SCAURUS ON EPICTETUS AND PAUL
The cock was still crowing when I started out of my dream. It was not
yet dawn but sleep was impossible. When Arrian called to accompany me
to lecture, he found me in a fever and sent in a physician, by whose
advice I stayed indoors for two or three days. During this enforced
inaction, I resolved to write to my old friend Scaurus. Marcus Æmilius
Scaurus—for that was his name in full—had been a friend of my father’s,
years before I was born; and his advice had been largely the cause of my
coming to Nicopolis. Scaurus had seen service; but for many years past he
had devoted himself wholly to literature, not as a rhetorician, nor as
a lover of the poets, but as “a practical historian,” so he called it.
By this he meant to distinguish himself from what he called “ornamental
historians.” “History,” he used to say, “contains truth in a well; and I
like trying to draw it out.”
For a man of nearly seventy, Scaurus was remarkably vigorous in mind
and thought, with large stores of observation and learning, of a sort
not common among Romans of good birth. His favourite motto was, “Quick
to perceive, slow to believe.” I used to think he erred on the side
of believing too little, and his friends used to call him Miso-mythus
or “Myth-hater.” But over and over again, when I had ventured to
discuss with him a matter of documentary evidence, I had found that his
incredulity was justified; so that I had come to admit that there was
some force in his protest, that he ought to be called, not “Myth-hater,”
but “Truth-lover.”
In the year after my fathers death, when I was wasting my time in Rome,
and in danger of doing worse, Scaurus took me to task as befitted my
father’s dearest friend—a cousin also of my mother, who had died while
I was still an infant. He had long desired me to enter the army, and
I should have done so but for illness. Now that my health was almost
restored, he returned to his previous advice, but suggested that, for
the present, I might spend a month or two with advantage in attending
the lectures of Epictetus, of whom he knew something while he was in
Rome, and about whom he had heard a good deal since. When I demurred, and
told him that I had heard a good many philosophers and did not care for
them, he replied, “Epictetus you will not find a common philosopher.” He
pressed me and I yielded.
Since my coming to Nicopolis, I had written once to tell him of my
arrival, and to thank him for advising me to come to so admirable a
teacher. But I had been too much absorbed in the teaching to enter into
detail. Now, having leisure, and knowing his great interest in such
subjects, I wrote to him even more fully than I have done for my readers
above, sending him all my lecture notes; and I asked him what he judged
to be the secret of Epictetus, which made him so different from other
philosophers. Nor did I omit to tell him of my talk with Arrian about the
Christians and their _sacramentum_.
Many days elapsed, and I had been attending lectures again for a long
time, before his letter in reply reached Nicopolis; but I will set it
down here, as also a second letter from him on the same subject. In the
first, Scaurus expressed his satisfaction at my meeting with Arrian (whom
he knew and described as an extremely sensible and promising young man,
likely to get on). He added a hope that I would take precisely Arrian’s
view of the advantage to be derived from philosophy. But a large part
of his letter—much more than I could have wished—was occupied with our
“wonderful discovery” (as he called it) that Plato and Xenophon disagreed
in their versions of the Apologia of Socrates. On this he rallied us as
mere babes in criticism, but, said he, not much more babyish than many
professed critics, who cannot be made to understand that—outside poetry,
and traditions learned by rote, and a few “aculeate sayings” (so he
called them) of philosophers and great men—no two historians ever agree
independently—he laid stress on “_independently_”—for twenty consecutive
words, in recording a speech or dialogue. “I will not lay you a wager,”
said he, “for it would be cheating you. But I will make you an offer.
If you and Arrian, between you, can find twenty identical consecutive
words of Socrates in the whole of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s
Dialogues, I will give you five hundred sesterces apiece[1]. Your failure
(for fail you will) ought to strike you as all the more remarkable
because both Plato and Xenophon tell us that Socrates used to describe
himself as ‘_always saying the same things about the same subjects_.’
That one similar saying they have preserved. For the rest, these two
great biographers, writing page upon page of Socratic talk, cannot agree
exactly about ‘_the same things_’ for a score of consecutive words!”
He added more, not of great interest to me, about the credulity of
those who persuaded themselves that Xenophon’s version must be spurious
just because it differed from Plato’s, whereas, said he, this very
difference went to shew that it was genuine, and that Xenophon was
tacitly correcting Plato. But concerning the secret of Epictetus he said
very little—and that, merely in reference to the _sacramentum_ of the
Christians which I mentioned in my first letter. On this he remarked that
Pliny, with whom he had been well acquainted, had never mentioned the
matter to him. “But that,” he said, “is not surprising. His measures to
suppress the Christian superstition did not prove so successful as he
had hoped. Moreover he disliked the whole business—having to deal with
mendacious informers on one side, and fanatical fools or hysterical women
on the other. And I, who knew a good deal more about the Christians than
Pliny did, disliked the subject still more. My conviction is, however,
that your excellent Epictetus—rationalist though he is now, and even less
prone to belief than Socrates—has not been always unscathed by that same
Christian infection (for that is the right name for it).
“Partly, he sympathizes with the Christian hatred or contempt for ‘the
powers of this world’ (to use their phrase) and partly with their
allegiance to one God, whom he and they regard as casting down kings
and setting up philosophers. But there is this gulf between them. The
Christians think of their champion, Christus, as having devoted himself
to death for their sake, and then as having been miraculously raised from
the dead, and as, even now, present among them whenever they choose to
meet together and ‘sing hymns to him as to a God.’ Epictetus absolutely
disbelieves this. Hence, he is at a great disadvantage—I mean, of course,
as a preacher, not as a philosopher. The Christians have their God,
standing in the midst of their daily assemblies, before whom they can
‘corybantize’—to repeat your expression—to their hearts’ content. Your
teacher has nothing—nay, worse than nothing, for he has a blank and feels
it to be a blank.
“What does he do then? He fills the blank with a Hercules or a Diogenes
or a Socrates, and he corybantizes before that. But it is a make-believe,
though an honest one. I have said more than I intended. You know how I
ramble on paper. And the habit is growing on me. Let no casual word of
mine make you doubt that Epictetus is thoroughly honest. But honest men
may be deceived. Be ‘quick in perceiving, slow in believing.’ Keep to
Arrian’s view of a useful and practical life in the world, the world as
it is, not as it might be in Plato’s Republic—which, by the way, would be
a very dull place. Farewell.”
This letter did not satisfy me at all. “Honest men,” I repeated, “may be
deceived.” True, and Scaurus, though honest as the day, is no exception.
To think that Epictetus, _our_ Epictetus—for so Arrian and I used to call
him—had been even for a time under the spell of such a superstition as
this! I had always assumed—and my conversation with Arrian about what
seemed exceptional experiences in Bithynia had done little to shake my
assumption—that the Christians were a vile Jewish sect, morose, debased,
given up to monstrous secret vices, hostile to the Empire, and hateful
to Gods and men. What was the ground for connecting Epictetus with
them? Contempt for rulers? That was no new thing in philosophers. Many
of them had despised kings, or affected to despise them, without any
intention of rebelling against them. What though Epictetus suggested,
in a hyperbolical or metaphorical way, a religious _sacramentum_ for
philosophers? This was quite different from that of the Christians as
mentioned by Arrian. I could not help feeling that, for once, my old
friend had “perceived” little and “believed” much.
Perhaps my reply shewed traces of this feeling. At all events, Scaurus
wrote back, asking whether I had observed in him “a habit of basing
conclusions on slight grounds.” Then he continued “I told you that I
knew a good deal about the Christians. I also know a great deal more
about Epictetus than you suppose. When I was a young man, I attended the
lectures of that most admirable of philosophers, Musonius Rufus. About
the time when I left, Epictetus, then a slave, was brought to the classes
by his master, Epaphroditus; and Rufus, whom I shall always regard with
respect and affection, spoke to me about his new pupil in the highest
terms. Afterwards he often told me how he tried to arm the poor boy with
philosophy against what he would have to endure from such a master. Many
a time have I thought that the young philosopher must have needed all his
Stoic armour, going home from the lecture-room of Rufus to the palace of
Nero’s freedman.
“But I also remember seeing him long before that, when he came one
morning as a mere child not twelve years old, along with Epaphroditus, to
Nero’s Palace. I was then about fourteen or fifteen. After we had left
the Palace—my father and I—we came upon him again on that same evening,
staring at some Christians, smeared with pitch and burning away like so
many flaring torches, to light the Imperial Gardens—one of Nero’s insane
or bestial freaks! I have never been able to forget the sight, and I have
often thought that he could never forget it. Somewhere about that time,
one of the Christian ringleaders, Paulus by name, was put to death. As
happens in such cases, his people began to collect every scrap of his
writings that could be found. A little volume of them came into my hands
some twenty years ago. But long before that date, all through the period
when Epictetus was in Rufus’s classes, the Christian slaves in Rome had
in their hands the letters of this Paulus or Paul. One of them, the
longest, written to the Christians in Rome (a few years before Paul was
brought to the City as a prisoner) goes back as far as sixty years ago.
Some are still earlier. I saw the volume more than once in Cæsar’s Palace
in the days of Vespasian. This Paul was one of the most practical of men,
and his letters are steeped in practical experience. Epictetus, besides
being a great devourer of literature in general, devoured in particular
everything that bore on practical life. The odds are great that he would
have come across the book somewhere among his slave or freedman friends.
“But I do not trust to such mere antecedent probabilities. You must know
that, ever since Epictetus set up as a philosopher, I have followed
his career with interest. Recluse though I am, I have many friends and
correspondents. These, from time to time, have furnished me with notes of
his lectures. Well, when I came to read Paul’s letters, I was prepared to
find in them certain general similarities to Stoic doctrine; for Paul was
a man of Tarsus and might have picked up these things at the University
there. But I found a great deal more. I found particularities, just of
the sort that you find in your lectures. Paul’s actual experiences had
been exactly those of a vagrant Æsculapius or Hercules. Your friend
idealizes the wanderings of Hercules; Paul enacted them. Paul journeyed
from city to city, from continent to continent, everywhere turning
the world upside down—Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Ephesus, Colossæ,
Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Jerusalem again—last of all, Rome.
Everywhere the slaves, the poor, the women, went after him. Everywhere he
came into collision with the rulers of the earth. If he did not proclaim
a war between them and his God, he at all events implied war.
“Now this is just what Epictetus would have liked to do. Only he could
not often get people to take him in the same serious way, because he
had not the same serious business in hand. I verily believe he was not
altogether displeased when the Prefect of the City banished him with
other philosophers of note under Domitian. I know certain philosophers
who actually made money by being thus banished. It was an advertisement
for their lectures. Don’t imagine that _your_ philosopher made, or wished
to make, money. No. But he made influence—which he valued above money.
“However, the Emperors and Prefects after Domitian were not such fools.
They knew the difference between a real revolution and a revolution on
paper. A mere theoretical exaltation of the mind above the body, a mere
scholastic laudation of kingship over the minds of men as superior to
kingship over their bodies—these things kings tolerate; for they mean
nothing but words. But a revolution in the name of a _person_—a person,
too, supposed by fanatics to be living and present in all their secret
meetings, ‘wherever two or three are gathered together,’ for that is
their phrase—this may mean a great deal. A person, regarded in this way,
may take hold of men’s spirits. Missionaries pretending—or, still worse,
believing—that they are speaking in the name of such a person, may lead
crowds of silly folk into all sorts of sedition. They may refuse, for
example, to adore the Emperor’s image and to offer sacrifice to the Gods
of the State; or they might even attempt to subvert the foundations of
society by withholding taxes, or by encouraging or inculcating some
wholesale manumission of slaves. This sort of thing means war, and Paul,
fifty years ago, was actually waging this war. Epictetus longs to be
waging it now. As he cannot, he takes pleasure in urging his pupils
to it, painting an imaginary battle array in which he sees imaginary
soldiers waging, or destined to wage, imaginary conflicts with imaginary
enemies.
“Hence that picturesque contrast (in the lecture you transcribed for
me) between the unmarried and the married Cynic—which, besides the
similarity of thought, contains some curious similarities to the actual
words of Paul. It ran thus, ‘The condition of the times being such as it
is, opposing forces, as it were, being drawn up in line of battle’—that
was his expression. Well, what followed from this non-existent,
hypothetical, imminent conflict? The Philosopher, it seems, must be a
soldier, ‘_undistracted_, wholly devoted to the ministry of God, able to
go about and visit men, not bound fast to private personal duties, not
_entangled_ in conditions of life that he cannot honourably transgress.’
And then he describes at great length a married Cynic dragged down from
his royal throne by the claims and encumbrances of a nursery. Now this
same ‘undistractedness’ (using the very word) of unmarried life Paul
himself has mentioned in a letter to the Corinthians, where he says that
‘owing to the pressing necessity’ of the times, it was good for a man
to be unmarried, and that he wished them to be ‘free from anxiety.’ He
concludes ‘But I speak this for your own profit, not that I may cast
a noose round you but that you may with all seemliness attend on the
Lord _undistractedly_.’ Again, he writes to one of his assistants or
subalterns, ‘Endure hardship with me as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.
No one engaged in a campaign is _entangled_’—your friend’s word again—‘in
the affairs of civil life.’
“I lay little stress on the similarity of word, but a great deal on the
similarity of thought. There is no such conflict as Epictetus describes.
There is no such ‘line of battle’—not at least for us, Romans, or for
you, Cynics. But _there is for the Christians_—arrayed as they are
against the authorities of the Empire. And that reminds me of your
Epictetian antithesis between ‘the Beast’ and ‘the Man.’ It is a little
like a Christian tradition about ‘the Beast.’ By ‘the Beast’ they mean
Nero. They have never forgotten his treatment of them after the fire.
For a long time after his death they had a notion—I believe some of them
have it still—that the Beast may rise from the dead and persecute them
again. They also expect—I cannot do more than allude to their fantastic
dreams—a sort of ‘Son of Man’ to appear on the clouds taking vengeance on
the armies of the Beast. So, you see, they, too, recognise an opposition
between the Man and the Beast. Only, with the Christians it is of a date
much earlier than Epictetus. It goes back to a Jewish tradition, which
represents a sort of opposition between the empires of Beasts and the
empire of the Son of Man, in a prophet named Daniel, some centuries ago.
“Epictetus, of course, does not believe in all this. But still he
persuades himself that there is such a ‘line of battle’ in the air,
and that he and his followers can take part in this aerial conflict
by ‘going about the world’ as spiritually armed warriors, making
themselves substantially miserable—or what the world would call
such—while championing the cause of unsubstantial good against evil. All
that you wrote to me about the missionary life and its hardships—its
destitution, homelessness, nakedness, yes, even the extraordinary phrase
you added from Arrian’s notes about the cudgelled Cynic, how he ‘must
be cudgelled like a donkey, and, in the act of being cudgelled, must
love his cudgellers as being the father of all and brother of all’—all
this I could match, in a compressed form, from a passage in my little
Pauline volume. Here it is: ‘_For I think that God has made a show of us
Missionaries_’—Missionaries, or Apostles, that is their name for their
wandering Æsculapii—‘_like condemned criminals in the arena. We have been
made a theatre-show to the universe, to angels and men …:—up to this
very moment, hungering, thirsting, naked, buffeted, driven from place
to place, toiling and labouring with our own hands. Reviled, we bless;
persecuted, we endure. Men imprecate evil on us, we exhort them to their
good. We have been made as the refuse of the universe, the offscouring of
all, up to this very moment._’
“Again, elsewhere, Paul brings in that same Epictetian contrast between
the external misery and the internal joy of the Missionary: ‘_Never
needlessly offending anyone in anything, lest the Service_’—which your
philosopher calls ‘the service of God’—‘_be reproached, but in everything
commending ourselves as the Servants of God, in much endurance, in
tribulations, in necessities, in hardships, in scourgings, in prisons,
in tumults, in toils, in watchings, in fastings_.’ Now comes the
contrast, indicating that all these things are superficial trifles,
the petty pin-pricks inflicted by the spite of the contemptible world,
but underneath lie the solid realities:—‘_in purity, in knowledge, in
longsuffering, in kindness and goodness, in the holy spirit, in love
unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God_.’
“This leads Paul to the thought of the armour of God, and the friends and
enemies of God, the good and the evil, which this wandering Christian
Hercules has to deal with: ‘_By the arms of righteousness, on the right
hand and on the left; by glory and dishonour; by ill report and good
report_—,’ he means, I think, ‘glory in the sight of God, dishonour
in the sight of men,’ and again, ‘ill report on earth, good report in
heaven.’ And so he continues, ‘_as knaves and true_’—that is, ‘knaves in
appearance, in the world’s false judgment, but true men in the sight of
Him who judges truly.’ It is a marvel of compression. And it is kept up
in what follows:—‘_misunderstood_ [_i.e._ by men] _and well understood_
[_i.e._ by God]; _dying, and behold we live; under the headsman’s
scourge, yet not beheaded; grieving, but always rejoicing; beggars, but
making many rich; having nothing, yet having all things for ever!_’
“You will be tired of this. But your zeal for your new teacher brought
it on you. You admire his ‘fervour.’ Then what do you think of this
man’s fervour? He could give points to Epictetus both for fervour and
for compression. I admit that Paul has not your master’s dramatic flash,
irony, and epigrammatic twist. But, as for ‘fervour,’ here, I contend,
is the original Falernian, which your friend Epictetus has watered down.
Not that I blame him, either as regards style or in respect of morality.
His humorous description of the nursery troubles of the married Stoic
was very good—for his purpose, and for a lecture. But it would not have
suited Paul. A lecturer must not be too brief. If Epictetus were to pack
stuff in his lectures as Paul packs it in his epistles, your lesson would
sometimes not last five minutes.
“But I am straying from the question, which is, whether Epictetus
borrowed. Let me give you another instance. The Christians are permeated
with two notions, the first is, that they have received an ‘invitation,’
‘summons,’ or ‘calling’ (_Klēsis_ they call it) to a heavenly Feast in
a Kingdom of Heaven. The second is, that, if they are to attain to this
Feast, they must pass through suffering and persecution, by ‘witnessing’
or ‘testifying’ to Christ, as being their King, in opposition to the Gods
of the Romans. This ‘witness,’ or _martyria_, is so closely associated in
their minds with the notion of persecution that ‘martyrdom,’ with them,
has come to imply, almost always, death. Now, as far as I know, the
Greeks do not anywhere use the word ‘calling’ in this sense. But look at
what Epictetus says about a sham philosopher, who, having been ‘called’
by God to be a beggar, ‘disgraces his _calling_’: ‘How then dost thou
mount the stage now? It is in the character of a witness _called_ by God,
who says “Come thou, and bear witness to me.”’ Then the sham philosopher
whines out, ‘I am in a terrible strait, O Lord, and most unfortunate.
None take thought for me; none give to me. All blame me. All speak evil
of me.’ To which Epictetus replies, ‘Is this the witness thou wouldst
bear, _bringing shame on the calling wherewith He hath called thee_, in
that He honoured thee with so great an honour, and counted thee _worthy_
to be promoted to the high task of such a witnessing?’ Now this phrase,
‘worthy of the calling,’ is Pauline in thought, and Pauline in word. Here
is an instance, from a letter to the Thessalonians, ‘That our God would
_count you worthy of the calling_.’ And Paul writes to the Ephesians,
‘That ye walk _worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called_.’
“Again, you yourself remarked to me on the strangeness and originality
of Epictetus’s expression about ‘eating,’ namely, that, in the very act
of eating, or going to the gymnasium, or whatever else, the philosopher
was to remember that he was ‘feeding on God’ and ‘carrying about God,’
and that he must not ‘defile’ the image of the God within him. Well, I
admit it is strange, but I do not admit that it is original. I can match
it in the first place with another passage from Epictetus himself, where
he bids some of his uppish pupils, who wished to reform the world, first
to reform themselves. ‘In this way,’ he said, ‘when eating, help those
who eat with you; when drinking, those who drink with you.’ In the next
place, I can match both out of the letter to the Corinthians, which says,
‘Ye are _God’s temple_,’ and ‘If anyone destroys _God’s temple_, him will
God destroy,’ and again, ‘Your body is _the temple of the Holy Spirit_,
which ye have from God.’ It adds that people cause shame to others and
injury to themselves by greediness at the sacred meals they take in
common; and lastly, says Paul, ‘_Whether therefore ye eat or drink, or
whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God._’ There are things like
this, of course, in Seneca, but none, as far as I know, that come so near
as Epictetus does to the language of Paul.
“I could quote more from Paul, and also from other sacred books of the
Christians, to shew that Epictetus is indebted to them. But I have been
already led on by the fascination—to me it is a fascination—of a merely
literary discussion, to say more than enough, and a great deal more
than I intended. Let me conclude with an extract from a letter I lately
rummaged up from my dear old friend Pliny, whom I greatly miss. He was
the former Governor of Bithynia about whom you wrote. It refers to a
very fine fellow, Artemidorus by name, a military tribune, son-in-law of
the excellent Musonius (Epictetus’s teacher, whom I mentioned above).
‘Among the whole multitude of those who in these days call themselves
philosophers, you will hardly find one so sincere, genuine, and true,
as Artemidorus. I say nothing about his bodily endurance of heat and
cold and the most arduous toil, of his indifference to the pleasures of
the table, of the strict control with which he keeps his eyes and his
passions in order. These are great virtues, but only great in others. In
him they are but trifles compared with his other merits.’
“So wrote Pliny. Well, for me at all events, ‘to keep eyes and passions
in order’ is not ‘a trifle.’ Perhaps it is not ‘a trifle’ for you. I
fully believe that Musonius’s successor—for as such I regard Epictetus—in
spite of some opinions in which I cannot quite follow him, will help you
to attain this object. Give yourself wholly to that. I knew Artemidorus.
So did your father. We both thought him the model of a soldier and a
gentleman. Believe me, my dear Quintus, it would be one of the greatest
comforts in my last moments if I could feel assured that—to some slight
extent in consequence of advice from me—the son of my old friend Decimus
Junius Silanus was following in the footsteps of one whom he so esteemed
and admired. Farewell.”
This was the end of the letter. But out of it dropped a paper containing
a sealed note. On the paper were these words: “To convince you that I
had not judged your philosopher unfairly, I transcribed a few passages
from other Christian documents, containing words assigned by Christians
to Christ himself, which seem to me to have influenced Epictetus. On
second thoughts, I have come to think it was waste of my time. That it
might not waste yours too, I was on the point of throwing the thing into
the fire. But I decided to send it rather than let you suppose me to be
a crotchety, suspicious, prejudiced old man, ungenerous towards one whom
both you and I respect with all our hearts. I grant that I am slow to
believe in new _facts_; but I need hardly assure you, my dearest Quintus,
that I am not slow to believe in good _motives_—the motives of good men,
tried, tested, and proved, by such severe trials as have befallen your
admirable Master. Rather than suspect me thus, break the seal and read
it at once. But I hope you will not want to read it. Discussions of this
sort must not be allowed to distract your energies as they might do.
Better burn it. Or keep it—till you are military tribune.”
[1] In “Notes on Silanus,” 2809_a_, the author repeats this offer.