CHAPTER II. THE PAGAN EMPIRE.

One of the first facts that must strike a student who examines the ethical

teaching of the ancient civilisations is how imperfectly that teaching was

represented, and how feebly it was influenced by the popular creed. The

moral ideas had at no time been sought in the actions of the gods, and

long before the triumph of Christianity, polytheism had ceased to have any

great influence upon the more cultivated intellects of mankind.

In Greece we may trace from the earliest time the footsteps of a religion

of nature, wholly different from the legends of the mythology. The

language in which the first Greek dramatists asserted the supreme

authority and universal providence of Zeus was so emphatic, that the

Christian Fathers commonly attributed it either to direct inspiration or

to a knowledge of the Jewish writings, while later theologians of the

school of Cudworth have argued from it in favour of the original

monotheism of our race. The philosophers were always either contemptuous

or hostile to the prevailing legends. Pythagoras is said to have declared

that he had seen Hesiod tied to a brazen pillar in hell, and Homer hung

upon a tree surrounded by serpents, on account of the fables they had

invented about the gods.(148) Plato, for the same reason, banished the

poets from his republic. Stilpo turned to ridicule the whole system of

sacrifices,(149) and was exiled from Athens for denying that the Athene of

Phidias was a goddess.(150) Xenophanes remarked that each nation

attributed to the gods its distinctive national type, the gods of the

Æthiopians being black, the gods of the Thracians fair and blue-eyed.(151)

Diagoras and Theodorus are said to have denied, and Protagoras to have

questioned the existence of the gods,(152) while the Epicureans deemed

them wholly indifferent to human affairs, and the Pyrrhonists pronounced

our faculties absolutely incapable of attaining any sure knowledge, either

human or divine. The Cynic Antisthenes said that there were many popular

gods, but there was only one god of nature.(153) The Stoics, reproducing

an opinion which was supported by Aristotle and attributed to

Pythagoras,(154) believed in an all-pervading soul of nature, but unlike

some modern schools which have adopted this view, they asserted in

emphatic language the doctrine of Providence, and the self-consciousness

of the Deity.

In the Roman republic and empire, a general scepticism had likewise arisen

among the philosophers as the first fruit of intellectual development, and

the educated classes were speedily divided between avowed or virtual

atheists, like the Epicureans,(155) and pure theists, like the Stoics and

the Platonists. The first, represented by such writers as Lucretius and

Petronius, regarded the gods simply as the creations of fear, denied every

form of Providence, attributed the world to a concurrence of atoms, and

life to spontaneous generation, and regarded it as the chief end of

philosophy to banish as illusions of the imagination every form of

religious belief. The others formed a more or less pantheistic conception

of the Deity, asserted the existence of a Providence,(156) but treated

with great contempt the prevailing legends which they endeavoured in

various ways to explain. The first systematic theory of explanation

appears to have been that of the Sicilian Euhemerus, whose work was

translated by Ennius. He pretended that the gods were originally kings,

whose history and genealogies he professed to trace, and who after death

had been deified by mankind.(157) Another attempt, which in the first

period of Roman scepticism was more generally popular, was that of some of

the Stoics, who regarded the gods as personifications of the different

attributes of the Deity, or of different forces of nature. Thus Neptune

was the sea, Pluto was fire, Hercules represented the strength of God,

Minerva His wisdom, Ceres His fertilising energy.(158) More than a hundred

years before the Empire, Varro had declared that “the soul of the world is

God, and that its parts are true divinities.”(159) Virgil and Manilius

described, in lines of singular beauty, that universal spirit, the

principle of all life, the efficient cause of all motion, which permeates

and animates the globe. Pliny said that “the world and sky, in whose

embrace all things are enclosed, must be deemed a god, eternal, immense,

never begotten, and never to perish. To seek things beyond this is of no

profit to man, and they transcend the limits of his faculties.”(160)

Cicero had adopted the higher Platonic conception of the Deity as mind

freed from all taint of matter,(161) while Seneca celebrated in

magnificent language “Jupiter the guardian and ruler of the universe, the

soul and spirit, the lord and master of this mundane sphere, ... the cause

of causes, upon whom all things hang.... Whose wisdom oversees the world

that it may move uncontrolled in its course, ... from whom all things

proceed, by whose spirit we live, ... who comprises all we see.”(162)

Lucan, the great poet of stoicism, rose to a still higher strain, and to

one which still more accurately expressed the sentiments of his school,

when he described Jupiter as that majestic, all-pervasive spirit, whose

throne is virtue and the universe.(163) Quintilian defended the

subjugation of the world beneath the sceptre of a single man, on the

ground that it was an image of the government of God. Other philosophers

contented themselves with asserting the supreme authority of Jupiter

Maximus, and reducing the other divinities to mere administrative and

angelic functions, or, as the Platonists expressed it, to the position of

dæmons. According to some of the Stoics, a final catastrophe would consume

the universe, the resuscitated spirits of men and all these minor gods,

and the whole creation being absorbed into the great parent spirit, God

would be all in all. The very children and old women ridiculed Cerberus

and the Furies(164) or treated them as mere metaphors of conscience.(165)

In the deism of Cicero the popular divinities were discarded, the oracles

refuted and ridiculed, the whole system of divination pronounced a

political imposture, and the genesis of the miraculous traced to the

exuberance of the imagination, and to certain diseases of the

judgment.(166) Before the time of Constantine, numerous books had been

written against the oracles.(167) The greater number of these had actually

ceased, and the ablest writers justly saw in this cessation an evidence of

the declining credulity of the people, and a proof that the oracles had

been a fruit of that credulity.(168) The Stoics, holding, as was their

custom, aloof from direct religious discussion, dissuaded their disciples

from consulting them, on the ground that the gifts of fortune were of no

account, and that a good man should be content with his conscience, making

duty and not success the object of his life.(169) Cato wondered that two

augurs could meet with gravity.(170) The Roman general Sertorius made the

forgery of auspicious omens a continual resource in warfare.(171) The

Roman wits made divination the favourite subject of their ridicule.(172)

The denunciation which the early Greek moralists launched against the

popular ascription of immoral deeds to the gods was echoed by a long

series of later philosophers,(173) while Ovid made these fables the theme

of his mocking _Metamorphoses_, and in his most immoral poem proposed

Jupiter as a model of vice. With an irony not unlike that of Isaiah,

Horace described the carpenter deliberating whether he should convert a

shapeless log into a bench or into a god.(174) Cicero, Plutarch, Maximus

of Tyre, and Dion Chrysostom either denounced idolatry or defended the use

of images simply on the ground that they were signs and symbols of the

Deity,(175) well suited to aid the devotions of the ignorant. Seneca(176)

and the whole school of Pythagoras objected to the sacrifices.

These examples will be sufficient to show how widely the philosophic

classes in Rome were removed from the professed religion of the State, and

how necessary it is to seek elsewhere the sources of their moral life. But

the opinions of learned men never reflect faithfully those of the vulgar,

and the chasm between the two classes was even wider than at present

before the dawn of Christianity and the invention of printing. The

atheistic enthusiasm of Lucretius and the sceptical enthusiasm of some of

the disciples of Carneades were isolated phenomena, and the great majority

of the ancient philosophers, while speculating with the utmost freedom in

private, or in writings that were read by the few, countenanced,

practised, and even defended the religious rites that they despised. It

was believed that many different paths adapted to different nations and

grades of knowledge converge to the same Divinity, and that the most

erroneous religion is good if it forms good dispositions and inspires

virtuous actions. The oracle of Delphi had said that the best religion is

that of a man’s own city. Polybius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who

regarded all religions simply as political agencies, dilated in rapturous

terms upon the devotion of the Romans and the comparative purity of their

creed.(177) Varro openly professed the belief that there are religious

truths which it is expedient that the people should not know, and

falsehoods which they should believe to be true.(178) The Academic Cicero

and the Epicurean Cæsar were both high officers of religion. The Stoics

taught that every man should duly perform the religious ceremonies of his

country.(179)

But the Roman religion, even in its best days, though an admirable system

of moral discipline, was never an independent source of moral enthusiasm.

It was the creature of the State, and derived its inspiration from

political feeling. The Roman gods were not, like those of the Greeks, the

creations of an unbridled and irreverent fancy, nor, like those of the

Egyptians, representations of the forces of nature; they were for the most

part simple allegories, frigid personifications of different virtues, or

presiding spirits imagined for the protection of different departments of

industry. The religion established the sanctity of an oath, it gave a kind

of official consecration to certain virtues, and commemorated special

instances in which they had been displayed; its local character

strengthened patriotic feeling, its worship of the dead fostered a vague

belief in the immortality of the soul,(180) it sustained the supremacy of

the father in the family, surrounded marriage with many imposing

solemnities, and created simple and reverent characters profoundly

submissive to an over-ruling Providence and scrupulously observant of

sacred rites. But with all this it was purely selfish. It was simply a

method of obtaining prosperity, averting calamity, and reading the future.

Ancient Rome produced many heroes, but no saint. Its self-sacrifice was

patriotic, not religious. Its religion was neither an independent teacher

nor a source of inspiration, although its rites mingled with and

strengthened some of the best habits of the people.

But these habits, and the religious reverence with which they were

connected, soon disappeared amid the immorality and decomposition that

marked the closing years of the Republic and the dawn of the Empire. The

stern simplicity of life, which the censors had so zealously and often so

tyrannically enforced,(181) was exchanged for a luxury which first

appeared after the return of the army of Manlius from Asia,(182) increased

to immense proportions after the almost simultaneous conquests of

Carthage, Corinth, and Macedonia,(183) received an additional stimulus

from the example of Antony,(184) and at last, under the Empire, rose to

excesses which the wildest Oriental orgies have never surpassed.(185) The

complete subversion of the social and political system of the Republic,

the anarchy of civil war, the ever-increasing concourse of strangers,

bringing with them new philosophies, customs, and gods, had dissolved or

effaced all the old bonds of virtue. The simple juxtaposition of many

forms of worship effected what could not have been effected by the most

sceptical literature or the most audacious philosophy. The moral influence

of religion was almost annihilated. The feeling of reverence was almost

extinct. Augustus solemnly degraded the statue of Neptune because his

fleet had been wrecked.(186) When Germanicus died, the populace stoned or

overthrew the altars of the gods.(187) The idea of sanctity was so far

removed from the popular divinities that it became a continual complaint

that prayers were offered which the most depraved would blush to pronounce

aloud.(188) Amid the corruption of the Empire, we meet with many noble

efforts of reform made by philosophers or by emperors, but we find

scarcely a trace of the moral influence of the old religion. The

apotheosis of the emperors consummated its degradation. The foreign gods

were identified with those of Rome, and all their immoral legends

associated with the national creed.(189) The theatre greatly extended the

area of scepticism. Cicero mentions the assenting plaudits with which the

people heard the lines of Ennius, declaring that the gods, though real

beings, take no care for the things of man.(190) Plutarch tells of a

spectator at a theatre rising up with indignation after a recital of the

crimes of Diana, and exclaiming to the actor, “May you have a daughter

like her whom you have described!”(191) St. Augustine and other of the

Fathers long after ridiculed the pagans who satirised in the theatres the

very gods they worshipped in the temples.(192) Men were still profoundly

superstitious, but they resorted to each new religion as to a charm or

talisman of especial power, or a system of magic revealing the future.

There existed, too, to a very large extent, a kind of superstitious

scepticism which occupies a very prominent place in religious history.

There were multitudes who, declaring that there were no gods, or that the

gods never interfered with human affairs, professed with the same breath

an absolute faith in all portents, auguries, dreams, and miracles.

Innumerable natural objects, such as comets, meteors, earthquakes, or

monstrous births, were supposed to possess a kind of occult or magical

virtue, by which they foreshadowed, and in some cases influenced, the

destinies of men. Astrology, which is the special representative of this

mode of thought, rose to great prominence. The elder Pliny notices that in

his time a belief was rapidly gaining ground, both among the learned and

among the vulgar, that the whole destiny of man is determined by the star

that presides over his nativity; that God, having ordained this, never

interferes with human affairs, and that the reality of the portents is due

to this pre-ordainment.(193) One of the later historians of the Empire

remarks that numbers who denied the existence of any divinity believed

nevertheless that they could not safely appear in public, or eat or bathe,

unless they had first carefully consulted the almanac to ascertain the

position of the planet Mercury, or how far the moon was from the

Crab.(194) Except, perhaps, among the peasants in the country districts,

the Roman religion, in the last years of the Republic, and in the first

century of the Empire, scarcely existed, except in the state of a

superstition, and he who would examine the true moral influence of the

time must turn to the great schools of philosophy which had been imported

from Greece.

The vast place which the rival systems of Zeno and Epicurus occupy in the

moral history of mankind, and especially in the closing years of the

empire of paganism, may easily lead us to exaggerate the creative genius

of their founders, who, in fact, did little more than give definitions or

intellectual expression to types of excellence that had at all times

existed in the world. There have ever been stern, upright,

self-controlled, and courageous men, actuated by a pure sense of duty,

capable of high efforts of self-sacrifice, somewhat intolerant of the

frailties of others, somewhat hard and unsympathising in the ordinary

intercourse of society, but rising to heroic grandeur as the storm lowered

upon their path, and more ready to relinquish life than the cause they

believed to be true. There have also always been men of easy tempers and

of amiable disposition, gentle, benevolent, and pliant, cordial friends

and forgiving enemies, selfish at heart, yet ever ready, when it is

possible, to unite their gratifications with those of others, averse to

all enthusiasm, mysticism, utopias, and superstition, with little depth of

character or capacity for self-sacrifice, but admirably fitted to impart

and to receive enjoyment, and to render the course of life easy and

harmonious. The first are by nature Stoics, and the second Epicureans, and

if they proceed to reason about the _summum bonum_ or the affections, it

is more than probable that in each case their characters will determine

their theories. The first will estimate self-control above all other

qualities, will disparage the affections, and will endeavour to separate

widely the ideas of duty and of interest, while the second will

systematically prefer the amiable to the heroic, and the utilitarian to

the mystical.

But while it is undoubtedly true that in these matters character usually

determines opinion, it is not less true that character is itself in a

great measure governed by national circumstances. The refined, artistic,

sensual civilisations of Greece and Asia Minor might easily produce fine

examples of the Epicurean type, but Rome was from the earliest times

pre-eminently the home of stoicism. Long before the Romans had begun to

reason about philosophy, they had exhibited it in action, and in their

speculative days it was to this doctrine that the noblest minds naturally

tended. A great nation engaged in perpetual wars in an age when success in

warfare depended neither upon wealth nor upon mechanical genius, but upon

the constant energy of patriotic enthusiasm, and upon the unflinching

maintenance of military discipline, the whole force of the national

character tended to the production of a single definite type. In the

absolute authority accorded to the father over the children, to the

husband over the wife, to the master over the slave, we may trace the same

habits of discipline that proved so formidable in the field. Patriotism

and military honour were indissolubly connected in the Roman mind. They

were the two sources of national enthusiasm, the chief ingredients of the

national conception of greatness. They determined irresistibly the moral

theory which was to prove supreme.

Now war, which brings with it so many demoralising influences, has, at

least, always been the great school of heroism. It teaches men how to die.

It familiarises the mind with the idea of noble actions performed under

the influence, not of personal interest, but of honour and of enthusiasm.

It elicits in the highest degree strength of character, accustoms men to

the abnegation needed for simultaneous action, compels them to repress

their fears, and establish a firm control over their affections.

Patriotism, too, leads them to subordinate their personal wishes to the

interests of the society in which they live. It extends the horizon of

life, teaching men to dwell among the great men of the past, to derive

their moral strength from the study of heroic lives, to look forward

continually, through the vistas of a distant future, to the welfare of an

organisation which will continue when they have passed away. All these

influences were developed in Roman life to a degree which can now never be

reproduced. War, for the reasons I have stated, was far more than at

present the school of heroic virtues. Patriotism, in the absence of any

strong theological passion, had assumed a transcendent power. The citizen,

passing continually from political to military life, exhibited to

perfection the moral effects of both. The habits of command formed by a

long period of almost universal empire, and by the aristocratic

organisation of the city, contributed to the elevation, and also to the

pride, of the national character.

It will appear, I think, sufficiently evident, from these considerations,

that the circumstances of the Roman people tended inevitably to the

production of a certain type of character, which, in its essential

characteristics, was the type of stoicism. In addition to the

predisposition which leads men in their estimate of the comparative

excellence of different qualities to select for the highest eulogy those

which are most congruous to their own characters, this fact derives a

great importance from the large place which the biographical element

occupied in ancient ethical teaching. Among Christians the ideals have

commonly been either supernatural beings or men who were in constant

connection with supernatural beings, and these men have usually been

either Jews or saints, whose lives were of such a nature as to isolate

them from most human sympathies, and to efface as far as possible the

national type. Among the Greeks and Romans the examples of virtue were

usually their own fellow-countrymen; men who had lived in the same moral

atmosphere, struggled for the same ends, acquired their reputation in the

same spheres, exhibited in all their intensity the same national

characteristics as their admirers. History had assumed a didactic

character it has now almost wholly lost. One of the first tasks of every

moralist was to collect traits of character illustrating the precepts he

enforced. Valerius Maximus represented faithfully the method of the

teachers of antiquity when he wrote his book giving a catalogue of

different moral qualities, and illustrating each by a profusion of

examples derived from the history of his own or of foreign nations.

“Whenever,” said Plutarch, “we begin an enterprise, or take possession of

a charge, or experience a calamity, we place before our eyes the example

of the greatest men of our own or of bygone ages, and we ask ourselves how

Plato or Epaminondas, Lycurgus or Agesilaus, would have acted. Looking

into these personages as into a faithful mirror, we can remedy our defects

in word or deed.... Whenever any perplexity arrives, or any passion

disturbs the mind, the student of philosophy pictures to himself some of

those who have been celebrated for their virtue, and the recollection

sustains his tottering steps and prevents his fall.”(195)

Passages of this kind continually occur in the ancient moralists,(196) and

they show how naturally the highest type of national excellence determined

the prevailing school of moral philosophy, and also how the influence of

the heroic period of national history would act upon the best minds in the

subsequent and wholly different phases of development. It was therefore

not surprising that during the Empire, though the conditions of national

life were profoundly altered, Stoicism should still be the philosophical

religion, the great source and regulator of moral enthusiasm. Epicureanism

had, indeed, spread widely in the Empire,(197) but it proved little more

than a principle of disintegration or an apology for vice, or at best the

religion of tranquil and indifferent natures animated by no strong moral

enthusiasm. It is indeed true that Epicurus had himself been a man of the

most blameless character, that his doctrines were at first carefully

distinguished from the coarse sensuality of the Cyrenaic school which had

preceded them, that they admitted in theory almost every form of virtue,

and that the school had produced many disciples who, if they had not

attained the highest grades of excellence, had at least been men of

harmless lives, intensely devoted to their master, and especially noted

for the warmth and constancy of their friendships.(198) But a school which

placed so high a value on ease and pleasure was eminently unfit to

struggle against the fearful difficulties that beset the teachers of

virtue amid the anarchy of a military despotism, and the virtues and the

vices of the Romans were alike fatal to its success. All the great ideals

of Roman excellence belonged to a different type. Such men as a Decius or

a Regulus would have been impossible in an Epicurean society, for even if

their actuating emotion were no nobler than a desire for posthumous fame,

such a desire could never grow powerful in a moral atmosphere charged with

the shrewd, placid, unsentimental utilitarianism of Epicurus. On the other

hand, the distinctions the Epicureans had drawn between more or less

refined pleasures and their elevated conceptions of what constitutes the

true happiness of men, were unintelligible to the Romans, who knew how to

sacrifice enjoyment, but who, when pursuing it, gravitated naturally to

the coarsest forms. The mission of Epicureanism was therefore chiefly

negative. The anti-patriotic tendency of its teaching contributed to that

destruction of national feeling which was necessary to the rise of

cosmopolitanism, while its strong opposition to theological beliefs,

supported by the genius and enthusiasm of Lucretius, told powerfully upon

the decaying faith.

Such being the functions of Epicureanism, the constructive or positive

side of ethical teaching devolved almost exclusively upon Stoicism; for

although there were a few philosophers who expressed themselves in strong

opposition to some portions of the Stoical system, their efforts usually

tended to no more than a modification of its extreme and harshest

features. The Stoics asserted two cardinal principles—that virtue was the

sole legitimate object to be aspired to, and that it involved so complete

an ascendancy of the reason as altogether to extinguish the affections.

The Peripatetics and many other philosophers, who derived their opinions

chiefly from Plato, endeavoured to soften down the exaggeration of these

principles. They admitted that virtue was an object wholly distinct from

interest, and that it should be the leading motive of life; but they

maintained that happiness was also a good, and a certain regard for it

legitimate. They admitted that virtue consisted in the supremacy of the

reason over the affections, but they allowed the exercise of the latter

within restricted limits. The main distinguishing features, however, of

Stoicism, the unselfish ideal and the controlling reason, were acquiesced

in, and each represents an important side of the ancient conception of

excellence which we must now proceed to examine.

In the first we may easily trace the intellectual expression of the high

spirit of self-sacrifice which the patriotic enthusiasm had elicited. The

spirit of patriotism has this peculiar characteristic, that, while it has

evoked acts of heroism which are both very numerous and very sublime, it

has done so without presenting any prospect of personal immortality as a

reward. Of all the forms of human heroism, it is probably the most

unselfish. The Spartan and the Roman died for his country because he loved

it. The martyr’s ecstasy of hope had no place in his dying hour. He gave

up all he had, he closed his eyes, as he believed, for ever, and he asked

for no reward in this world or in the next. Even the hope of posthumous

fame—the most refined and supersensual of all that can be called

reward—could exist only for the most conspicuous leaders. It was examples

of this nature that formed the culminations or ideals of ancient systems

of virtue, and they naturally led men to draw a very clear and deep

distinction between the notions of interest and of duty. It may, indeed,

be truly said, that while the conception of what constituted duty was

often very imperfect in antiquity, the conviction that duty, as

distinguished from every modification of selfishness, should be the

supreme motive of life was more clearly enforced among the Stoics than in

any later society.

The reader will probably have gathered from the last chapter that there

are four distinct motives which moral teachers may propose for the purpose

of leading men to virtue. They may argue that the disposition of events is

such that prosperity will attend a virtuous life, and adversity a vicious

one—a proposition they may prove by pointing to the normal course of

affairs, and by asserting the existence of a special Providence in behalf

of the good in the present world, and of rewards and punishments in the

future. As far as these latter arguments are concerned, the efficacy of

such teaching rests upon the firmness with which certain theological

tenets are held, while the force of the first considerations will depend

upon the degree and manner in which society is organised, for there are

undoubtedly some conditions of society in which a perfectly upright life

has not even a general tendency to prosperity. The peculiar circumstances

and dispositions of individuals will also influence largely the way in

which they receive such teaching, and, as Cicero observed, “what one

utility has created, another will often destroy.”

They may argue, again, that vice is to the mind what disease is to the

body, and that a state of virtue is in consequence a state of health. Just

as bodily health is desired for its own sake, as being the absence of a

painful, or at least displeasing state, so a well-ordered and virtuous

mind may be valued for its own sake, and independently of all the external

good to which it may lead, as being a condition of happiness; and a mind

distracted by passion and vice may be avoided, not so much because it is

an obstacle in the pursuit of prosperity, as because it is in itself

essentially painful and disturbing. This conception of virtue and vice as

states of health or sickness, the one being in itself a good and the other

in itself an evil, was a fundamental proposition in the ethics of

Plato.(199) It was admitted, but only to a subsidiary place, by the

Stoics,(200) and has passed more or less into all the succeeding systems.

It is especially favourable to large and elevating conceptions of

self-culture, for it leads men to dwell much less upon isolated acts of

virtue or vice than upon the habitual condition of mind from which they

spring.

It is possible, in the third place, to argue in favour of virtue by

offering as a motive that sense of pleasure which follows the deliberate

performance of a virtuous act. This emotion is a distinct and isolated

gratification following a distinct action, and may therefore be easily

separated from that habitual placidity of temper which results from the

extinction of vicious and perturbing impulses. It is this theory which is

implied in the common exhortations to enjoy ’the luxury of doing good,’

and though especially strong in acts of benevolence, in which case

sympathy with the happiness created intensifies the feeling, this pleasure

attends every kind of virtue.

These three motives of action have all this common characteristic, that

they point as their ultimate end to the happiness of the agent. The first

seeks that happiness in external circumstances; the second and third in

psychological conditions. There is, however, a fourth kind of motive which

may be urged, and which is the peculiar characteristic of the intuitive

school of moralists and the stumbling-block of its opponents. It is

asserted that we are so constituted that the notion of duty furnishes in

itself a natural motive of action of the highest order, wholly distinct

from all the refinements and modifications of self-interest. The coactive

force of this motive is altogether independent of surrounding

circumstances, and of all forms of belief. It is equally true for the man

who believes and for the man who rejects the Christian faith, for the

believer in a future world and for the believer in the mortality of the

soul. It is not a question of happiness or unhappiness, of reward or

punishment, but of a generically different nature. Men feel that a certain

course of life is the natural end of their being, and they feel bound,

even at the expense of happiness, to pursue it. They feel that certain

acts are essentially good and noble, and others essentially base and vile,

and this perception leads them to pursue the one and to avoid the other,

irrespective of all considerations of enjoyment.

I have recurred to these distinctions, which were more fully discussed in

the last chapter, because the school of philosophy we are reviewing

furnishes the most perfect of all historical examples of the power which

the higher of these motives can exercise over the mind. The coarser forms

of self-interest were in stoicism absolutely condemned. It was one of the

first principles of these philosophers that all things that are not in our

power should be esteemed indifferent; that the object of all mental

discipline should be to withdraw the mind from all the gifts of fortune,

and that prudence must in consequence be altogether excluded from the

motives of virtue. To enforce these principles they continually dilated

upon the vanity of human things, and upon the majesty of the independent

mind, and they indulged, though scarcely more than other sects, in many

exaggerations about the impassive tranquillity of the sage.(201) In the

Roman empire stoicism flourished at a period which, beyond almost any

other, seemed unfavourable to such teaching. There were reigns when, in

the emphatic words of Tacitus, “virtue was a sentence of death.” In no

period had brute force more completely triumphed, in none was the thirst

for material advantages more intense, in very few was vice more

ostentatiously glorified. Yet in the midst of all these circumstances the

Stoics taught a philosophy which was not a compromise, or an attempt to

moderate the popular excesses, but which was rather in its austere

sanctity the extreme antithesis of all that the prevailing examples and

their own interests could dictate. And these men were no impassioned

fanatics, fired with the prospect of coming glory. They were men from

whose motives of action the belief in the immortality of the soul was

resolutely excluded. In the scepticism that accompanied the first

introduction of philosophy into Rome, in the dissolution of the old fables

about Tartarus and the Styx, and the dissemination of Epicureanism among

the people, this doctrine had sunk very low, notwithstanding the beautiful

reasonings of Cicero and the religious faith of a few who clung like

Plutarch to the mysteries in which it was perpetuated. An interlocutor in

Cicero expressed what was probably a common feeling when he acknowledged

that, with the writings of Plato before him, he could believe and realise

it; but when he closed the book, the reasonings seemed to lose their

power, and the world of spirits grew pale and unreal.(202) If Ennius could

elicit the plaudits of a theatre when he proclaimed that the gods took no

part in human affairs, Cæsar could assert in the senate, without scandal

and almost without dissent, that death was the end of all things.(203)

Pliny, perhaps the greatest of Roman scholars, adopting the sentiment of

all the school of Epicurus, describes the belief in a future life as a

form of madness, a puerile and a pernicious illusion.(204) The opinions of

the Stoics were wavering and uncertain. Their first doctrine was that the

soul of man has a future and independent, but not an eternal existence,

that it survives until the last conflagration which was to destroy the

world, and absorb all finite things into the all-pervading soul of nature.

Chrysippus, however, restricted to the best and noblest souls this future

existence, which Cleanthes had awarded to all,(205) and among the Roman

Stoics even this was greatly doubted. The belief that the human soul is a

detached fragment of the Deity naturally led to the belief that after

death it would be reabsorbed into the parent Spirit. The doctrine that

there is no real good but virtue deprived the Stoics of the argument for a

future world derived from unrequited merit and unpunished crime, and the

earnestness with which they contended that a good man should act

irrespectively of reward inclined them, as it is said to have inclined

some Jewish thinkers,(206) to the denial of the existence of the

reward.(207) Panætius, the founder of Roman stoicism, maintained that the

soul perished with the body,(208) and his opinion was followed by

Epictetus,(209) and Cornutus.(210) Seneca contradicted himself on the

subject.(211) Marcus Aurelius never rose beyond a vague and mournful

aspiration. Those who believed in a future world believed in it faintly

and uncertainly, and even when they accepted it as a fact, they shrank

from proposing it as a motive. The whole system of Stoical ethics, which

carried self-sacrifice to a point that has scarcely been equalled, and

exercised an influence which has rarely been surpassed, was evolved

without any assistance from the doctrine of a future life.(212) Pagan

antiquity has bequeathed us few nobler treatises of morals than the “De

Officiis” of Cicero, which was avowedly an expansion of a work of

Panætius.(213) It has left us no grander example than that of Epictetus,

the sickly, deformed slave of a master who was notorious for his

barbarity, enfranchised late in life, but soon driven into exile by

Domitian; who, while sounding the very abyss of human misery, and looking

forward to death as to simple decomposition, was yet so filled with the

sense of the Divine presence that his life was one continued hymn to

Providence, and his writings and his example, which appeared to his

contemporaries almost the ideal of human goodness, have not lost their

consoling power through all the ages and the vicissitudes they have

survived.(214)

There was, however, another form of immortality which exercised a much

greater influence among the Roman moralists. The desire for reputation,

and especially for posthumous reputation—that “last infirmity of noble

minds”(215)—assumed an extraordinary prominence among the springs of Roman

heroism, and was also the origin of that theatrical and overstrained

phraseology which the greatest of ancient moralists rarely escaped.(216)

But we should be altogether in error if we inferred, as some have done,

that paganism never rose to the conception of virtue concealing itself

from the world, and consenting voluntarily to degradation. No characters

were more highly appreciated in antiquity than those of men who, through a

sense of duty, opposed the strong current of popular favour; of men like

Fabius, who consented for the sake of their country to incur the

reputation that is most fatal to a soldier;(217) of men like Cato, who

remained unmoved among the scoffs, the insults, and the ridicule of an

angry crowd.(218) Cicero, expounding the principles of Stoicism, declared

that no one has attained to true philosophy who has not learnt that all

vice should be avoided, “though it were concealed from the eyes of gods

and men,”(219) and that no deeds are more laudable than those which are

done without ostentation, and far from the sight of men.(220) The writings

of the Stoics are crowded with sentences to the same effect. “Nothing for

opinion, all for conscience.”(221) “He who wishes his virtue to be blazed

abroad is not labouring for virtue but for fame.”(222) “No one is more

virtuous than the man who sacrifices the reputation of a good man rather

than sacrifice his conscience.”(223) “I do not shrink from praise, but I

refuse to make it the end and term of right.”(224) “If you do anything to

please men, you have fallen from your estate.”(225) “Even a bad reputation

nobly earned is pleasing.”(226) “A great man is not the less great when he

lies vanquished and prostrate in the dust.”(227) “Never forget that it is

possible to be at once a divine man, yet a man unknown to all the

world.”(228) “That which is beautiful is beautiful in itself; the praise

of man adds nothing to its quality.”(229) Marcus Aurelius, following an

example that is ascribed to Pythagoras, made it a special object of mental

discipline, by continually meditating on death, and evoking, by an effort

of the imagination, whole societies that had passed away, to acquire a

realised sense of the vanity of posthumous fame. The younger Pliny painted

faithfully the ideal of Stoicism when he described one of his friends as a

man “who did nothing for ostentation, but all for conscience; who sought

the reward of virtue in itself, and not in the praise of man.”(230) Nor

were the Stoics less emphatic in distinguishing the obligation from the

attraction of virtue. It was on this point that they separated from the

more refined Epicureans, who were often willing to sublimate to the

highest degree the kind of pleasure they proposed as an object, provided

only it were admitted that pleasure is necessarily the ultimate end of our

actions. But this the Stoics firmly denied. “Pleasure,” they argued, “is

the companion, not the guide, of our course.”(231) “We do not love virtue

because it gives us pleasure, but it gives us pleasure because we love

it.”(232) “The wise man will not sin, though both gods and men should

overlook the deed, for it is not through the fear of punishment or of

shame that he abstains from sin. It is from the desire and obligation of

what is just and good.”(233) “To ask to be paid for virtue is as if the

eye demanded a recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking.”(234) In

doing good, man “should be like the vine which has produced grapes, and

asks for nothing more after it has produced its proper fruit.”(235) His

end, according to these teachers, is not to find peace either in life or

in death. It is to do his duty, and to tell the truth.

The second distinguishing feature of Stoicism I have noticed was the

complete suppression of the affections to make way for the absolute

ascendancy of reason. There are two great divisions of character

corresponding very nearly to the Stoical and Epicurean temperaments I have

described—that in which the will predominates, and that in which the

desires are supreme. A good man of the first class is one whose will,

directed by a sense of duty, pursues the course he believes to be right,

in spite of strong temptations to pursue an opposite course, arising

either from his own passions and tendencies, or from the circumstances

that surround him. A good man of the second class is one who is so happily

constituted that his sympathies and desires instinctively tend to virtuous

ends. The first character is the only one to which we can, strictly

speaking, attach the idea of merit, and it is also the only one which is

capable of rising to high efforts of continuous and heroic self-sacrifice;

but on the other hand there is a charm in the spontaneous action of the

unforced desires which disciplined virtue can perhaps never attain. The

man who is consistently generous through a sense of duty, when his natural

temperament impels him to avarice and when every exercise of benevolence

causes him a pang, deserves in the very highest degree our admiration; but

he whose generosity costs him no effort, but is the natural gratification

of his affections, attracts a far larger measure of our love.

Corresponding to these two casts of character, we find two distinct

theories of education, the aim of the one being chiefly to strengthen the

will, and that of the other to guide the desires. The principal examples

of the first are the Spartan and Stoical systems of antiquity, and, with

some modifications, the asceticism of the Middle Ages. The object of these

systems was to enable men to endure pain, to repress manifest and

acknowledged desires, to relinquish enjoyments, to establish an absolute

empire over their emotions. On the other hand, there is a method of

education which was never more prevalent than in the present day, which

exhausts its efforts in making virtue attractive, in associating it with

all the charms of imagination and of prosperity, and in thus insensibly

drawing the desires in the wished-for direction. As the first system is

especially suited to a disturbed and military society, which requires and

elicits strong efforts of the will, and is therefore the special sphere of

heroic virtues, so the latter belongs naturally to a tranquil and highly

organised civilisation, which is therefore very favourable to the amiable

qualities, and it is probable that as civilisation advances, the heroic

type will, in consequence, become more and more rare, and a kind of

self-indulgent goodness more common. The circumstances of the ancient

societies led them to the former type, of which the Stoics furnished the

extreme expression in their doctrine that the affections are of the nature

of a disease(236)—a doctrine which they justified by the same kind of

arguments as those which are now often employed by metaphysicians to prove

that love, anger, and the like can only be ascribed by a figure of speech

to the Deity. Perturbation, they contended, is necessarily imperfection,

and none of its forms can in consequence be ascribed to a perfect being.

We have a clear intuitive perception that reason is the highest, and

should be the directing, power of an intelligent being; but every act

which is performed at the instigation of the emotions is withdrawn from

the empire of reason. Hence it was inferred that while the will should be

educated to act habitually in the direction of virtue, even the emotions

that seem most fitted to second it should be absolutely proscribed. Thus

Seneca has elaborated at length the distinction between clemency and pity,

the first being one of the highest virtues, and the latter a positive

vice. Clemency, he says, is an habitual disposition to gentleness in the

application of punishments. It is that moderation which remits something

of an incurred penalty, it is the opposite of cruelty, which is an

habitual disposition to rigour. Pity, on the other hand, bears to clemency

the same kind of relation as superstition to religion. It is the weakness

of a feeble mind that flinches at the sight of suffering. Clemency is an

act of judgment, but pity disturbs the judgment. Clemency adjudicates upon

the proportion between suffering and guilt. Pity contemplates only

suffering, and gives no thought to its cause. Clemency, in the midst of

its noblest efforts, is perfectly passionless; pity is unreasoning

emotion. Clemency is an essential characteristic of the sage; pity is only

suited for weak women and for diseased minds. “The sage will console those

who weep, but without weeping with them; he will succour the shipwrecked,

give hospitality to the proscribed, and alms to the poor, ... restore the

son to the mother’s tears, save the captive from the arena, and even bury

the criminal; but in all this his mind and his countenance will be alike

untroubled. He will feel no pity. He will succour, he will do good, for he

is born to assist his fellows, to labour for the welfare of mankind, and

to offer to each one his part.... His countenance and his soul will betray

no emotion as he looks upon the withered legs, the tattered rags, the bent

and emaciated frame of the beggar. But he will help those who are worthy,

and, like the gods, his leaning will be towards the wretched.... It is

only diseased eyes that grow moist in beholding tears in other eyes, as it

is no true sympathy, but only weakness of nerves, that leads some to laugh

always when others laugh, or to yawn when others yawn.”(237)

Cicero, in a sentence which might be adopted as the motto of Stoicism,

said that Homer “attributed human qualities to the gods; it would have

been better to have imparted divine qualities to men.” The remarkable

passage I have just cited serves to show the extremes to which the Stoics

pushed this imitation. And indeed, if we compare the different virtues

that have flourished among Pagans and Christians, we invariably find that

the prevailing type of excellence among the former is that in which the

will and judgment, and among the latter that in which the emotions, are

most prominent. Friendship rather than love, hospitality rather than

charity, magnanimity rather than tenderness, clemency rather than

sympathy, are the characteristics of ancient goodness. The Stoics, who

carried the suppression of the emotions farther than any other school,

laboured with great zeal to compensate the injury thus done to the

benevolent side of our nature, by greatly enlarging the sphere of reasoned

and passionless philanthropy. They taught, in the most emphatic language,

the fraternity of all men, and the consequent duty of each man

consecrating his life to the welfare of others. They developed this

general doctrine in a series of detailed precepts, which, for the range,

depth, and beauty of their charity, have never been surpassed. They even

extended their compassion to crime, and adopting the paradox of Plato,

that all guilt is ignorance,(238) treated it as an involuntary disease,

and declared that the only legitimate ground of punishment is

prevention.(239) But, however fully they might reconcile in theory their

principles with the widest and most active benevolence, they could not

wholly counteract the practical evil of a system which declared war

against the whole emotional side of our being, and reduced human virtue to

a kind of majestic egotism; proposing as examples Anaxagoras, who, when

told that his son had died, simply observed, “I never supposed that I had

begotten an immortal;”(240) or Stilpo, who, when his country had been

ruined, his native city captured, and his daughters carried away as slaves

or as concubines, boasted that he had lost nothing, for the sage is

independent of circumstances. The framework or theory of benevolence might

be there, but the animating spirit was absent. Men who taught that the

husband or the father should look with perfect indifference on the death

of his wife or his child, and that the philosopher, though he may shed

tears of pretended sympathy in order to console his suffering friend, must

suffer no real emotion to penetrate his breast,(241) could never found a

true or lasting religion of benevolence. Men who refused to recognise pain

and sickness as evils were scarcely likely to be very eager to relieve

them in others.

In truth, the Stoics, who taught that all virtue was conformity to nature,

were, in this respect, eminently false to their own principle. Human

nature, as revealed to us by reason, is a composite thing, a constitution

of many parts differing in kind and dignity, a hierarchy in which many

powers are intended to co-exist, but in different positions of ascendancy

or subordination. To make the higher part of our nature our whole nature,

is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this mutilation has never

been attempted without producing grave evils. As philanthropists, the

Stoics, through their passion for unity, were led to the extirpation of

those emotions which nature intended as the chief springs of benevolence.

As speculative philosophers, they were entangled by the same desire in a

long train of pitiable paradoxes. Their famous doctrines that all virtues

are equal, or, more correctly, are the same, that all vices are equal,

that nothing is an evil which does not affect our will, and that pain and

bereavement are, in consequence, no ills,(242) though partially explained

away and frequently disregarded by the Roman Stoics, were yet sufficiently

prominent to give their teaching something of an unnatural and affected

appearance. Prizing only a single object, and developing only a single

side of their nature, their minds became narrow and their views

contracted. Thus, while the Epicureans, urging men to study nature in

order to banish superstition, endeavoured to correct that ignorance of

physical science which was one of the chief impediments to the progress of

the ancient mind, the Stoics for the most part disdained a study which was

other than the pursuit of virtue.(243) While the Epicurean poet painted in

magnificent language the perpetual progress of mankind, the Stoic was

essentially retrospective, and exhausted his strength in vain efforts to

restore the simplicity of a by-gone age. While, too, the school of Zeno

produced many of the best and greatest men who have ever lived, it must be

acknowledged that its records exhibit a rather unusual number of examples

of high professions falsified in action, and of men who, displaying in

some forms the most undoubted and transcendent virtue, fell in others far

below the average of mankind. The elder Cato, who, though not a

philosopher, was a model of philosophers, was conspicuous for his

inhumanity to his slaves.(244) Brutus was one of the most extortionate

usurers of his time, and several citizens of Salamis died of starvation,

imprisoned because they could not pay the sum he demanded.(245) No one

eulogised more eloquently the austere simplicity of life which Stoicism

advocated than Sallust, who in a corrupt age was notorious for his

rapacity. Seneca himself was constitutionally a nervous and timid man,

endeavouring, not always with success, to support himself by a sublime

philosophy. He guided, under circumstances of extreme difficulty, the

cause of virtue, and his death is one of the noblest antiquity records;

but his life was deeply marked by the taint of flattery, and not free from

the taint of avarice, and it is unhappily certain that he lent his pen to

conceal or varnish one of the worst crimes of Nero. The courage of Lucan

failed signally under torture, and the flattery which he bestowed upon

Nero, in his “Pharsalia,” ranks with the Epigrams of Martial as probably

the extreme limit of sycophancy to which Roman literature descended.

While, too, the main object of the Stoics was to popularise philosophy,

the high standard of self-control they exacted rendered their system

exceedingly unfit for the great majority of mankind, and for the ordinary

condition of affairs. Life is history, not poetry. It consists mainly of

little things, rarely illumined by flashes of great heroism, rarely broken

by great dangers, or demanding great exertions. A moral system, to govern

society, must accommodate itself to common characters and mingled motives.

It must be capable of influencing natures that can never rise to an heroic

level. It must tincture, modify, and mitigate where it cannot eradicate or

transform. In Christianity there are always a few persons seeking by

continual and painful efforts to reverse or extinguish the ordinary

feelings of humanity, but in the great majority of cases the influence of

the religious principle upon the mind, though very real, is not of a

nature to cause any serious strain or struggle. It is displayed in a

certain acquired spontaneity of impulse. It softens the character,

purifies and directs the imagination, blends insensibly with the habitual

modes of thought, and, without revolutionising, gives a tone and bias to

all the forms of action. But Stoicism was simply a school of heroes. It

recognised no gradations of virtue or vice. It condemned all emotions, all

spontaneity, all mingled motives, all the principles, feelings, and

impulses upon which the virtue of common men mainly depends. It was

capable of acting only on moral natures that were strung to the highest

tension, and it was therefore naturally rejected by the multitude.

The central conception of this philosophy of self-control was the dignity

of man. Pride, which looks within, making man seek his own approbation, as

distinguished from vanity, which looks without, and shapes its conduct

according to the opinions of others, was not only permitted in Stoicism,

it was even its leading moral agent. The sense of virtue, as I have

elsewhere observed, occupies in this system much the same place as the

sense of sin in Christianity. Sin, in the conception of the ancients, was

simply disease, and they deemed it the part of a wise man to correct it,

but not to dwell upon its circumstances. In the many disquisitions which

Epictetus and others have left us concerning the proper frame of mind in

which man should approach death, repentance for past sin has absolutely no

place, nor do the ancients appear to have ever realised the purifying and

spiritualising influence it exercises upon character. And while the

reality of moral disease was fully recognised, while a lofty and indeed

unattainable ideal was continually proposed, no one doubted the essential

excellence of human nature, and very few doubted the possibility of man

acquiring by his own will a high degree of virtue. In this last respect

there was a wide difference between the teaching of the Roman moralists

and of the Greek poets.(246) Homer continually represents courage, anger,

and the like, as the direct inspiration of Heaven. Æschylus, the great

poet of fatalism, regards every human passion as but a single link in the

great chain of causes forged by the inexorable will of Zeus. There are,

indeed, few grander things in poetry than his picture of the many and

various motives that urged Clytemnestra to the slaughter of

Agamemnon—revenge for her murdered daughter, love for Ægisthus, resentment

at past breaches of conjugal duty, jealousy of Cassandra, all blending in

that fierce hatred that nerved her arm against her husband’s life; while

above all this tumult of passion the solemn song of Cassandra proclaimed

that the deed was but the decree of Heaven, the harvest of blood springing

from the seed of crime, the accomplishment of the ancient curse that was

destined to cling for ever to the hapless race of Atreus. Before the body

of the murdered king, and in presence of the wildest paroxysms of human

passion, the bystanders bowed their heads, exclaiming, “Zeus has willed

it—Zeus the supreme Ruler, the God who does all; for what can happen in

the world without the will of Zeus?”

But conceptions of this kind had little or no place in the philosophy of

Rome. The issue of human enterprises and the disposition of the gifts of

fortune were recognised as under the control of Providence; but man was

master of his own feelings, and was capable of attaining such excellence

that he might even challenge comparison with the gods. Audacious as such

sentiments may now appear, they were common to most schools of Roman

moralists. “We boast justly of our own virtue,” said the eclectic Cicero,

“which we could not do if we derived it from the Deity and not from

ourselves.”

“All mortals judge that fortune is to be received from the gods and wisdom

from ourselves.”(247) The Epicurean Horace, in his noblest ode, described

the just man, confident in his virtue, undaunted amid the crash of worlds,

and he tells us to pray only for those things which Jupiter gives and

takes away. “He gives life, he gives wealth; an untroubled mind I secure

for myself.”(248) “The calm of a mind blest in the consciousness of its

virtue,” was the expression of supreme felicity the Epicureans had derived

from their master.(249) Lucretius, in a magnificent passage, designates

Epicurus as a god, and boasts that the popular divinities dwindle into

insignificance before him. Ceres, he says, gave men corn, and Bacchus

wine, but Epicurus the principles of virtue. Hercules conquered monsters,

Epicurus conquered vice.(250) “Pray,” said Juvenal, “for a healthy mind in

a healthy body. Ask for a brave soul unscared by death.... But there are

things you can give yourself.”(251) “Misfortune, and losses, and calumny,”

said Seneca, “disappear before virtue as the taper before the sun.”(252)

“In one point the sage is superior to God. God owes it to His nature not

to fear, but the sage owes it to himself. Sublime condition! he joins the

frailty of a man to the security of a god.”(253) “Except for immortality,”

he elsewhere writes, “the sage is like to God.”(254) “It is the

characteristic of a wise man,” added Epictetus, “that he looks for all his

good and evil from himself.”(255) “As far as his rational nature is

concerned, he is in no degree inferior to the gods.”(256)

There were, however, other veins of thought exhibited in stoicism which

greatly modified and sometimes positively contradicted this view of the

relations of man to the Deity. The theology of the Stoics was an

ill-defined, uncertain, and somewhat inconsistent Pantheism; the Divinity

was especially worshipped under the two aspects of Providence and moral

goodness, and the soul of man was regarded as “a detached fragment of the

Deity,”(257) or as at least pervaded and accompanied by a divine energy.

“There never,” said Cicero, “was a great man, without an inspiration from

on high.”(258) “Nothing,” said Seneca, “is closed to God. He is present in

our conscience. He intervenes in our thoughts.”(259) “I tell thee,

Lucilius,” he elsewhere writes, “a sacred spirit dwells within us, the

observer and the guardian of our good and evil deeds.... No man is good

without God. Who, save by His assistance, can rise above fortune? He gives

noble and lofty counsels. A God (what God I know not) dwells in every good

man.”(260) “Offer to the God that is in thee,” said Marcus Aurelius, “a

manly being, a citizen, a soldier at his post ready to depart from life as

soon as the trumpet sounds.”(261) “It is sufficient to believe in the

Genius who is within us, and to honour him by a pure worship.”(262)

Passages of this kind are not unfrequent in Stoical writings. More

commonly, however, virtue is represented as a human act imitating God.

This was the meaning of the Platonic maxim, “follow God,” which the Stoics

continually repeated, which they developed in many passages of the most

touching and beautiful piety, and to which they added the duty of the most

absolute and unquestioning submission to the decrees of Providence. Their

doctrine on this latter point harmonised well with their antipathy to the

emotional side of our being. “To weep, to complain, to groan, is to

rebel;”(263) “to fear, to grieve, to be angry, is to be a deserter.”(264)

“Remember that you are but an actor, acting whatever part the Master has

ordained. It may be short, or it may be long. If He wishes you to

represent a poor man, do so heartily; if a cripple, or a magistrate, or a

private man, in each case act your part with honour.”(265) “Never say of

anything that you have lost it, but that you have restored it; your wife

and child die—you have restored them; your farm is taken from you—that

also is restored. It is seized by an impious man. What is it to you by

whose instrumentality He who gave it reclaims it?”(266) “God does not keep

a good man in prosperity; He tries, He strengthens him, He prepares him

for Himself.”(267) “Those whom God approves, whom He loves, He hardens, He

proves, He exercises; but those whom He seems to indulge and spare, He

preserves for future ills.”(268) With a beautiful outburst of submissive

gratitude, Marcus Aurelius exclaims, “Some have said, Oh, dear city of

Cecrops!—but thou, canst thou say, Oh, dear city of Jupiter?... All that

is suitable to thee, oh world, is suitable to me.”(269)

These passages, which might be indefinitely multiplied, serve to show how

successfully the Stoics laboured, by dilating upon the conception of

Providence, to mitigate the arrogance which one aspect of their teaching

unquestionably displayed. But in this very attempt another danger was

incurred, upon which a very large proportion of the moral systems of all

ages have been wrecked. A doctrine which thus enjoins absolute submission

to the decrees of Providence,(270) which proscribes the affections, and

which represents its disciples as altogether independent of surrounding

circumstances, would in most conditions of society have led necessarily to

quietism, and proved absolutely incompatible with active virtue.

Fortunately, however, in the ancient civilisations the idea of virtue had

from the earliest times been so indissolubly connected with that of

political activity that the danger was for a long period altogether

avoided. The State occupied in antiquity a prominence in the thoughts of

men which it never has attained in modern times. The influence of

patriotism thrilled through every fibre of moral and intellectual life.

The most profound philosophers, the purest moralists, the most sublime

poets, had been soldiers or statesmen. Hence arose the excessive

predominance occasionally accorded to civic virtues in ancient systems of

ethics, and also not a few of their most revolting paradoxes. Plato

advocated community of wives mainly on the ground that the children

produced would be attached more exclusively to their country.(271)

Aristotle may be almost said to have made the difference between Greek and

barbarian the basis of his moral code. The Spartan legislation was

continually extolled as an ideal, as the Venetian constitution by the

writers of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, the contact of the

spheres of speculation and of political activity exercised in one respect

a very beneficial influence upon ancient philosophies. Patriotism almost

always occupied a prominence in the scale of duties, which forms a

striking contrast to the neglect or discredit into which it has fallen

among modern teachers. We do, indeed, read of an Anaxagoras pointing to

heaven as to his true country, and pronouncing exile to be no evil, as the

descent to the infernal regions is the same from every land;(272) but such

sentiments, though not unknown among the Epicureans and the Cynics, were

diametrically opposed to the prevailing tone. Patriotism was represented

as a moral duty, and a duty of the highest order. Cicero only echoed the

common opinion of antiquity in that noble passage, in which he asserts

that the love we owe our country is even holier and more profound than

that we owe our nearest kinsman, and that he can have no claim to the

title of a good man who even hesitates to die in its behalf.(273)

A necessary consequence of this prominence of patriotism was the practical

character of most ancient ethics. We find, indeed, moralists often

exhorting men to moderate their ambition, consoling them under political

adversity, and urging that there are some circumstances under which an

upright man should for a time withdraw from public affairs;(274) but the

general duty of taking part in political life was emphatically asserted,

and the vanity of the quietist theory of life not only maintained, but

even somewhat exaggerated. Thus Cicero declared that “all virtue is in

action.”(275) The younger Pliny mentions that he once lamented to the

Stoic Euphrates the small place which his official duties left for

philosophical pursuits; but Euphrates answered that the discharge of

public affairs and the administration of justice formed a part, and the

most important part, of philosophy, for he who is so engaged is but

practising the precepts of the schools.(276) It was a fundamental maxim of

the Stoics that humanity is a body in which each limb should act solely

and continually with a view to the interests of the whole. Marcus

Aurelius, the purest mind of the sect, was for nineteen years the active

ruler of the civilised globe. Thrasea, Helvidius, Cornutus, and a crowd of

others who had adopted Stoicism as a religion, lived, and in many cases

died, in obedience to its precepts, struggling for the liberties of their

country in the darkest hours of tyranny.

Men who had formed such high conceptions of duty, who had bridled so

completely the tumult of passion, and whose lives were spent in a calm

sense of virtue and of dignity, were little likely to be assailed by the

superstitious fears that are the nightmare of weaker men. The preparation

for death was deemed one of the chief ends of philosophy.(277) The thought

of a coming change assisted the mind in detaching itself from the gifts of

fortune, and the extinction of all superstitious terrors completed the

type of self-reliant majesty which Stoicism had chosen for its ideal. But

while it is certain that no philosophers expatiated upon death with a

grander eloquence, or met it with a more placid courage, it can hardly be

denied that their constant disquisitions forced it into an unhealthy

prominence, and somewhat discoloured their whole view of life. “The

Stoics,” as Bacon has said, “bestowed too much cost on death, and by their

preparations made it more fearful.”(278) There is a profound wisdom in the

maxims of Spinoza, that “the proper study of a wise man is not how to die,

but how to live,” and that “there is no subject on which the sage will

think less than death.”(279) A life of active duty is the best preparation

for the end, and so large a part of the evil of death lies in its

anticipation, that an attempt to deprive it of its terrors by constant

meditation almost necessarily defeats its object, while at the same time

it forms an unnaturally tense, feverish, and tragical character,

annihilates the ambition and enthusiasm that are essential to human

progress, and not unfrequently casts a chill and a deadness over the

affections.

Among the many half-pagan legends that were connected with Ireland during

the middle ages, one of the most beautiful is that of the islands of life

and of death. In a certain lake in Munster it is said there were two

islands; into the first death could never enter, but age and sickness, and

the weariness of life, and the paroxysms of fearful suffering were all

known there, and they did their work till the inhabitants, tired of their

immortality, learned to look upon the opposite island as upon a haven of

repose: they launched their barks upon the gloomy waters; they touched its

shore and they were at rest.(280)

This legend, which is far more akin to the spirit of paganism than to that

of Christianity, and is in fact only another form of the myth of Tithonus,

represents with great fidelity the aspect in which death was regarded by

the exponents of Stoicism. There was much difference of opinion and of

certitude in the judgments of the ancient philosophers concerning the

future destinies of the soul, but they were unanimous in regarding death

simply as a natural rest, and in attributing the terrors that were

connected with it to a diseased imagination. Death, they said, is the only

evil that does not afflict us when present. While we are, death is not,

when death has come we are not. It is a false belief that it only follows,

it also precedes, life. It is to be as we were before we were born. The

candle which has been extinguished is in the same condition as before it

was lit, and the dead man as the man unborn. Death is the end of all

sorrow. It either secures happiness or ends suffering. It frees the slave

from his cruel master, opens the prison door, calms the qualms of pain,

closes the struggles of poverty. It is the last and best boon of nature,

for it frees man from all his cares. It is at worst but the close of a

banquet we have enjoyed. Whether it be desired or whether it be shunned,

it is no curse and no evil, but simply the resolution of our being into

its primitive elements, the law of our nature to which it is our duty

cheerfully to conform.

Such were the leading topics that were employed in that beautiful

literature of “Consolations,” which the academic Crantor is said to have

originated, and which occupies so large a place in the writings of Cicero,

Plutarch, and the Stoics. Cicero, like all the school of Plato, added to

these motives a very firm and constant reference to the immortality of the

soul. Plutarch held the same doctrine with equal assurance, but he gave it

a much less conspicuous position in his “Consolations,” and he based it

not upon philosophical grounds, but upon the testimonies of the oracles,

and upon the mysteries of Bacchus.(281) Among the Stoics the doctrine

shone with a faint and uncertain light, and was seldom or never adopted as

a motive. But that which is most impressive to a student who turns from

the religious literature of Christianity to the pagan philosophies, is the

complete absence in the latter of all notion concerning the penal

character of death. Death, according to Socrates,(282) either extinguishes

life or emancipates it from the thraldom of the body. Even in the first

case it is a blessing, in the last it is the greatest of boons. “Accustom

yourself,” said Epicurus, “to the thought that death is indifferent; for

all good and all evil consist in feeling, and what is death but the

privation of feeling?”(283) “Souls either remain after death,” said

Cicero, “or they perish in death. If they remain they are happy; if they

perish they are not wretched.”(284) Seneca, consoling Polybius concerning

the death of his brother, exhorts his friend to think, “if the dead have

any sensations, then my brother, let loose as it were from a lifelong

prison, and at last enjoying his liberty, looks down from a loftier height

on the wonders of nature and on all the deeds of men, and sees more

clearly those divine things which he had so long sought in vain to

understand. But why should I be afflicted for one who is either happy or

is nothing? To lament the fate of one who is happy is envy; to lament the

fate of a nonentity is madness.”(285)

But while the Greek and Roman philosophers were on this point unanimous,

there was a strong opposing current in the popular mind. The Greek word

for superstition signifies literally, fear of gods or dæmons, and the

philosophers sometimes represent the vulgar as shuddering at the thought

of death, through dread of certain endless sufferings to which it would

lead them. The Greek mythology contains many fables on the subject. The

early Greek vases occasionally represent scenes of infernal torments, not

unlike those of the mediæval frescoes.(286) The rapture with which

Epicureanism was received, as liberating the human mind from the thraldom

of superstitious terrors, shows how galling must have been the yoke. In

the poem of Lucretius, in occasional passages of Cicero and other Latin

moralists, above all, in the treatise of Plutarch “On Superstition,” we

may trace the deep impression these terrors had made upon the populace,

even during the later period of the Republic, and during the Empire. To

destroy them was represented as the highest function of philosophy.

Plutarch denounced them as the worst calumny against the Deity, as more

pernicious than atheism, as the evil consequences of immoral fables, and

he gladly turned to other legends which taught a different lesson. Thus it

was related that when, during a certain festival at Argos, the horses that

were to draw the statue of Juno to the temple were detained, the sons of

the priestess yoked themselves to the car, and their mother, admiring

their piety, prayed the goddess to reward them with whatever boon was the

best for man. Her prayer was answered—they sank asleep and died.(287) In

like manner the architects of the great temple of Apollo at Delphi, prayed

the god to select that reward which was best. The oracle told them in

reply to spend seven days in rejoicing, and on the following night their

reward would come. They too died in sleep.(288) The swan was consecrated

to Apollo because its dying song was believed to spring from a prophetic

impulse.(289) The Spanish Celts raised temples, and sang hymns of praise

to death.(290) No philosopher of antiquity ever questioned that a good

man, reviewing his life, might look upon it without shame and even with

positive complacency, or that the reverence with which men regard heroic

deaths is a foretaste of the sentence of the Creator. To this confidence

may be traced the tranquil courage, the complete absence of all remorse,

so conspicuous in the closing hours of Socrates, and of many other of the

sages of antiquity. There is no fact in religious history more startling

than the radical change that has in this respect passed over the character

of devotion. It is said of Chilon, one of the seven sages of Greece, that

at the close of his career he gathered his disciples around him, and

congratulated himself that in a long life he could recall but a single act

that saddened his dying hour. It was that, in a perplexing dilemma, he had

allowed his love of a friend in some slight degree to obscure his sense of

justice.(291) The writings of Cicero in his old age are full of passionate

aspirations to a future world, unclouded by one regret or by one fear.

Seneca died tranquilly, bequeathing to his friends “the most precious of

his possessions, the image of his life.”(292) Titus on his deathbed

declared that he could remember only a single act with which to reproach

himself.(293) On the last night in which Antoninus Pius lived, the tribune

came to ask for the pass-word of the night. The dying emperor gave him

“æquanimitas.”(294) Julian, the last great representative of his expiring

creed, caught up the same majestic strain. Amid the curses of angry

priests, and the impending ruin of the cause he loved, he calmly died in

the consciousness of his virtue; and his death, which is among the most

fearless that antiquity records, was the last protest of philosophic

paganism against the new doctrine that had arisen.(295)

It is customary with some writers, when exhibiting the many points in

which the ancient philosophers anticipated Christian ethics, to represent

Christianity as if it were merely a development or authoritative

confirmation of the highest teaching of paganism, or as if the additions

were at least of such a nature that there is but little doubt that the

best and purest spirits of the pagan world, had they known them, would

have gladly welcomed them. But this conception, which contains a large

amount of truth if applied to the teaching of many Protestants, is either

grossly exaggerated or absolutely false if applied to that of the

patristic period or of mediæval Catholicism. On the very subject which the

philosophers deemed the most important their unanimous conclusion was the

extreme antithesis of the teaching of Catholicism. The philosophers taught

that death is “a law and not a punishment;”(296) the fathers taught that

it is a penal infliction introduced into the world on account of the sin

of Adam, which was also the cause of the appearance of all noxious plants,

of all convulsions in the material globe, and, as was sometimes asserted,

even of a diminution of the light of the sun. The first taught that death

was the end of suffering; they ridiculed as the extreme of folly the

notion that physical evils could await those whose bodies had been reduced

to ashes, and they dwelt with emphatic eloquence upon the approaching,

and, as they believed, final extinction of superstitious terrors. The

second taught that death to the vast majority of the human race is but the

beginning of endless and excruciating tortures—tortures before which the

most ghastly of terrestrial sufferings dwindle into

insignificance—tortures which no courage could defy—which none but an

immortal being could endure. The first represented man as pure and

innocent until his will had sinned; the second represented him as under a

sentence of condemnation at the very moment of his birth. “No funeral

sacrifices” said a great writer of the first school, “are offered for

children who die at an early age, and none of the ceremonies practised at

the funerals of adults are performed at their tombs, for it is believed

that infants have no hold upon earth or upon terrestrial affections....

The law forbids us to honour them because it is irreligious to lament for

those pure souls who have passed into a better life and a happier

dwelling-place.”(297) “Whosoever shall tell us,” said a distinguished

exponent of the patristic theology, “that infants shall be quickened in

Christ who die without partaking in His Sacrament, does both contradict

the Apostle’s teaching and condemn the whole Church.... And he that is not

quickened in Christ must remain in that condemnation of which the Apostle

speaks, ‘by one man’s offence condemnation came upon all men to

condemnation.’ To which condemnation infants are born liable as all the

Church believes.”(298) The one school endeavoured to plant its foundations

in the moral nature of mankind, by proclaiming that man can become

acceptable to the Deity by his own virtue, and by this alone, that all

sacrifices, rites, and forms are indifferent, and that the true worship of

God is the recognition and imitation of His goodness. According to the

other school, the most heroic efforts of human virtue are insufficient to

avert a sentence of eternal condemnation, unless united with an implicit

belief in the teachings of the Church, and a due observance of the rites

it enjoins. By the philosophers the ascription of anger and vengeance to

the Deity, and the apprehension of future torture at His hands, were

unanimously repudiated;(299) by the priests the opposite opinion was

deemed equally censurable.(300)

These are fundamental points of difference, for they relate to the

fundamental principles of the ancient philosophy. The main object of the

pagan philosophers was to dispel the terrors the imagination had cast

around death, and by destroying this last cause of fear to secure the

liberty of man. The main object of the Catholic priests has been to make

death in itself as revolting and appalling as possible, and by

representing escape from its terrors as hopeless, except by complete

subjection to their rule, to convert it into an instrument of government.

By multiplying the dancing or warning skeletons, and other sepulchral

images representing the loathsomeness of death without its repose; by

substituting inhumation for incremation, and concentrating the imagination

on the ghastliness of decay; above all, by peopling the unseen world with

demon phantoms and with excruciating tortures, the Catholic Church

succeeded in making death in itself unspeakably terrible, and in thus

preparing men for the consolations it could offer. Its legends, its

ceremonies, its art,(301) its dogmatic teaching, all conspired to this

end, and the history of its miracles is a striking evidence of its

success. The great majority of superstitions have ever clustered around

two centres—the fear of death and the belief that every phenomenon of life

is the result of a special spiritual interposition. Among the ancients

they were usually of the latter kind. Auguries, prophecies, interventions

in war, prodigies avenging the neglect of some rite or marking some epoch

in the fortunes of a nation or of a ruler, are the forms they usually

assumed. In the middle ages, although these were very common, the most

conspicuous superstitions took the form of visions of purgatory or hell,

conflicts with visible demons, or Satanic miracles. Like those mothers who

govern their children by persuading them that the dark is crowded with

spectres that will seize the disobedient, and who often succeed in

creating an association of ideas which the adult man is unable altogether

to dissolve, the Catholic priests resolved to base their power upon the

nerves; and as they long exercised an absolute control over education,

literature, and art, they succeeded in completely reversing the teaching

of ancient philosophy, and in making the terrors of death for centuries

the nightmare of the imagination.

There is, indeed, another side to the picture. The vague uncertainty with

which the best pagans regarded death passed away before the teaching of

the Church, and it was often replaced by a rapture of hope, which,

however, the doctrine of purgatory contributed at a later period largely

to quell. But, whatever may be thought of the justice of the Catholic

conception of death or of its influence upon human happiness, it is plain

that it is radically different from that of the pagan philosophers. That

man is not only an imperfect but a fallen being, and that death is the

penal consequence of his sin, was a doctrine profoundly new to mankind,

and it has exercised an influence of the most serious character upon the

moral history of the world.

The wide divergence of the classical from the Catholic conception of death

appears very plainly in the attitude which each system adopted towards

suicide. This is, perhaps, the most striking of all the points of contrast

between the teaching of antiquity, and especially of the Roman Stoics, on

the one hand, and that of almost all modern moralists on the other. It is

indeed true that the ancients were by no means unanimous in their approval

of the act. Pythagoras, to whom so many of the wisest sayings of antiquity

are ascribed, is said to have forbidden men “to depart from their guard or

station in life without the order of their commander, that is, of

God.”(302) Plato adopted similar language, though he permitted suicide

when the law required it, and also when men had been struck down by

intolerable calamity, or had sunk to the lowest depths of poverty.(303)

Aristotle condemned it on civic grounds, as being an injury to the

State.(304) The roll of Greek suicides is not long, though it contains

some illustrious names, among others those of Zeno and Cleanthes.(305) In

Rome, too, where suicide acquired a greater prominence, its lawfulness was

by no means accepted as an axiom, and the story of Regulus, whether it be

a history or a legend, shows that the patient endurance of suffering was

once the supreme ideal.(306) Virgil painted in gloomy colours the

condition of suicides in the future world.(307) Cicero strongly asserted

the doctrine of Pythagoras, though he praised the suicide of Cato.(308)

Apuleius, expounding the philosophy of Plato, taught that “the wise man

never throws off his body except by the will of God.”(309) Cæsar, Ovid,

and others urged that in extreme distress it is easy to despise life, and

that true courage is shown in enduring it.(310) Among the Stoics

themselves, the belief that no man may shrink from a duty co-existed with

the belief that every man has a right to dispose of his own life. Seneca,

who emphatically advocated suicide, admits that there were some who deemed

it wrong, and he himself attempted to moderate what he termed “the passion

for suicide”, that had arisen among his disciples.(311) Marcus Aurelius

wavers a little on the subject, sometimes asserting the right of every man

to leave life when he pleases, sometimes inclining to the Platonic

doctrine that man is a soldier of God, occupying a post which it is

criminal to abandon.(312) Plotinus and Porphyry argued strongly against

all suicide.(313)

But, notwithstanding these passages, there can be no question that the

ancient view of suicide was broadly and strongly opposed to our own. A

general approval of it floated down through most of the schools of

philosophy, and even to those who condemned it, it never seems to have

assumed its present aspect of extreme enormity. This was in the first

instance due to the ancient notion of death; and we have also to remember

that when a society once learns to tolerate suicide, the deed, in ceasing

to be disgraceful, loses much of its actual criminality, for those who are

most firmly convinced that the stigma and suffering it now brings upon the

family of the deceased do not constitute its entire guilt, will readily

acknowledge that they greatly aggravate it. In the conditions of ancient

thought, this aggravation did not exist. Epicurus exhorted men “to weigh

carefully, whether they would prefer death to come to them, or would

themselves go to death;”(314) and among his disciples, Lucretius, the

illustrious poet of the sect, died by his own hand,(315) as did also

Cassius the tyrannicide, Atticus the friend of Cicero,(316) the voluptuary

Petronius,(317) and the philosopher Diodorus.(318) Pliny described the lot

of man as in this respect at least superior to that of God, that man has

the power of flying to the tomb,(319) and he represented it as one of the

greatest proofs of the bounty of Providence, that it has filled the world

with herbs, by which the weary may find a rapid and a painless death.(320)

One of the most striking figures that a passing notice of Cicero brings

before us, is that of Hegesias, who was surnamed by the ancients “the

orator of death.” A conspicuous member of that Cyrenaic school which

esteemed the pursuit of pleasure the sole end of a rational being, he

taught that life was so full of cares, and its pleasure so fleeting and so

alloyed, that the happiest lot for man was death; and such was the power

of his eloquence, so intense was the fascination he cast around the tomb,

that his disciples embraced with rapture the consequence of his doctrine,

multitudes freed themselves by suicide from the troubles of the world, and

the contagion was so great, that Ptolemy, it is said, was compelled to

banish the philosopher from Alexandria.(321)

But it was in the Roman Empire and among the Roman Stoics that suicide

assumed its greatest prominence, and its philosophy was most fully

elaborated. From an early period self-immolation, like that of Curtius or

Decius, had been esteemed in some circumstances a religious rite, being,

as has been well suggested, probably a lingering remnant of the custom of

human sacrifices,(322) and towards the closing days of paganism many

influences conspired in the same direction. The example of Cato, who had

become the ideal of the Stoics, and whose dramatic suicide was the

favourite subject of their eloquence,(323) the indifference to death

produced by the great multiplication of gladiatorial shows, the many

instances of barbarian captives, who, sooner than slay their

fellow-countrymen, or minister to the pleasures of their conquerors,

plunged their lances into their own necks, or found other and still more

horrible roads to freedom,(324) the custom of compelling political

prisoners to execute their own sentence, and, more than all, the

capricious and atrocious tyranny of the Cæsars,(325) had raised suicide

into an extraordinary prominence. Few things are more touching than the

passionate joy with which, in the reign of Nero, Seneca clung to it as the

one refuge for the oppressed, the last bulwark of the tottering mind. “To

death alone it is due that life is not a punishment, that, erect beneath

the frowns of fortune, I can preserve my mind unshaken and master of

itself. I have one to whom I can appeal. I see before me the crosses of

many forms.... I see the rack and the scourge, and the instruments of

torture adapted to every limb and to every nerve; but I also see Death.

She stands beyond my savage enemies, beyond my haughty fellow-countrymen.

Slavery loses its bitterness when by a step I can pass to liberty. Against

all the injuries of life, I have the refuge of death.”(326) “Wherever you

look, there is the end of evils. You see that yawning precipice—there you

may descend to liberty. You see that sea, that river, that well—liberty

sits at the bottom.... Do you seek the way to freedom?—you may find it in

every vein of your body.”(327) “If I can choose between a death of torture

and one that is simple and easy, why should I not select the latter? As I

choose the ship in which I will sail, and the house I will inhabit, so I

will choose the death by which I will leave life.... In no matter more

than in death should we act according to our desire. Depart from life as

your impulse leads you, whether it be by the sword, or the rope, or the

poison creeping through the veins; go your way, and break the chains of

slavery. Man should seek the approbation of others in his life; his death

concerns himself alone. That is the best which pleases him most.... The

eternal law has decreed nothing better than this, that life should have

but one entrance and many exits. Why should I endure the agonies of

disease, and the cruelties of human tyranny, when I can emancipate myself

from all my torments, and shake off every bond? For this reason, but for

this alone, life is not an evil—that no one is obliged to live. The lot of

man is happy, because no one continues wretched but by his fault. If life

pleases you, live. If not, you have a right to return whence you

came.”(328)

These passages, which are but a few selected out of very many, will

sufficiently show the passion with which the most influential teacher of

Roman Stoicism advocated suicide. As a general proposition, the law

recognised it as a right, but two slight restrictions were after a time

imposed.(329) It had become customary with many men who were accused of

political offences to commit suicide before trial, in order to prevent the

ignominious exposure of their bodies and the confiscation of their goods;

but Domitian closed this resource by ordaining that the suicide of an

accused person should entail the same consequences as his condemnation.

Hadrian afterwards assimilated the suicide of a Roman soldier to

desertion.(330) With these exceptions, the liberty appears to have been

absolute, and the act was committed under the most various motives. The

suicide of Otho, who is said to have killed himself to avoid being a

second time a cause of civil war, was extolled as equal in grandeur to

that of Cato.(331) In the Dacian war, the enemy, having captured a

distinguished Roman general named Longinus, endeavoured to extort terms

from Trajan as a condition of his surrender, but Longinus, by taking

poison, freed the emperor from his embarrassment.(332) On the death of

Otho, some of his soldiers, filled with grief and admiration, killed

themselves before his corpse,(333) as did also a freedman of Agrippina, at

the funeral of the empress.(334) Before the close of the Republic, an

enthusiastic partisan of one of the factions in the chariot races flung

himself upon the pile on which the body of a favourite coachman was

consumed, and perished in the flames.(335) A Roman, unmenaced in his

fortune, and standing high in the favour of his sovereign, killed himself

under Tiberius, because he could not endure to witness the crimes of the

empire.(336) Another, being afflicted by an incurable malady, postponed

his suicide till the death of Domitian, that at least he might die free,

and on the assassination of the tyrant, hastened cheerfully to the

tomb.(337) The Cynic Peregrinus announced that, being weary of life, he

would on a certain day depart, and, in presence of a large concourse, he

mounted the funeral pile.(338) Most frequently, however, death was

regarded as “the last physician of disease,”(339) and suicide as the

legitimate relief from intolerable suffering. “Above all things,” said

Epictetus, “remember that the door is open. Be not more timid than boys at

play. As they, when they cease to take pleasure in their games, declare

they will no longer play, so do you, when, all things begin to pall upon

you, retire; but if you stay, do not complain.”(340) Seneca declared that

he who waits the extremity of old age is not “far removed from a coward,”

“as he is justly regarded as too much addicted to wine who drains the

flask to the very dregs.” “I will not relinquish old age,” he added, “if

it leaves my better part intact. But if it begins to shake my mind, if it

destroys its faculties one by one, if it leaves me not life but breath, I

will depart from the putrid or tottering edifice. I will not escape by

death from disease so long as it may be healed, and leaves my mind

unimpaired. I will not raise my hand against myself on account of pain,

for so to die is to be conquered. But if I know that I must suffer without

hope of relief, I will depart, not through fear of the pain itself, but

because it prevents all for which I would live.”(341) “Just as a

landlord,” said Musonius, “who has not received his rent, pulls down the

doors, removes the rafters, and fills up the well, so I seem to be driven

out of this little body, when nature, which has let it to me, takes away,

one by one, eyes and ears, hands and feet. I will not, therefore, delay

longer, but will cheerfully depart as from a banquet.”(342)

This conception of suicide as an euthanasia, an abridgment of the pangs of

disease, and a guarantee against the dotage of age, was not confined to

philosophical treatises. We have considerable evidence of its being

frequently put in practice. Among those who thus abridged their lives was

Silius Italicus, one of the last of the Latin poets.(343) The younger

Pliny describes in terms of the most glowing admiration the conduct of one

of his friends, who, struck down by disease, resolved calmly and

deliberately upon the path he should pursue. He determined, if the disease

was only dangerous and long, to yield to the wishes of his friends and

await the struggle; but if the issue was hopeless, to die by his own hand.

Having reasoned on the propriety of this course with all the tranquil

courage of a Roman, he summoned a council of physicians, and, with a mind

indifferent to either fate, he calmly awaited their sentence.(344) The

same writer mentions the case of a man who was afflicted with a horrible

disease, which reduced his body to a mass of sores. His wife, being

convinced that it was incurable, exhorted her husband to shorten his

sufferings; she nerved and encouraged him to the effort, and she claimed

it as her privilege to accompany him to the grave. Husband and wife, bound

together, plunged into a lake.(345) Seneca, in one of his letters, has

left us a detailed description of the death-bed of one of the Roman

suicides. Tullius Marcellinus, a young man of remarkable abilities and

very earnest character, who had long ridiculed the teachings of

philosophy, but had ended by embracing it with all the passion of a

convert, being afflicted with a grave and lingering though not incurable

disease, resolved at length upon suicide. He gathered his friends around

him, and many of them entreated him to continue in life. Among them,

however, was one Stoical philosopher, who addressed him in what Seneca

terms the very noblest of discourses. He exhorted him not to lay too much

stress upon the question he was deciding, as if existence was a matter of

great importance. He urged that life is a thing we possess in common with

slaves and animals, but that a noble death should indeed be prized, and he

concluded by recommending suicide. Marcellinus gladly embraced the counsel

which his own wishes had anticipated. According to the advice of his

friend, he distributed gifts among his faithful slaves, consoled them on

their approaching bereavement, abstained dining three days from all food,

and at last, when his strength had been wholly exhausted, passed into a

warm bath and calmly died, describing with his last breath the pleasing

sensations that accompanied receding life.(346)