
principles that this is so.”[588]
And again: “It is royal to do good and to be abused”[589]; “be gentle
toward those who try to hinder or otherwise trouble thee.”[590]
“The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like [the
wrongdoer].”[591] Epictetus quotes with approval Pittacus, one of the
Seven Wise Men, in these words: “Forgiveness is better than revenge,
for forgiveness is the sign of a gentle nature, but revenge the sign of
a savage nature.”[592]
Purity and sincerity of thought is inculcated by Marcus Aurelius. “A
man should,” he says, “accustom himself to think of those things only
about which if one should suddenly ask, What hast thou now in thy
thought? with perfect openness thou mightest immediately answer, This
or that; so that from thy word it should be plain that everything in
thee is simple and benevolent.”[593]
Seneca taught that adversity has moral uses: “God does not pamper
the good man; he puts him to the test to prove him, he hardens him,
and thus prepares him for himself.”[594] Trust in Providence and
resignation is inculcated by Marcus Aurelius in many passages in which
he teaches that one should accept with all his soul everything which
happens to him as his portion assigned by God. He trusts in Him who
governs; he says to the universe, “I love as thou lovest.”[595] He
accepts death with perfect resignation whether it be extinction, or
birth into another life: “To go away from among men is not a thing to
be afraid of, for the gods, if there be gods, will not involve thee in
evil.”[596] But death may be extinction. If so, well; for “if it ought
to have been otherwise, the gods would have ordered it so.”[597]
Strangely Christian in tone are the reflections of Marcus Aurelius on
the transitoriness of earthly life: “What belongs to the soul is a
dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn.”[598]
The duty of godlikeness is enjoined by Epictetus: “He who seeks to
please the gods must labor as far as in him lies to resemble them. He
must be faithful as God is faithful, free as He is free, beneficent
as He is beneficent, magnanimous as He is magnanimous.”[599] Marcus
Aurelius sums up the duty of man in love to his fellows and in
following God;[600] and Plutarch declares that “man can enjoy no
greater blessing from God than to attain to virtue by the earnest
imitation of the noblest qualities of the divine nature.”[601]
[Sidenote: Some divergences
between Roman and Christian ethics]
But while in many of the teachings of the leaders of moral thought in
the later Roman Empire, as shown by the above quotations, we find a
near approach to Christian ethics, or a perfect accordance therewith,
still it is a fact that must not be overlooked or minimized that in
other of their teachings in which they represented more truly the
popular conceptions of right and wrong, they as conspicuously diverged
from the Christian ideal.
We have heard some of the moralists, particularly the Stoic Marcus
Aurelius, condemning the spirit of revenge and extolling forgiveness
as a virtue; but in general the Stoics as well as the followers of
other schools had not advanced beyond the common conscience of the
time in regard to the permissibility and even duty of returning injury
for injury. Cicero unequivocally approved the taking of revenge for
injuries received;[602] only the person injured should avenge himself
equitably and humanely.[603] Again he says that justice requires that
no one should do harm to another, “unless in requital of some injury
received.”[604] Even the gentle Plutarch, who may be regarded as
representing the composite ideal of character which was forming in
the first century of the Empire through the union of Greek and Roman
ethical ideas and feelings, declares it to be a virtue to make one’s
self disagreeable to one’s enemies.
Tyrannicide, which in general is condemned by the modern conscience,
was given by the Roman moralist, as by the Greek teachers, a place
among the greatest of the virtues. Cicero deems it a meritorious act to
slay a tyrant on the ground that he is but a “ferocious beast in the
guise of a man,”[605] and declares that of all illustrious deeds the
Roman people regard tyrannicide the most laudable.[606] Consistently he
extols the killing of the Gracchi.[607]
Pity or compassion for suffering, which is assigned such a high place
in the Christian type of character, was regarded by the Roman moralists
as a weakness, even a vice; not but that they extolled clemency in the
ruler, but they distinguished between this sentiment and that of pity.
Seneca declared pity to be a vice incident to weak minds. “The wise
man,” he said, “will dry the tears of others but will not add his to
theirs. He will not pity those in distress, but will relieve and aid
them.”[608]
Suicide, which to the modern conscience appears a censurable act, was
by most of the Roman moralists regarded with unqualified approval,[609]
provided the person committing the act had a strong motive for doing
so. Epictetus said, “The door is open”; but added this admonition, “Do
not depart without a reason.”[610] But almost any circumstance which
made life hard or a burden would justify the act; “The house is smoky,
and I quit it,” calmly remarks the Stoic Emperor Aurelius.[611] Seneca
says, “The eternal law has decreed nothing better than this, that life
should have but one entrance and many exits.”[612] He thinks the gods
must have looked on with great joy when Cato, with the world fallen
into Cæsar’s power, drove the sword into his own breast. That in his
view was “a glorious and memorable departure.” By such an act a man
raises himself to the level of the gods.[613]
Suicide was at its height in the early Empire. This is to be
explained by the teachings of the Stoics--among whom suicides were
numerous[614]--and the unbearable tyranny of the imperial régime. Not
till Christianity came with its teachings regarding the sacredness
of human life and the duty of resignation was there any essential
change in the general attitude of the ancient world toward the act of
self-destruction.[615]
[Sidenote: The insufficiency of
Stoicism as a moral guide for the
masses]
The composite Greco-Roman ideal, in which Stoicism had united the best
elements of the Greek and the Roman type of character, while it did
serve as a guide to the moral strivings of select souls, was wholly
unfitted to give support to the moral life of the masses or to awaken
in them moral enthusiasm. There were in Stoicism two serious defects
which made it impossible for it to become the guide and rule of life
for the multitude. First, it was too intellectually exalted and cold
to make appeal to the common people. The Stoics, in the suppression
of the feelings and emotions,--“they made solitude in the heart and
called it peace,”[616]--cut themselves off from all sympathy with the
masses, with whom feeling is ever the larger part of life. Second,
Stoicism failed to give due place to the religious sentiment. Belief
in the ancestral Roman gods had, it is true, been undermined, but the
religious feeling of awe and mystery in the presence of the Unseen was
deeper and more universal than ever before. Man, in the fine phrase of
Sabatier, is incurably religious.
The ideal of character which shall appeal to the masses must be an
ideal whose requirements make full recognition of the rightful claims
of human affections and of the religious instinct of mankind. The
mystical and religious East contributes to the ideal created by the
interaction of the Greek and the Roman spirit those elements which
neither of the classical cultures could supply.
[Sidenote: The Orient contributes
new elements to the moral life of
the West]
From the first century of our era, Rome was in close contact with the
Orient, as long before she had been in contact with Greece. And just as
the Greek spirit had profoundly influenced the moral ideal of Rome, so
now was the spirit of the Orient to effect even greater changes in her
ancestral standard of character.
As philosophy mediated between Rome and Greece, so did religion mediate
between Rome and the Orient. It was through the religions or cults
of Egypt, Persia, and Judea that the ethical forces of the ancient
cultures of the East were brought to bear on Roman life and thought
and conduct. In the present connection we shall speak only of the
influences which went forth from Egypt and Persia, and point out in
what way they gave an added impulse to that ethical movement going on
in the Roman world which finally culminated in the triumph of the creed
and moral ideal of Judea.
[Sidenote: The contribution of
Egypt; the worship of Isis]
And first we note the relation to this ethical evolution of the
worship of Isis and Serapis, the chief imported and modified cults of
the ancient civilization of the Valley of the Nile. In this worship
religion and morality were joined in a way practically unknown to the
priestly colleges of Rome. “The Egyptian,” says Lecky, “... bowed low
before the divine presence. He veiled his eyes, he humbled his reason,
he represented the introduction of a new element into the moral life of
Europe, the spirit of religious reverence and awe.”[617]
Forming an important part of the body of ideas which constituted the
basis of this religious feeling, was the doctrine of a life after
death. This was a doctrine which was common to all the Oriental
religions with which we have here to do,--the Isiac, the Mithraic,
and the Christian,--but a doctrine which, aside from the initiates of
the Orphic, the Eleusinian, and like Mysteries, was practically new
to the classical world. It was this doctrine which helped greatly to
secure for these religions or cults such wide acceptance in the Roman
world,--for the Roman world, old, worn, and weary, was yearning for
assurance of another and better life,--and which largely explains the
moral influence they exerted upon the nations of the West.[618]
For more than five hundred years the worship of Isis particularly found
ardent devotees in the West. The general effect of the cult upon its
followers was to cause the active, heroic qualities in the old Roman
ideal of character to be overshadowed by the passive contemplative
virtues, and to impart a religious, ritual character to the moral code.
Expiatory and purification rites formed a large part of the duties of
the worshiper of the Egyptian goddess.[619]
[Sidenote: The contribution of
Persia: Mithraism]
The influence of Egypt upon the religious-ethical life of the West was
reënforced by a like influence from Persia, which came through the cult
of Mithra.[620] This worship came into Europe by the way of Asia Minor.
Its missionaries were seemingly Oriental recruits in the Roman legions.
It came bearing many accretions gathered in its passage through the
west Asian lands, and yet with all the characteristics which marked
the old Persian religion as a religion of combat and strenuousness,
of moral striving and moral achievement.[621] During the last three
centuries of the Empire the cult spread widely in the Western lands,
taking deep root especially in the frontier regions of the Danube and
the Rhine, and in the remote province of Britain.
This incoming of Mithraism had special significance for the reason
that Mithra, as the god of light, was invested with certain moral
qualities symbolized by his physical attributes. He was the god of
truth and purity. It was this moral element in the cult, in connection
with its doctrine of a future life,--the promise and hope of which
was dependent upon purification, inward as well as ceremonial, from
all earthly stains and impurities,--which in a measure met and
satisfied the yearnings of the age, and which, in the great religious
and ethical propaganda that marked the later centuries of the Roman
Empire, rendered the religion of Mithra the most formidable rival
of Christianity in its great competition with the various Oriental
religions and cults for supremacy in the hearts and consciences of
men.[622]
[Sidenote: Relation of the
Egyptian and Persian propaganda to
that of Christianity]
But the pagan priest no more than the pagan philosopher could
effect the moral renovation of ancient society. Like the moral
propaganda carried on by Cynic, Stoic, and Neoplatonist missionaries
and preachers, these efforts of paganism to effect its own moral
regeneration failed, perhaps because these pagan cults lacked what
Christianity possessed--“the dynamic of a great personality.” Yet these
efforts were not without influence upon the ethical development of the
Western nations. In two ways the Egyptian and Persian propaganda was a
preparation for the moral revolution effected by Christianity: first,
it helped to give morality a religious basis, which it did not have in
classical antiquity; and second, it taught men to seek in deity and not
in themselves the pattern of moral excellence.[623] Thus did Egypt and
Persia, through the mediation of religion, contribute important ethical
elements to Greco-Roman civilization, and thereby help to give a fresh
impulse and a new trend to the moral evolution of the Western world.