The doctrine of suicide was indeed the culminating point of Roman

Stoicism. The proud, self-reliant, unbending character of the philosopher

could only be sustained when he felt that he had a sure refuge against the

extreme forms of suffering or of despair. Although virtue is not a mere

creature of interest, no great system has ever yet flourished which did

not present an ideal of happiness as well as an ideal of duty. Stoicism

taught men to hope little, but to fear nothing. It did not array death in

brilliant colours, as the path to positive felicity, but it endeavoured to

divest it, as the end of suffering, of every terror. Life lost much of its

bitterness when men had found a refuge from the storms of fate, a speedy

deliverance from dotage and pain. Death ceased to be terrible when it was

regarded rather as a remedy than as a sentence. Life and death in the

Stoical system were attuned to the same key. The deification of human

virtue, the total absence of all sense of sin, the proud stubborn will

that deemed humiliation the worst of stains, appeared alike in each. The

type of its own kind was perfect. All the virtues and all the majesty that

accompany human pride, when developed to the highest point, and directed

to the noblest ends, were here displayed. All those which accompany

humility and self-abasement were absent.

I desire at this stage of our enquiry to pause for a moment, in order to

retrace briefly the leading steps of the foregoing argument, and thus to

bring into the clearest light the connection which many details and

quotations may have occasionally obscured. Such a review will show at a

single glance in what respects Stoicism was a result of the pre-existent

state of society, and in what respects it was an active agent, how far its

influence was preparing the way for Christian ethics, and how far it was

opposed to them.

We have seen, then, that among the Romans, as among other people, a very

clear and definite type of moral excellence was created before men had

formed any clear intellectual notions of the nature and sanctions of

virtue. The characters of men are chiefly governed by their occupations,

and the republic being organised altogether with a view to military

success, it had attained all the virtues and vices of a military society.

We have seen, too, that at all times, but most especially under the

conditions of ancient warfare, military life is very unfavourable to the

amiable, and very favourable to the heroic virtues. The Roman had learnt

to value force very highly. Being continually engaged in inflicting pain,

his natural or instinctive humanity was very low. His moral feelings were

almost bounded by political limits, acting only, and with different

degrees of intensity, towards his class, his country, and its allies.

Indomitable pride was the most prominent element of his character. A

victorious army which is humble or diffident, or tolerant of insult, or

anxious to take the second place, is, indeed, almost a contradiction of

terms. The spirit of patriotism, in its relation to foreigners, like that

of political liberty in its relation to governors, is a spirit of constant

and jealous self-assertion; and although both are very consonant with high

morality and great self-devotion, we rarely find that the grace of genuine

humility can flourish in a society that is intensely pervaded by their

influence. The kind of excellence that found most favour in Roman eyes was

simple, forcible, massive, but coarse-grained. Subtilty of motives,

refinements of feelings, delicacies of susceptibility, were rarely

appreciated.

This was the darker side of the picture. On the other hand, the national

character, being formed by a profession in which mercenary considerations

are less powerful, and splendid examples of self-devotion more frequent,

than in any other, had early risen to a heroic level. Death being

continually confronted, to meet it with courage was the chief test of

virtue. The habits of men were unaffected, frugal, honourable, and

laborious. A stern discipline pervading all ages and classes of society,

the will was trained, to an almost unexampled degree, to repress the

passions, to endure suffering and opposition, to tend steadily and

fearlessly towards an unpopular end. A sense of duty was very widely

diffused, and a deep attachment to the interests of the city became the

parent of many virtues.

Such was the type of excellence the Roman people had attained at a time

when its intellectual cultivation produced philosophical discussions, and

when numerous Greek professors, attracted partly by political events, and

partly by the patronage of Scipio Æmilianus, arrived at Rome, bringing

with them the tenets of the great schools of Zeno and Epicurus, and of the

many minor sects that clustered around them. Epicureanism being

essentially opposed to the pre-existing type of virtue, though it spread

greatly, never attained the position of a school of virtue. Stoicism,

taught by Panætius of Rhodes, and soon after by the Syrian Posidonius,

became the true religion of the educated classes. It furnished the

principles of virtue, coloured the noblest literature of the time, and

guided all the developments of moral enthusiasm.

The Stoical system of ethics was in the highest sense a system of

independent morals. It taught that our reason reveals to us a certain law

of nature, and that a desire to conform to this law, irrespectively of all

considerations of reward or punishment, of happiness or the reverse, is a

possible and a sufficient motive of virtue. It was also in the highest

sense a system of discipline. It taught that the will, acting under the

complete control of the reason, is the sole principle of virtue, and that

all the emotional part of our being is of the nature of a disease. Its

whole tendency was therefore to dignify and strengthen the will, and to

degrade and suppress the desires. It taught, moreover, that man is capable

of attaining an extremely high degree of moral excellence, that he has

nothing to fear beyond the present life, that it is essential to the

dignity and consistence of his character that he should regard death

without dismay, and that he has a right to hasten it if he desires.

It is easy to see that this system of ethics was strictly consonant with

the type of character the circumstances of the Roman people had formed. It

is also manifest that while the force of circumstances had in the first

instance secured its ascendancy, the energy of will which it produced

would enable it to offer a powerful resistance to the tendencies of an

altered condition of society. This was pre-eminently shown in the history

of Roman Stoicism. The austere purity of the writings of Seneca and his

school is a fact probably unique in history, when we consider, on the one

hand, the intense and undisguised depravity of the Empire, and on the

other, the prominent position of most of the leading Stoics in the very

centre of the stream. More than once in later periods did great

intellectual brilliancy coincide with general depravity, but on none of

these occasions was this moral phenomenon reproduced. In the age of Leo

X., in the age of the French Regency, or of Lewis XV., we look in vain for

high moral teaching in the centre of Italian or of Parisian civilisation.

The true teachers of those ages were the reformers, who arose in obscure

towns of Germany or Switzerland, or that diseased recluse who, from his

solitude near Geneva, fascinated Europe by the gleams of a dazzling and

almost peerless eloquence, and by a moral teaching which, though often

feverish, paradoxical, and unpractical, abounded in passages of

transcendent majesty and of the most entrancing purity and beauty. But

even the best moral teachers who rose in the centres of the depraved

society felt the contagion of the surrounding vice. Their ideal was

depressed, their austerity was relaxed, they appealed to sordid and

worldly motives, their judgments of character were wavering and uncertain,

their whole teaching was of the nature of a compromise. But in ancient

Rome, if the teachers of virtue acted but feebly upon the surrounding

corruption, their own tenets were at least unstained. The splendour of the

genius of Cæsar never eclipsed the moral grandeur of the vanquished Cato,

and amid all the dramatic vicissitudes of civil war and of political

convulsion, the supreme authority of moral distinctions was never

forgotten. The eloquence of Livy was chiefly employed in painting virtue,

the eloquence of Tacitus in branding vice. The Stoics never lowered their

standard because of the depravity around them, and if we trace in their

teaching any reflection of the prevailing worship of enjoyment, it is only

in the passionate intensity with which they dwelt upon the tranquillity of

the tomb.

But it is not sufficient for a moral system to form a bulwark against

vice, it must also be capable of admitting those extensions and

refinements of moral sympathies which advancing civilisation produces, and

the inflexibility of its antagonism to evil by no means implies its

capacity of enlarging its conceptions of good. During the period which

elapsed between the importation of Stoical tenets into Rome and the

ascendancy of Christianity, an extremely important transformation of moral

ideas had been effected by political changes, and it became a question how

far the new elements could coalesce with the Stoical ideal, and how far

they tended to replace it by an essentially different type. These changes

were twofold, but were very closely connected. They consisted of the

increasing prominence of the benevolent or amiable, as distinguished from

the heroic qualities, and of the enlargement of moral sympathies, which

having at first comprised only a class or a nation, came at last, by the

destruction of many artificial barriers, to include all classes and all

nations. The causes of these changes—which were the most important

antecedents of the triumph of Christianity—are very complicated and

numerous, but it will, I think, be possible to give in a few pages a

sufficiently clear outline of the movement.

It originated in the Roman Empire at the time when the union of the Greek

and Latin civilisations was effected by the conquest of Greece. The

general humanity of the Greeks had always been incomparably greater than

that of the Romans. The refining influence of their art and literature,

their ignorance of gladiatorial games, and their comparative freedom from

the spirit of conquest, had separated them widely from their

semi-barbarous conquerors, and had given a peculiar softness and

tenderness to their ideal characters. Pericles, who, when the friends who

had gathered round his death-bed, imagining him to be insensible, were

recounting his splendid deeds, told them that they had forgotten his best

title to fame—that “no Athenian had ever worn mourning on his account;”

Aristides, praying the gods that those who had banished him might never be

compelled by danger or suffering to recall him; Phocion, when unjustly

condemned, exhorting his son never to avenge his death, all represent a

type of character of a milder kind than that which Roman influences

produced. The plays of Euripides had been to the ancient world the first

great revelation of the supreme beauty of the gentler virtues. Among the

many forms of worship that flourished at Athens, there was an altar which

stood alone, conspicuous and honoured beyond all others. The suppliants

thronged around it, but no image of a god, no symbol of dogma was there.

It was dedicated to Pity, and was venerated through all the ancient world

as the first great assertion among mankind of the supremo sanctity of

Mercy.(347)

But while the Greek spirit was from a very early period distinguished for

its humanity, it was at first as far removed from cosmopolitanism as that

of Rome. It is well known that Phrynichus was fined because in his

“Conquest of Miletus” he had represented the triumph of barbarians over

Greeks.(348) His successor, Æschylus, deemed it necessary to violate all

dramatic probabilities by making the Persian king and courtiers

continually speak of themselves as barbarians. Socrates, indeed, had

proclaimed himself a citizen of the world,(349) but Aristotle taught that

Greeks had no more duties to barbarians than to wild beasts, and another

philosopher was believed to have evinced an almost excessive range of

sympathy when he declared that his affections extended beyond his own

State, and included the whole people of Greece. But the dissolving and

disintegrating philosophical discussions that soon followed the death of

Socrates, strengthened by political events, tended powerfully to destroy

this feeling. The traditions that attached Greek philosophy to Egypt, the

subsequent admiration for the schools of India to which Pyrrho and

Anaxarchus are said to have resorted,(350) the prevalence of Cynicism and

Epicureanism, which agreed in inculcating indifference to political life,

the complete decomposition of the popular national religions, and the

incompatibility of a narrow local feeling with great knowledge and matured

civilisation, were the intellectual causes of the change, and the movement

of expansion received a great political stimulus when Alexander eclipsed

the glories of Spartan and Athenian history by the vision of universal

empire, accorded to the conquered nations the privileges of the

conquerors, and created in Alexandria a great centre both of commercial

intercourse and of philosophical eclecticism.(351)

It is evident, therefore, that the prevalence of Greek ideas in Rome would

be in a two-fold way destructive of narrow national feelings. It was the

ascendancy of a people who were not Romans, and of a people who had

already become in a great degree emancipated from local sentiments. It is

also evident that the Greeks having had for several centuries a splendid

literature, at a time when the Romans had none, and when the Latin

language was still too rude for literary purposes, the period in which the

Romans first emerged from a purely military condition into an intelligent

civilisation would bring with it an ascendancy of Greek ideas. Fabius

Pictor and Cincius Alimentus, the earliest native Roman historians, both

wrote in Greek,(352) and although the poems of Ennius, and the “Origines”

of Marcus Cato, contributed largely to improve and fix the Latin language,

the precedent was not at once discontinued.(353) After the conquest of

Greece, the political ascendancy of the Romans and the intellectual

ascendancy of Greece were alike universal.(354) The conquered people,

whose patriotic feelings had been greatly enfeebled by the influences I

have noticed, acquiesced readily in their new condition, and

notwithstanding the vehement exertions of the conservative party, Greek

manners, sentiments, and ideas soon penetrated into all classes, and

moulded all the forms of Roman life. The elder Cato, as an acute observer

has noticed, desired all Greek philosophers to be expelled from Rome. The

younger Cato made Greek philosophers his most intimate friends.(355) Roman

virtue found its highest expression in Stoicism. Roman vice sheltered

itself under the name of Epicurus. Diodorus of Sicily and Polybius first

sketched in Greek the outlines of universal history. Dionysius of

Halicarnassus explored Roman antiquities. Greek artists and Greek

architects thronged the city; but the first, under Roman influence,

abandoned the ideal for the portrait, and the second degraded the noble

Corinthian pillar into the bastard composite.(356) The theatre, which now

started into sudden life, was borrowed altogether from the Greeks. Ennius

and Pacuvius imitated Euripides; Cæcilius, Plautus, Terence, and Nævius

devoted themselves chiefly to Menander. Even the lover in the days of

Lucretius painted his lady’s charms in Greek.(357) Immense sums were given

for Greek literary slaves, and the attractions of the capital drew to Rome

nearly all that was brilliant in Athenian society.

While the complete ascendancy of the intellect and manners of Greece was

destroying the simplicity of the old Roman type, and at the same time

enlarging the range of Roman sympathies, an equally powerful influence was

breaking down the aristocratic and class feeling which had so long raised

an insurmountable barrier between the nobles and the plebeians. Their long

contentions had issued in the civil wars, the dictatorship of Julius

Cæsar, and the Empire, and these changes in a great measure obliterated

the old lines of demarcation. Foreign wars, which develop with great

intensity distinctive national types, and divert the public mind from

internal changes, are usually favourable to the conservative spirit; but

civil wars are essentially revolutionary, for they overwhelm all class

barriers and throw open the highest prizes to energy and genius. Two very

remarkable and altogether unprecedented illustrations of this truth

occurred at Rome. Ventidius Bassus, by his military skill, and by the

friendship of Julius Cæsar, and afterwards of Antony, rose from the

position of mule-driver to the command of a Roman army, and at last to the

consulate,(358) which was also attained, about 40 B.C., by the Spaniard

Cornelius Balbus.(359) Augustus, though the most aristocratic of emperors,

in order to discourage celibacy, permitted all citizens who were not

senators to intermarry with freedwomen. The empire was in several distinct

ways unfavourable to class distinctions. It was for the most part

essentially democratic, winning its popularity from the masses of the

people, and crushing the senate, which had been the common centre of

aristocracy and of freedom. A new despotic power, bearing alike on all

classes, reduced them to an equality of servitude. The emperors were

themselves in many cases the mere creatures of revolt, and their policy

was governed by their origin. Their jealousy struck down many of the

nobles, while others were ruined by the public games, which it became

customary to give, or by the luxury to which, in the absence of political

occupations, they were impelled, and the relative importance of all was

diminished by the new creations. The ascendancy of wealth began to pass

into new quarters. Delators, or political informers, encouraged by the

emperors, and enriched by the confiscated properties of those whose

condemnation they had procured, rose to great influence. From the time of

Caligula, for several reigns, the most influential citizens were freedmen,

who occupied the principal offices in the palace, and usually obtained

complete ascendancy over the emperors. Through them alone petitions were

presented. By their instrumentality the Imperial favours were distributed.

They sometimes dethroned the emperors. They retained their power unshaken

through a succession of revolutions. In wealth, in power, in the crowd of

their courtiers, in the splendour of their palaces in life, and of their

tombs in death, they eclipsed all others, and men whom the early Roman

patricians would have almost disdained to notice, saw the proudest

struggling for their favour.(360)

Together with these influences many others of a kindred nature may be

detected. The colonial policy which the Gracchi had advocated was carried

out at Narbonne, and during the latter days of Julius Cæsar, to the

amazement and scandal of the Romans, Gauls of this province obtained seats

in the senate.(361) The immense extent of the empire made it necessary for

numerous troops to remain during long periods of time in distant

provinces, and the foreign habits that were thus acquired began the

destruction of the exclusive feelings of the Roman army, which the

subsequent enrolment of barbarians completed. The public games, the

immense luxury, the concentration of power, wealth, and genius, made Rome

the centre of a vast and ceaseless concourse of strangers, the focus of

all the various philosophies and religions of the empire, and its

population soon became an amorphous, heterogeneous mass, in which all

nations, customs, languages, and creeds, all degrees of virtue and vice,

of refinement and barbarism, of scepticism and credulity, intermingled and

interacted. Travelling had become more easy and perhaps more frequent than

it has been at any other period before the nineteenth century. The

subjection of the whole civilised world to a single rule removed the chief

obstacles to locomotion. Magnificent roads, which modern nations have

rarely rivalled and never surpassed, intersected the entire empire, and

relays of post-horses enabled the voyager to proceed with an astonishing

rapidity. The sea, which, after the destruction of the fleets of Carthage,

had fallen almost completely under the dominion of pirates, had been

cleared by Pompey. The European shores of the Mediterranean and the port

of Alexandria were thronged with vessels. Romans traversed the whole

extent of the empire on political, military, or commercial errands, or in

search of health, or knowledge, or pleasure.(362) The entrancing beauties

of Como and of Tempe, the luxurious manners of Baiæ and Corinth, the

schools, commerce, climate, and temples of Alexandria, the soft winters of

Sicily, the artistic wonders and historic recollections of Athens and the

Nile, the great colonial interests of Gaul, attracted their thousands,

while Roman luxury needed the products of the remotest lands, and the

demand for animals for the amphitheatre spread Roman enterprise into the

wildest deserts. In the capital, the toleration accorded to different

creeds was such that the city soon became a miniature of the world. Almost

every variety of charlatanism and of belief displayed itself unchecked,

and boasted its train of proselytes. Foreign ideas were in every form in

the ascendant. Greece, which had presided over the intellectual

development of Rome, acquired a new influence under the favouring policy

of Hadrian, and Greek became the language of some of the later as it had

been of the earliest writers. Egyptian religions and philosophies excited

the wildest enthusiasm. As early as the reign of Augustus there were many

thousands of Jewish residents at Rome,(363) and their manners and creed

spread widely among the people.(364) The Carthaginian Apuleius,(365) the

Gauls Floras and Favorinus, the Spaniards Lucan, Columella, Martial,

Seneca, and Quintilian, had all in their different departments a high

place in Roman literature or philosophy.

In the slave world a corresponding revolution was taking place. The large

proportion of physicians and sculptors who were slaves, the appearance of

three or four distinguished authors in the slave class, the numerous

literary slaves imported from Greece, and the splendid examples of

courage, endurance, and devotion to their masters furnished by slaves

during the civil wars, and during some of the worst periods of the Empire,

were bridging the chasm between the servile and the free classes, and the

same tendency was more powerfully stimulated by the vast numbers and

overwhelming influence of the freedmen. The enormous scale and frequent

fluctuations of the great Roman establishments, and the innumerable

captives reduced to slavery after every war, rendered manumission both

frequent and easy, and it was soon regarded as a normal result of faithful

service. Many slaves bought their freedom out of the savings which their

masters always permitted them to make. Others paid for it by their labour

after their emancipation. Some masters emancipated their slaves in order

to obtain their part in the distribution of corn, others to prevent the

discovery of their own crimes by the torture of their slaves, others

through vanity, being desirous of having their funerals attended by a long

train of freedmen, very many simply as a reward for long service.(366) The

freedman was still under what was termed the patronage of his former

master; he was bound to him by what in a later age would have been called

a feudal tie, and the political and social importance of a noble depended

in a very great degree upon the multitude of his clients. The children of

the emancipated slave were in the same relation to the patron, and it was

only in the third generation that all disqualifications and restraints

were abrogated. In consequence of this system, manumission was often the

interest of the master. In the course of his life he enfranchised

individual slaves. On his death-bed or by his will he constantly

emancipated multitudes. Emancipation by testament acquired such

dimensions, that Augustus found it necessary to restrict the power; and he

made several limitations, of which the most important was that no one

should emancipate by his will more than one hundred of his slaves.(367) It

was once proposed that the slaves should be distinguished by a special

dress, but the proposition was abandoned because their number was so great

that to reveal to them their strength would be to place the city at their

mercy.(368) Even among those who were not slaves, the element that was

derived from slavery soon preponderated. The majority of the free

population had probably either themselves been slaves, or were descended

from slaves, and men with this tainted lineage penetrated to all the

offices of the State.(369) “There was,” as has been well said, “a

circulation of men from all the universe. Rome received them slaves, and

sent them back Romans.”(370)

It is manifest how profound a change had taken place since the Republican

days, when the highest dignities were long monopolised by a single class,

when the censors repressed with a stringent severity every form or

exhibition of luxury, when the rhetoricians were banished from the city,

lest the faintest tinge of foreign manners should impair the stern

simplicity of the people, and when the proposal to transfer the capital to

Veii, after a great disaster, was rejected on the ground that it would be

impious to worship the Roman deities anywhere but on the Capitol, or for

the Flamens and the Vestals to emigrate beyond the walls.(371)

The greater number of these tendencies to universal fusion or equality

were blind forces resulting from the stress of circumstances, and not from

any human forethought, or were agencies that were put in motion for a

different object. It must, however, be acknowledged that a definite theory

of policy had a considerable part in accelerating the movement. The policy

of the Republic may be broadly described as a policy of conquest, and that

of the Empire as a policy of preservation. The Romans having acquired a

vast dominion, were met by the great problem which every first-class power

is called upon to solve—by what means many communities, with different

languages, customs, characters, and traditions, can be retained peaceably

under a single ruler. In modern times, this difficulty has been most

successfully met by local legislatures, which, if they supply a “line of

cleavage,” a nucleus around which the spirit of opposition may form, have

on the other hand the priceless advantage of giving the annexed people a

large measure of self-government, a centre and safety-valve of local

public opinion, a sphere for local ambitions, and a hierarchy of

institutions adapted to the distinctive national type. Under no other

conditions can a complex empire be carried on with so little strain, or

effort, or humiliation, or its inevitable final dissolution be effected

with so little danger or convulsion. But local legislatures, which are the

especial glory of English statesmanship, belong exclusively to modern

civilisation. The Roman method of conciliation was, first of all, the most

ample toleration of the customs, religion, and municipal freedom of the

conquered, and then their gradual admission to the privileges of the

conqueror. By confiding to them in a great measure the defence of the

empire, by throwing open to them the offices of State, and especially by

according to them the right of Roman citizenship, which had been for

centuries jealously restricted to the inhabitants of Rome, and was

afterwards only conceded to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, the emperors sought

to attach them to their throne. The process was very gradual, but the

whole movement of political emancipation attained its completion when the

Imperial throne was occupied by the Spaniard Trajan, and by Pertinax, the

son of a freedman, and when an edict of Caracalla extended the rights of

Roman citizenship to all the provinces of the empire.

It will appear evident, from the foregoing sketch, that the period which

elapsed between Panætius and Constantine exhibited an irresistible

tendency to cosmopolitanism. The convergence, when we consider the number,

force, and harmony of the influences that composed it, is indeed

unexampled in history. The movement extended through all the fields of

religious, philosophical, political, industrial, military, and domestic

life. The character of the people was completely transformed, the

landmarks of all its institutions were removed, the whole principle of its

organisation was reversed. It would be impossible to find a more striking

example of the manner in which events govern character, destroying old

habits and associations, and thus altering that national type of

excellence which is, for the most part, the expression or net moral result

of the national institutions and circumstances. The effect of the movement

was, no doubt, in many respects evil, and some of the best men, such as

the elder Cato and Tacitus, opposed it, as leading to the demoralisation

of the empire; but if it increased vice, it also gave a peculiar character

to virtue. It was impossible that the conception of excellence, formed in

a society where everything conspired to deepen class divisions and

national jealousies and antipathies, should be retained unaltered in a

period of universal intercourse and amalgamation. The moral expression of

the first period is obviously to be found in the narrower military and

patriotic virtues; that of the second period in enlarged philanthropy and

sympathy.

The Stoical philosophy was admirably fitted to preside over this extension

of sympathies. Although it proved itself in every age the chief school of

patriots, it recognised also, from the very first, and in the most

unequivocal manner, the fraternity of mankind. The Stoic taught that

virtue alone is a good, and that all other things are indifferent; and

from this position he inferred that birth, rank, country, or wealth are

the mere accidents of life, and that virtue alone makes one man superior

to another. He taught also that the Deity is an all-pervading Spirit,

animating the universe, and revealed with especial clearness in the soul

of man; and he concluded that all men are fellow-members of a single body,

united by participation in the same Divine Spirit. These two doctrines

formed part of the very first teaching of the Stoics, but it was the

special glory of the Roman teachers, and an obvious result of the

condition of affairs I have described, to have brought them into full

relief. One of the most emphatic as well as one of the earliest extant

assertions of the duty of “charity to the human race,”(372) occurs in the

treatise of Cicero upon duties, which was avowedly based upon Stoicism.

Writing at a period when the movement of amalgamation had for a generation

been rapidly proceeding,(373) and adopting almost without restriction the

ethics of the Stoics, Cicero maintained the doctrine of universal

brotherhood as distinctly as it was afterwards maintained by the Christian

Church. “This whole world,” he tells us, “is to be regarded as the common

city of gods and men.”(374) “Men were born for the sake of men, that each

should assist the others.”(375) “Nature ordains that a man should wish the

good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason, that he is a

man.”(376) “To reduce man to the duties of his own city and to disengage

him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal

society of the human race.”(377) “Nature has inclined us to love men, and

this is the foundation of the law.”(378) The same principles were

reiterated with increasing emphasis by the later Stoics. Adopting the

well-known line which Terence had translated from Menander, they

maintained that man should deem nothing human foreign to his interest.

Lucan expatiated with all the fervour of a Christian poet upon the time

when “the human race will cast aside its weapons, and when all nations

will learn to love.”(379) “The whole universe,” said Seneca, “which you

see around you, comprising all things, both divine and human, is one. We

are members of one great body. Nature has made us relatives when it begat

us from the same materials and for the same destinies. She planted in us a

mutual love, and fitted us for a social life.”(380) “What is a Roman

knight, or freedman, or slave? These are but names springing from ambition

or from injury.”(381) “I know that my country is the world, and my

guardians are the gods.”(382) “You are a citizen,” said Epictetus, “and a

part of the world.... The duty of a citizen is in nothing to consider his

own interest distinct from that of others, as the hand or foot, if they

possessed reason and understood the law of nature, would do and wish

nothing that had not some relation to the rest of the body.”(383) “An

Antonine,” said Marcus Aurelius, “my country is Rome; as a man, it is the

world.”(384)

So far Stoicism appears fully equal to the moral requirements of the age.

It would be impossible to recognise more cordially or to enforce more

beautifully that doctrine of universal brotherhood for which the

circumstances of the Roman Empire had made men ripe. Plato had said that

no one is born for himself alone, but that he owes himself in part to his

country, in part to his parents, and in part to his friends. The Roman

Stoics, taking a wider survey, declared that man is born not for himself

but for the whole world.(385) And their doctrine was perfectly consistent

with the original principles of their school.

But while Stoicism was quite capable of representing the widening

movement, it was not equally capable of representing the softening

movement of civilisation. Its condemnation of the affections, and its

stern, tense ideal, admirably fitted for the struggles of a simple

military age, were unsuited for the mild manners and luxurious tastes of

the age of the Antonines. A class of writers began to arise who, like the

Stoics, believed virtue, rather than enjoyment, to be the supreme good,

and who acknowledged that virtue consisted solely of the control which the

enlightened will exercises over the desires, but who at the same time gave

free scope to the benevolent affections and a more religious and mystical

tone to the whole scheme of morals. Professing various speculative

doctrines, and calling themselves by many names—eclectics, peripatetics,

or Platonists—they agreed in forming or representing a moral character,

less strong, less sublime, less capable of endurance and heroism, less

conspicuous for energy of will, than that of the Stoics, but far more

tender and attractive. The virtues of force began to recede, and the

gentler virtues to advance, in the moral type. Insensibility to suffering

was no longer professed; indomitable strength was no longer idolised, and

it was felt that weakness and sorrow have their own appropriate

virtues.(386) The works of these writers are full of delicate touches

which nothing but strong and lively feelings could have suggested. We find

this in the well-known letter of Pliny on the death of his slaves,(387) in

the frequent protests against the ostentation of indifference with which

the Stoics regarded the loss of their friends, in many instances of

simple, artless pathos, which strike the finest chords of our nature. When

Plutarch, after the death of his daughter, was writing a letter of

consolation to his wife, we find him turning away from all the

commonplaces of the Stoics as the recollection of one simple trait of his

little child rushed upon his mind:—“She desired her nurse to press even

her dolls to the breast. She was so loving that she wished everything that

gave her pleasure to share in the best of what she had.”

Plutarch, whose fame as a biographer has, I think, unduly eclipsed his

reputation as a moralist, may be justly regarded as the leader of this

movement, and his moral writings may be profitably compared with those of

Seneca, the most ample exponent of the sterner school. Seneca is not

unfrequently self-conscious, theatrical, and overstrained. His precepts

have something of the affected ring of a popular preacher. The imperfect

fusion of his short sentences gives his style a disjointed and, so to

speak, granulated character, which the Emperor Caligula happily expressed

when he compared it to sand without cement; yet he often rises to a

majesty of eloquence, a grandeur both of thought and of expression, that

few moralists have ever rivalled. Plutarch, though far less sublime, is

more sustained, equable, and uniformly pleasing. The Montaigne of

antiquity, his genius coruscates playfully and gracefully around his

subject; he delights in illustrations which are often singularly vivid and

original, but which, by their excessive multiplication, appear sometimes

rather the texture than the ornament of his discourse. A gentle, tender

spirit, and a judgment equally free from paradox, exaggeration, and

excessive subtilty, are the characteristics of all he wrote. Plutarch

excels most in collecting motives of consolation; Seneca in forming

characters that need no consolation. There is something of the woman in

Plutarch; Seneca is all a man. The writings of the first resemble the

strains of the flute, to which the ancients attributed the power of

calming the passions and charming away the clouds of sorrow, and drawing

men by a gentle suasion into the paths of virtue; the writings of the

other are like the trumpet-blast, which kindles the soul with an heroic

courage. The first is most fitted to console a mother sorrowing over her

dead child, the second to nerve a brave man, without flinching and without

illusion, to grapple with an inevitable fate.

The elaborate letters which Seneca has left us on distinctive tenets of

the Stoical school, such as the equality of vices or the evil of the

affections, have now little more than an historic interest; but the

general tone of his writings gives them a permanent importance, for they

reflect and foster a certain type of excellence which, since the

extinction of Stoicism, has had no adequate expression in literature. The

prevailing moral tone of Plutarch, on the other hand, being formed mainly

on the prominence of the amiable virtues, has been eclipsed or transcended

by the Christian writers, but his definite contributions to philosophy and

morals are more important than those of Seneca. He has left us one of the

best works on superstition, and one of the most ingenious works on

Providence, we possess. He was probably the first writer who advocated

very strongly humanity to animals on the broad ground of universal

benevolence, as distinguished from the Pythagorean doctrine of

transmigration, and he was also remarkable, beyond all his contemporaries,

for his high sense of female excellence and of the sanctity of female

love.

The Romans had at all times cared more for the practical tendency of a

system of philosophy than for its logical or speculative consistency. One

of the chief attractions of Stoicism, in their eyes, had been that its

main object was not to build a system of opinion, but to propose a pattern

of life,(388) and Stoicism itself was only adapted to the Roman character

after it had been simplified by Panætius.(389) Although the system could

never free itself altogether from that hardness which rendered it so

unsuited for an advanced civilisation, it was profoundly modified by the

later Stoics, who rarely scrupled to temper it by the admixture of new

doctrines. Seneca himself was by no means an unmixed Stoic. If Epictetus

was more nearly so, this was probably because the extreme hardship he

underwent made him dwell more than his contemporaries upon the importance

of fortitude and endurance. Marcus Aurelius was surrounded by the

disciples of the most various schools, and his Stoicism was much tinctured

by the milder and more religious spirit of Platonism. The Stoics, like all

other men, felt the moral current of the time, though they yielded to it

less readily than some others. In Thrasea, who occupied in his age a

position analogous to that of Cato in an earlier period, we find little or

nothing of the asperity and hardness of his great prototype. In the

writings of the later Stoics, if we find the same elements as in those of

their predecessors, these elements are at least combined in different

proportions.

In the first place, Stoicism became more essentially religious. The

Stoical character, like all others of a high order, had always been

reverential; but its reverence differed widely from that of Christians. It

was concentrated much less upon the Deity than upon virtue, and especially

upon virtue as exhibited in great men. When Lucan, extolling his hero,

boasted that “the gods favoured the conquering cause, but Cato the

conquered,” or when Seneca described “the fortune of Sulla” as “the crime

of the gods,” these sentences, which sound to modern ears grossly

blasphemous, appear to have excited no murmur. We have already seen the

audacious language with which the sage claimed an equality with the

Divinity. On the other hand, the reverence for virtue apart from all

conditions of success, and especially for men of the stamp of Cato, who

through a strong moral conviction struggled bravely, though

unsuccessfully, against force, genius, or circumstances, was perhaps more

steady and more passionate than in any later age. The duty of absolute

submission to Providence, as I have already shown, was continually

inculcated, and the pantheistic notion of all virtue being a part or

emanation of the Deity was often asserted, but man was still the centre of

the Stoic’s scheme, the ideal to which his reverence and devotion aspired.

In later Stoicism this point of view was gradually changed. Without any

formal abandonment of their pantheistic conceptions, the language of

philosophers recognised with much greater clearness a distinct and

personal Divinity. Every page of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius is

impregnated with the deepest religious feeling. “The first thing to

learn,” said the former, “is that there is a God, that His knowledge

pervades the whole universe, and that it extends not only to our acts but

to our thoughts and feelings.... He who seeks to please the gods must

labour as far as lies in him to resemble them. He must be faithful as God

is faithful, free as He is free, beneficent as He is beneficent,

magnanimous as He is magnanimous.”(390) “To have God for our maker and

father and guardian, should not that emancipate us from all sadness and

from all fear?”(391) “When you have shut your door and darkened your room,

say not to yourself you are alone. God is in your room, and your attendant

genius likewise. Think not that they need the light to see what you

do.(392) What can I, an old man and a cripple, do but praise God? If I

were a nightingale, I would discharge the office of a nightingale; if a

swan, that of a swan. But I am a reasonable being; my mission is to praise

God, and I fulfil it; nor shall I ever, as far as lies in me, shrink from

my task, and I exhort you to join in the same song of praise.”(393)

The same religious character is exhibited, if possible, in a still greater

degree in the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius; but in one respect the

ethics of the emperor differ widely from those of the slave. In Epictetus

we invariably find the strongest sense of the majesty of man. As the child

of the Deity, as a being capable of attaining the most exalted virtue, he

magnified him to the highest point, and never more so than in the very

passage in which he exhorted his disciples to beware of haughtiness. The

Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, he reminds them, exhibits no arrogance, but

the unclouded serenity of perfect confidence and strength.(394) Marcus

Aurelius, on the other hand, dwelt rather on the weakness than on the

force of man, and his meditations breathe a spirit, if not of Christian

humility, at least of the gentlest and most touching modesty. He was not,

it is true, like some later saints, who habitually apply to themselves

language of reprobation which would be exaggerated if applied to the

murderer or the adulterer. He did not shrink from recognising human virtue

as a reality, and thanking Providence for the degree in which he had

attained it, but he continually reviewed with an unsparing severity the

weaknesses of his character, he accepted and even solicited reproofs from

every teacher of virtue, he made it his aim, in a position of supreme

power, to check every emotion of arrogance and pride, and he set before

him an ideal of excellence which awed and subdued his mind.

Another very remarkable feature of later Stoicism was its increasingly

introspective character. In the philosophy of Cato and Cicero, virtue was

displayed almost exclusively in action. In the later Stoics,

self-examination and purity of thought were continually inculcated. There

are some writers who, with an obstinacy which it is more easy to explain

than to excuse, persist, in defiance of the very clearest evidence to the

contrary, in representing these virtues as exclusively Christian, and in

maintaining, without a shadow of proof, that the place they undeniably

occupy in the later Roman moralists was due to the direct or indirect

influence of the new faith. The plain fact is that they were fully known

to the Greeks, and both Plato and Zeno even exhorted men to study their

dreams, on the ground that these often reveal the latent tendencies of the

disposition.(395) Pythagoras urged his disciples daily to examine

themselves when they retired to rest,(396) and this practice soon became a

recognised part of the Pythagorean discipline.(397) It was introduced into

Rome with the school before the close of the Republic. It was known in the

time of Cicero(398) and Horace.(399) Sextius, one of the masters of

Seneca, a philosopher of the school of Pythagoras, who flourished chiefly

before the Christian era, was accustomed daily to devote a portion of time

to self-examination; and Seneca, who at first inclined much to the tenets

of Pythagoras,(400) expressly tells us that it was from Sextius he learnt

the practice.(401) The increasing prominence of the Pythagorean philosophy

which accompanied the invasion of Oriental creeds, the natural tendency of

the empire, by closing the avenues of political life, to divert the

attention from action to emotion, and also the increased latitude allowed

to the play of the sympathies or affections by the later Stoics, brought

this emotional part of virtue into great prominence. The letters of Seneca

are a kind of moral medicine applied for the most part to the cure of

different infirmities of character. Plutarch, in a beautiful treatise on

“The Signs of Moral Progress,” treated the culture of the feelings with

delicate skill. The duty of serving the Divinity with a pure mind rather

than by formal rites became a commonplace of literature, and

self-examination one of the most recognised of duties. Epictetus urged men

so to purify their imaginations, that at the sight of a beautiful woman

they should not even mentally exclaim, “Happy her husband!”(402) The

meditations of Marcus Aurelius, above all, are throughout an exercise of

self-examination, and the duty of watching over the thoughts is

continually inculcated.

It was a saying of Plutarch that Stoicism, which sometimes exercised a

prejudicial and hardening influence upon characters that were by nature

stern and unbending, proved peculiarly useful as a cordial to those which

were naturally gentle and yielding. Of this truth we can have no better

illustration than is furnished by the life and writings of Marcus

Aurelius, the last and most perfect representative of Roman Stoicism. A

simple, childlike, and eminently affectionate disposition, with little

strength of intellect or perhaps originally of will, much more inclined to

meditation, speculation, solitude, or friendship, than to active and

public life, with a profound aversion to the pomp of royalty and with a

rather strong natural leaning to pedantry, he had embraced the fortifying

philosophy of Zeno in its best form, and that philosophy made him perhaps

as nearly a perfectly virtuous man as has ever appeared upon our world.

Tried by the chequered events of a reign of nineteen years, presiding over

a society that was profoundly corrupt, and over a city that was notorious

for its license, the perfection of his character awed even calumny to

silence, and the spontaneous sentiment of his people proclaimed him rather

a god than a man.(403) Very few men have ever lived concerning whose inner

life we can speak so confidently. His “Meditations,” which form one of the

most impressive, form also one of the truest books in the whole range of

religious literature. They consist of rude fragmentary notes without

literary skill or arrangement, written for the most part in hasty, broken,

and sometimes almost unintelligible sentences amid the turmoil of a

camp,(404) and recording, in accents of the most penetrating sincerity,

the struggles, doubts, and aims of a soul of which, to employ one of his

own images, it may be truly said that it possessed the purity of a star,

which needs no veil to hide its nakedness. The undisputed master of the

whole civilised world, he set before him as models such men as Thrasea and

Helvidius, as Cato and Brutus, and he made it his aim to realise the

conception of a free State in which all citizens are equal, and of a

royalty which makes it its first duty to respect the liberty of the

citizens.(405) His life was passed in unremitting activity. For nearly

twelve years he was absent with armies in the distant provinces of the

empire; and although his political capacity has been much and perhaps

justly questioned, it is impossible to deny the unwearied zeal with which

he discharged the duties of his great position. Yet few men have ever

carried farther the virtue of little things, the delicate moral tact and

the minute scruples which, though often exhibited by women and by secluded

religionists, very rarely survive much contact with active life. The

solicitude with which he endeavoured to persuade two jealous rhetoricians

to abstain during their debates from retorts that might destroy their

friendship,(406) the careful gratitude with which, in a camp in Hungary,

he recalled every moral obligation he could trace, even to the most

obscure of his tutors,(407) his anxiety to avoid all pedantry and

mannerism in his conduct,(408) and to repel every voluptuous imagination

from his mind,(409) his deep sense of the obligation of purity,(410) his

laborious efforts to correct a habit of drowsiness into which he had

fallen, and his self-reproval when he had yielded to it,(411) become all,

I think, inexpressibly touching when we remember that they were exhibited

by one who was the supreme ruler of the civilised globe, and who was

continually engaged in the direction of the most gigantic interests. But

that which is especially remarkable in Marcus Aurelius is the complete

absence of fanaticism in his philanthropy. Despotic monarchs sincerely

anxious to improve mankind are naturally led to endeavour, by acts of

legislation, to force society into the paths which they believe to be

good, and such men, acting under such motives, have sometimes been the

scourges of mankind. Philip II. and Isabella the Catholic inflicted more

suffering in obedience to their consciences than Nero and Domitian in

obedience to their lusts. But Marcus Aurelius steadily resisted the

temptation. “Never hope,” he once wrote, “to realise Plato’s Republic. Let

it be sufficient that you have in some slight degree ameliorated mankind,

and do not think that amelioration a matter of small importance. Who can

change the opinions of men? and without a change of sentiments what can

you make but reluctant slaves and hypocrites?”(412) He promulgated many

laws inspired by a spirit of the purest benevolence. He mitigated the

gladiatorial shows. He treated with invariable deference the senate, which

was the last bulwark of political freedom. He endowed many chairs of

philosophy which were intended to diffuse knowledge and moral teaching

through the people. He endeavoured by the example of his Court to correct

the extravagances of luxury that were prevalent, and he exhibited in his

own career a perfect model of an active and conscientious administrator;

but he made no rash efforts to force the people by stringent laws out of

the natural channel of their lives. Of the corruption of his subjects he

was keenly sensible, and he bore it with a mournful but gentle patience.

We may trace in this respect the milder spirit of those Greek teachers who

had diverged from Stoicism, but it was especially from the Stoical

doctrine that all vice springs from ignorance that he derived his rule of

life, and this doctrine, to which he repeatedly recurred, imparted to all

his judgments a sad but tender charity. “Men were made for men; correct

them, then, or support them.”(413) “If they do ill, it is evidently in

spite of themselves and through ignorance.”(414) “Correct them if you can;

if not, remember that patience was given you to exercise it in their

behalf.”(415) “It would be shameful for a physician to deem it strange

that a man was suffering from fever.”(416) “The immortal gods consent for

countless ages to endure without anger, and even to surround with

blessings, so many and such wicked men; but thou who hast so short a time

to live, art thou already weary, and that when thou art thyself

wicked?”(417) “It is involuntarily that the soul is deprived of justice,

and temperance, and goodness, and all other virtues. Continually remember

this; the thought will make you more gentle to all mankind.”(418) “It is

right that man should love those who have offended him. He will do so when

he remembers that all men are his relations, and that it is through

ignorance and involuntarily that they sin—and then we all die so

soon.”(419)

The character of the virtue of Marcus Aurelius, though exhibiting the

softening influence of the Greek spirit which in his time pervaded the

empire, was in its essentials strictly Roman.(420) Though full of

reverential gratitude to Providence, we do not find in him that intense

humility and that deep and subtle religious feeling which were the

principles of Hebrew virtue, and which have given the Jewish writers so

great an ascendancy over the hearts of men. Though borne naturally and

instinctively to goodness, his “Meditations” do not display the keen

æsthetical sense of the beauty of virtue which was the leading motive of

Greek morals, and which the writing of Plotinus afterwards made very

familiar to the Roman world. Like most of the best Romans, the principle

of his virtue was the sense of duty, the conviction of the existence of a

law of nature to which it is the aim and purpose of our being to conform.

Of secondary motives he appears to have been little sensible. The belief

in a superintending Providence was the strongest of his religious

convictions, but even that was occasionally overcast. On the subject of a

future world his mind floated in a desponding doubt. The desire for

posthumous fame he deemed it his duty systematically to mortify. While

most writers of his school regarded death chiefly as the end of sorrows,

and dwelt upon it in order to dispel its terrors, in Marcus Aurelius it is

chiefly represented as the last great demonstration of the vanity of

earthly things. Seldom, indeed, has such active and unrelaxing virtue been

united with so little enthusiasm, and been cheered by so little illusion

of success. “There is but one thing,” he wrote, “of real value—to

cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of

lying and unjust men.”(421)

The command he had acquired over his feelings was so great that it was

said of him that his countenance was never known to betray either elation

or despondency.(422) We, however, who have before us the records of his

inner life, can have no difficulty in detecting the deep melancholy that

overshadowed his mind, and his closing years were darkened by many and

various sorrows. His wife, whom he dearly loved and deeply honoured, and

who, if we may believe the Court scandals that are reported by historians,

was not worthy of his affection,(423) had preceded him to the tomb. His

only surviving son had already displayed the vicious tendencies that

afterwards made him one of the worst of rulers. The philosophers, who had

instructed him in his youth, and to whom he had clung with an affectionate

friendship, had one by one disappeared, and no new race had arisen to

supply their place. After a long reign of self-denying virtue, he saw the

decadence of the empire continually more apparent. The Stoical school was

rapidly fading before the passion for Oriental superstitions. The

barbarians, repelled for a time, were again menacing the frontiers, and it

was not difficult to foresee their future triumph. The mass of the people

had become too inert and too corrupt for any efforts to regenerate them. A

fearful pestilence, followed by many minor calamities, had fallen upon the

land and spread misery and panic through many provinces. In the midst of

these calamities, the emperor was struck down with a mortal illness, which

he bore with the placid courage he had always displayed, exhibiting in

almost the last words he uttered his forgetfulness of self and his

constant anxiety for the condition of his people.(424) Shortly before his

death he dismissed his attendants, and, after one last interview, his son,

and he died as he long had lived, alone.(425)

Thus sank to rest in clouds and darkness the purest and gentlest spirit of

all the pagan world, the most perfect model of the later Stoics. In him

the hardness, asperity, and arrogance of the sect had altogether

disappeared, while the affectation its paradoxes tended to produce was

greatly mitigated. Without fanaticism, superstition, or illusion, his

whole life was regulated by a simple and unwavering sense of duty. The

contemplative and emotional virtues which Stoicism had long depressed, had

regained their place, but the active virtues had not yet declined. The

virtues of the hero were still deeply honoured, but gentleness and

tenderness had acquired a new prominence in the ideal type.

But while the force of circumstances was thus developing the ethical

conceptions of antiquity in new directions, the mass of the Roman people

were plunged in a condition of depravity which no mere ethical teaching

could adequately correct. The moral condition of the empire is, indeed, in

some respects one of the most appalling pictures on record, and writers

have much more frequently undertaken to paint or even to exaggerate its

enormity than to investigate the circumstances by which it may be

explained. Such circumstances, however, must unquestionably exist. There

is no reason to believe that the innate propensities of the people were

worse during the Empire than during the best days of the Republic. The

depravity of a nation is a phenomenon which, like all others, may be

traced to definite causes, and in the instance before us they are not

difficult to discover.

I have already said that the virtue of the Romans was a military and

patriotic virtue, formed by the national institutions, and to which

religious teaching was merely accessory. The domestic, military, and

censorial discipline, concurring with the general poverty and also with

the agricultural pursuits of the people, had created the simplest and most

austere habits, while the institutions of civic liberty provided ample

spheres for honourable ambition. The nobles, being the highest body in a

free State, and being at the same time continually confronted by a

formidable opposition under the guidance of the tribunes, were ardently

devoted to public life. The dangerous rivalry of the surrounding Italian

States, and afterwards of Carthage, demanded and secured a constant

vigilance. Roman education was skilfully designed to elicit heroic

patriotism, and the great men of the past became the ideal figures of the

imagination. Religion hallowed the local feeling by rites and legends,

instituted many useful and domestic habits, taught men the sanctity of

oaths, and, by fostering a continual sense of a superintending Providence,

gave a depth and solemnity to the whole character.

Such were the chief influences by which the national type of virtue had

been formed, but nearly all of these were corroded or perverted by

advancing civilisation. The domestic and local religion lost its

ascendancy amid the increase of scepticism and the invasion of a crowd of

foreign superstitions. The simplicity of manners, which sumptuary laws and

the institution of the censorship had long maintained, was replaced by the

extravagances of a Babylonian luxury. The aristocratic dignity perished

with the privileges on which it reposed. The patriotic energy and

enthusiasm died away in a universal empire which embraced all varieties of

language, custom, and nationality.

But although the virtues of a poor and struggling community necessarily

disappear before increasing luxury, they are in a normal condition of

society replaced by virtues of a different stamp. Gentler manners and

enlarged benevolence follow in the train of civilisation, greater

intellectual activity and more extended industrial enterprise give a new

importance to the moral qualities which each of these require, the circle

of political interests expands, and if the virtues that spring from

privilege diminish, the virtues that spring from equality increase.

In Rome, however, there were three great causes which impeded the normal

development—the Imperial system, the institution of slavery, and the

gladiatorial shows. Each of these exercised an influence of the widest and

most pernicious character on the morals of the people. To trace those

influences in all their ramifications would lead me far beyond the limits

I have assigned to the present work, but I shall endeavour to give a

concise view of their nature and general character.

The theory of the Roman Empire was that of a representative despotism. The

various offices of the Republic were not annihilated, but they were

gradually concentrated in a single man. The senate was still ostensibly

the depository of supreme power, but it was made in fact the mere creature

of the Emperor, whose power was virtually uncontrolled. Political spies

and private accusers, who in the latter days of the Republic had been

encouraged to denounce plots against the State, began under Augustus to

denounce plots against the Emperor; and the class being enormously

increased under Tiberius, and stimulated by the promise of part of the

confiscated property, they menaced every leading politician and even every

wealthy man. The nobles were gradually depressed, ruined, or driven by the

dangers of public life into orgies of private luxury. The poor were

conciliated, not by any increase of liberty or even of permanent

prosperity, but by gratuitous distributions of corn and by public games,

while, in order to invest themselves with a sacred character, the emperors

adopted the religious device of an apotheosis.

This last superstition, of which some traces may still be found in the

titles appropriated to royalty, was not wholly a suggestion of

politicians. Deified men had long occupied a prominent place in ancient

belief, and the founders of cities had been very frequently worshipped by

the inhabitants.(426) Although to more educated minds the ascription of

divinity to a sovereign was simply an unmeaning flattery, although it in

no degree prevented either innumerable plots against his life, or an

unsparing criticism of his memory, yet the popular reverence not

unfrequently anticipated politicians in representing the emperor as in

some special way under the protection of Providence. Around Augustus a

whole constellation of miraculous stories soon clustered. An oracle, it

was said, had declared his native city destined to produce a ruler of the

world. When a child, he had been borne by invisible hands from his cradle,

and placed on a lofty tower, where he was found with his face turned to

the rising sun. He rebuked the frogs that croaked around his grandfather’s

home, and they became silent for ever. An eagle snatched a piece of bread

from his hand, soared into the air, and then, descending, presented it to

him again. Another eagle dropped at his feet a chicken, bearing a

laurel-branch in its beak. When his body was burnt, his image was seen

rising to heaven above the flames. When another man tried to sleep in the

bed in which the Emperor had been born, the profane intruder was dragged

forth by an unseen hand. A patrician named Lætorius, having been condemned

for adultery, pleaded in mitigation of the sentence that he was the happy

possessor of the spot of ground on which Augustus was born.(427) An

Asiatic town, named Cyzicus, was deprived of its freedom by Tiberius,

chiefly because it had neglected the worship of Augustus.(428) Partly, no

doubt, by policy, but partly also by that spontaneous process by which in

a superstitious age conspicuous characters so often become the nuclei of

legends,(429) each emperor was surrounded by a supernatural aureole. Every

usurpation, every break in the ordinary line of succession, was adumbrated

by a series of miracles; and signs, both in heaven and earth, were

manifested whenever an emperor was about to die.

Of the emperors themselves, a great majority, no doubt, accepted their

divine honours as an empty pageant, and more than one exhibited beneath

the purple a simplicity of tastes and character which the boasted heroes

of the Republic had never surpassed. It is related of Vespasian that, when

dying, he jested mournfully on his approaching dignity, observing, as he

felt his strength ebbing away, “I think I am becoming a god.”(430)

Alexander Severus and Julian refused to accept the ordinary language of

adulation, and of those who did not reject it we know that many looked

upon it as a modern sovereign looks upon the phraseology of petitions or

the ceremonies of the Court. Even Nero was so far from being intoxicated

with his Imperial dignity that he continually sought triumphs as a singer

or an actor, and it was his artistic skill, not his divine prerogatives,

that excited his vanity.(431) Caligula, however, who appears to have been

literally deranged,(432) is said to have accepted his divinity as a

serious fact, to have substituted his own head for that of Jupiter on many

of the statues,(433) and to have once started furiously from his seat

during a thunderstorm that had interrupted a gladiatorial show, shouting

with frantic gestures his imprecations against Heaven, and declaring that

the divided empire was indeed intolerable, that either Jupiter or himself

must speedily succumb.(434) Heliogabalus, if we may give any credence to

his biographer, confounded all things, human and divine, in hideous and

blasphemous orgies, and designed to unite all forms of religion in the

worship of himself.(435)

A curious consequence of this apotheosis was that the images of the

emperors were invested with a sacred character like those of the gods.

They were the recognised refuge of the slave or the oppressed,(436) and

the smallest disrespect to them was resented as a heinous crime. Under

Tiberius, slaves and criminals were accustomed to hold in their hands an

image of the emperor, and, being thus protected, to pour with impunity a

torrent of defiant insolence upon their masters or judges.(437) Under the

same emperor, a man having, when drunk, accidentally touched a nameless

domestic utensil with a ring on which the head of the emperor was carved,

he was immediately denounced by a spy.(438) A man in this reign was

accused of high treason for having sold an image of the emperor with a

garden.(439) It was made a capital offence to beat a slave, or to undress,

near a statue of Augustus, or to enter a brothel with a piece of money on

which his head was engraved,(440) and at a later period a woman, it is

said, was actually executed for undressing before the statue of

Domitian.(441)

It may easily be conceived that men who had been raised to this pinnacle

of arrogance and power, men who exercised uncontrolled authority in the

midst of a society in a state of profound corruption, were often guilty of

the most atrocious extravagances. In the first period of the Empire more

especially, when traditions were not yet formed, and when experience had

not yet shown the dangers of the throne, the brains of some of its

occupants reeled at their elevation, and a kind of moral insanity ensued.

The pages of Suetonius remain as an eternal witness of the abysses of

depravity, the hideous, intolerable cruelty, the hitherto unimagined

extravagances of nameless lust that were then manifested on the Palatine,

and while they cast a fearful light upon the moral chaos into which pagan

society had sunk, they furnish ample evidence of the demoralising

influences of the empire. The throne was, it is true, occupied by some of

the best as well as by some of the worst men who have ever lived; but the

evil, though checked and mitigated, was never abolished. The corruption of

a Court, the formation of a profession of spies, the encouragement given

to luxury, the distributions of corn, and the multiplication of games,

were evils which varied greatly in their degrees of intensity, but the

very existence of the empire prevented the creation of those habits of

political life which formed the moral type of the great republics of

antiquity. Liberty, which is often very unfavourable to theological

systems, is almost always in the end favourable to morals; for the most

effectual method that has been devised for diverting men from vice is to

give free scope to a higher ambition. This scope was absolutely wanting in

the Roman Empire, and the moral condition, in the absence of lasting

political habits, fluctuated greatly with the character of the Emperors.

The results of the institution of slavery were probably even more serious.

In addition to its manifest effect in encouraging a tyrannical and

ferocious spirit in the masters, it cast a stigma upon all labour, and at

once degraded and impoverished the free poor. In modern societies the

formation of an influential and numerous middle class, trained in the

sober and regular habits of industrial life, is the chief guarantee of

national morality, and where such a class exists, the disorders of the

upper ranks, though undoubtedly injurious, are never fatal to society. The

influence of great outbursts of fashionable depravity, such as that which

followed the Restoration in England, is rarely more than superficial. The

aristocracy may revel in every excess of ostentatious vice, but the great

mass of the people, at the loom, the counter, or the plough, continue

unaffected by their example, and the habits of life into which they are

forced by the condition of their trades preserve them from gross

depravity. It was the most frightful feature of the corruption of ancient

Rome that it extended through every class of the community. In the absence

of all but the simplest machinery, manufactures, with the vast industrial

life they beget, were unknown. The poor citizen found almost all the

spheres in which an honourable livelihood might be obtained wholly or at

least in a very great degree preoccupied by slaves, while he had learnt to

regard trade with an invincible repugnance. Hence followed the immense

increase of corrupt and corrupting professions, as actors, pantomimes,

hired gladiators, political spies, ministers to passion, astrologers,

religious charlatans, pseudo-philosophers, which gave the free classes a

precarious and occasional subsistence, and hence, too, the gigantic

dimensions of the system of clientage. Every rich man was surrounded by a

train of dependants, who lived in a great measure at his expense, and

spent their lives in ministering to his passions and flattering his

vanity. And, above all, the public distribution of corn, and occasionally

of money, was carried on to such an extent, that, so far as the first

necessaries of life were concerned, the whole poor free population of Rome

was supported gratuitously by the Government. To effect this distribution

promptly and lavishly was the main object of the Imperial policy, and its

consequences were worse than could have resulted from the most extravagant

poor-laws or the most excessive charity. The mass of the people were

supported in absolute idleness by corn, which was given without any

reference to desert, and was received, not as a favour, but as a right,

while gratuitous public amusements still further diverted them from

labour.

Under these influences the population rapidly dwindled away. Productive

enterprise was almost extinct in Italy, and an unexampled concurrence of

causes made a vicious celibacy the habitual condition. Already in the days

of Augustus the evil was apparent, and the dangers which in later reigns

drove the patricians still more generally from public life, drove them

more and more into every extravagance of sensuality. Greece, since the

destruction of her liberty, and also the leading cities of Asia Minor and

of Egypt, had become centres of the wildest corruption, and Greek and

Oriental captives were innumerable in Rome. Ionian slaves of a surpassing

beauty, Alexandrian slaves, famous for their subtle skill in stimulating

the jaded senses of the confirmed and sated libertine, became the

ornaments of every patrician house, the companions and the instructors of

the young. The disinclination to marriage was so general, that men who

spent their lives in endeavouring by flatteries to secure the inheritance

of wealthy bachelors became a numerous and a notorious class. The slave

population was itself a hotbed of vice, and it contaminated all with which

it came in contact; while the attractions of the games, and especially of

the public baths, which became the habitual resort of the idle, combined

with the charms of the Italian climate, and with the miserable domestic

architecture that was general, to draw the poor citizens from indoor life.

Idleness, amusements, and a bare subsistence were alone desired, and the

general practice of abortion among the rich, and of infanticide and

exposition in all classes, still further checked the population.

The destruction of all public spirit in a population so situated was

complete and inevitable. In the days of the Republic a consul had once

advocated the admission of a brave Italian people to the right of Roman

citizenship, on the ground that “those who thought only of liberty

deserved to be Romans.”(442) In the Empire all liberty was cheerfully

bartered for games and corn, and the worst tyrant could by these means be

secure of popularity. In the Republic, when Marius threw open the houses

of those he had proscribed, to be plundered, the people, by a noble

abstinence, rebuked the act, for no Roman could be found to avail himself

of the permission.(443) In the Empire, when the armies of Vitellius and

Vespasian were disputing the possession of the city, the degenerate Romans

gathered with delight to the spectacle as to a gladiatorial show,

plundered the deserted houses, encouraged either army by their reckless

plaudits, dragged out the fugitives to be slain, and converted into a

festival the calamity of their country.(444) The degradation of the

national character was permanent. Neither the teaching of the Stoics, nor

the government of the Antonines, nor the triumph of Christianity could

restore it. Indifferent to liberty, the Roman now, as then, asks only for

an idle subsistence and for public spectacles, and countless monasteries

and ecclesiastical pageants occupy in modern Rome the same place as did

the distributions of corn and the games of the amphitheatre in the Rome of

the Cæsars.

It must be remembered, too, that while public spirit had thus decayed in

the capital of the empire, there existed no independent or rival power to

reanimate by its example the smouldering flame. The existence in modern

Europe of many distinct nations on the same level of civilisation, but

with different forms of government and conditions of national life,

secures the permanence of some measure of patriotism and liberty. If these

perish in one nation, they survive in another, and each people affects

those about it by its rivalry or example. But an empire which comprised

all the civilised globe could know nothing of this political interaction.

In religious, social, intellectual, and moral life, foreign ideas were

very discernible, but the enslaved provinces could have no influence in

rekindling political life in the centre, and those which rivalled Italy in

their civilisation, even surpassed it in their corruption and their

servility.

In reviewing, however, the conditions upon which the moral state of the

empire depended, there are still two very important centres or seed-plots

of virtue to which it is necessary to advert. I mean the pursuit of

agriculture and the discipline of the army. A very early tradition, which

was attributed to Romulus, had declared that warfare and agriculture were

the only honourable occupations for a citizen,(445) and it would be

difficult to overrate the influence of the last in forming temperate and

virtuous habits among the people. It is the subject of the only extant

work of the elder Cato. Virgil had adorned it with the lustre of his

poetry. A very large part of the Roman religion was intended to symbolise

its stages or consecrate its operations. Varro expressed an eminently

Roman sentiment in that beautiful sentence which Cowper has introduced

into English poetry, “Divine Providence made the country, but human art

the town.”(446) The reforms of Vespasian consisted chiefly of the

elevation to high positions of the agriculturists of the provinces.

Antoninus, who was probably the most perfect of all the Roman emperors,

was through his whole reign a zealous farmer.

As far as the distant provinces were concerned, it is probable that the

Imperial system was on the whole a good. The scandalous rapacity of the

provincial governors, which disgraced the closing years of the Republic,

and which is immortalised by the indignant eloquence of Cicero, appears to

have ceased, or at least greatly diminished, under the supervision of the

emperors. Ample municipal freedom, good roads, and for the most part wise

and temperate rulers, secured for the distant sections of the empire a

large measure of prosperity. But in Italy itself, agriculture, with the

habits of life that attended it, speedily and fatally decayed. The peasant

proprietor soon glided hopelessly into debt. The immense advantages which

slavery gave the rich gradually threw nearly all the Italian soil into

their hands. The peasant who ceased to be proprietor found himself

excluded by slave labour from the position of a hired cultivator, while

the gratuitous distributions of corn drew him readily to the metropolis.

The gigantic scale of these distributions induced the rulers to obtain

their corn in the form of a tribute from distant countries, chiefly from

Africa and Sicily, and it almost ceased to be cultivated in Italy. The

land fell to waste, or was cultivated by slaves or converted into pasture,

and over vast tracts the race of free peasants entirely disappeared.

This great revolution, which profoundly affected the moral condition of

Italy, had long been impending. The debts of the poor peasants, and the

tendency of the patricians to monopolise the conquered territory, had

occasioned some of the fiercest contests of the Republic, and in the

earliest days of the Empire the blight that seemed to have fallen on the

Italian soil was continually and pathetically lamented. Livy, Varro,

Columella, and Pliny have noticed it in the most emphatic terms,(447) and

Tacitus observed that as early as the reign of Claudius, Italy, which had

once supplied the distant provinces with corn, had become dependent for

the very necessaries of life upon the winds and the waves.(448) The evil

was indeed of an almost hopeless kind. Adverse winds, or any other

accidental interruption of the convoys of corn, occasioned severe distress

in the capital; but the prospect of the calamities that would ensue if any

misfortune detached the great corn-growing countries from the empire,

might well have appalled the politician. Yet the combined influence of

slavery, and of the gratuitous distributions of corn, acting in the manner

I have described, rendered every effort to revive Italian agriculture

abortive, and slavery had taken such deep root that it would have been

impossible to abolish it, while no emperor dared to encounter the

calamities and rebellion that would follow a suspension or even a

restriction of the distributions.(449) Many serious efforts were made to

remedy the evil.(450) Alexander Severus advanced money to the poor to buy

portions of land, and accepted a gradual payment without interest from the

produce of the soil. Pertinax settled poor men as proprietors on deserted

land, on the sole condition that they should cultivate it. Marcus Aurelius

began, and Aurelian and Valentinian continued, the system of settling

great numbers of barbarian captives upon the Italian soil, and compelling

them as slaves to till it. The introduction of this large foreign element

into the heart of Italy was eventually one of the causes of the downfall

of the empire, and it is also about this time that we first dimly trace

the condition of serfdom or servitude to the soil into which slavery

afterwards faded, and which was for some centuries the general condition

of the European poor. But the economical and moral causes that were

destroying agriculture in Italy were too strong to be resisted, and the

simple habits of life which agricultural pursuits promote had little or no

place in the later empire.

A somewhat less rapid but in the end not less complete decadence had taken

place in military life. The Roman army was at first recruited exclusively

from the upper classes, and the service, which lasted only during actual

warfare, was gratuitous. Before the close of the Republic, however, these

conditions had disappeared. Military pay is said to have been instituted

at the time of the siege of Veii.(451) Some Spaniards who were enrolled

during the rivalry of Rome and Carthage were the first example of the

employment of foreign mercenaries by the former.(452) Marius abolished the

property qualification of the recruits.(453) In long residences in Spain

and in the Asiatic provinces discipline gradually relaxed, and the

historian who traced the progress of Oriental luxury in Rome dwelt with a

just emphasis upon the ominous fact that it had first been introduced into

the city by soldiers.(454) The civil wars contributed to the destruction

of the old military traditions, but being conducted by able generals it is

probable that they had more effect upon the patriotism than upon the

discipline of the army. Augustus reorganised the whole military system,

establishing a body of soldiers known as the Prætorian guard, and

dignified with some special privileges, permanently in Rome, while the

other legions were chiefly mustered upon the frontiers. During his long

reign, and during that of Tiberius, both sections were quiescent, but the

murder of Caligula by his soldiers opened a considerable period of

insubordination. Claudius, it was observed, first set the fatal example of

purchasing his safety from his soldiers by bribes.(455) The armies of the

provinces soon discovered that it was possible to elect an emperor outside

Rome, and Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian were all the creatures of

revolt. The evil was, however, not yet past recovery. Vespasian and Trajan

enforced discipline with great stringency and success. The emperors began

more frequently to visit the camps. The number of the soldiers was small,

and for some time the turbulence subsided. The history of the worst period

of the Empire, it has been truly observed, is full of instances of brave

soldiers trying, under circumstances of extreme difficulty, simply to do

their duty. But the historian had soon occasion to notice again the

profound influence of the voluptuous Asiatic cities upon the legions.(456)

Removed for many years from Italy, they lost all national pride, their

allegiance was transferred from the sovereign to the general, and when the

Imperial sceptre fell into the hands of a succession of incompetent

rulers, they habitually urged their commanders to revolt, and at last

reduced the empire to a condition of military anarchy. A remedy was found

for this evil, though not for the luxurious habits that had been acquired,

in the division of the empire, which placed each army under the direct

supervision of an emperor, and it is probable that at a later period

Christianity diminished the insubordination, though it may have also

diminished the military fire, of the soldiers.(457) But other and still

more powerful causes were in operation preparing the military downfall of

Rome. The habits of inactivity which the Imperial policy had produced, and

which, through a desire for popularity, most emperors laboured to

encourage, led to a profound disinclination for the hardships of military

life. Even the Prætorian guard, which was long exclusively Italian, was

selected after Septimus Severus from the legions on the frontiers,(458)

while, Italy being relieved from the regular conscription, these were

recruited solely in the provinces, and innumerable barbarians were

subsidised. The political and military consequences of this change are

sufficiently obvious. In an age when, artillery being unknown, the

military superiority of civilised nations over barbarians was far less

than at present, the Italians had become absolutely unaccustomed to real

war, and had acquired habits that were beyond all others incompatible with

military discipline, while many of the barbarians who menaced and at last

subverted the empire had been actually trained by Roman generals. The

moral consequence is equally plain—military discipline, like agricultural

labour, ceased to have any part among the moral influences of Italy.

To those who have duly estimated the considerations I have enumerated, the

downfall and moral debasement of the empire can cause no surprise, though

they may justly wonder that its agony should have been so protracted, that

it should have produced a multitude of good and great men, both pagan and

Christian, and that these should have exercised so wide an influence as

they unquestionably did. Almost every institution or pursuit by which

virtuous habits would naturally have been formed had been tainted or

destroyed, while agencies of terrific power were impelling the people to

vice. The rich, excluded from most honourable paths of ambition, and

surrounded by countless parasites who inflamed their every passion, found

themselves absolute masters of innumerable slaves who were their willing

ministers, and often their teachers, in vice. The poor, hating industry

and destitute of all intellectual resources, lived in habitual idleness,

and looked upon abject servility as the normal road to fortune. But the

picture becomes truly appalling when we remember that the main amusement

of both classes was the spectacle of bloodshed, of the death, and

sometimes of the torture, of men.

The gladiatorial games form, indeed, the one feature of Roman society

which to a modern mind is almost inconceivable in its atrocity. That not

only men, but women, in an advanced period of civilisation—men and women

who not only professed but very frequently acted upon a high code of

morals—should have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that

all this should have continued for centuries, with scarcely a protest, is

one of the most startling facts in moral history. It is, however,

perfectly normal, and in no degree inconsistent with the doctrine of

natural moral perceptions, while it opens out fields of ethical enquiry of

a very deep though painful interest.

These games, which long eclipsed, both in interest and in influence, every

other form of public amusement at Rome,(459) were originally religious

ceremonies celebrated at the tombs of the great, and intended as human

sacrifices to appease the Manes of the dead.(460) They were afterwards

defended as a means of sustaining the military spirit by the constant

spectacle of courageous death,(461) and with this object it was customary

to give a gladiatorial show to soldiers before their departure to a

war.(462) In addition to these functions they had a considerable political

importance, for at a time when all the regular organs of liberty were

paralysed or abolished, the ruler was accustomed in the arena to meet tens

of thousands of his subjects, who availed themselves of the opportunity to

present their petitions, to declare their grievances, and to censure

freely the sovereign or his ministers.(463) The games are said to have

been of Etruscan origin; they were first introduced into Rome, B.C. 264,

when the two sons of a man named Brutus compelled three pair of gladiators

to fight at the funeral of their father,(464) and before the close of the

Republic they were common on great public occasions, and, what appears

even more horrible, at the banquets of the nobles.(465) The rivalry of

Cæsar and Pompey greatly multiplied them, for each sought by this means to

ingratiate himself with the people. Pompey introduced a new form of combat

between men and animals.(466) Cæsar abolished the old custom of

restricting the mortuary games to the funerals of men, and his daughter

was the first Roman lady whose tomb was desecrated by human blood.(467)

Besides this innovation, Cæsar replaced the temporary edifices in which

the games had hitherto been held by a permanent wooden amphitheatre,

shaded the spectators by an awning of precious silk, compelled the

condemned persons on one occasion to fight with silver lances,(468) and

drew so many gladiators into the city that the Senate was obliged to issue

an enactment restricting their number.(469) In the earliest years of the

Empire, Statilius Taurus erected the first amphitheatre of stone.(470)

Augustus ordered that not more than 120 men should fight on a single

occasion, and that no prætor should give more than two spectacles in a

single year,(471) and Tiberius again fixed the maximum of combatants,(472)

but notwithstanding these attempts to limit them the games soon acquired

the most gigantic proportions. They were celebrated habitually by great

men in honour of their dead relatives, by officials on coming into office,

by conquerors to secure popularity, and on every occasion of public

rejoicing, and by rich tradesmen who were desirous of acquiring a social

position.(473) They were also among the attractions of the public baths.

Schools of gladiators—often the private property of rich citizens—existed

in every leading city of Italy, and, besides slaves and criminals, they

were thronged with freemen, who voluntarily hired themselves for a term of

years. In the eyes of multitudes, the large sums that were paid to the

victor, the patronage of nobles and often of emperors, and still more the

delirium of popular enthusiasm that centred upon the successful gladiator,

outweighed all the dangers of the profession. A complete recklessness of

life was soon engendered both in the spectators and the combatants. The

“lanistæ,” or purveyors of gladiators, became an important profession.

Wandering bands of gladiators traversed Italy, hiring themselves for the

provincial amphitheatres. The influence of the games gradually pervaded

the whole texture of Roman life. They became the common-place of

conversation.(474) The children imitated them in their play.(475) The

philosophers drew from them their metaphors and illustrations. The artists

pourtrayed them in every variety of ornament.(476) The vestal virgins had

a seat of honour in the arena.(477) The Colosseum, which is said to have

been capable of containing more than 80,000 spectators, eclipsed every

other monument of Imperial splendour, and is even now at once the most

imposing and the most characteristic relic of pagan Rome.

In the provinces the same passion was displayed. From Gaul to Syria,

wherever the Roman influence extended, the spectacles of blood were

introduced, and the gigantic remains of amphitheatres in many lands still

attest by their ruined grandeur the scale on which they were pursued. In

the reign of Tiberius, more than 20,000 persons are said to have perished

by the fall of the amphitheatre at the suburban town of Fidenæ.(478) Under

Nero, the Syracusans obtained, as a special favour, an exemption from the

law which limited the number of gladiators.(479) Of the vast train of

prisoners brought by Titus from Judea, a large proportion were destined by

the conqueror for the provincial games.(480) In Syria, where they were

introduced by Antiochus Epiphanes, they at first produced rather terror

than pleasure; but the effeminate Syrians soon learned to contemplate them

with a passionate enjoyment,(481) and on a single occasion Agrippa caused

1,400 men to fight in the amphitheatre at Berytus.(482) Greece alone was

in some degree an exception. When an attempt was made to introduce the

spectacle into Athens, the cynic philosopher Demonax appealed successfully

to the better feelings of the people by exclaiming, “You must first

overthrow the altar of Pity.”(483) The games are said to have afterwards

penetrated to Athens, and to have been suppressed by Apollonius of

Tyana;(484) but with the exception of Corinth, where a very large foreign

population existed, Greece never appears to have shared the general

enthusiasm.(485)

One of the first consequences of this taste was to render the people

absolutely unfit for those tranquil and refined amusements which usually

accompany civilisation. To men who were accustomed to witness the fierce

vicissitudes of deadly combat, any spectacle that did not elicit the

strongest excitement was insipid. The only amusements that at all rivalled

the spectacles of the amphitheatre and the circus were those which

appealed strongly to the sensual passions, such as the games of Flora, the

postures of the pantomimes, and the ballet.(486) Roman comedy, indeed,

flourished for a short period, but only by throwing itself into the same

career. The pander and the courtesan are the leading characters of

Plautus, and the more modest Terence never attained an equal popularity.

The different forms of vice have a continual tendency to act and react

upon one another, and the intense craving after excitement which the

amphitheatre must necessarily have produced, had probably no small

influence in stimulating the orgies of sensuality which Tacitus and

Suetonius describe.

But if comedy could to a certain extent flourish with the gladiatorial

games, it was not so with tragedy. It is, indeed, true that the tragic

actor can exhibit displays of more intense agony and of a grander heroism

than were ever witnessed in the arena. His mission is not to paint nature

as it exists in the light of day, but nature as it exists in the heart of

man. His gestures, his tones, his looks, are such as would never have been

exhibited by the person he represents, but they display to the audience

the full intensity of the emotions which that person would have felt, but

which he would have been unable adequately to reveal. But to those who

were habituated to the intense realism of the amphitheatre, the idealised

suffering of the stage was unimpressive. All the genius of a Siddons or a

Ristori would fail to move an audience who had continually seen living men

fall bleeding and mangled at their feet. One of the first functions of the

stage is to raise to the highest point the susceptibility to disgust. When

Horace said that Medea should not kill her children upon the stage, he

enunciated not a mere arbitrary rule, but one which grows necessarily out

of the development of the drama. It is an essential characteristic of a

refined and cultivated taste to be shocked and offended at the spectacle

of bloodshed; and the theatre, which somewhat dangerously dissociates

sentiment from action, and causes men to waste their compassion on ideal

sufferings, is at least a barrier against the extreme forms of cruelty by

developing this susceptibility to the highest degree. The gladiatorial

games, on the other hand, destroyed all sense of disgust, and therefore

all refinement of taste, and they rendered the permanent triumph of the

drama impossible.(487)