They have involved the gods themselves in this abomination, and
they believe that a Deity in the heavens can rejoice in the
slaughter of the laborious and useful ox. The spotless victim,
excelling in the beauty of its form (for its very beauty is the
cause of its destruction), decked out with garlands and with gold
is placed before their altars, and, ignorant of the purport of
the proceedings, it hears the prayers of the priest. It sees the
fruits which it cultivated placed on its head between its horns,
and, struck down, with its life-blood it dyes the sacrificial knife
which it had perhaps already seen in the clear water. Immediately
they inspect the nerves and fibres torn from the yet living being,
and scrutinise the will of the gods in them.
“‘From whence such a hunger in man after unnatural and unlawful
food? Do you dare, O mortal race, to continue to feed on flesh? Do
it not, I beseech you, and give heed to my admonitions. And when
you present to your palates the limbs of slaughtered oxen, know and
feel that you are feeding on the tillers of the ground.’”--_Metam._
xv., 73-142.
V.
SENECA. DIED 65 A.D.
Lucius Annæus Seneca, the greatest name in the stoic school of
philosophy, and the first of Latin moralists, was born at Corduba
(Cordova) almost contemporaneously with the beginning of the Christian
era. His family, like that of Ovid, was of the equestrian order. He was
of a weakly constitution; and bodily feebleness, as with many other
great intellects, served to intensify if not originate, the activity
of the mind. At Rome, with which he early made acquaintance, he soon
gained great distinction at the bar; and the eloquence and fervour he
displayed in the Senate before the Emperor Caligula excited the jealous
hatred of that insane tyrant. Later in life he obtained a prætorship,
and he was also appointed to the tutorship of the young Domitius,
afterwards the Emperor Nero. On the accession of that prince, at the
age of seventeen, to the imperial throne, Seneca became one of his
chief advisers.
Unfortunately for his credit as a philosopher, while exerting his
influence to restrain the vicious propensities of his old pupil, he
seems to have been too anxious to acquire, not only a fair proportion
of wealth, but even an enormous fortune, and his villas and gardens
were of so splendid a kind as to provoke the jealousy and covetousness
of Nero. This, added to his alleged disparagement of the prince’s
talents, especially in singing and driving, for which Nero particularly
desired to be famous, was the cause of his subsequent disgrace and
death. The philosopher prudently attempted to anticipate the will of
Nero by a voluntary surrender of all his accumulated possessions, and
he sought to disarm the jealous suspicions of the tyrant by a retired
and unostentatious life. These precautions were of no avail; his death
was already decided. He was accused of complicity in the conspiracy of
Piso, and the only grace allowed him was to be his own executioner. The
despair of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, he attempted to mitigate by the
reflection that his life had been always directed by the standard of a
higher morality. Nothing, however, could dissuade her from sharing her
husband’s fate, and the two faithful friends laid open their veins by
the same blow.
Advanced age and his extremely meagre diet had left little blood in
Seneca’s veins, and it flowed with painful slowness. His tortures were
excessive and, to avoid the intolerable grief of being witnesses of
each other’s suffering, they shut themselves up in separate apartments.
With that marvellous intrepid tranquillity which characterised some
of the old sages, Seneca calmly dictated his last thoughts to his
surrounding friends. These were afterwards published. His agonies being
still prolonged, he took hemlock; and this also failing, he was carried
into a vapour-stove, where he was suffocated, and thus at length ceased
to suffer.
In estimating the character of Seneca, it is just that we should
consider all the circumstances of the exceptional time in which his
life was cast. Perhaps there has never been an age or people more
utterly corrupt and abandoned than that of the period of the earlier
Roman Cæsars and that of Rome and the large cities of the empire.
Allowing the utmost that his detractors have brought against him, the
moral character of the author of the _Consolations_ and _Letters_
stands out in bright relief as compared with that of the immense
majority of his contemporaries of equal rank and position, who were
sunk in the depths of licentiousness and of selfish indifference to
the miseries of the surrounding world. That his public career was not
of so exalted a character altogether as are his moral precepts, is
only too patent to be denied and, in this shortcoming of a loftier
_ideal_, he must share reproach with some of the most esteemed of the
world’s luminaries. If, for instance, we compare him with Cicero or
with Francis Bacon, the comparison would certainly be not unfavourable
to Seneca. The darkest stigma on the reputation of the great Latin
moralist is his connivance at the death of the infamous Agrippina, the
mother of his pupil Nero. Although not to be excused, we may fairly
attribute this act to conscientious, if mistaken, motives. His best
apology is to be found in the fact that, so long as he assisted to
direct the counsels of Nero, he contrived to restrain that prince’s
depraved disposition from those outbreaks which, after the death of the
philosopher, have stigmatised the name of Nero with undying infamy.
The principal writings of Seneca are:--
1. _On Anger._ His earliest, and perhaps his best known, work.
2. _On Consolation._ Addressed to his mother, Helvia. An admirable
philosophical exhortation.
3. _On Providence; or, Why evils happen to good men though a divine
Providence may exist._
4. _On Tranquillity of Mind._
5. _On Clemency._ Addressed to Nero Cæsar. One of the most meritorious
writings of all antiquity. It is not unworthy of being classed with the
humanitarian protests of Beccaria and Voltaire. The stoical distinction
between clemency and pity (_misericordia_), in book ii., is, as Seneca
admits, merely a dispute about words.
6. _On the Shortness of Life._ In which the proper employment of time
and the acquisition of wisdom are eloquently enforced as the best
employment of a fleeting life.
7. _On a Happy Life._ In which he inculcates that there is no happiness
without virtue. An excellent treatise.
8. _On Kindnesses._
9. _Epistles to Lucilius._ 124 in number. They abound in lessons and
precepts in morality and philosophy, and, excepting the _De Irâ_, have
been the most read, perhaps, of all Seneca’s productions.
10. _Questions on Natural History._ In seven books.
Besides these moral and philosophic works, he composed several
tragedies. They were not intended for the stage, but rather as moral
lessons. As in all his works, there is much of earnest thought and
feeling, although expressed in rhetorical and declamatory language.
What especially characterises Seneca’s writings is their remarkably
_humanitarian_ spirit. Altogether he is imbued with this, for the
most part, very modern feeling in a greater degree than any other
writer, Greek or Latin. Plutarch indeed, in his noble _Essay on Flesh
Eating_, is more expressly denunciatory of the barbarism of the
Slaughter House, and of the horrible cruelties inseparably connected
with it, and evidently felt more deeply the importance of exposing
its evils. The Latin moralist, however, deals with a wider range of
ethical questions, and on such subjects, as, _e.g._, the relations of
master and slave, is far ahead of his contemporaries. His treatment of
_Dietetics_, in common with that of most of the old-world moralists, is
rather from the spiritual and ascetic than from the purely humanitarian
point of view. “The judgments on Seneca’s writings,” says the author
of the article on Seneca in Dr. Smith’s _Dictionary of Greek and Latin
Biography_, “have been as various as the opinions about his character,
and both in extremes. It has been said of him that he looks best in
quotations; but this is an admission that there is something worth
quoting, which cannot be said of all writers. That Seneca possessed
great mental powers cannot be doubted. He had seen much of human life,
and he knew well what man is. His philosophy, so far as he adopted a
system, was the stoical; but it was rather an eclecticism of stoicism
than pure stoicism. His style is antithetical, and apparently laboured;
and where there is much labour there is generally affectation. Yet his
language is clear and forcible--it is not mere words--there is thought
always. It would not be easy to name any modern writer, who has treated
on morality and has said so much that is practically good and true, or
has treated the matter in so attractive a way.”
Jerome, in his _Ecclesiastical Writers_, hesitates to include him in
the catalogue of his saints only because he is not certain of the
genuineness of the alleged literary correspondence between Seneca and
St. Paul. We may observe, in passing, on the remarkable coincidence
of the presence of the two greatest teachers of the old and the new
faiths in the capital of the Roman Empire at the same time; and it is
possible, or rather highly probable, that St. Paul was acquainted with
the writings of Seneca; while, from the total silence of the pagan
philosopher, it seems that he knew nothing of the Pauline epistles
or teaching. Amongst many testimonies to the superiority of Seneca,
Tacitus, the great historian of the empire, speaks of the “splendour
and celebrity of his philosophic writings,” as well as of his “amiable
genius”--_ingenium amœnum_. (_Annals_, xii., xiii.) The elder Pliny
writes of him as “at the very head of all the learned men of that
time.” (xiv. 4.) Petrarch quotes the testimony of Plutarch, “that great
man who, Greek though he was freely confesses ‘that there is no Greek
writer who could be brought into comparison with him in the department
of _morals_.’”
The following passage is to be found in a letter to Lucilius, in which,
after expatiating on the sublimity of the teaching of the philosopher
Attalus in inculcating moderation and self-control in corporeal
pleasures, Seneca thus enunciates his _dietetic_ opinions:--
“Since I have begun to confide to you with what exceeding ardour
I approached the study of philosophy in my youth, I shall not be
ashamed to confess the affection with which Sotion [his preceptor]
inspired me for the teaching of Pythagoras. He was wont to
instruct me on what grounds he himself, and, after him, Sextius,
had determined to abstain from the flesh of animals. Each had a
different reason, but the reason in both instances was a grand
one (_magnifica_). Sotion held that man can find a sufficiency
of nourishment without blood shedding, and that cruelty became
habitual when once the practice of butchering was applied to the
gratification of the appetite. He was wont to add that ‘It is our
bounden duty to limit the materials of luxury. That, moreover,
variety of foods is injurious to health, and not natural to our
bodies. If these maxims [of the Pythagorean school] are true, then
to abstain from the flesh of animals is to encourage and foster
_innocence_; if ill-founded, at least they teach us frugality
and simplicity of living. And what loss have you in losing your
cruelty? (Quod istic crudelitatis tuæ damnum est?) I merely deprive
you of the food of lions and vultures.’
“Moved by these and similar arguments, I resolved to abstain from
flesh meat, and at the end of a year the habit of abstinence was
not only easy but delightful. I firmly believed that the faculties
of my mind were more active,[25] and at this day I will not take
pains to assure you whether they were so or not. You ask, then,
‘Why did you go back and relinquish this mode of life?’ I reply
that the lot of my early days was cast in the reign of the emperor
Tiberius. Certain foreign religions became the object of the
imperial suspicion, and amongst the proofs of adherence to the
foreign cultus or superstition was that of abstinence from the
flesh of animals. At the entreaties of my father, therefore, who
had no real fear of the practice being made a ground of accusation,
but who had a hatred of philosophy,[26] I was induced to return to
my former dietetic habits, nor had he much difficulty in persuading
me to recur to more sumptuous repasts....
“This I tell,” he proceeds, “to prove to you how powerful are the
early impetuses of youth to what is truest and best under the
exhortations and incentives of virtuous teachers. We err partly
through the fault of our guides, who teach us _how to dispute_, not
_how to live_; partly by our own fault in expecting our teachers
to cultivate not so much the _disposition of the mind_ as the
faculties of the intellect. Hence it is that in place of a love
of wisdom there is only a love of words (Itaque quæ _philosophia_
fuit, facta _philologia_ est).”--_Epistola_ cviii.[27]
Seneca here cautiously reveals the jealous suspicion with which the
first Cæsars viewed all foreign, and especially quasi-religious,
innovations, and his own _public_ compliance, to some extent, with the
orthodox dietetic practices. Yet that in private life he continued
to practise, as well as to preach, a radical dietary reformation
is sufficiently evident to all who are conversant with his various
writings. The refinement and gentleness of his ethics are everywhere
apparent, and exhibit him as a man of extraordinary sensibility and
feeling.
As for _dietetics_, he makes it a matter of the first importance, on
which he is never weary of insisting. “_We must so live, not as if we
ought to live for, but as though we could not do without, the body._”
He quotes Epikurus: “_If you live according to nature, you will never
be poor; if according to conventionalism, you will never be rich.
Nature demands little; fashion_ (opinio) _superfluity_.” In one of his
letters he eloquently describes the riotous feasting of the period
which corresponds to our festival of Christmas--another illustration of
the proverb, “History repeats itself”:--
“December is the month,” he begins his letter, “when the city
[Rome] most especially gives itself up to riotous living
(_desudat_). Free licence is allowed to the public luxury. Every
place resounds with the gigantic preparations for eating and
gorging, just as if,” he adds, “the whole year were not a sort of
_Saturnalia_.”
He contrasts with all this waste and gluttony the simplicity and
frugality of Epikurus, who, in a letter to his friend Polyænus,
declares that his own food does not cost him sixpence a day; while his
friend Metrodorus, who had not advanced so far in frugality, expended
the whole of that small sum:--
“Do you ask if that can supply due nourishment? Yes; and pleasure
too. Not, indeed, that fleeting and superficial pleasure which
needs to be perpetually recruited, but a solid and substantial
one. Bread and pearl-barley (_polenta_) certainly is not luxurious
feeding, but it is no little advantage to be able to receive
pleasure from a simple diet of which no change of fortune can
deprive one.... Nature demands bread and water only: no one is poor
in regard to those necessaries.”[28]
Again, Seneca writes:--
“How long shall we weary heaven with petitions for superfluous
luxuries, as though we had not at hand wherewithal to feed
ourselves? How long shall we fill our plains with huge cities? How
long shall the people slave for us unnecessarily? How long shall
countless numbers of ships from every sea bring us provisions for
the consumption of a single month? An Ox is satisfied with the
pasture of an acre or two: one wood suffices for several Elephants.
Man alone supports himself by the pillage of the whole earth and
sea. What! Has Nature indeed given us so insatiable a stomach,
while she has given us so insignificant bodies? No: it is not the
hunger of our stomachs, but insatiable covetousness (_ambitio_)
which costs so much. The slaves of the belly (as says Sallust) are
to be counted in the number of the lower animals, not of men. Nay,
not of them, but rather of the dead.... You might inscribe on their
doors, ‘These have anticipated death.’”--(_Ep._ lx.)
The extreme difficulty of abstinence is oftentimes alleged:--
“It is disagreeable, you say, to abstain from the pleasures of
the customary diet. Such abstinence is, I grant, difficult at
first. But in course of time the desire for that diet will begin
to languish; the incentives to our unnatural wants failing, the
stomach, at first rebellious, will after a time feel an aversion
for what formerly it eagerly coveted. The desire dies of itself,
and it is no severe loss to be without those things that you have
ceased to long for. Add to this that there is no disease, no
pain, which is not certainly intermitted or relieved, or cured
altogether. Moreover it is possible for you to be on your guard
against a threatened return of the disease, and to oppose remedies
if it comes upon you.”--(_Ep._ lxxviii.)
On the occasion of a shipwreck, when his fellow-passengers found
themselves forced to live upon the scantiest fare, he takes the
opportunity to point out how extravagantly superfluous must be the
ordinary living of the richer part of the community:--
“How easily we can dispense with these superfluities, which, when
necessity takes them from us, we do not feel the want of....
Whenever I happen to be in the company of richly-living people I
cannot prevent a blush of shame, because I see evident proof that
the principles which I approve and commend have as yet no sure
and firm faith placed in them.... A warning voice needs to be
published abroad in opposition to the prevailing opinion of the
human race: ‘You are out of your senses (_insanitis_); you are
wandering from the path of right; you are lost in stupid admiration
for superfluous luxuries; you value no one thing for its proper
worth.’”--(_Ep._ lxxxvii.)
Again:--
“I now turn to you, whose insatiable and unfathomable gluttony
(_profunda et insatiabilis gula_) searches every land and every
sea. Some animals it persecutes with snares and traps, with
hunting-nets [the customary method of the _battue_ of that period],
with hooks, sparing no sort of toil to obtain them. Excepting
from mere caprice or daintiness, there is no peace allowed to any
species of beings. Yet how much of all these feasts which you
obtain by the agency of innumerable hands do you even so much as
touch with your lips, satiated as they are with luxuries? How much
of that animal, which has been caught with so much expense or
peril, does the dyspeptic and bilious owner taste? Unhappy even in
this! that you perceive not that you hunger more than your belly.
Study,” he concludes his exhortation to his friend, “not to know
_more_, but to know _better_.”
Again:--
“If the human race would but listen to the voice of reason, it
would recognise that [fashionable] cooks are as superfluous as
soldiers.... Wisdom engages in all useful things, is favourable to
peace, and summons the whole human species to concord.”--(_Ep._ xc.)
“In the simpler times there was no need of so large a supernumerary
force of medical men, nor of so many surgical instruments or of
so many boxes of drugs. Health was simple for a simple reason.
Many dishes have induced many diseases. Note how _vast a quantity
of lives one stomach absorbs_--devastator of land and sea.[29] No
wonder that with so discordant diet disease is ever varying....
Count the cooks: you will no longer wonder at the innumerable
number of human maladies.”--(_Ep._ xcv.)
We must be content with giving our readers only one more of Seneca’s
exhortations to a reform in diet:--
“You think it a great matter that you can bring yourself to live
without all the apparatus of fashionable dishes; that you do not
desire wild boars of a thousand pounds weight or the tongues of
rare birds, and other portents of a luxury which now despises whole
carcases,[30] and chooses only certain parts of each victim. I
shall admire you then only when you scorn not plain bread, when
you have persuaded yourself that herbs exist not for other animals
only, but for man also--if you shall recognise that vegetables are
sufficient food for the stomach into which we now stuff valuable
lives, as though it were to keep them for ever. For what matters
it what it receives, since it will soon lose all that it has
devoured? The apparatus of dishes, containing the spoils of sea and
land, gives you pleasure, you say.... The splendour of all this,
heightened by art, gives you pleasure. Ah! those very things so
solicitously sought for and served up so variously--no sooner have
they entered the belly than one and the same foulness shall take
possession of them all. Would you contemn the pleasures of the
table? Consider their final destination” (_exitum specta_).[31]
If Seneca makes _dietetics_ of the first importance, he at the same
time by no means neglects the other departments of _ethics_, which, for
the most part, ultimately depend upon that fundamental reformation; and
he is equally excellent on them all. Space will not allow us to present
our readers with all the admirable _dicta_ of this great moralist. We
cannot resist, however, the temptation to quote some of his unique
teaching on certain branches of humanitarianism and philosophy little
regarded either in his own time or in later ages. Slaves, both in pagan
and Christian Europe, were regarded very much as the domesticated
non-human species are at the present day, as born merely for the will
and pleasure of their masters. Such seems to have been the universal
estimate of their _status_. While often superior to their lords,
nationally and individually, by birth, by mind, and by education,
they were at the arbitrary disposal of too often cruel and capricious
owners:--
“Are they slaves?” eloquently demands Seneca. “Nay, they
are men. Are they slaves? Nay, they live under the same roof
(_contubernales_). Are they slaves? Nay, they are humble friends.
Are they slaves? Nay, they are fellow-servants (_conservi_), if
you will consider that both master and servant are equally the
creatures of chance. I smile, then, at the prevalent opinion
which thinks it a disgrace for one to sit down to a meal with
his servant. Why is it thought a disgrace, but because arrogant
_Custom_ allows a master a crowd of servants to stand round him
while he is feasting?”
He expressly denounces their cruel and contemptuous treatment, and
demands in noble language (afterwards used by Epictetus, himself a
slave):--
“Would you suppose that he whom you call a slave has the same
origin and birth as yourself? has the same free air of heaven with
yourself? that he breathes, lives, and dies like yourself?”
He denounces the haughty and insulting attitude of masters towards
their helpless dependants, and lays down the precept: “So live with
your dependant as you would wish your superior to live with you.” He
laments the use of the term “slaves,” or “servants” (_servi_), in place
of the old “domestics” (_familiares_). He declaims against the common
prejudice which judges by the _outward_ appearance:--
“That man,” he asserts, “is of the stupidest sort who values
another either by his dress or by his condition.” Is he a slave?
He is, it may be, _free in mind_. He is the _true_ slave who is a
slave to cruelty, to ambition, to avarice, to pleasure. “Love,”
he declares, insisting upon humanity, “cannot co-exist with
fear.”--(_Ep._ xlviii.)