_Ethical aspect of Græco-Roman Society in the period
of Plutarch: difficulty of obtaining an impartial view
of it—Revival of moral earnestness concurrent with the
establishment of the Empire: the reforms of Augustus a
formal expression of actual tendencies—Evidences of this in
philosophical and general literature—The differences between
various Schools modified by the importance of the ethical end
to which all their efforts were directed—Endeavour made to base
morality on sanctions already consecrated by the philosophies
and religious traditions of the Past—Plutarch’s “Ethics” the
result of such an endeavour._
Few ages have left to posterity a character less easy to define, or more
subjected to the ravages of mutually destructive schools of criticism,
than that which gave the Religion of Christ to the Western world, and
witnessed the moulding of Pagan Religion and Philosophy—or rather of
Pagan religions and philosophies—into that systematized shape which
they afterwards presented against the progress of Christianity. Many
ancient and some modern apologists of Christianity have appeared to
think it essential to the honour and glory of their Creed that the
world, before its rise, should be regarded as sunk in iniquity to such a
depth that nothing but a Divine Revelation could serve to elevate and
purify it.[98] It has been maintained, on the other hand, and that too
by Christian writers, that no epoch of Western civilization has been so
marked, not only by the material well-being of the mass of mankind, but
“by virtue in the highest places and by moderation and sobriety in the
ranks beneath,” as that during which the new Creed was generally regarded
as a base and superstitious sort of Atheism.[99] It may be conceded that
the original authors of this period who have been most read in modern
times have easily been construed into vigorous and effective testimony in
support of the former position. The poets and rhetoricians of the Empire
have had their most exaggerated phrases turned into evidence against
the morals of their own days, and their less emphatic expressions have
been regarded as hinting at the perpetration of vices too monstrous to
be more clearly indicated. If, by chance an author has left writings
marked by a lofty conception of morality, and breathing the purest and
most disinterested love of virtue, this very fact has been sufficient
to justify a denial of their Pagan origin, and the assertion that the
true source of their inspiration must have been Judæa. Hence the curious
struggles of many intelligent men to establish a personal connexion
between Paul and Seneca, and to demonstrate that the Ethics of Plutarch
are coloured by Christian modes of thought.[100] Other authors of the
period who furnish material for correcting this one-sided impression
have been less known to the multitude and less consulted by the learned.
Even were the worst true that Juvenal, and Tacitus, and Martial, and
Suetonius, and Petronius have said about Roman courts and Roman society;
even were it not possible to supply a corrective colouring to the picture
from the pages of Seneca, and Lucan, and Pliny, and Persius, and even
Juvenal himself: yet it should be easy to remember that, just as the
Palace of the Cæsars was not the City, so the City was not the Empire.
_Exeat aula qui volet esse pius_ is a maxim that could with advantage
be applied to the sphere of historical criticism as well as to that of
practical Ethics; and if we leave the factions and scandals of the Court
and the City under the worst of the Emperors, and follow Dion into the
huts of lonely herdsmen on the deserted hills of Eubœa, or linger with
Plutarch at some modest gathering of family friends in Athens or the
villages of Bœotia, we shall find innumerable examples of that virtue
which the Republican poet sarcastically denies to the highest rulers.
Even after the long reign of Christianity, vice has been centralized in
the great capitals of civilization; and Rome and Alexandria and Antioch
are not without their parallels among the cities of Modern Europe. In
Alexandria itself, the populace who could listen to discourses like those
of Dion must have been endowed with a considerable capacity for virtue;
the tone of the orator, indeed, frequently reminds us of those modern
preachers who provoke an agreeable sensation of excitement in the minds
of their highly respectable audiences, by depicting them as involved in
such wickedness as only the most daring of mankind would find courage
to perpetrate.[101] We propose to deal elsewhere with the testimony of
Plutarch as to the moral character of the age in which he lived, and at
present confine our observations to the assertion that his “Ethical”
writings are crowded with examples of the purest and most genuine virtue;
not such virtue as shows itself on striking and public occasions only,
but such also as irradiates the daily life of the common people in
their homes and occupations. And although he is, perhaps, in some of
his precepts, a little in advance of the general trend of his times,
inculcating, in these instances, virtues which, though not unpractised
and unknown, are still so far limited in their application that he wishes
to draw them from their shy seclusion in some few better homes, and to
establish them in the broad and popular light of recognized customs;[102]
yet it is clear to every one of the few students of his pages that the
virtues he depicts are the common aim of the people he meets in the
streets and houses of Chæronea, and that the failings he corrects are
the failings of the good people who are not too good to have to struggle
against the temptations incident to humanity. The indications conveyed by
Plutarch and Dion respecting the moral progress of obscure families and
unknown villagers point to the widespread existence through the Empire of
that same strenuous longing after goodness, which had already received
emphatic expression in the writings of philosophers and poets whose
activities had been confined to Rome.
For there can be no doubt that the establishment of the Empire had been
accompanied by a strenuous moral earnestness which is in marked contrast
to the flippant carelessness of the last days of the Republican Era. The
note of despair—despair none the less because its external aspect was
gay and _debonnaire_—so frequently raised by Ovid and Propertius and
Tibullus; the reckless cry, _Interea, dum fata sinunt, jungamus amores;
Iam veniet tenebris Mors adoperta caput_, is the last word of a dying
epoch.[103] These three great poets utter the swan song of the moribund
Republic. Their beliefs are sceptical, or frankly materialistic; they
shut their eyes at the prospect of death to open them on the nearer
charms of the sensual life: devoting their days and their genius to the
pleasures of a passionately voluptuous love of women. In their higher
moods they turn to the Past, but with an antiquarian interest only, like
Ovid and Propertius, or, like Tibullus, to delight in the religious
customs that still linger in the rural parts of Italy, the relics of a
simpler and devouter time. If they turn their thoughts to the Afterworld
at all, it is to depict in glowing verses the conventional charms of the
classic Elysium, or to find occasion for striking description in the
fabled woes of Ixion and Tantalus.[104] Even these descriptions change
by a natural gradation into an appeal for more passionate devotion on
the part of Corinna, or Delia, or Cynthia.[105] If Propertius thinks
of death, it is but to hope that Cynthia will show her regard for his
memory by visiting his tomb in her old age; to regret, with infinite
pathos, the thousands of “dear dead women” who have become the prey of
the Infernal Deities—_sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum_; to lament
that his deserted mistress will call in vain upon his scattered dust;
or to postpone all consideration of such matters until age shall have
exhausted his capacity for more passionate enjoyment. If he mentions
the mighty political events of his time, it is with the air of one who
watches a triumphal procession while resting his head on his mistress’s
shoulder.[106] But these poets, wrapped in all the physical pleasures
which their age had to supply, are not ignorant of the malady from which
it suffers; they know that their despair and their materialism are born
of the misery of long years of sanguinary strife; and Tibullus, in one
of the sweetest of his Elegies, utters a wish which is the Ave of the
storm-tossed Republic to the approaching peace of the Empire:—_At nobis,
Pax alma, veni._[107]
_Cum domino Pax ista venit._[108] Virgil and Horace are poets of the
Empire, and strike the dominant note of the new epoch. It was not the
mere courtly complaisance of genius for its patrons that led Virgil and
Horace to identify their muse with the religious and moral reforms of
Augustus. It was rather a conscious recognition of the spiritual needs
of the new age which led poets and statesmen alike to further this joint
work. It is the custom to regard the labours of Augustus as resulting
in the superimposition on the social fabric of mere forms and rituals
which would have been appropriate were society only a fabric, but which
were utterly inadequate to serve as anything better than a superficial
ornament to an expanding and developing organism.[109] But, taken
in conjunction with the poems of Virgil and Horace, they show their
real character as outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual
grace. It is true that Horace at times attributes the disasters from
which his countrymen have suffered to their disregard of the ancient
religious ceremonies; to their neglect of the _templa ædesque labentes
deorum et fœda nigro simulacra fumo_;[110] but in the six famous Odes
which stand at the head of Book III he emphasizes the national necessity
of chastity, fidelity, mercy, loyalty to duty; and he utters not less
emphatic warnings against the general danger from avarice, ambition,
luxury. The essentially religious character of the Æneid is evident to
every reader. That is no mere formalism which inspires with moral vigour
the splendid melodies of the Sixth Book.[111] Although the Poet uses
the conventional machinery of Elysium and Tartarus to emphasize the
contrast between Virtue and Vice by contrasting the fates that await
them hereafter; yet justice, piety, patriotism, chastity, self-devotion;
fidelity to friend and wife and client; filial and fraternal love: never
received advocacy more strenuous and sincere, never were sanctioned
by praise more eloquent, or reprehension more terrible, than in those
immortal verses which it is an impertinence to praise. The question
which presented itself to Augustus, to his ministers and to his poets,
was how to re-invigorate and preserve those qualities by her practice of
which Rome had become _pulcherrima rerum_. And we cannot wonder that an
important part of their answer to this question lay in the direction of
restoring those ancient religious ceremonies and moral practices which
had been most conspicuously displayed when Rome was making her noblest
efforts to accomplish her great destiny. The sanction of antiquity is
the most permanent of all appeals that are ever made to humanity; and,
even in times of revolution, its authority has been invoked by those most
eager to sweep away existing institutions. _Pro magno teste vetustas
creditur._[112] But if Augustus and his friends appealed to antiquity, it
was not merely to recall the shadows of the ancient forms and customs,
but to revivify them with the new life of virtue that was welling up in
their time, and which, in its turn, received external grace and strength
by its embodiment in the ancestral forms.
The strong chord of moral earnestness struck by Horace and Virgil grows
more resonant as the new era advances, until, in literature at least,
it attains the persistence of a dominant. Juvenal is so passionately
moral that he frequently renders himself liable to Horace’s censure of
those who worship virtue too much; but, in his best moods, as in the
famous lines which close the Tenth Satire, he depicts the virtuous man
in a style which is not the less earnest and sincere because it is also
dignified and calm. Persius, whose disposition was marked by maidenly
modesty and gentleness, and who is also described as _frugi et pudicus_,
shows, even when hampered by a disjointed style which only allows him to
utter his thought in fragments, that devotion to the highest moral aims
which we should expect from a writer brought up under the influences
which he enjoyed;[113] and though he, too, exhibits some of the savage
ferocity of Juvenal in his strictures of vice, he yet pays, in his Fifth
Satire, that tribute to virtue in the person of Cornutus which “proves
the goodness of the writer and the gracefulness with which he could
write.”[114] Lucan, too, whose youth, like that of Persius, had the
inestimable advantage of receiving a share of the wisdom which Cornutus
had gained by nights devoted to philosophic studies, exhibits a spirit
of the loftiest morality under the rhetorical phrasing of his great
Republican Epic.[115] Looking back, with something of regret, to the days
of a dominant oligarchy, he does not conceal the licentiousness which
society harboured beneath the sway of the later Optimates, and he turns
mostly to Cato as the type which he would fain accept as representative
of the true Roman patrician:—
“Nam cui crediderim Superos arcana daturos
Dicturosque magis quam sancto vera Catoni?”[116]
The noble lines in which Cato refuses to consult the Libyan oracle—_Non
exploratum populis Ammona relinquens_—are well known, and express a
highly ethical view of the divine administration of the world:—
“Hæremus cuncti superis, temploque tacente
Nil facimus non sponte Dei: nec vocibus ullis
Numen agit: dixitque semel nascentibus auctor
Quicquid scire licet: steriles nec legit arenas
Ut caneret paucis, mersitque hoc pulvere verum.
Estne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aer
Et cælum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra?
Juppiter est quodcunque vides quocunque moveris.”[117]
His biting sarcasms on those who exercise the art of Magic are conceived
in the same spirit of lofty reverence for the Divine Nature,[118] and
he would fain believe in the immortality of the soul as a stimulus to
virtue and self-abnegation in the present life.[119]
The philosophers are marked by the same strenuous seriousness as the
poets. The letters of Seneca to Lucilius are still an Enchiridion for
those that love virtue, and though there were, doubtless, in the ranks of
the philosophers some who deserved the ferocity of Juvenal; some who laid
themselves open to the sarcasms of Seneca’s friend, Marcellinus;[120]
some like Euxenus, an early teacher of Apollonius of Tyana, “who did
not care much to conform the actions of his life” to the tenets of the
philosophy he professed;[121] some who resembled the Cynics who haunted
the streets and temple gates of Alexandria, and did nothing, as Dion
said, “but teach fools to laugh at Philosophy;”[122] yet it is beyond
controversy that philosophers at this time were generally recognized as
the moral teachers of society, and contributed largely, both as domestic
chaplains like Fronto, and evangelistic preachers like Apollonius of
Tyana, to the spread of that virtue whose praise and admiration are so
conspicuous and sincere in the Greek and Roman writers of the period.
The contrast presented by the Sophists, with their artificial graces
and their luxurious lives, only served to emphasize the worth of the
true philosopher, and when a Sophist turned round upon his career, and
determined to lead a virtuous life, he joined the ranks of those who
professed philosophy.[123]
One of the most frequently recurrent signs of the essential love of
virtue exhibited by this age is the constant and strenuous insistence
that practice must conform to profession; and that hypocrisy is almost in
the condition of a cardinal vice. It may, of course, be asserted that the
passionate eagerness displayed touching the importance of being true in
act to the explicit utterances of Philosophy is but a sign of conscious
weakness in well-doing; and that a truer virtue would have given effect
to itself without all this noisy preaching. But a recognition of one’s
own feebleness has subsequently become one of the most lauded elements of
the saintly character, and it is given to very few to blossom gently and
naturally into that goodness which does neither strive nor cry. Juvenal’s
diatribes against the Egnatii of Rome are not very different in language,
and hardly different at all in spirit, from the attacks of New Testament
writers on hypocritical members of the Churches. So far as Greece was
concerned, this love of sincerity was but a return—from a somewhat
distant lapse—to the ideal of personal openness presented in the famous
words of Achilles:—
“For like hell mouth I loath
Who holds not in his words and thoughts one indistinguished troth.”[124]
And not only is practice regarded as the culmination of theory, the
habit formed upon the active principle, Philosophy, but the question
of personal honour is involved in the harmony between creed and deed;
and one mark of distinction between sophist and philosopher is that
the external apparatus of the former—“his contracted brows and studied
gravity of aspect”—do not indicate the possession of the virtues which
are the pride of the latter.[125]
Plutarch frequently lays strenuous weight on this point;[126] Seneca,
Dion, Aurelius, Epictetus, Apuleius, are crowded with sermons on its
importance.[127] And if pure professions are to be carried out into
pure actions, there is a growing sense that neither may impure words
be indulged in, even by those whose lives are pure. Even so far as
the composition of light verse was concerned, a new sensitiveness
was making itself evident. Catullus had said in the old days that a
chaste and pious man might legitimately write verses of a licentious
character, and the catchword had been repeated by all the society poets
down to Martial.[128] But, even when addressing Domitian, Martial, who
asserts that his life is pure, begs the Emperor to regard his lightest
epigrams with the toleration due to the licence of a court jester.
Pliny, the excellent and respectable Pliny, could not read his naughty
hendecasyllables “merely to a few friends in my private chamber” without
subjecting his compositions to serious criticisms in the homes of these
friends, criticisms which he strives to meet by a long display of great
names who have sinned in the same direction; but beneath this display his
uneasiness peeps forth at every word.[129]
The moral reformation officially inaugurated by Augustus appears, in the
light of these indications, as corresponding to an increased tendency to
virtue actually leavening Græco-Roman society. The formal acts of the
Cæsar, the policy of his ministers, the religious sentiment of Horace
and Virgil, the Stoic fervour of Seneca and Lucan, the martyr spirit of
the Thraseas and the Arrias, the tyrannizing morality of Juvenal, the
kindly humanity of Pliny the Younger, the missionary enthusiasm of Dion,
the gentle persuasiveness of Plutarch, are all common indications of
the good that still interfused the Roman world; all point, as indeed,
many other signs also point, to the existence of a widespread belief
that virtuous ideals and virtuous actions were an inheritance of which
mankind ought not to allow itself to be easily deprived. Philosophers
and politicians, as they were at one in recognizing the value of this
heritage, so they were also at one touching the general means by which
its precious elements were to be invigorated and maintained. As we have
already suggested, it is a remarkable characteristic of the philosophic
writers of this period—of Seneca and Dion, of Plutarch, and even of
Epictetus—that there is in them no pedantic adhesion to the fixed tenets
of a particular school. The half-playful boast of Horace at one end of
the period—_nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri_[130]—is reiterated
with something of sarcastic emphasis in Epictetus at the other: “Virtue
does not consist in having understood Chrysippus.”[131] Seneca gives
expression to this prevalent spirit of compromise with great courage
and clearness. After quoting _suo more_ a certain _nobilis sententia_
of Epicurus, he says: “You must not regard these expressions as peculiar
to Epicurus; they are common property. The practice which obtains in the
Senate should, I think, be adopted in Philosophy. When a speaker says
something with which I partly agree, I ask him to compromise, and then
I go with him.”[132] Anything in the whole gathered wealth of the Past
which promised support to a man in his efforts to regulate his life in
accordance with the dictates of reason and virtue was welcomed and made
available for the uses of morality by the selective power of Philosophy.
Hence Plutarch levies contributions on philosophers, poets, legislators;
on Hellenic and Barbarian Religions; on Mysteries, Oracles, private
utterances; on the whole complex civilization of the Græco-Roman world,
and the civilizations which it had absorbed or dominated; on everything,
in fact, which, from its antiquity, or its possession of national or
individual authority, could be made available for establishing the
practice of virtue on the sanction of an ancient and inalienable
foundation. The object of the following pages is to scrutinize the
results of this appeal to the Past, as they are presented in the “Ethics”
of Plutarch, and to arrange in some kind of order the various elements of
which they are composed.