What power could such a discussion really have to constrain an ordinary
man to right action? The constraint, such as it is, seems purely an
intellectual process, and this is indeed noticeable in the Stoic ethics
of all periods. No Stoic brought his doctrine nearer to a religious
system than Epictetus; yet this is how Epictetus puts the matter:[797]
"If a man could be thoroughly penetrated, as he ought to be, with this
_thought_, that we are all in an especial manner sprung from God, and
that God is the Father of men as well as gods, full sure he would never
conceive aught ignoble or base of himself.... Those few who _hold_ that
they are born for fidelity, modesty, and unerring rightness in dealing
with the things of sense, never conceive aught base or ignoble of
themselves." He means that, for the real Stoic, _self-respect is the
necessary consequence of his intellectual conception of his place in the
universe_, and that self-respect must as inevitably result in virtue.
Can this intellectual attitude really act as a constraining force on the
will of the average man? This is far too complicated a question for me
to enter upon here, and I can but suggest the study of it for anyone who
would wish to test the actual life-giving moral power of this
philosophy. Suffice it to say that their idea of the universe as Reason
and God naturally led the Stoics into a kind of Fatalism, a destined
order in the world which nothing could effectually oppose;[798] and they
were naturally in some difficulty in reconciling this with the freedom
of Man's will. That freedom they constantly and consistently asserted;
but it comes after all to this, that Man is free to bring his will into
conformity, _through knowledge_, with the Power and the universal
Reason; or, as Dr. Caird puts it,[799] "Man has the choice whether he
will be a willing or an unwilling servant (of the universal Reason):
unwilling, if he makes it his aim to satisfy his particular self, an aim
which he can only attain so far as the general system of things allows
him; willing, if he identifies himself with the divine reason which is
manifested in that system." But that identification of himself with the
divine Reason is again an intellectual process; it can only be realised
by minds highly trained in thinking; it could not have the smallest grip
on the conduct of the ordinary ignorant man, or on the minds of women
and children.
And here we come upon another weak point in Stoicism as presented to the
Roman world in this last century B.C. It was an age in which gentleness,
tenderness, pity, and the philanthropic spirit were most sadly needed,
and it cannot be said of Stoicism that it had any mission to encourage
their growth. The Stoics looked on the mass of men as ignorant and
wicked,[800] and it never occurred to them that it was a duty of the
Good Man to teach and redeem them,--to sacrifice his life, if need be,
in the work of enlightenment. They seem to have thought even of women
and children as hardly partaking of Reason; their ideally good man was
virtuous in a strictly virile way,[801] and it never occurred to them
that training in goodness must begin from the earliest years, and be
gradually developed with infinite sympathy and tenderness. If a man is
to learn that there is something within him which partakes of God, and
which should naturally lead him to right conduct, he must begin to learn
this truth in his infancy.[802] But the absence of a place for emotion
and sympathy in the Stoic system, resulting from the purely intellectual
nature of their central doctrine of Reason, meant also the absence of
any spirit of enthusiastic propaganda. Their notion that emotion or
passion is "a movement of mind contrary to reason and nature,"[803]
lamed their whole system as a progressive force in the world of that
day. Such religious power as it could exercise worked simply through
the radiating influence of a few wise and good men, by nature pure and
unselfish, who gradually familiarised the educated part of society with
a nobler idea of God than the old religion had ever been able to supply,
and with that other inspiring idea of the near relation of Man to God as
partaking of His nature. But the active enthusiasm of a real
religion--the _effective_ desire to be in right relation with the
Power--was strange to Stoicism. In one way or another it had many
excellent results; it cleared the ground, for example, for a new and
universal religion by putting into the shade, if not altogether out of
the way, the old local cults with their narrow and limited civic force:
it glorified the idea of law and order in an age when the Roman world
seemed to be forgetting what these sacred words meant; _but a real
active enthusiasm of humanity was wanting in it_. Hence there is a
certain hopelessness about Stoicism, which increased rather than
diminished as the world went on, and such as is seen in a kind of sad
grandeur in Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor. Of him it may be said,
both as emperor and philosopher, as has been said of the Stoic in
general, that "he was essentially a soldier left to hold a fort
surrounded by overpowering hosts of the enemy. He could not conquer or
drive them away, but he could hold out to the last and die at his post."
NOTES TO LECTURE XVI.
[755] See, _e.g._ Livy iii. 20: "Sed nondum haec, quae
nunc tenet saeculum, neglegentia deum venerat; nec
interpretando sibi quisque iusiurandum et leges aptas
faciebat, sed suos potius mores ad ea accommodabat." Cp.
Cic. _de Off._ iii. 111.
[756] Two Epicureans were expelled from Rome in 173
(probably), Athenaeus, p. 547. Cicero, _Tusc._ iv. 3, 7,
gives some idea of the later popularity of the school in
the first half of the last century B.C.
[757] So Masson, _Lucretius_, i. 263, 271.
[758] See Masson i. ch. xii. and ii. p. 141 foll.;
Mayor's Cicero _de Nat. Deor._ vol. i. xlviii. and 138
foll.; Guyau, _La Morale d'Epicure_ (ed. 4), p. 171
foll.
[759] Cic. _N.D._ i. 19, 49 foll., and many other
passages; Diog. Laert. x. 55; Zeller, _Stoics,
Epicureans, and Sceptics_, p. 441 foll.; Masson i. 292,
who aptly quotes Cotta the academic critic in Cicero's
dialogue: "When Epicurus takes away from the gods the
power of helping and doing good, he extirpates the very
roots of religion from the minds of men" (Cic. _N.D._ i.
45. 121). One may add with Dr. Masson (i. 416 foll.)
that a machine cannot command worship; the _Natura_ of
Lucretius, _i.e._, was really a machine.
[760] Masson i. p. 284, and citations of Philodemus
there given.
[761] Mayor's Cic. _N.D._ vol. i. p. xlix.
[762] Lucr. vi. 68 foll.
[763] Masson i. p. 285.
[764] Cic. _N.D._ i. 2. 3.
[765] Cic. _N.D._ i. 37. 102; to believe the gods idle
"etiam homines inertes efficit."
[766] For this profound reverence for Epicurus see also
Cic. _N.D._ i. 8. 18. It amounted to a faith. In this
passage the Epicurean is described as "nihil tam verens
quam ne dubitare aliqua de re videretur, tanquam modo ex
deorum concilio et ex Epicuri intermundiis
descendisset." See also sec. 43 and Mayor's note; Cic.
_de Finibus_, i. 5. 14; Masson i. 354-5, who quotes the
most striking passages from Lucretius, _e.g._ v. 8-10:
deus ille fuit, deus, inclyte Memmi,
qui princeps vitae rationem invenit eam quae
nunc appellatur sapientia, etc.
In a paper entitled "Die Bekehrung (conversion) im
klassischen Altertum," by W. A. Heidel (_Zeitschrift fuer
Religionspsychologie_, vol. iii. Heft 2), the author, an
American disciple of W. James, argues that the exordium
of Bk. iii. indicates a psychological conversion of
Lucretius.
[767] See Masson's chapter (p. 399 foll.) on the
teaching and personality of Lucretius. _Social Life at
Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 327 foll., and references
there given. I may note here that the power of Epicurism
as a faith depended also largely on the directness,
downrightness, and audacity of its system, working on
minds weary of philosophers' disputations and political
quarrels.
[768] Cic. _de Finibus_, i. viii. to end (translation by
J. S. Reid, Camb. Univ. Press). The following sentence
in ch. 18, sec. 57, puts the Epicurean ethics in a
nutshell: "Clamat Epicurus, is quem vos nimis
voluptatibus esse deditum dicitis, non posse iucunde
vivi nisi sapienter, honeste, iusteque vivatur, nec
sapienter, honeste, iuste, nisi iucunde."
[769] What this quietism might mean for a Roman may be
gathered from the following passage in Cic. _de
Finibus_, i. 13. 43, in which _sapientia_ is practical
wisdom, the Aristotelian [Greek: phronesis] or the _ars
vivendi_, as Cicero has explained it just before:
"Sapientia est adhibenda, quae, et terroribus
cupiditatibusque detractis et omnium falsarum opinionum
temeritate derepta, certissimam se ducem praebeat ad
voluptatem. Sapientia enim est una, quae maestitiam
pellat ex animis, quae nos exhorrescere metu non sinat;
qua praeceptrice in tranquillitate vivi potest, omnium
cupiditatum ardore restincto. Cupiditates enim sunt
insatiabiles, quae non modo singulos homines, sed
universas familias evertunt, totam etiam labefactant
saepe rempublicam. Ex cupiditatibus odia discidia
discordiae seditiones bella nascuntur." And so on to the
end of the chapter. The message of Lucretius to the
Roman was practically the same. The remedy was the wrong
one in that age; though it does not necessarily entail
withdrawal from public life with all its enticements
and risks, it must inevitably have a strong tendency to
suggest it; and such withdrawal had, as a matter of
fact, been one of the characteristics of the Epicurean
life. See Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., ch. xx.; Guyau, _La
Morale d'Epicure_, p. 141 foll.
[770] _History of European Morals_ (1899), vol. i. p.
225. The treatment of Stoicism in this work, though not,
strictly speaking, philosophical, is in many ways most
instructive.
[771] F. Leo, _Die griechische und lateinische
Literatur_, p. 337. See the author's _Social Life at
Rome in the Age of Cicero_, p. 105.
[772] Polybius xxxii. 9-16.
[773] See a discussion by the author of the meaning of
[Greek: tyche] in Polybius, _Classical Review_, vol.
xvii. p. 445, and the passages there quoted relating to
the growth of the Roman dominion.
[774] See Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, p. 3 foll.
[775] _Ib._ p. 6, note 3.
[776] See above, p. 251.
[777] Cic. _N.D._ ii., end of sec. 19. He is translating
the Greek [Greek: pneuma], which in Stoicism is not a
spiritual conception, but a material one, in harmony
with their theory of the universe as being itself
material, including reason and the soul. This is one of
the weak points of the Stoic idea of Unity. For the
meaning of _spiritus_ see Mayor's note on the passage;
it is "the ether or warm air which penetrates and gives
life to all things, and connects them together in one
organic whole."
[778] Cic. _N.D._ ii. xiii. 36 _ad fin._ On all this
department of the Stoic teaching see Zeller, _Stoics_,
etc., p. 135 foll.; Caird, _Gifford Lectures_, vol. ii.,
Lectures 16 and 17.
[779] _Marcus Aurelius and the Later Stoics_, by F. W.
Bussell p. 42.
[780] Cic. _N.D._ ii. ch. 28 (secs. 70-72), with Mayor's
commentary; Zeller, _op. cit._ p. 327 foll.; Mayor,
introduction to vol. ii. of his edition of Cic. _N.D._
xi. foll.; _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_,
p. 334 foll. It is important to note the distinction
drawn by Cicero between religion and superstition; what
Lucretius called _religio_ as a whole Cicero (and Varro
too, cf. Aug. _Civ. Dei_, vi. 9) thus divided. See
Mayor's valuable note, vol. ii. p. 183. Some interesting
remarks on the Stoic way of dealing with popular
mythology will be found in Oakesmith's _Religion of
Plutarch_, p. 68 foll.
[781] See above, p. 118 foll.
[782] See Mayor's note on Cic. _N.D._ ii. 15. 39 (vol.
i. p. 130), with quotation from Philodemus. Zeller,
_Stoics_, etc., p. 337 foll.
[783] Cic. _de Legibus_, i. 7. 22.
[784] _Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum_, Paris, 1883.
I have borrowed the beautiful translation of my friend
Hastings Crossley, printed p. 183 foll. of his _Golden
Sayings of Epictetus_, in Macmillan's Golden Treasury
Series.
[785] _Gifford Lectures_, ii. p. 94.
[786] So Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, p. 61 foll. The
evidence is not conclusive, and the process of argument
is one of elimination; but it raises a fairly strong
probability.
[787] Cic. _de Rep._ i. 21. 34.
[788] See Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 294 foll.
[789] Cic. _de Rep._ iii. 22. 33.
[790] Cic. _de Legibus_, i. 7. 22 foll.: "Est igitur,
quoniam nihil est ratione melius, eaque in homine et in
deo, prima homini cum deo rationis societas. Inter quos
autem ratio, inter eosdem etiam recta ratio communis
est," etc.
[791] Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 226 foll.
[792] _Social Life at Rome_, p. 117.
[793] _Ib._ p. 118 foll.
[794] I may take this opportunity of noting that a Roman
might better understand this notion of his Reason as the
voice of God within him, or conscience, from his own
idea of his "other soul," or genius; see above, p. 75.
But we do not know for certain that it was presented to
him in this way by Panaetius, though Posidonius (_ap.
Galenum_, 469) used the word [Greek: daimon] in this
sense, as did the later Stoics; see Mulder, _de
Conscientiae notione_, p. 71. Seneca, _Ep._ 41. 2, uses
the word _spiritus_: "Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet ...
in unoquoque virorum bonorum, quis deus incertum est,
habitat deus" (from Virg. _Aen._ viii. 352). Cp. Marcus
Aurelius iii. 3. Seneca uses the word genius clearly in
this sense in _Ep._ 110 foll. On the Stoic daemon
consult Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 332 foll.; Oakesmith,
_Religion of Plutarch_, ch. vi.
[795] See, _e.g._, Zeller, p. 268.
[796] This habit of illustrating by historical examples
had an educational value of its own, but serves well to
show how comparatively feeble was the appeal of Stoicism
to the conscience. It may be seen well in Valerius
Maximus, whose work, compiled of fact and fiction for
educational purposes, is far indeed from being an
inspiring one. See _Social Life at Rome_, p. 189.
[797] Arrian, _Discourses_, i. 3. 1-6 (_Golden Sayings
of Epictetus_, No. 9).
[798] Schmekel, _Die mittlere Stoa_, p. 190 foll.
(Panaetius), and 244 foll. (Posidonius), Zeller 160
foll. This is the Fate or Providence on which the moral
lesson of the _Aeneid_ is based; see below, p. 409
foll. Aeneas is the servant of Destiny. If he had
persisted in rebelling against it by remaining at
Carthage with Dido, that would not have changed the
inevitable course of things, but it would have ruined
him.
[799] _Gifford Lectures_, ii. 96.
[800] Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 255. This, of course,
did not diminish the duty of general benevolence, _ib._
p. 310 and references, where fine passages of Cicero and
Seneca are quoted about duties to one's inferiors. But
an enthusiasm of humanity was none the less wanting in
Stoicism, and this was largely owing no doubt to their
hard and fast distinction between virtue and vice, and
their want of perception of a growth or evolution in
society. See Caird, _op. cit._ ii. 99; Lecky, _Hist. of
European Morals_, i. 192 foll.; Zeller 251 foll.
[801] See some excellent remarks in Lecky, _op. cit._ i.
p. 242 foll.
[802] See above, note 40.
[803] Zeller, _Stoics_, etc., p. 229. Cic. _de Finibus_,
iii, 10, 35; _Tusc. Disp._ iv. 28, 60.
LECTURE XVII
MYSTICISM--IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE
We have now reached the end of the period of the Republic; but before I
go on to the age of Augustus, with which I must bring these lectures to
an end, I must ask attention to a movement which can best be described
by the somewhat vague term Mysticism, but is generally known to
historians of philosophy as Neo-pythagoreanism. The fact is that such
tendency as there ever was at Rome towards Mysticism--which was never
indeed a strong one till Rome had almost ceased to be Roman[804]--seems
to have taken the form of thinking known as Pythagorean. The ideas at
the root of the Pythagorean doctrine, the belief in a future life, the
conception of this life as only preparatory to another, the conviction
of the need of purgation in another life and of the preparatory
discipline and asceticism to be practised while we are here,--these are
truly religious ideas; and even among Romans the religious instinct,
though it might be hypnotised, could never be entirely destroyed. When
it awoke from time to time in the minds of thinking men it was apt to
express itself in Pythagorean tones. With the ignorant and vulgar it
might find a baser expression in superstition pure and simple,--in the
finding of portents, in astrology, in Dionysiac orgies; but with these
Pythagoreanism must not be reckoned. These, as they appeared on the soil
of Italy, were the bastard children of quasi-religious thought. But the
movement of which I speak marks a reaction, among men who could both
feel and think, against the whole tendency of Roman religious experience
as we have been tracing it; against the extreme formalism, now
meaningless, of the Roman State religion; against the extreme scepticism
and indifference so obvious in the last century and a half of the
republican era; against the purely intellectual appeal of the ethical
systems of which I have been recently speaking. Stoicism indeed, as we
shall see, held out a hand to the new movement, simply because Stoicism
had a religious side which was wanting in Epicurism. But the thought
that our senses and our reason are not after all the sole fountains of
our knowledge, a thought which is the essence of mysticism, was really
foreign to Stoicism; and when this thought did find a soil in the mind
of a thinking Roman of this age, it was likely to spring up in a
transcendental form which we may call Pythagoreanism.
South Italy was indeed the true home of the Pythagorean teaching. There
its founder had established it, and there, mixed up with more popular
Orphic doctrine and practice, it must have remained latent for
centuries.[805] "Tenuit magnam illam Graeciam," says Cicero of
Pythagoras, "cum honore disciplinae, tum etiam auctoritate; multaque
saecula post sic viguit Pythagoreorum nomen, ut nulli alii docti
viderentur."[806] To South Italy Plato is said to have travelled to
study this philosophy, and to learn the doctrine of the immortality of
the soul; and the story is generally accepted as true.[807] But of any
missionary attempt of Pythagoreanism on Rome we know nothing--and
probably there was nothing to tell--till that mysterious plot to
introduce it after the Hannibalic war which I mentioned in a recent
lecture.[808] That war brought Rome into close contact with Tarentum and
southern Italy, and it is likely enough that the attempt to connect King
Numa with the philosopher, both in the familiar legend and in the
alleged discovery of the stone coffin with its forged manuscripts, had
its origin in this contact. The Senate could not object to the legend,
but it promptly stamped out this grotesque attempt at propagandism. Then
we hear no more of the doctrine for a century at least; but in the last
century B.C. we know that there appeared a number of Pythagorean
writings, falsely attributed to the founder himself or his
disciples,[809]--a method of propagandism which, like that of the
previous century, may perhaps be taken as marking the religious nature
of the doctrine, which needed the _ipse dixit_ of the founder or
something as near it as possible.[810] But of the immediate influence of
these writings we know nothing. The person really responsible for the
tendency to this kind of mysticism was undoubtedly the great Posidonius,
philosopher, historian, traveller, who more than any other man dominated
the Roman world of thought in the first half of the last century B.C.,
and whose writings, now surviving in a few fragments only, lie at the
back of nearly all the serious Roman literature of his own and indeed of
the following age.[811] Panaetius, there can be little doubt, had done
something to leaven Stoicism with Platonic-Aristotelian psychology,[812]
the general tendency of which was towards a dualism of Soul and Body.
The Stoics, in the strict sense of the name, "could not be content with
any philosophy which divided heaven from earth, the spiritual from the
material." "They rebelled against the idea of a transcendent God and a
transcendent ideal world, as modern thought has rebelled against the
supernaturalism of mediaeval religion and philosophy."[813] In their
passion for unity they would not separate soul and body. But when once
Panaetius had hinted at a reversion to the older mode of thought, it was
natural and easy to follow his lead in a society which had long ago
abandoned burial for cremation, and bidden farewell to the primitive
notion that the body lived on under the earth: in a society, too, which
had always believed in that "other soul," the _Genius_ of a man, as
distinct from his bodily self of this earthly life.[814]
Now as soon as this dualism of body and soul was suggested, it was taken
up by Posidonius into what we may call his neo-Stoic system, and at once
gave mysticism,--or transcendentalism, if we choose so to call it--its
chance. For in such a dualistic psychology it is the soul that gains in
value, the body that loses. Life becomes an imprisonment of the soul in
the body; the soul seeks to escape, death is but the beginning of a new
life, and the imagination is set to work to fathom the mysteries of
Man's future existence, nay, in some more fanciful minds, those of his
pre-existence as well. This kind of speculation, half philosophic, half
poetical, is the transcendental side of the Platonic psychology, and in
the last age of the Republic was able to connect Platonism and
Pythagoreanism without deserting Stoicism.[815] We can see it reflected
from Posidonius in the Dream of Scipio, the beautiful myth, imitated
from those of Plato, with which Cicero concluded his treatise on the
State, written in the year 54 B.C., after his retirement from political
life. In this, and again in the first book of his _Tusculan
Disputations_, composed nearly ten years later, Cicero is beyond doubt
on the tracks of Posidonius, and therefore also of Pythagoreanism.[816]
Listen to the words put into the mouth of the elder Scipio and addressed
to his younger namesake: "Tu vero enitere et sic habeto, non esse te
mortalem, sed corpus hoc; non enim tu es, quem forma ista declarat; sed
_mens cuiusque is est quisque_, non ea figura quae digito demonstrari
potest."[817] Here is the body plainly losing, the soul gaining
importance. But he goes still further: "_deum igitur te scito esse_: si
quidem deus est qui viget qui sentit qui meminit: qui providet, qui tam
regit et moderatur et movet id corpus cui propositus est, quam hunc
mundum ille princeps deus, et ut mundum ex quadam parte mortalem ipse
deus aeternus, sic fragile corpus animus sempiternus movet."[818]
With such a view of the soul in relation to the body, we can understand
how in this myth it is described as flying upwards, released from
corporeal bondage, and ascending through heavenly stations to pure
aether, if at least (and here we may note the characteristic Roman
touch) its abode on earth has been the body of a good citizen.[819] All
that is of earth earthy, all old ideas of burial, all notions of a
gloomy abode below the earth, are here fairly left behind. So too in the
first book of the _Tusculans_, written after the death of his beloved
daughter, Cicero would persuade himself and others that death cannot be
an evil if we once allow the soul to be immortal: for from its very
nature it must rise into aethereal realms, cannot sink like the body
into the earth.[820] Into its experiences in the aether I do not need to
go here. Enough has been said to show that, as it were, the heavens were
opened, and with the psychological separation of soul from body the
imaginative faculty was released also; not indeed that any Roman, or
even Posidonius himself, could revel in cosmological dreams as did
Plato, but they found in him all they needed, and it would seem that
they made much use of it. Plato's _Timaeus_ was made by Posidonius the
subject of a commentary,[821] and by Cicero himself it was in part at
least translated, about the time when he was writing the _Tusculans_,
and still deeply moved by his recent loss. Of this translation a
fragment survives; and in the introductory sentences he indicates a
second stimulus to his Pythagorean tendencies, besides Posidonius. He
tells how he had met at Ephesus, when on his way to his province of
Cilicia, the famous Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus, and had enjoyed
conversation with him.[822] Nigidius was an old friend, who had helped
Cicero in his consulship; he was one of those "polyhistores" who are
characteristic of the age, like Posidonius and Varro, and wrote works on
all kinds of subjects of which but few fragments remain. But his
reputation as a Pythagorean survived for centuries;[823] and this
mention of him by Cicero is only another proof of the direction the
thoughts of the latter were taking in these last two years of his life.