CHAPTER II

THE STOICS

"I am entering," writes Tacitus,[1] "upon the history of a period, rich

in disasters, gloomy with wars, rent with seditions, nay, savage in its

very hours of peace. Four Emperors perished by the sword; there were

three civil wars; there were more with foreigners--and some had both

characters at once.... Rome was wasted by fires, its oldest temples

burnt, the very Capitol set in flames by Roman hands. There was

defilement of sacred rites; adulteries in high places; the sea crowded

with exiles; island rocks drenched with murder. Yet wilder was the

frenzy in Rome; nobility, wealth, the refusal of office, its

acceptance--everything was a crime, and virtue the surest ruin. Nor

were the rewards of informers less odious than their deeds; one found

his spoils in a priesthood or a consulate; another in a provincial

governorship; another behind the throne; and all was one delirium of

hate and terror; slaves were bribed to betray their masters, freedmen

their patrons. He who had no foe was destroyed by his friend."

It was to this that Virgil's hope of a new Golden Age had

come--_Redeunt Saturnia regna_. Augustus had restored the Republic; he

had restored religion; and after a hundred years here is the outcome.

Tacitus himself admits that the age was not "barren of virtues," that

it "could show fine illustrations" of family love and friendship, and

of heroic death. It must also be owned that the Provinces at large

were better governed than under the Republic; and, further, that, when

he wrote Tacitus thought of a particular period of civil disorder and

that not a long one. Yet the reader of his Annals will feel that the

description will cover more than the year 69; it is essentially true of

the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, and it was to be true

again of the reign of Domitian--of perhaps eighty years of the first

century of our era. If it was not true {34} of the whole Mediterranean

world, or even of the whole of Rome, it was true at least of that

half-Rome which gave its colour to the thinking of the world.

[Sidenote: The Imperial court]

Through all the elaborate pretences devised by Augustus to obscure the

truth, through all the names and phrases and formalities, the Roman

world had realized the central fact of despotism.[2] The Emperors

themselves had grasped it with pride and terror. One at least was

insane, and the position was enough to turn almost any brain.

"Monarchy," in Herodotus' quaint sentence,[3] "would set the best man

outside the ordinary thoughts." Plato's myth of Gyges was

fulfilled--of the shepherd, who found a ring that made him invisible,

and in its strength seduced a queen, murdered a king and became a

tyrant. Gaius banished his own sisters, reminding them that he owned

not only islands but swords; and he bade his grandmother remember that

he could "do anything he liked and do it to anybody."[4] Oriental

princes had been kept at Rome as hostages and had given the

weaker-minded members of the Imperial family new ideas of royalty. The

very word was spoken freely--in his treatise "On Clemency" Seneca uses

again and again the word _regnum_ without apology.

But what gave Despotism its sting was its uncertainty. Augustus had

held a curiously complicated set of special powers severally conferred

on him for specified periods, and technically they could be taken from

him. The Senate was the Emperor's partner in the government of the

world, and it was always conceivable that the partnership might cease,

for it was not a definite institution--prince followed prince, it is

true, but there was an element of accident about it all. The situation

was difficult; Senate and Emperor eyed each other with

suspicion--neither knew how far the other could go, or would go;

neither knew the terms of the partnership. Tiberius wrote despatches

to the Senate and he was an artist in concealing his meaning. The

Senate had to guess what he wished; if it guessed wrong, he would

resent the liberty; if it guessed right, he resented the appearance of

servility. The solitude of the throne grew more and more uneasy.

{35}

Again, the republican government had been in the hands of free men, who

ruled as magistrates, and the imperial government had no means of

replacing them, for one free-born Roman could not take service with

another. The Emperor had to fall back upon his own household. His

Secretaries of State were slaves and freedmen--men very often of great

ability, but their past was against them. If it had not depraved them,

none the less it left upon them a social taint, which nothing could

remove. They were despised by the men who courted them, and they knew

it. It was almost impossible for such men not to be the gangrene of

court and state. And as a fact we find that the freedman was

throughout the readiest agent for all evil that Rome knew, and into the

hands of such men the government of the world drifted. Under a weak,

or a careless, or even an absent, Emperor Rome was governed by such men

and such methods as we suppose to be peculiar to Sultanates and the

East.

The honour, the property, the life of every Roman lay in the hands of

eunuchs and valets, and, as these quarrelled or made friends, the

fortunes of an old nobility changed with the hour. It had not been so

under Augustus, nor was it so under Vespasian, nor under Trajan or his

successors; but for the greater part of the first century A.D. Rome was

governed by weak or vicious Emperors, and they by their servants. The

spy and the informer were everywhere.

To this confusion fresh elements of uncertainty were added by the

astrologer and mathematician, and it became treason to be interested in

"the health of the prince." Superstition ruled the

weakling--superstition, perpetually re-inforced by fresh hordes of

Orientals, obsequious and unscrupulous. Seneca called the imperial

court, which he knew, "a gloomy slave-gaol" (_triste ergastulum_).[5]

Reduced to merely registering the wishes of their rulers, the Roman

nobility sought their own safety in frivolity and extravagance. To be

thoughtful was to be suspected of independence and to invite danger.

We naturally suppose moralists and satirists to exaggerate the vices of

their contemporaries, but a sober survey of Roman morals in the first

century--at any rate before 70 A.D.--reveals a great deal that {36} is

horrible. (Petronius is not exactly a moralist or a satirist, and

there is plenty of other evidence.) Marriage does not thrive alongside

of terror, nor yet where domestic slavery prevails, and in Rome both

militated against purity of life. The Greek girl's beauty, her charm

and wit, were everywhere available. For amusements, there were the

gladiatorial shows,--brutal, we understand, but their horrible

fascination we fortunately cannot know. The reader of St Augustine's

_Confessions_ will remember a famous passage on these games. The

gladiators were the popular favourites of the day. They toured the

country, they were modelled and painted. Their names survive scratched

by loafers on the walls of Pompeii. The very children played at being

gladiators, Epictetus said--"sometimes athletes, now monomachi, now

trumpeters." The Colosseum had seats for 80,000 spectators of the

games, "and is even now at once the most imposing and the most

characteristic relic of pagan Rome."[6]

[Sidenote: "Despotism tempered by epigrams"]

Life was terrible in its fears and in its pleasures. If the poets drew

Ages of Gold in the latter days of the Republic, now the philosophers

and historians looked away to a "State of Nature," to times and places

where greed and civilization were unknown. In those happy days, says

Seneca, they enjoyed Nature in common; the stronger had not laid his

hand upon the weaker; weapons lay unused, and human hands, unstained by

human blood, turned all the hatred they felt upon the wild beasts; they

knew quiet nights without a sigh, while the stars moved onward above

them and the splendid pageant of Night; they drank from the stream and

knew no water-pipes, and their meadows were beautiful without art;

their home was Nature and not terrible; while our abodes form the

greatest part of our terror.[7] In Germany, writes Tacitus, the

marriage-bond is strict; there are no shows to tempt virtue; adultery

is rare; none there makes a jest of vice, _nec corrumpere et corrumpi

seculum vocatur_; none but virgins marry and they marry to bear big

children and to suckle them, _sera invenum venus eoque inexhausta

pubertas_; and the children inherit the sturdy frames of their

parents.[8]

But whatever their dreams of the Ideal, the actual was {37} around

them, and men had to accommodate themselves to it. In France before

the Revolution, men spoke of the government as "despotism tempered by

epigrams," and the happy phrase is as true of Imperial Rome. "Verses

of unknown authorship reached the public and provoked" Tiberius,[9] who

complained of the "circles and dinner-parties." Now and again the

authors were discovered and were punished sufficiently. The tone of

the society that produced them lives for ever in the _Annals_ of

Tacitus. It is worth noting how men and women turned to Tacitus and

Seneca during the French Revolution and found their own experience

written in their books.[10]

Others unpacked their hearts with words in tyrannicide declamations and

imitations of Greek tragedy. Juvenal laughs at the crowded class-room

busy killing tyrants,--waiting himself till they were dead. The

tragedies got nearer the mark. Here are a few lines from some of

Seneca's own:--

Who bids all pay one penalty of death

Knows not a tyrant's trade. Nay, vary it--

Forbid the wretch to die, and slay the happy. (_H.F._ 515.)

And is there none to teach them stealth and sin?

Why! then the throne will! (_Thyestes_ 313.)

Let him who serves a king, fling justice forth,

Send every scruple packing from his heart;

Shame is no minister to wait on kings. (_Phaedra_ 436.)

But bitterness and epigram could not heal; and for healing and inward

peace men longed more and more,[11] as they felt their own weakness,

the power of evil and the terror of life; and they found both in a

philosophy that had originally come into being under circumstances

somewhat similar. They needed some foundation for life, some means of

linking the individual to something that could not be shaken, and this

they found in Stoicism. The Stoic philosopher saw a unity in this

world of confusion--it was the "Generative Reason"--the _spermatikos

logos_, the Divine Word, or Reason, that is the seed and vital

principle, whence all things come and in virtue of which they {38}

live. All things came from fiery breath, _pneuma diapuron_, and

returned to it. The whole universe was one polity--_politeia tou

kosmou_--in virtue of the spirit that was its origin and its life, of

the common end to which it tended, of the absolute and universal scope

of the laws it obeyed--mind, matter, God, man, formed one community.

The soul of the individual Roman partook of the very nature of

God--_divinae particula aurae_[12]--and in a way stood nearer to the

divine than did anything else in the world, every detail of which,

however, was some manifestation of the same divine essence. All men

were in truth of one blood, of one family,--all and each, as Seneca

says, sacred to each and all.[13] (_Unum me donavit_ [_sc. Natura

rerum_] _omnibus, uni mihi omnes_.)

[Sidenote: Harmony with nature]

Taught by the Stoic, the troubled Roman looked upon himself at once as

a fragment of divinity,[14] an entity self-conscious and individual,

and as a member of a divine system expressive of one divine idea, which

his individuality subserved. These thoughts gave him ground and

strength. If he seemed to be the slave and plaything of an Emperor or

an imperial freedman, none the less a divine life pulsed within him,

and he was an essential part of "the world." He had two havens of

refuge--the universe and his own soul--both quite beyond the reach of

the oppressor. Over and over we find both notes sounded in the

writings of the Stoics and their followers--God within you and God

without you. "Jupiter is all that you see, and all that lives within

you."[15] There is a Providence that rules human and all other

affairs; nothing happens that is not appointed; and to this Providence

every man is related. "He who has once observed with understanding the

administration of the world, and learnt that the greatest and supreme

and most comprehensive community is the system (_systema_) of men and

God, and that from God come the seeds whence all things, and especially

rational beings, spring, why should not that man call himself a citizen

of the world [Socrates' word _kosmios_], why not a son of God?"[16]

And when we consider the individual, we find that God {39} has put in

his power "the best thing of all, the master thing"--the rational

faculty. What is not in our power is the entire external world, of

which we can alter nothing, but the use we make of it and its

"appearances"[17] is our own. Confine yourself to "what is in your

power" (_ta epi soi_), and no man can hurt you. If you can no longer

endure life, leave it; but remember in doing so to withdraw quietly,

not at a run; yet, says the sage, "Men! wait for God; when He shall

give you the signal and release you from this service, then go to Him;

but for the present endure to dwell in this place where He has set

you."[18]

To sum up; the end of man's being and his true happiness is what Zeno

expressed as "living harmoniously," a statement which Cleanthes

developed by adding the words "with Nature." Harmony with Nature and

with oneself is the ideal life; and this the outside world of Emperors,

freedmen, bereavements and accidents generally, can neither give nor

take away. "The end," says Diogenes Laertius, "is to act in conformity

with nature, that is, at once with the nature which is in us and with

the nature of the universe, doing nothing forbidden by that common law

which is the right reason that pervades all things, and which is,

indeed, the same in the Divine Being who administers the universal

system of things. Thus the life according to nature is that virtuous

and blessed flow of existence, which is enjoyed only by one who always

acts so as to maintain the harmony between the daemon (_daimon_) within

the individual and the will of the power that orders the universe."[19]

This was indeed a philosophy for men, and it was also congenial to

Roman character, as history had already shown. It appealed to manhood,

and whatever else has to be said of Stoics and Stoicism, it remains the

fact that Stoicism inspired nearly all the great characters of the

early Roman Empire, and nerved almost every attempt that was made to

maintain the freedom and dignity of the human soul.[20] The government

was not slow to realise the danger of men with such a trust in

themselves and so free from fear.

On paper, perhaps, all religions and philosophies may at first glance

seem equally good, and it is not till we test them in life {40} that we

can value them aright. And even here there is a wide field for error.

Every religion has its saints--men recognizable to everyone as saints

in the beauty, manhood and tenderness of their character--and it is

perhaps humiliating to have to acknowledge that very often they seem to

be so through some happy gift of Nature, quite independently of any

effort they make, or of the religion to which they themselves generally

attribute anything that redeems them from being base. We have to take,

if possible, large masses of men, and to see how they are affected by

the religion which we wish to study--average men, as we call them--for

in this way we shall escape being led to hasty conclusions by happy

instances of natural endowment, or of virtues carefully acquired in

favourable circumstances of retirement or helpful environment. Side by

side with such results as we may reach from wider study, we have to set

our saints and heroes, for while St Francis would have been tender and

Thrasea brave under any system of thought, it remains that the one was

Christian and the other Stoic. We need the individual, if we are to

avoid mere rough generalities; but we must be sure that he is

representative in some way of the class and the system under review.

As representatives of the Stoicism of the early Roman Empire, two men

stand out conspicuous--men whose characters may be known with a high

degree of intimacy. The one was a Roman statesman, famous above all

others in his age, and a man of letters--one of those writers who

reveal themselves in every sentence they write and seem to leave

records of every mood they have known. The other was an emancipated

slave, who lived at Nicopolis in Epirus, away from the main channels of

life, who wrote nothing, but whose conversations or monologues were

faithfully recorded by a disciple.

"Notable Seneca," writes Carlyle, "so wistfully desirous to stand well

with Truth and yet not ill with Nero, is and remains only our perhaps

niceliest proportioned half-and-half, the plausiblest Plausible on

record; no great man, no true man, no man at all... 'the father of all

such as wear shovel-hats.'" This was in the essay on Diderot written

in 1833; and we find in his diary for 10th August 1832, when Carlyle

was fresh from reading Seneca, an earlier judgment to much the same

effect--"He is father of all that work in sentimentality, and, by fine

speaking {41} and decent behaviour, study to serve God and mammon, to

stand well with philosophy and not ill with Nero. His _force_ had

mostly oozed out of him, or corrupted itself into _benevolence_,

virtue, sensibility. Oh! the everlasting clatter about virtue!

virtue!! In the Devil's name be virtuous and no more about it."

Even in his most one-sided judgments Carlyle is apt to speak truth,

though it is well to remember that he himself said that little is to be

learnt of a man by dwelling only or mainly on his faults. That what he

says in these passages is in some degree true, every candid reader must

admit; but if he had written an essay instead of a paragraph we should

have seen that a great deal more is true of Seneca. As it is, we must

take what Carlyle says as representing a judgment which has often been

passed upon Seneca, though seldom in such picturesque terms. It is in

any case truer than Mommsen's description of Cicero.

[Sidenote: Seneca's early life]

Seneca was born at Cordova in Spain about the Christian era--certainly

not long before it. His father was a rich man of equestrian rank, a

rhetorician, who has left several volumes of rhetorical compositions on

imaginary cases. He hated philosophy, his son tells us.[21] Seneca's

mother seems to have been a good woman, and not the only one in the

family; for his youth was delicate and owed much to the care of a good

aunt at Rome; and his later years were spent with a good wife Pompeia

Paulina, who bore him two little short-lived boys.

In one of his letters (108) Seneca tells us of his early life in Rome.

He went to the lectures of Attalus, a Stoic teacher, who laid great

stress on simplicity of life and independence of character and was also

interested in superstition and soothsaying. The pupil was a

high-minded and sensitive youth, quick then, as he remained through

life, to take fire at an idea.[22] "I used to be the first to come and

the last to go; and as he walked I would lead him on to further

discussions, for he was not only ready for those who would learn, but

he would meet them." "When I heard Attalus declaim against the vices,

errors and evils of life, I would often pity mankind; and as for him I

thought of him as one on high, far above human nature's highest. He

himself used to say he was a king [a Stoic {42} paradox at which Horace

had laughed]; but he seemed to me more than king,--the judge of kings.

When he began to commend poverty, and to show that whatever is more

than need requires, is a useless burden to him that has it, I often

longed to leave the room a poor man. When he attacked our pleasures

and praised the chaste body, the sober table, the pure mind, I

delighted to refrain, not merely from unlawful pleasures, but from

needless ones too. Some of it has stuck by me, Lucilius, for I made a

good beginning." All his life long, in fact, he avoided the luxuries

of table and bath, and drank water. He continues, "Since I have begun

to tell you how much more keenly I began philosophy in my youth than I

persevere with it in my old age, I am not ashamed to own what love of

Pythagoras Sotion waked in me." Sotion recommended vegetarianism on

the grounds which Pythagoras had laid down. "But you do not believe,"

he said, "that souls are allotted to one body after another, and that

what we call death is transmigration? You don't believe that in beasts

and fishes dwells the mind (_animum_) that was once a man's? ... Great

men have believed it; so maintain your own opinion, but keep the matter

open. If it is true, then to have abstained from animal food will be

innocence; if it is false, it will still be frugality."[23] So for a

year Seneca was a vegetarian with some satisfaction and he fancied that

his mind was livelier than when he was "an eater of beef."[24] It is

as well not to quote some contemporary methods of preparing meat.[25]

However, after a while some scandal arose about foreign religions, and

vegetarianism was counted a "proof of superstition," and the old

rhetorician, more from dislike of philosophy than from fear of calumny,

made it an excuse to put a little pressure on his philosophic son, who

obediently gave up the practice. Such is the ardour of youth, he

concludes,--a good teacher finds idealists ready to his hand. The

fault is partly in the teachers, who train us to argue and not to live,

and partly in the pupils too, whose aim is to have the wits trained and

not the mind. "So what was philosophy becomes philology--the love of

words."[26]

There is a certain gaiety and good humour about these {43} confessions,

which is closely bound up with that air of tolerance and that sense of

buoyant ease[27] which pervade all his work. Here the tone is in

keeping with the matter in hand, but it is not always. Everything

seems so easy to him that the reader begins to doubt him and to wonder

whether he is not after all "The plausiblest Plausible on record." We

associate experience with a style more plain, more tense, more

inevitable; and the extraordinary buoyancy of Seneca's writing suggests

that he can hardly have known the agony and bloody sweat of the true

teacher. Yet under the easy phrases there lay a real sincerity. From

his youth onward he took life seriously, and, so far as is possible for

a man of easy good nature, he was in earnest with himself.

Like other youths of genius, he had had thoughts of suicide, but on

reflexion, he tells us, he decided to live, and his reason was

characteristic. While for himself he felt equal to dying bravely, he

was not so sure that his "kind old father" would be quite so brave in

doing without him. It was to philosophy, he says, that he owed his

resolution.[28]

Apart from philosophy, he went through the ordinary course of Roman

education. He "wasted time on the grammarians,"[29] whom he never

forgave, and at whom, as "guardians of Latin speech"[30] he loved to

jest,--and the greatest of all Roman Grammarians paid him back in the

familiar style of the pedagogue. Rhetoric came to him no doubt by

nature, certainly by environment; it conspicuously haunted his family

for three generations.[31] He duly made his appearance at the

bar--making more speeches there than Virgil did, and perhaps not

disliking it so much. But he did not like it, and, when his father

died, he ceased to appear, and by and by found that he had lost the

power to plead as he had long before lost the wish.[32]

On the accession of Claudius to the Imperial throne in 41 A.D., Seneca,

now in middle life, was for some reason banished to Corsica, and there

for eight weary years he remained, till the Empress Messalina fell. A

little treatise, which he wrote {44} to console his mother,

survives--couched in the rhetoric she knew so well. If the language is

more magnificent than sons usually address to their mothers, it must be

remembered that he wrote to console her for misfortunes which he was

himself enduring. The familiar maxim that the mind can make itself

happy and at home anywhere is rather like a platitude, but it loses

something of that character when it comes from the lips of a man

actually in exile. Another little work on the subject, which he

addressed later on to Polybius, the freedman of Claudius, stands on a

different footing, and his admirers could wish he had not written it.

There is flattery in it of a painfully cringing tone. "The Emperor did

not hurl him down so utterly as never to raise him again; rather he

supported him when evil fortune smote him and he tottered; he gently

used his godlike hand to sustain him and pleaded with the Senate to

spare his life.... He will see to his cause.... He best knows the

time at which to show favour.... Under the clemency of Claudius,

exiles live more peacefully than princes did under Gaius."[33] But a

little is enough of this.

It is clear that Seneca was not what we call a strong man. A fragile

youth, a spirit of great delicacy and sensibility, were no outfit for

exile. Nor is it very easy to understand what exile was to the

educated Roman. Some were confined to mere rocks, to go round and

round them for ever and never leave them. Seneca had of course more

space, but what he endured, we may in some measure divine from the

diaries and narratives that tell of Napoleon's life on St Helena. The

seclusion from the world, the narrow range, the limited number of

faces, the red coats, the abhorred monotony, told heavily on every

temper, on gaoler and prisoner alike, even on Napoleon; and Seneca's

temperament was not of stuff so stern. We may wish he had not broken

down, but we cannot be surprised that he did. It was human of him.

Perhaps the memory of his own weakness and failure contributed to make

him the most sympathetic and the least arrogant of all Stoics.

[Sidenote: Nero]

At last Messalina reached her end, and the new Empress, Agrippina,

recalled the exile in 49 A.D., and made him tutor of her son, Nero; and

from now till within two years of his death Seneca lived in the circle

of the young prince. When Claudius died in 54, Seneca and Burrus

became the guardians of the {45} Emperor and virtually ruled the

Empire. It was a position of great difficulty. Seneca grew to be

immensely rich, and his wealth and his palaces and gardens[34] weakened

his influence, while they intensified the jealousy felt for a minister

so powerful. Yet perhaps none of his detractors guessed the limits of

his power as surely as he came to feel them himself. Some measure of

the situation may be taken from what befell when the freedwoman Claudia

Acte became the mistress of Nero. "His older friends did not thwart

him," says Tacitus, "for here was a girl, who, without harm to anyone,

gratified his desires, since he was utterly estranged from his wife

Octavia."[35] Later on, we learn, Seneca had to avail himself of

Acte's aid to prevent worse scandals.

In February 55 A.D. the young prince Britannicus was poisoned at Nero's

table. He was the son of Claudius and the brother of Octavia--a

possible claimant therefore to the Imperial throne. Nero, not more

than eighteen years old, told the company quite coolly that it was an

epileptic seizure, and the feast went on, while the dead boy was

carried out and buried there and then in the rain--in a grave prepared

before he had entered the dining-hall.[36] Ten months later Seneca

wrote his tractate on Clemency. Nero should ask himself "Am I the

elected of the gods to be their vice-gerent on earth? The arbiter of

life and death to the nations?" and so forth. He is gently reminded of

the great light that fronts the throne; that his anger would be as

disastrous as war; that "Kings gain from kindness a greater security,

while their cruelty swells the number of their enemies." Seneca

wanders a good deal, but his drift is clear--and the wretchedness of

his position.

That Burrus and he had no knowledge of Nero's design to do away with

his mother, is the verdict of Nero's latest historian, but to Seneca

fell the horrible task of writing the explanatory letter which Nero

sent to the Senate when the murder was done. Perhaps to judge him

fairly, one would need to have been a Prime Minister. It may have been

a necessary thing to do, in order to maintain the world's government,

but the letter imposed on nobody, and Thrasea Paetus at once rose from

his seat and walked conspicuously out.

From the year 59 Nero was more than ever his own master. {46} His

guardians' repeated condonations had set him free, and the lad, who had

"wished he had never learned writing" when he had to sign his first

death-warrant, began from now to build up that evil fame for which the

murders of his brother and his mother were only the foundation. For

three years Seneca and Burrus kept their places--miserably enough.

Then Burrus found a happy release in death, and with him died the last

of Seneca's influence.[37] Seneca begged the Emperor's leave to retire

from the Court, offering him the greater part of his wealth, and it was

refused. It had long been upon his mind that he was too rich. In 58 a

furious attack was made upon him by "one who had earned the hate of

many," Publius Suillius; this man asked in the Senate "by what kind of

wisdom or maxims of philosophy" Seneca had amassed in four years a

fortune equal to two and a half millions sterling; and he went on to

accuse him of intrigue with princesses, of hunting for legacies, and of

"draining Italy and the provinces by boundless usury."[38] There was

probably a good deal of inference in these charges, if one may judge by

the carelessness of evidence which such men show in all ages. Still

Seneca felt the taunt, and in a book "On the Happy Life," addressed to

his brother Gallic, he dealt with the charge. He did not claim to be a

sage (17, 3); his only hope was day by day to lessen his vices--he was

still in the thick of them; perhaps he might not reach wisdom, but he

would at least live for mankind "as one born for others,"[39] would do

nothing for glory, and all for conscience, would be gentle and

accessible even to his foes; as for wealth, it gave a wise man more

opportunity, but if his riches deserted him, they would take nothing

else with them; a philosopher might have wealth, "if it be taken

forcibly from no man, stained with no man's blood, won by no wrong done

to any, gained without dishonour; if its spending be as honest as its

getting, if it wake no envy but in the envious."[40] The treatise has

a suggestion of excitement, and there is a good deal of rhetoric in it.

Now he proposed to the Emperor to put his words into action, and Nero

would not permit him--he was not ready for the odium of despoiling his

guardian, and the old man's name might still be of use to cover deeds

in which he had no share. Seneca was not to resign his {47} wealth nor

to leave Rome. Nero's words as given by Tacitus are pleasant enough,

but we hardly need to be told their value.[41]

[Sidenote: Seneca's last days]

It was merely a reservation of the death sentence, and Seneca must have

known it. The only thing now was to wait till he should receive the

order to die, and Seneca occupied the time in writing. If what he

wrote has a flushed and excited air, it is not surprising. The

uncertainty of his position had preyed upon him while he was still

Minister--"there are many," he had written, "who must hold fast to

their dizzy height; it is only by falling that they can leave it."[42]

He had fallen, and still he had to live in uncertainty; he had always

been a nervous man.

The end came in 65, in connexion with the conspiracy of Piso. Tacitus

is not altogether distinct as to the implication of Seneca in this

plot, but modern historians have inclined to believe in his guilt--if

guilt it was.[43] Mr Henderson, in particular, is very severe on him

for this want of "gratitude" to his benefactor and pupil, but it is

difficult to see what Nero had done for him that he would not have

preferred undone.[44] Perhaps at the time, and certainly later on,

Seneca was regarded as a possible substitute for Nero upon the

throne;[45] but he was well over sixty and frail, nor is it clear that

the world had yet decided that a man could be Emperor without being a

member of the Julian or Claudian house. Seneca, in fact any man, must

have felt that any one would be better than Nero, but he had himself

conspicuously left the world, and, with his wife, was living the

philosophic life--a vegetarian again, and still a water-drinker.[46]

Seneca was ready for the death-summons and at once opened his veins.

Death came slowly, but it came; and he died, eloquent to the

last--_novissimo quoque momenta suppeditante eloquentia_.

Such is the story of Seneca. Even in bare outline it shows something

of his character--his kindliness and sensibility, his weakness and

vanity; but there are other features revealed in his books and his many

long letters to Lucilius. No Roman, perhaps, ever laid more stress on

the duty of gentleness and forgiveness.[47] "Look at the City of

Rome," he says, "and the {48} crowds unceasingly pouring through its

broad streets--what a solitude, what a wilderness it would be, were

none left but whom a strict judge would acquit. We have all done wrong

(_peccavimus_), some in greater measure, some in less, some on purpose,

some by accident, some by the fault of others; we have not stood

bravely enough by our good resolutions; despite our will and our

resistance, we have lost our innocence. Nor is it only that we have

acted amiss; we shall do so to the end."[48] He is anxious to make

Stoicism available for his friends; he tones down its gratuitous

harshness, accommodates, conciliates. He knows what conscience is; he

is recognized as a master in dealing with the mind at variance with

itself, so skilfully does he analyse and lay bare its mischiefs.

Perhaps he analyses too much--the angel, who bade Hermas cease to ask

concerning sins and ask of righteousness, might well have given him a

word. But he is always tender with the man to whom he is writing. If

he was, as Quintilian suggests, a "splendid assailant of the faults of

men," it is the faults of the unnamed that he assails; his friends'

faults suggest his own, and he pleads and sympathizes. His style

corresponds with the spirit in which he thinks. "You complain," he

writes to Lucilius, "that my letters are not very finished in style.

Who talks in a finished style unless he wishes to be affected? What my

talk would be, if we were sitting or walking together, unlaboured and

easy, that is what I wish my letters to be, without anything precious

or artificial in them."[49] And he has in measure succeeded in giving

the air of talk to his writing--its ease, its gaiety, even its rambling

and discursiveness. He always sees the friend to whom he writes, and

talks to him--sometimes at him--and not without some suggestion of

gesticulation. He must have talked well--though one imagines that,

like Coleridge on Highgate Hill, he probably preferred the listener who

sat "like a passive bucket to be pumped into." Happily the reader is

not obliged to be quite so passive.

But we shall not do him justice if we do not recognize his high

character. In an age when it was usual to charge every one with

foulness, natural and unnatural, Dio Cassius alone among writers

suggests it of Seneca; and, quite apart from his particular bias in

this case, Dio is not a high authority,--more {49} especially as he

belonged to a much later generation. If his talk is of "virtue!

virtue!" Seneca's life was deliberately directed to virtue. In the

midst of Roman society, and set in the highest place but one in the

world, he still cherished ideals, and practised self-discipline, daily

self-examination. "This is the one goal of my days and of my nights:

this is my task, my thought--to put an end to my old faults."[50] His

whole philosophy is practical, and directed to the reformation of

morals. The Stoic paradoxes, and with them every part of philosophy

which has no immediate bearing upon conduct, he threw aside. His

language on the accumulation of books recalls the amusement of St

Francis at the idea of possessing a breviary. And further, we may note

that whatever be charged against him as a statesman, not his own

master, and as a writer, not always quite in control of his rhetoric,

Seneca was fundamentally truthful with himself. He never hid his own

weakness; he never concealed from himself the difficulty of his ideals;

he never tried to delude himself with what he could not believe. The

Stoics had begun long since to make terms with popular religion, but

Seneca is entirely free from delusions as to the gods of popular

belief. He saw clearly enough that there was no truth in them, and he

never sought help from anything but the real. He is a man, trained in

the world,[51] in touch with its problems of government, with the

individual and his questions of character, death and eternity,--a man

tender, pure and true--too great a man to take the purely negative

stand of Thrasea, or to practise the virtue of the schools in "arrogant

indolence." But he has hardly reached the inner peace which he sought.

The story of Epictetus can be more briefly told, for there is very

little to tell.[52] He was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia:--he was the

slave of Nero's freedman Epaphroditus, and somehow managed to hear the

lectures of the Stoic Musonius. Eventually he was set free, and when

Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, he went to Nicopolis in

Epirus,[53] where he lived and taught--lame, neat, poor and old. How

{50} he taught is to be seen in the discourses which Arrian took down

in the reign of Trajan,--"Whatever I heard him say, I tried to write

down exactly, and in his very words as far as I could--to keep them as

memorials for myself of his mind and of his outspokenness. So they

are, as you would expect, very much what a man would say to another on

the spur of the moment--not what he would write for others to read

afterwards.... His sole aim in speaking was to move the minds of his

hearers to the best things. If then these discourses should achieve

this, they would have the effect which I think a philosopher's words

should have. But if they do not, let my readers know that, when he

spoke them, the hearer could not avoid being affected as Epictetus

wished him to be. If the discourses do not achieve this, perhaps it

will be my fault, or perhaps it may be inevitable. Farewell."

[Sidenote: Epictetus on children and women]

Such, save for a sentence or two omitted, is Arrian's

preface,--thereafter no voice is heard but that of Epictetus. To

place, time or persons present the barest allusions only are made.

"Someone said ... And Epictetus spoke." The four books of Arrian give

a strong impression of fidelity. We hear the tones of the old man, and

can recognize "the mind and the outspokenness," which Arrian cherished

in memory--we understand why, as we read. The high moral sense of the

teacher, his bursts of eloquence, his shrewdness, his abrupt turns of

speech, his apostrophes--"Slave!" he cries, as he addresses the

weakling--his diminutives of derision, produce the most lively sense of

a personality. There is wit, too, but like Stoic wit in general it is

hard and not very sympathetic; it has nothing of the charm and delicacy

of Plato's humour, nor of its kindliness.

Here and there are words and thoughts which tell of his life. More

than once he alludes to his age and his lameness--"A lame old man like

me." But perhaps nowhere in literature are there words that speak so

loud of a man without experience of woman or child. "On a voyage," he

says, "when the ship calls at a port and you go ashore for water, it

amuses you to pick up a shell or a plant by the way; but your thoughts

ought to be directed to the ship, and you must watch lest the captain

call, and then you must throw away all those things, that you may not

be flung aboard, tied like the sheep. So in life, suppose {51} that

instead of some little shell or plant, you are given something in the

way of wife or child (_anti bolbariou kai kochlidiou gynaikarion kai

paidion_) nothing need hinder. But, if the captain call, run to the

ship letting them all go and never looking round. If you are old, do

not even go far from the ship, lest you fail to come when called."[54]

He bids a man endure hunger; he can only die of it. "But my wife and

children also suffer hunger, (_ohi emoi peineousi_). What then? does

their hunger lead to any other place? Is there not for them the same

descent, wherever it lead? Below, is it not the same for them as for

you?"[55] "If you are kissing your child, or brother, or friend, never

give full licence to the appearance (_ten phantasian_); check your

pleasure ... remind yourself that you love a mortal thing, a thing that

is not your own (_ouden ton sautou_).... What harm does it do to

whisper, as you kiss the child, 'To-morrow you will die'?" This is a

thought he uses more than once,[56] though he knows the attractiveness

of lively children.[57] He recommends us to practise

resignation--beginning on a broken jug or cup, then on a coat or puppy,

and so up to oneself and one's limbs, children, wife or brothers.[58]

"If a man wishes his son or his wife not to do wrong, he really wishes

what is another's not to be another's."[59]

As to women, a few quotations will show his detachment. He seems

hardly to have known a good woman. "Do not admire your wife's beauty,

and you are not angry with the adulterer. Learn that a thief and an

adulterer have no place among the things that are yours, but among

those which are not yours and not in your power,"[60] and he

illustrates his philosophy with an anecdote of an iron lamp stolen from

him, which he replaced with an earthenware one. From fourteen years

old, he says, women think of nothing and aim at nothing {52} but lying

with men.[61] Roman women liked Plato's Republic for the licence they

wrongly supposed it gave.[62] He constantly speaks of women as a

temptation, nearly always using a diminutive _korasion_,

_korasidion_--little girls--and as a temptation hardly to be resisted

by young men. He speaks of their "softer voices."[63] A young

philosopher is no match for a "pretty girl"; let him fly

temptation.[64] "As to pleasure with women, abstain as far as you can,

before marriage; but if you do indulge in it, do it in the way

conformable to custom. Do not, however, be disagreeable to those who

take such pleasures, nor apt to rebuke them or to say often that you do

not."[65] All this may be taken as the impression left by Rome and the

household of Epaphroditus upon a slave's mind. It may be observed that

he makes nothing like Dio Chrysostom's condemnation of prostitution--an

utterance unexampled in pagan antiquity.

It is pleasanter to turn to other features of Epictetus. He has a very

striking lecture on personal cleanliness.[66] In proportion as men

draw near the gods by reason, they cling to purity of soul and body.

Nature has given men hands and nostrils; so, if a man does not use a

handkerchief, "I say, he is not fulfilling the function of a man."

Nature has provided water. "It is impossible that some impurity should

not remain in the teeth after eating. 'So wash your teeth,' says

Nature. Why? 'That you may be a man and not a beast--a pig.'" If a

man would not bathe and use the strigil and have his clothes

washed--"either go into a desert where you deserve to go, or live alone

and smell yourself." He cannot bear a dirty man,--"who does not get

out of his way?" It gives philosophy a bad name, he says; but it is

quite clear that that was not his chief reason. He would sooner a

young man came to him with his hair carefully trimmed than with it

dirty and rough; such care implied "some conception of the beautiful,"

which it was only necessary to direct towards the things of the mind;

"but if a man comes to me filthy and dirty, with a moustache down to

his knees--what _can_ I say to him?" "But whence am I to get a fine

cloak? Man! you have water; wash it!"

{53}

[Sidenote: Fame of Epictetus]

Pupils gathered round him and he became famous, as we can see in the

reminiscences of Aulus Gellius.[67] Sixty or seventy years after his

death a man bought his old earthenware lamp for three thousand

drachmas.[68] Even in his lifetime men began to come about "the

wonderful old man" who were hardly serious students. They wished, he

says, to occupy the time while waiting to engage a passage on a

ship--they happened to be passing (_parodos estin_) and looked in to

see him as if he were a statue. "We can go and see Epictetus

too.--Then you go away and say; Oh! Epictetus was nothing! he talked

bad Greek--oh! barbarous Greek!"[69] Others came to pick up a little

philosophic language for use in public. Why could they not

philosophize and say nothing? he asked. "Sheep do not vomit up their

grass to show the shepherd how much they have eaten--no! they digest it

inside, and then produce wool and milk outside."[70] He took his

teaching seriously as a matter of life, and he looked upon it as a

service done to mankind--quite equivalent to the production of "two or

three ugly-nosed children."[71] He has a warm admiration for the Cynic

philosopher's independence of encumberments--how can he who has to

teach mankind go looking after a wife's confinement--or "something to

heat the water in to give the baby a bath?"[72]

These then are the two great teachers of Stoicism, the outstanding

figures, whose words and tones survive, whose characters are familiar

to us. They are clearly preachers, both of them, intent on the

practical reformation of their listeners or correspondents. For them

conduct is nine-tenths of life. Much of their teaching is of course

the common property of all moral teachers--the deprecation of anger, of

quarrelsomeness, of self-indulgence, of grumbling, of impurity, is

peculiar to no school. Others have emphasized that life is a campaign

with a general to be obeyed, if you can by some instinct divine what he

is signalling.[73] But {54} perhaps it was a new thing in the Western

World, when so much accent was laid on conduct. The terror of

contemporary life, with its repulsiveness, its brutality and its

fascination, drove men in search of the moral guide. The philosopher's

school was an infirmary, not for the glad but for the sorry.[74] "That

man," says Seneca, "is looking for salvation--_ad salutem spectat_."

[Sidenote: Self-examination]

Men sought the help of the philosopher, and relapsed. "He thinks he

wishes reason. He has fallen out with luxury, but he will soon make

friends with her. But he says he is offended with his own life! I do

not deny it; who is not? Men love their vices and hate them at the

same time."[75] So writes Seneca of a friend of Lucilius and his

fugitive thoughts of amendment, and Epictetus is no less emphatic on

the crying need for earnestness. The Roman world was so full of

glaring vice that every serious man from Augustus onward had insisted

on some kind of reformation, and now men were beginning to feel that

the reformation must begin within themselves. The habit of daily

self-examination became general among the Stoics, and they recommended

it warmly to their pupils. Here is Seneca's account of himself.

"When the day was over and Sextius had gone to his night's rest, he

used to ask his mind (_animum_): 'what bad habit of yours have you

cured to-day? what vice have you resisted? in what respect are you

better?' Anger will cease and will be more moderate, when it knows it

must daily face the judge. Could anything be more beautiful than this

habit of examining the whole day? What a sleep is that which follows

self-scrutiny! How calm, how deep and free, when the mind is either

praised or admonished, when it has looked into itself, and like a

secret censor makes a report upon its own moral state. I avail myself

of this power and daily try my own case. When the light is removed

from my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, is silent, I survey my

whole day and I measure my words again. I hide nothing from myself; I

pass over nothing. For why should I be afraid of any of my errors,

when I can say: 'See that you do it no more, now I forgive you. In

that discussion, you spoke too pugnaciously; after this do not engage

with the ignorant; they will not learn who have never {55} learned.

That man you admonished too freely, so you did him no good; you

offended him. For the future, see not only whether what you say is

true, but whether he to whom it is said will bear the truth.'"[76]

Similar passages might be multiplied. "Live with yourself and see how

ill-furnished you are," wrote Persius (iv, 52) the pupil of Cornutus.

"From heaven comes that word 'know thyself,'" said Juvenal. A rather

remarkable illustration is the letter of Serenus, a friend of Seneca's,

of whose life things are recorded by Tacitus that do not suggest

self-scrutiny. In summary it is as follows:--

"I find myself not quite free, nor yet quite in bondage to faults which

I feared and hated. I am in a state, not the worst indeed, but very

querulous and uncomfortable, neither well nor ill. It is a weakness of

the mind that sways between the two, that will neither bravely turn to

right nor to wrong. Things disturb me, though they do not alter my

principles. I think of public life; something worries me, and I fall

back into the life of leisure, to be pricked to the will to act by

reading some brave words or seeing some fine example. I beg you, if

you have any remedy to stay my fluctuation of mind, count me worthy to

owe you peace. To put what I endure into a simile, it is not the

tempest that troubles me, but sea-sickness."[77]

Epictetus quotes lines which he attributes to Pythagoras--

Let sleep not come upon thy languid eyes

Ere thou has scanned the actions of the day--

Where have I sinned? What done or left undone?

From first to last examine all, and then

Blame what is wrong, in what is right, rejoice.[78]

These verses, he adds, are for use, not for quotation. Elsewhere he

gives us a parody of self-examination--the reflections of one who would

prosper in the world--"Where have I failed in flattery? Can I have

done anything like a free man, or a noble-minded? Why did I say that?

Was it not in my power to lie? Even the philosophers say nothing

hinders a man from telling a lie."[79]

{56}

But self-examination may take us further.[80] We come into the world,

he says, with some innate idea (_emphutos ennoia_) of good and evil, as

if Nature had taught us; but we find other men with different

ideas,--Syrians and Egyptians, for instance. It is by a comparison of

our ideas with those of other men that philosophy comes into being for

us. "The beginning of philosophy--with those at least who enter upon

it aright--by the door--is a consciousness of one's own weakness and

insufficiency in necessary things (_astheneias kai adunamias_)." We

need rules or canons, and philosophy determines these for us by

criticism.[81]

This reference to Syrians and Egyptians is probably not idle. The

prevalence of Syrian and Egyptian religions, inculcating ecstatic

communion with a god and the soul's need of preparation for the next

world, contributed to the change that is witnessed in Stoic philosophy.

The Eastern mind is affecting the Greek, and later Stoicism like later

Platonism has thoughts and ideals not familiar to the Greeks of earlier

days. It was with religions, as opposed to city cults, that Stoicism

had now to compete for the souls of men; and while it retains its Greek

characteristics in its intellectualism and its slightly-veiled contempt

for the fool and the barbarian, it has taken on other features. It was

avowedly a rule of life rather than a system of speculation; and it was

more, for the doctrine of the Spermaticos Logos (the Generative Reason)

gave a new meaning to conduct and opened up a new and rational way to

God. Thus Stoicism, while still a philosophy was pre-eminently a

religion, and even a gospel--Good News of emancipation from the evil in

the world and of union with the Divine.

[Sidenote: The true worship of the gods]

Stoicism gave its convert a new conception of the relation of God and

man. One Divine Word was the essence of both--Reason was shared by men

and gods, and by pure thought men came into contact with the divine

mind. Others sought communion in trance and ritual--the Stoic when he

was awake, at his highest and best level, with his mind and not his

hand, in thoughts, which he could understand and assimilate, rather

than in magical formulae, which lost their value when they became {57}

intelligible. God and men formed a polity, and the Stoic was the

fellow-citizen of the gods, obeying, understanding and adoring, as they

did, one divine law, one order--a partaker of the divine nature, a

citizen of the universe, a free man as no one else was free, because he

knew his freedom and knew who shared it with him. He stood on a new

footing with the gods, and for him the old cults passed away,

superseded by a new worship which was divine service indeed.

"How the gods are to be worshipped, men often tell us. Let us not

permit a man to light lamps on the Sabbath, for the gods need not the

light, and even men find no pleasure in the smoke. Let us forbid to

pay the morning salutation and to sit at the doors of the temples; it

is human interest that is courted by such attentions: God, he worships

who knows Him. Let us forbid to take napkins and strigils to Jove, to

hold the mirror to Juno. God seeks none to minister to him; nay!

himself he ministers to mankind; everywhere he is, at the side of every

man. Let a man hear what mode to keep in sacrifices, how far to avoid

wearisomeness and superstition: never will enough be done, unless in

his mind he shall have conceived God as he ought, as in possession of

all things, as giving all things freely. What cause is there that the

gods should do good? Nature. He errs, who thinks they _can_ not do

harm; they _will_ not. They cannot receive an injury nor do one. To

hurt and to be hurt are one thing. Nature, supreme and above all most

beautiful, has exempted them from danger and from being dangerous. The

beginning of worship of the gods is to believe gods are; then to

attribute to them their own majesty, to attribute to them goodness,

without which majesty is not, to know it is they who preside over the

universe, who rule all things by their might, who are guardians of

mankind; at times[82] thoughtful of individuals. They neither give nor

have evil; but they chastise, they check, they assign penalties and

sometimes punish in the form of blessing. Would you propitiate the

gods? Be good! He has worshipped them enough who has imitated

them."[83]

{58}

This is not merely a statement of Stoic dogma; it was a proclamation of

freedom. Line after line of this fine passage directly counters what

was asserted and believed throughout the world by the adherents of the

Eastern religions. Hear Seneca once more.

[Sidenote: Providence]

"We understand Jove to be ruler and guardian of the whole, mind and

breath of the Universe (_animum spiritumque mundi_), lord and artificer

of this fabric. Every name is his. Would you call him fate? You will

not err. He it is on whom all things depend, the cause of causes.

Would you call him Providence? You will speak aright. He it is whose

thought provides for the universe that it may move on its course unhurt

and do its part. Would you call him Nature? you will not speak amiss.

He it is of whom all things are born, by whose breath (_spiritu_) we

live. Would you call him Universe? You will not be deceived. He

himself is this whole that you see, fills his own parts, sustains

himself and what is his."[84]

Some one asked Epictetus one day how we can be sure that all our

actions are under the inspection of God. "Do you think," said

Epictetus, "that all things are a unity?" (_i.e._ in the polity of the

cosmos). "Yes." "Well then, do you not think that things earthly are

in sympathy (_sympathein_) with things heavenly?" "Yes." Epictetus

reminded his listener of the harmony of external nature, of flowers and

moon and sun. "But are leaves and our bodies so bound up and united

with the whole, and are not our souls much more? and are our souls so

bound up and in touch with God (_synapheis to theo_) as parts of Him

and portions of Him, and can it be that God does not perceive every

motion of these parts as being His own motion cognate with Himself

(_symphyous_)?"[85] He bade the man reflect upon his own power of

grasping in his mind ten thousand things at once under divine

administration; "and is not God able to oversee all things, and to be

present with them, and to receive from all a certain communication?"

The man replied that he could not comprehend all these things at once.

"And who tells you this--that you have equal power with Zeus?

Nevertheless, he has placed by every man a guardian (_epitropon_), each

man's {59} Daemon, to whom he has committed the care of the man, a

guardian who never sleeps, is never deceived. For to what better and

more careful watch (_phylaki_) could He have entrusted each of us?

When then you (plural) have shut your doors and made darkness within,

remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not; but God is

within and your Daemon (Greek: _ho hymeteros daimon_); and what need

have they of light to see what you are doing?"[86]

Here another feature occurs--the question of the daemons. Seneca once

alludes to the idea--"for the present," he writes to Lucilius, "set

aside the view of some people, that to each individual one of us a god

is given as a pedagogue, not indeed of the first rank, but of an

inferior brand, of the number of those whom Ovid calls 'gods of the

lower order' (_de plebe deos_); yet remember that our ancestors who

believed this were so far Stoics, for to every man and woman they gave

a _Genius_ or a _Juno_. Later on we shall see whether the gods have

leisure to attend to private people's business."[87] But before we

pursue a side issue, which we shall in any case have to examine at a

later point, let us look further at the central idea.

The thoughtful man finds himself, as we have seen, in a polity of gods

and men, a cosmos, well-ordered in its very essence. "In truth," says

Epictetus, "the whole scheme of things (_ta hola_) is badly managed, if

Zeus does not take care of his own citizens, so that they may be like

himself, happy."[88] The first lesson of philosophy is that "there is a

God and that he provides for the whole scheme of things, and that it is

not possible to conceal from him our acts--no, nor our intentions or

thoughts."[89] "God," says Seneca, "has a father's mind towards the

good, and loves them stoutly--'let them,' he says, 'be exercised in

work, pain and loss, that they may gather true strength.'" It is

because God is in love with the good (_bonorum amantissimus_) that he

gives them fortune to wrestle with. "_There_ is a match worth God's

sight (_pardeo dignum_)--a brave man paired with evil

fortune--especially if he is himself the challenger."[90] He goes on to

show that what appear to be evils are not so; that misfortunes are at

once for the advantage of those whom {60} they befall and of men in

general or the universe (_universis_), "for which the gods care more

than for individuals"; that those who receive them are glad to have

them--"and deserve evil if they are not"; that misfortunes come by fate

and befall men by the same law by which they are good. "Always to be

happy and to go through life without a pang of the mind (_sine morsu

animi_) is to know only one half of Nature."[91] "The fates lead us:

what time remains for each of us, the hour of our birth determined.

Cause hangs upon cause.... Of old it was ordained whereat you should

rejoice or weep; and though the lives of individuals seem marked out by

a great variety, the sum total comes to one and the same

thing--perishable ourselves we receive what shall perish."[92] "The

good man's part is then to commit himself to fate--it is a great

comfort to be carried along with the universe. Whatever it is that has

bidden us thus to live and thus to die, by the same necessity it binds

the gods. An onward course that may not be stayed sweeps on human and

divine alike. The very founder and ruler of all things has written

fate, but he follows it: he ever obeys, he once commanded."[93] To the

good, God says, "To you I have given blessings sure and enduring; all

your good I have set within you. Endure! herein you may even

out-distance God; he is outside the endurance of evils and you above

it.[94] Above all I have provided that none may hold you against your

will; the door is open; nothing I have made more easy than to die; and

death is quick."[95]

Epictetus is just as clear that we have been given all we need. "What

says Zeus? Epictetus, had it been possible, I would have made both

your little body and your little property free, and not exposed to

hindrance.... Since I was not able to do this, I have given you a

little portion of us, this faculty of pursuing or avoiding an object,

the faculty of desire and {61} aversion and in a word the faculty of

using the appearances of things."[96] "Must my leg then be lamed?

Slave! do you then on account of one wretched leg find fault with the

cosmos? Will you not willingly surrender it for the whole? ... Will

you be vexed and discontented with what Zeus has set in order, with

what he and the Moirae, who were there spinning thy nativity

(_genesin_), ordained and appointed? I mean as regards your body; for

so far as concerns reason you are no worse than the gods and no

less."[97]

[Sidenote: The holy spirit within us]

In language curiously suggestive of another school of thought, Seneca

speaks of God within us, of divine help given to human effort. "God is

near you, with you, within you. I say it, Lucilius; a holy spirit sits

within us (_sacer intra nos spiritus sedet_), spectator of our evil and

our good, and guardian. Even as he is treated by us, he treats us.

None is a good man without God.[98] Can any triumph over fortune

unless helped by him? He gives counsel, splendid and manly; in every

good man,

What god we know not, yet a god there dwells."[99]

"The gods," he says elsewhere, "are not scornful, they are not envious.

They welcome us, and, as we ascend, they reach us their hands. Are you

surprised a man should go to the gods? God comes to men, nay! nearer

still! he comes _into_ men. No mind (_mens_) is good without God.

Divine seeds are sown in human bodies," and will grow into likeness to

their origin if rightly cultivated.[100] It should be noted that the

ascent is by the route of frugality, temperance and fortitude. To this

we must return.

Man's part in life is to be the "spectator and interpreter" of

"God"[101] as he is the "son of God";[102] to attach himself to

God;[103] to be his soldier, obey his signals, wait his call to {62}

retreat; or (in the language of the Olympian festival) to "join with

him in the spectacle and the festival for a short time"

(_sympompeusonta auto kai syneortasonta pros oligon_), to watch the

pomp and the panegyris, and then go away like a grateful and modest

man;[104] to look up to God and say "use me henceforth for what thou

will. I am of thy mind; I am thine."[105] "If we had understanding,

what else ought we to do, but together and severally, hymn God, and

bless him (_euphemein_) and tell of his benefits? Ought we not, in

digging or ploughing or eating, to sing this hymn to God? 'Great is

God who has given us such tools with which to till the earth; great is

God who has given us hands, the power of swallowing, stomachs, the

power to grow unconsciously, and to breathe while we sleep.' ... What

else can I do, a lame old man, but hymn God? If I were a nightingale,

I would do the part of a nightingale ... but I am a rational creature,

and I ought to hymn God; this is my proper work; I do it; nor will I

quit my post so long as it is given me; and you I call upon to join in

this same song."[106] Herakles in all his toils had nothing dearer to

him than God, and "for that reason he was believed to be the son of God

and he was."[107] "Clear away from your thoughts sadness, fear,

desire, envy, avarice, intemperance, etc. But it is not possible to

eject all these things, otherwise than by looking away to God alone

(_pros monon ton theon apobleponta_) by fixing your affections on him

only, by being dedicated to his commands."[108] This is "a peace not of

Caesar's proclamation (for whence could he proclaim it?) but of

God's--through reason."[109]

[Sidenote: Humanity]

The man, who is thus in harmony with the Spermaticos, Logos, who has

"put his 'I' and 'mine'"[110] in the things of the will, has no quarrel

with anything external. He takes a part in the affairs of men without

aggression, greed or meanness. He submits to what is laid upon him.

His peace none can take away, and none can make him angry. There is a

fine passage in Seneca's ninety-fifth letter, following his account of

right worship already quoted, in which he proceeds to deduce from this

the right attitude to men. A sentence or two {63} must suffice. "How

little it is not to injure him, whom you ought to help! Great praise

forsooth, that man should be kind to man! Are we to bid a man to lend

a hand to the shipwrecked, point the way to the wanderer, share bread

with the hungry? ... This fabric which you see, wherein are divine and

human, is one. We are members of a great body. Nature has made us of

one blood, has implanted in us mutual love, has made us for society

(sociabiles). She is the author of justice and equity.... Let that

verse be in your heart and on your lip.

_Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto_"[111]

"Unhappy man! will you ever love? (_ecquando amabis_)" he says to the

irritable.[112] A little before, he said, "Man, a sacred thing to man,

is slain for sport and merriment; naked and unarmed he is led forth;

and the mere death of a man is spectacle enough."[113] This was the

Stoic's condemnation of the gladiatorial shows. Nor was it only by

words that Stoicism worked for humanity, for it was Stoic lawyers who

softened and broadened and humanized Roman law.[114]

Yet Stoicism in Seneca and Epictetus had reached its zenith. From now

onward it declined. Marcus Aurelius, in some ways the most attractive

of all Stoics, was virtually the last. With the second century

Stoicism ceased to be an effective force in occupying and inspiring the

whole mind of men, though it is evident that it still influenced

thinkers. Men studied the Stoics and made fresh copies of their books,

as they did for a thousand years; they borrowed and adapted; but they

were not Stoics. Stoicism had passed away as a system first and then

as a religion; and for this we have to find some reason or reasons.

It may well be true that the environment of the Stoics was not fit for

so high and pure a philosophy. The broad gulf between the common Roman

life and Stoic teaching is evident enough. The intellectual force of

the Roman world moreover was ebbing, and Stoicism required more

strength of mind and character than was easily to be found. That a

religion or a philosophy {64} fails to hold its own is not a sure sign

that it is unfit or untrue; it may only be premature, and it may be

held that at another stage of the world's history Stoicism or some

similar scheme of thought,--or, better perhaps, some central idea round

which a system and a life develop--may yet command the assent of better

men in a better age. At the same time, it is clear that when Stoicism

re-emerges,--if it does,--it will be another thing. Already we have

seen in Wordsworth, and (so far as I understand him) in Hegel, a great

informing conception which seems to have clear affinity with the

Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics. The passage from the "Lines written

above Tintern Abbey" (quoted in the previous chapter) may be

supplemented by many from the "Prelude" and other poems to illustrate

at once the likeness and the difference between the forms the thought

has taken. It is, however, a certain condemnation of a philosophic

school when we have to admit that, whatever its apprehension of truth,

it failed to capture its own generation, either because of some error

of presentment, or of some fundamental misconception. When we find,

moreover, that there is not only a refusal of Stoicism but a reaction

from it, conscious or unconscious, we are forced to inquire into the

cause.

[Sidenote: The individual will]

We shall perhaps be right in saying, to begin with, that the doctrine

of the Generative Reason, the Spermaticos Logos, is not carried far

enough. The immense practical need, which the Stoic felt, of

fortifying himself against the world, is not unintelligible, but it led

him into error. He employed his doctrine of the Spermaticos Logos to

give grandeur and sufficiency to the individual, and then, for

practical purposes, cut him off from the world. He manned and

provisioned the fortress, and then shut it off from supplies and from

relief. It was a necessary thing to assert the value and dignity of

the mere individual man against the despotisms, but to isolate the man

from mankind and from the world of nature was a fatal mistake. Of

course, the Stoic did not do this in theory, for he insisted on the

polity of gods and men, the "one city,"[115] and the duty of the

"citizen of the universe" (_kosmios_)--a man is not an independent

object; like the foot in the body he is essentially {65} a "part."[116]

In practice, too, Stoics were human. Seneca tells us to show clemency

but not to feel pity, but we may be sure that the human heart in him

was far from observing the distinction--he "talked more boldly than he

lived," he says--he was "among those whom grief conquered,"[117] and,

though he goes on to show why he failed in this way, he is endeared to

us by his failure to be his own ideal Stoic. Yet it remains that the

chapters, with which his book on Clemency ends, are a Stoic protest

against pity, and they can be re-inforced by a good deal in Epictetus.

If your friend is unhappy, "remember that his unhappiness is his own

fault, for God has made all men to be happy, to be free from

perturbations."[118] Your friend has the remedy in his own hands; let

him "purify his dogmata."[119] Epictetus would try to heal a friend's

sorrow "but not by every means, for that would be to fight against God

(_theomachein_)," and would involve daily and nightly punishment to

himself[120]--and "no one is nearer me than myself."[121] In the

_Manual_ the same thought is accentuated. "Say to yourself 'It is the

opinion about this thing that afflicts the man.' So far as words go,

do not hesitate to show sympathy, and even, if it so happen, to lament

with him. Take care, though, that you do not lament internally also

(_me kai esothen stenaxes_)."[122] We have seen what he has to say of

a lost child. In spite of all his fine words, the Stoic really knows

of nothing between the individual and the cosmos, for his practical

teaching deadens, if it does not kill, friendship and family love.

Everything with the Stoic turns on the individual. _ta epi soi_, "the

things in your own power," is the refrain of Epictetus' teaching. All

is thrown upon the individual will, upon "the universal" working in the

individual, according to Stoic theory, "upon me" the plain man would

say. If the gods, as Seneca says, lend a hand to such as climb, the

climber has to make his own way by temperance and fortitude. The "holy

spirit within us" is after all hardly to be distinguished from

conscience, intellect and will.[123] God, says Epictetus, ordains "if

you wish good, get it from yourself."[124] Once the will

(_proairesis_) is right, {66} all is achieved.[125] "You must exercise

the will (_thelesai_)--and the thing is done, it is set right; as on

the other hand, only fall a nodding and the thing is lost. For from

within (_esothen_) comes ruin, and from within comes help."[126] "What

do you want with prayers?" asks Seneca, "make yourself happy."[127]

The old Stoic paradox about the "folly" of mankind, and the

worthlessness of the efforts of all save the sage, was by now chiefly

remembered by their enemies.[128]

All this is due to the Stoic glorification of reason, as the embodiment

in man of the Spermaticos Logos. Though Nous with the Stoics is not

the pure dry light of reason, they tended in practice to distinguish

reason from the emotions or passions (_pathe_), in which they saw

chiefly "perturbations," and they held up the ideal of freedom from

them in consequence (_apatheia_).[129] To be godlike, a man had to

suppress his affections just as he suppressed his own sensations of

pain or hunger. Every human instinct of paternal or conjugal love, of

friendship, of sympathy, of pity, was thus brought to the test of a

Reason, which had two catch-words by which to try them--the "Universe"

and "the things in your own power"--and the sentence was swift and

summary enough. They did not realize that for most men--and probably

it is truest of the best men--Life moves onward with all its tender and

gracious instincts, while Analysis limps behind. The experiment of

testing affection and instinct by reason has often been tried, and it

succeeds only where the reason is willing to be a constitutional

monarch, so to say, instead of the despot responsible only to the vague

concept of the Universe, whom the Stoics wished to enthrone. They

talked of living according to Nature, but they were a great deal too

quick in deciding what was Nature. If the centuries have taught us

anything, it is to give Nature more time, more study and more respect

than even yet we do. There are words {67} at the beginning of the

thirteenth book of the "Prelude" wiser and truer than anything the

Stoics had to say of her with their "excessive zeal" and their "quick

turns of intellect." Carried away by their theories (none, we must

remember as we criticize them, without some ground in experience and

observation), the Stoics made solitude in the heart and called it

peace. The price was too high; mankind would not pay it, and sought a

religion elsewhere that had a place for a man's children.

[Sidenote: Sin and salvation]

Again, in their contempt for the passions the Stoics underestimated

their strength. How strong the passions are, no man can guess for

another, even if he can be sure how strong his own are. Perhaps the

Stoics could subordinate their passions to their reason;--ancient

critics kept sharp eyes on them and said they were not always

successful.[130] But there is no question that for the mass of men,

the Stoic account of reason is absurd. "I see another law in my

members," said a contemporary of Seneca's, "warring against the law of

my mind and bringing me into captivity." Other men felt the same and

sought deliverance in the sacraments of all the religions. That

Salvation was not from within, was the testimony of every man who

underwent the _taurobolium_. So far as such things can be, it is

established by the witness of every religious mind that, whether the

feeling is just or not the feeling is invincible that the will is

inadequate and that religion begins only when the Stoic's ideal of

saving oneself by one's own resolve and effort is finally abandoned.

Whether this will permanently be true is another question, probably for

us unprofitable. The ancient world, at any rate, and in general the

modern world, have pronounced against Stoic Psychology--it was too

quick, too superficial. The Stoics did not allow for the sense of

sin.[131] They recognized the presence of evil in the world; they felt

that "it has its seat within us, in our inward part";[132] and they

remark the effect of evil in the blunting of the faculties--let the

guilty, says Persius, "see virtue, and pine that they have lost her

forever."[133] While Seneca finds himself "growing better and becoming

changed," he still feels there may be much more needing amendment.[134]

He often {68} expresses dissatisfaction with himself.[135] But the

deeper realization of weakness and failure did not come to the Stoics,

and what help their teaching of strenuous endeavour could have brought

to men stricken with the consciousness of broken willpower, it is hard

to see. "Filthy Natta," according to Persius, was "benumbed by vice"

(_stupet hic vitio_).[136] "When a man is hardened like a stone

(_apolithothe_), how shall we be able to deal with him by argument?"

asks Epictetus, arguing against the Academics, who "opposed evident

truths"--what are we to do with necrosis of the soul?[137] But the

Stoics really gave more thought to fancies of the sage's equality with

God and occasional superiority--so confident were they in the powers of

the individual human mind. Plutarch, indeed, forces home upon them as

a deduction from their doctrine of "the common nature" of gods and men

the consequence that sin is not contrary to the Logos of Zeus--and yet

they say God punishes sin.[138]

Yet even the individual, much as they strove to exalt his capabilities,

was in the end cheapened in his own eyes.[139] As men have deepened

their self-consciousness, they have yielded to an instinctive craving

for the immortality of the soul.[140] Whether savages feel this or not,

it is needless to argue. No religion apart from Buddhism has

permanently held men which had no hopes of immortality; and how far the

corruptions of Buddhism have modified its rigour for common people, it

is not easy to say. In one form or another, in spite of a terrible

want of evidence, men have clung to eternal life. The Stoics

themselves used this consensus of opinion as evidence for the truth of

the belief.[141] "It pleased me," writes Seneca, "to inquire of the

eternity of souls (_de aeternitate animarum_)--nay! to believe in it. I

surrendered myself to that great hope."[142] {69} "How natural it is!"

he says, "the human mind is a great and generous thing; it will have no

bounds set to it unless they are shared by God."[143] "When the day

shall come, which shall part this mixture of divine and human, here,

where I found it, I will leave my body, myself I will give back to the

gods. Even now I am not without them." He finds in our birth into

this world an analogy of the soul passing into another world, and in

language of beauty and sympathy he pictures the "birthday of the

eternal," the revelation of nature's secrets, a world of light and more

light. "This thought suffers nothing sordid to dwell in the mind,

nothing mean, nothing cruel. It tells us that the gods see all, bids

us win their approval, prepare for them, and set eternity before

us."[144] Beautiful words that wake emotion yet!

[Sidenote: Immortality]

But is it clear that it is eternity after all? In the _Consolation_

which Seneca wrote for Marcia, after speaking of the future life of her

son, he passed at last to the Stoic doctrine of the first

conflagration, and described the destruction of the present scheme of

things that it may begin anew. "Then we also, happy souls who have

been assigned to eternity (_felices animae et aeterna sortitae_), when God

shall see fit to reconstruct the universe, when all things pass

(_labentibus_), we too, a little element in a great catastrophe, shall

be resolved into our ancient elements. Happy is your son, Marcia, who

already knows this."[145] Elsewhere he is still less certain. "Why am

I wasted for desire of him, who is either happy or non-existent? (_qui

aut beatus aut nullus est_)."[146]

That in later years, in his letters to Lucilius, Seneca should lean to

belief in immortality, is natural enough. Epictetus' language, with

some fluctuations, leans in the other direction: "When God does not

supply what is necessary, he is sounding the signal for retreat--he has

opened the door and says to you, Come! But whither? To nothing

terrible, but whence you came, to the dear and kin [both neuters], the

elements. What in you was fire, shall go to fire, earth to earth,

spirit to spirit [perhaps, breath _hoson pneumation eis pneumation_],

water to water; {70} no Hades, nor Acheron, nor Cocytus, nor

Pyriphlegethon; but all things full of gods and daemons. When a man has

such things to think on, and sees sun and moon and stars, and enjoys

earth and sea, he is not solitary or even helpless."[147] "This is

death, a greater change, not from what now is into what is not, but

into what now is not. Then shall I no longer be? You will be, but

something else, of which now the cosmos has no need. For you began to

be (_egenou_), not when you wished, but when the cosmos had need."[148]

On the whole the Stoic is in his way right, for the desire for

immortality goes with the instincts he rejected--it is nothing without

the affections and human love.[149] But once more logic failed, and

the obscure grave witnesses to man's instinctive rejection of Stoicism,

with its simple inscription _taurobolio in aeternum renatus_.

[Sidenote: The question of the gods]

Lastly we come to the gods themselves, and here a double question meets

us. Neither on the plurality nor the personality of the divine does

Stoicism give a certain note. In the passages already quoted it will

have been noticed how interchangeably "God," "the gods" and "Zeus" have

been used. It is even a question whether "God" is not an identity with

fate, providence, Nature and the Universe.[150] Seneca, as we have

seen, dismisses the theory of daemons or _genii_ rather abruptly--"that

is what some think." Epictetus definitely accepts them, so far as

anything here is definite, and with them, or in them, the ancestral

gods. Seneca, as we have seen, is contemptuous of popular ritual and

superstition. Epictetus inculcates that "as to piety about the gods,

the chief thing is to have right opinions about them," but, he

concludes, "to make libations and to sacrifice according to the custom

of our fathers, purely and not meanly, nor carelessly, nor scantily,

nor above our ability, is a thing which belongs to all to do."[151]

"Why do you," he asks, "act the part of a Jew, when you are a

Greek?"[152] He also accepts the {71} fact of divination.[153]

Indeed, aside perhaps from conspicuous extravagances, the popular

religion suffices. Without enthusiasm and without clear belief, the

Stoic may take part in the ordinary round of the cults. If he did not

believe himself, he pointed out a way to the reflective polytheist by

which he could reconcile his traditional faith with philosophy--the

many gods were like ourselves manifestations of the Spermaticos Logos;

and he could accept tolerantly the ordinary theory of daemons, for

Chrysippus even raised the question whether such things as the

disasters that befall good men are due to negligence on the part of

Providence, or to evil daemons in charge of some things.[154] While for

himself the Stoic had the strength of mind to shake off superstition,

the common people, and even the weaker brethren of the Stoic school,

remained saddled with polytheism and all its terrors and follies. Of

this compromise Seneca is guiltless.[155] It was difficult to cut the

connexion with Greek tradition--how difficult, we see in Plutarch's

case. The Stoics, however, fell between two stools, for they had not

enough feeling for the past to satisfy the pious and patriotic, nor the

resolution to be done with it. After all, more help was to be had from

Lucretius than from Epictetus in ridding the mind of the paralysis of

polytheism.

But the same instinct that made men demand immortality for themselves,

a feeling, dim but strong, of the value of personality and of love,

compelled them to seek personality in the divine. Here the Stoic had

to halt, for after all it is a thing beyond the power of reason to

demonstrate, and he could not here allege, as he liked, that the facts

stare one in the face. So, with other thinkers, impressed at once by

the want of evidence, and impelled by the demand for some available

terms, he wavered between a clear statement of his own uncertainty, and

the use of popular names. "Zeus" had long before been adopted by

Cleanthes in his famous hymn, but this was an element of weakness; for

the wall-paintings in every great house gave another account of Zeus,

which belied every attribute with which the Stoics credited him. The

apologists and the Stoics {72} explained the legends by the use of

allegory, but, as Plato says, children cannot distinguish between what

is and what is not allegory--nor did the common people. The finer

religious tempers demanded something firmer and more real than

allegory. They wanted God or Gods, immortal and eternal; and at best

the Stoic gods were to "melt like wax or tin" in their final

conflagration, while Zeus too, into whom they were to be resolved,

would thereby undergo change, and therefore himself also prove

perishable.[156]

"I put myself in the hands of a Stoic," writes Justin Martyr, "and I

stayed a long time with him, but when I got no further in the matter of

God--for he did not know himself and he used to say this knowledge was

not necessary--I left him."[157] Other men did not, like Justin,

pursue their philosophic studies, and when they found that, while the

Stoic's sense of truth would not let him ascribe personality to God,

all round there were definite and authoritative voices which left the

matter in no doubt, they made a quick choice. What authority means to

a man in such a difficulty, we know only too well.

The Stoics in some measure felt their weakness here. When they tell us

to follow God, to obey God, to look to God, to live as God's sons, and

leave us not altogether clear what they mean by God, their teaching is

not very helpful, for it is hard to follow or look to a vaguely grasped

conception. They realized that some more definite example was needed.

"We ought to choose some good man," writes Seneca, "and always have him

before our eyes that we may live as if he watched us, and do everything

as if he saw."[158] The idea came from Epicurus. "Do everything, said

he, as if Epicurus saw. It is without doubt a good thing to have set a

guard over oneself, to whom you may look, whom you may feel present in

your thoughts."[159] "Wherever I am, I am consorting with the best men.

To them, in whatever spot, in whatever age they were, I send my

mind."[160] He recommends Cato, Laelius, Socrates, Zeno. Epictetus has

the same advice. What would Socrates do? is the canon he

recommends.[161] "Though you are not yet a Socrates, you {73} ought to

live as one who wishes to be a Socrates."[162] "Go away to Socrates

and see him ... think what a victory he felt he won over himself."[163]

Comte in a later day gave somewhat similar advice. It seems to show

that we cannot do well without some sort of personality in which to

rest ourselves.

[Sidenote: Plutarch's criticism]

When once this central uncertainty in Stoicism appeared, all the fine

and true words the Stoics spoke of Providence lost their meaning for

ordinary men who thought quickly. The religious teachers of the day

laid hold of the old paradoxes of the school and with them demolished

the Stoic Providence. "Chrysippus," says Plutarch, "neither professes

himself, nor any one of his acquaintances and teachers, to be good

(_spoudaion_). What then do they think of others, but precisely what

they say--that all men are insane, fools, unholy, impious,

transgressors, that they reach the very acme of misery and of all

wretchedness? And then they say that it is by Providence that our

concerns are ordered--and we so wretched! If the Gods were to change

their minds and wish to hurt us, to do us evil, to overthrow and

utterly crush us, they could not put us in a worse condition; for

Chrysippus demonstrates that life can admit no greater degree either of

misery or unhappiness."[164] Of course, this attack is unfair, but it

shows how men felt. They demanded to know how they stood with the

gods--were the gods many or one? were they persons or natural laws[165]

or even natural objects? did they care for mankind? for the individual

man? This demand was edged by exactly the same experience of life

which made Stoicism so needful and so welcome to its followers. The

pressure of the empire and the terrors of living drove some to

philosophy and many more to the gods--and for these certainty was

imperative and the Stoics could not give it.

It is easy, but not so profitable as it seems, to find faults in the

religion of other men. Their generation rejected the Stoics, but they

may not have been right. If the Stoics were too hasty in making reason

into a despot to rule over the {74} emotions, their contemporaries were

no less hasty in deciding, on the evidence of emotions and desires,

that there were gods, and these the gods of their fathers, because they

wished for inward peace and could find it nowhere else. The Stoics

were at least more honest with themselves, and though their school

passed away, their memory remained and kept the respect of men who

differed from them, but realized that they had stood for truth.