It is abundantly evident, both from history and from present experience,

that the instinctive shock, or natural feeling of disgust, caused by the

sight of the sufferings of men is not generically different from that

which is caused by the sight of the sufferings of animals. The latter, to

those who are not accustomed to it, is intensely painful. The former

continually becomes by use a matter of absolute indifference. If the

repugnance which is felt in the one case appears greater than in the

other, it is not on account of any innate sentiment which commands us to

reverence our species, but simply because our imagination finds less

difficulty in realising human than animal suffering, and also because

education has strengthened our feelings in the one case much more than in

the other. There is, however, no fact more clearly established than that

when men have regarded it as not a crime to kill some class of their

fellow-men, they have soon learnt to do so with no more natural

compunction or hesitation than they would exhibit in killing a wild

animal. This is the normal condition of savage men. Colonists and Red

Indians even now often shoot each other with precisely the same

indifference as they shoot beasts of prey, and the whole history of

warfare—especially when warfare was conducted on more savage principles

than at present—is an illustration of the fact. Startling, therefore, as

it may now appear, it is in no degree unnatural that Roman spectators

should have contemplated with perfect equanimity the slaughter of men. The

Spaniard, who is brought in infancy to the bull-ring, soon learns to gaze

with indifference or with pleasure upon sights before which the

unpractised eye of the stranger quails with horror, and the same process

would be equally efficacious had the spectacle been the sufferings of men.

We now look back with indignation upon this indifference; but yet,

although it may be hard to realise, it is probably true that there is

scarcely a human being who might not by custom be so indurated as to share

it. Had the most benevolent person lived in a country in which the

innocence of these games was deemed axiomatic, had he been taken to them

in his very childhood, and accustomed to associate them with his earliest

dreams of romance, and had he then been left simply to the play of the

emotions, the first paroxysm of horror would have soon subsided, the

shrinking repugnance that followed would have grown weaker and weaker, the

feeling of interest would have been aroused, and the time would probably

come in which it would reign alone. But even this absolute indifference to

the sight of human suffering does not represent the full evil resulting

from the gladiatorial games. That some men are so constituted as to be

capable of taking a real and lively pleasure in the simple contemplation

of suffering as suffering, and without any reference to their own

interests, is a proposition which has been strenuously denied by those in

whose eyes vice is nothing more than a displacement, or exaggeration, of

lawful self-regarding feelings, and others, who have admitted the reality

of the phenomenon, have treated it as a very rare and exceptional

disease.(488) That it is so—at least in its extreme forms—in the present

condition of society, may reasonably be hoped, though I imagine that few

persons who have watched the habits of boys would question that to take

pleasure in giving at least some degree of pain is sufficiently common,

and though it is not quite certain that all the sports of adult men would

be entered into with exactly the same zest if their victims were not

sentient beings. But in every society in which atrocious punishments have

been common, this side of human nature has acquired an undoubted

prominence. It is related of Claudius that his special delight at the

gladiatorial shows was in watching the countenances of the dying, for he

had learnt to take an artistic pleasure in observing the variations of

their agony.(489) When the gladiator lay prostrate it was customary for

the spectators to give the sign with their thumbs, indicating whether they

desired him to be spared or slain, and the giver of the show reaped most

popularity when, in the latter case, he permitted no consideration of

economy to make him hesitate to sanction the popular award.(490)

Besides this, the mere desire for novelty impelled the people to every

excess or refinement of barbarity.(491) The simple combat became at last

insipid, and every variety of atrocity was devised to stimulate the

flagging interest. At one time a bear and a bull, chained together, rolled

in fierce contest along the sand; at another, criminals dressed in the

skins of wild beasts were thrown to bulls, which were maddened by red-hot

irons, or by darts tipped with burning pitch. Four hundred bears were

killed on a single day under Caligula; three hundred on another day under

Claudius. Under Nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants;

four hundred bears and three hundred lions were slaughtered by his

soldiers. In a single day, at the dedication of the Colosseum by Titus,

five thousand animals perished. Under Trajan, the games continued for one

hundred and twenty-three successive days.(492) Lions, tigers, elephants,

rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, bulls, stags, even crocodiles and

serpents, were employed to give novelty to the spectacle. Nor was any form

of human suffering wanting. The first Gordian, when edile, gave twelve

spectacles, in each of which from one hundred and fifty to five hundred

pair of gladiators appeared.(493) Eight hundred pair fought at the triumph

of Aurelian.(494) Ten thousand men fought during the games of Trajan.(495)

Nero illumined his gardens during the night by Christians burning in their

pitchy shirts.(496) Under Domitian, an army of feeble dwarfs was compelled

to fight,(497) and, more than once, female gladiators descended to perish

in the arena.(498) A criminal personating a fictitious character was

nailed to a cross, and there torn by a bear.(499) Another, representing

Scævola, was compelled to hold his hand in a real flame.(500) A third, as

Hercules, was burnt alive upon the pile.(501) So intense was the craving

for blood, that a prince was less unpopular if he neglected the

distribution of corn than if he neglected the games; and Nero himself, on

account of his munificence in this respect, was probably the sovereign who

was most beloved by the Roman multitude. Heliogabalus and Galerius are

reported, when dining, to have regaled themselves with the sight of

criminals torn by wild beasts. It was said of the latter that “he never

supped without human blood.”(502)

It is well for us to look steadily on such facts as these. They display

more vividly than any mere philosophical disquisition the abyss of

depravity into which it is possible for human nature to sink. They furnish

us with striking proofs of the reality of the moral progress we have

attained, and they enable us in some degree to estimate the regenerating

influence that Christianity has exercised in the world. For the

destruction of the gladiatorial games is all its work. Philosophers,

indeed, might deplore them, gentle natures might shrink from their

contagion, but to the multitude they possessed a fascination which nothing

but the new religion could overcome.

Nor was this fascination surprising, for no pageant has ever combined more

powerful elements of attraction. The magnificent circus, the gorgeous

dresses of the assembled Court, the contagion of a passionate enthusiasm

thrilling almost visibly through the mighty throng, the breathless silence

of expectation, the wild cheers bursting simultaneously from eighty

thousand tongues, and echoing to the farthest outskirts of the city, the

rapid alternations of the fray, the deeds of splendid courage that were

manifested, were all well fitted to entrance the imagination. The crimes

and servitude of the gladiator were for a time forgotten in the blaze of

glory that surrounded him. Representing to the highest degree that courage

which the Romans deemed the first of virtues, the cynosure of countless

eyes, the chief object of conversation in the metropolis of the universe,

destined, if victorious, to be immortalised in the mosaic and the

sculpture,(503) he not unfrequently rose to heroic grandeur. The gladiator

Spartacus for three years defied the bravest armies of Rome. The greatest

of Roman generals had chosen gladiators for his body-guard.(504) A band of

gladiators, faithful even to death, followed the fortunes of the fallen

Antony, when all besides had deserted him.(505) Beautiful eyes, trembling

with passion, looked down upon the fight, and the noblest ladies in Rome,

even the empress herself, had been known to crave the victor’s love.(506)

We read of gladiators lamenting that the games occurred so seldom,(507)

complaining bitterly if they were not permitted to descend into the

arena,(508) scorning to fight except with the most powerful

antagonists,(509) laughing aloud as their wounds were dressed,(510) and at

last, when prostrate in the dust, calmly turning their throats to the

sword of the conqueror.(511) The enthusiasm that gathered round them was

so intense that special laws were found necessary, and were sometimes

insufficient to prevent patricians from enlisting in their ranks,(512)

while the tranquil courage with which they never failed to die supplied

the philosopher with his most striking examples.(513) The severe

continence that was required before the combat, contrasting vividly with

the licentiousness of Roman life, had even invested them with something of

a moral dignity; and it is a singularly suggestive fact that of all pagan

characters the gladiator was selected by the Fathers as the closest

approximation to a Christian model.(514) St. Augustine tells us how one of

his friends, being drawn to the spectacle, endeavoured by closing his eyes

to guard against a fascination he knew to be sinful. A sudden cry caused

him to break his resolution, and he never could withdraw his gaze

again.(515)

And while the influences of the amphitheatre gained a complete ascendancy

over the populace, the Roman was not without excuses that could lull his

moral feelings to repose. The games, as I have said, were originally human

sacrifices—religious rites sacred to the dead—and it was argued that the

death of the gladiator was both more honourable and more merciful than

that of the passive victim, who, in the Homeric age, was sacrificed at the

tomb. The combatants were either professional gladiators, slaves,

criminals, or military captives. The lot of the first was voluntary. The

second had for a long time been regarded as almost beneath or beyond a

freeman’s care; but when the enlarging circle of sympathy had made the

Romans regard their slaves as “a kind of second human nature,”(516) they

perceived the atrocity of exposing them in the games, and an edict of the

emperor forbade it.(517) The third had been condemned to death, and as the

victorious gladiator was at least sometimes pardoned,(518) a permission to

fight was regarded as an act of mercy. The fate of the fourth could not

strike the early Roman with the horror it would now inspire, for the right

of the conquerors to massacre their prisoners was almost universally

admitted.(519) But, beyond the point of desiring the games to be in some

degree restricted, extremely few of the moralists of the Roman Empire ever

advanced. That it was a horrible and demoralising thing to make the

spectacle of the deaths, even of guilty men, a form of popular amusement,

was a position which no Roman school had attained, and which was only

reached by a very few individuals. Cicero observes, “that the gladiatorial

spectacles appear to some cruel and inhuman,” and, he adds, “I know not

whether as they are now conducted it is not so, but when guilty men are

compelled to fight, no better discipline against suffering and death can

be presented to the eye.”(520) Seneca, it is true, adopts a far nobler

language. He denounced the games with a passionate eloquence. He refuted

indignantly the argument derived from the guilt of the combatants, and

declared that under every form and modification these amusements were

brutalising, savage, and detestable.(521) Plutarch went even farther, and

condemned the combats of wild beasts on the ground that we should have a

bond of sympathy with all sentient beings, and that the sight of blood and

of suffering is necessarily and essentially depraving.(522) To these

instances we may add Petronius, who condemned the shows in his poem on the

civil war; Junius Mauricus, who refused to permit the inhabitants of

Vienne to celebrate them, and replied to the remonstrances of the emperor,

“Would to Heaven it were possible to abolish such spectacles, even at

Rome!”(523) and, above all, Marcus Aurelius, who, by compelling the

gladiators to fight with blunted swords, rendered them for a time

comparatively harmless.(524) But these, with the Athenian remonstrances I

have already noticed, are almost the only instances now remaining of pagan

protests against the most conspicuous as well as the most atrocious

feature of the age. Juvenal, whose unsparing satire has traversed the

whole field of Roman manners, and who denounces fiercely all cruelty to

slaves, has repeatedly noticed the gladiatorial shows, but on no single

occasion does he intimate that they were inconsistent with humanity. Of

all the great historians who recorded them, not one seems to have been

conscious that he was recording a barbarity, not one appears to have seen

in them any greater evils than an increasing tendency to pleasure and the

excessive multiplication of a dangerous class. The Roman sought to make

men brave and fearless, rather than gentle and humane, and in his eyes

that spectacle was to be applauded which steeled the heart against the

fear of death, even at the sacrifice of the affections. Titus and Trajan,

in whose reigns, probably, the greatest number of shows were compressed

into a short time, were both men of conspicuous clemency, and no Roman

seems to have imagined that the fact of 3,000 men having been compelled to

fight under the one, and 10,000 under the other, cast the faintest shadow

upon their characters. Suetonius mentions, as an instance of the

amiability of Titus, that he was accustomed to jest with the people during

the combats of the gladiators,(525) and Pliny especially eulogised Trajan

because he did not patronise spectacles that enervate the character, but

rather those which impel men “to noble wounds and to the contempt of

death.”(526) The same writer, who was himself in many ways conspicuous for

his gentleness and charity, having warmly commended a friend for acceding

to a petition of the people of Verona, who desired a spectacle, adds this

startling sentence: “After so general a request, to have refused would not

have been firmness—it would have been cruelty.”(527) Even in the closing

years of the fourth century, the præfect Symmachus, who was regarded as

one of the most estimable pagans of his age, collected some Saxon

prisoners to fight in honour of his son. They strangled themselves in

prison, and Symmachus lamented the misfortune that had befallen him from

their “impious hands,” but endeavoured to calm his feelings by recalling

the patience of Socrates and the precepts of philosophy.(528)

While, however, I have no desire to disguise or palliate the extreme

atrocity of this aspect of Roman life, there are certain very natural

exaggerations, against which it is necessary for us to guard. There are in

human nature, and more especially in the exercise of the benevolent

affections, inequalities, inconsistencies, and anomalies, of which

theorists do not always take account. We should be altogether in error if

we supposed that a man who took pleasure in a gladiatorial combat in

ancient Rome was necessarily as inhuman as a modern would be who took

pleasure in a similar spectacle. A man who falls but a little below the

standard of his own merciful age is often in reality far worse than a man

who had conformed to the standard of a much more barbarous age, even

though the latter will do some things with perfect equanimity from which

the other would recoil with horror. We have a much greater power than is

sometimes supposed of localising both our benevolent and malevolent

feelings. If a man is very kind, or very harsh to some particular class,

this is usually, and on the whole justly, regarded as an index of his

general disposition, but the inference is not infallible, and it may

easily be pushed too far. There are some who appear to expend all their

kindly feelings on a single class, and to treat with perfect indifference

all outside it. There are others who regard a certain class as quite

outside the pale of their sympathies, while in other spheres their

affections prove lively and constant. There are many who would accede

without the faintest reluctance to a barbarous custom, but would be quite

incapable of an equally barbarous act which custom had not consecrated.

Our affections are so capricious in their nature that it is continually

necessary to correct by detailed experience the most plausible deductions.

Thus, for example, it is a very unquestionable and a very important truth

that cruelty to animals naturally indicates and promotes a habit of mind

which leads to cruelty to men; and that, on the other hand, an

affectionate and merciful disposition to animals commonly implies a gentle

and amiable nature. But, if we adopted this principle as an infallible

criterion of humanity, we should soon find ourselves at fault. To the

somewhat too hackneyed anecdote of Domitian gratifying his savage

propensities by killing flies,(529) we might oppose Spinoza, one of the

purest, most gentle, most benevolent of mankind, of whom it is related

that almost the only amusement of his life was putting flies into spiders’

webs, and watching their struggles and their deaths.(530) It has been

observed that a very large proportion of the men who during the French

Revolution proved themselves most absolutely indifferent to human

suffering were deeply attached to animals. Fournier was devoted to a

squirrel, Couthon to a spaniel, Panis to two gold pheasants, Chaumette to

an aviary, Marat kept doves.(531) Bacon has noticed that the Turks, who

are a cruel people, are nevertheless conspicuous for their kindness to

animals, and he mentions the instance of a Christian boy who was nearly

stoned to death for gagging a long-billed fowl.(532) In Egypt there are

hospitals for superannuated cats, and the most loathsome insects are

regarded with tenderness; but human life is treated as if it were of no

account, and human suffering scarcely elicits a care.(533) The same

contrast appears more or less in all Eastern nations. On the other hand,

travellers are unanimous in declaring that in Spain an intense passion for

the bull-fight is quite compatible with the most active benevolence and

the most amiable disposition. Again, to pass to another sphere, it is not

uncommon to find conquerors, who will sacrifice with perfect callousness

great masses of men to their ambition, but who, in their dealings with

isolated individuals, are distinguished by an invariable clemency.

Anomalies of this kind continually appear in the Roman population. The

very men who looked down with delight when the sand of the arena was

reddened with human blood, made the theatre ring with applause when

Terence, in his famous line, proclaimed the universal brotherhood of man.

When the senate, being unable to discover the murderer of a patrician,

resolved to put his four hundred slaves to death, the people rose in open

rebellion against the sentence.(534) A knight named Erixo, who in the days

of Augustus had so scourged his son that he died of the effects, was

nearly torn to pieces by the indignant population.(535) The elder Cato

deprived a senator of his rank, because he had fixed an execution at such

an hour that his mistress could enjoy the spectacle.(536) Even in the

amphitheatre there were certain traces of a milder spirit. Drusus, the

people complained, took too visible a pleasure at the sight of blood;(537)

Caligula was too curious in watching death;(538) Caracalla, when a boy,

won enthusiastic plaudits by shedding tears at the execution of

criminals.(539) Among the most popular spectacles at Rome was

rope-dancing, and then, as now, the cord being stretched at a great height

above the ground, the apparent, and indeed real, danger added an evil zest

to the performances. In the reign of Marcus Aurelius an accident had

occurred, and the emperor, with his usual sensitive humanity, ordered that

no rope-dancer should perform without a net or a mattress being spread out

below. It is a singularly curious fact that this precaution, which no

Christian nation has adopted, continued in force during more than a

century of the worst period of the Roman Empire, when the blood of

captives was poured out like water in the Colosseum.(540) The standard of

humanity was very low, but the sentiment was still manifest, though its

displays were capricious and inconsistent.

The sketch I have now drawn will, I think, be sufficient to display the

broad chasm that existed between the Roman moralists and the Roman people.

On the one hand we find a system of ethics, of which when we consider the

range and beauty of its precepts, the sublimity of the motives to which it

appealed, and its perfect freedom from superstitious elements, it is not

too much to say that though it may have been equalled, it has never been

surpassed. On the other hand, we find a society almost absolutely

destitute of moralising institutions, occupations, or beliefs, existing

under an economical and political system which inevitably led to general

depravity, and passionately addicted to the most brutalising amusements.

The moral code, while it expanded in theoretical catholicity, had

contracted in practical application. The early Romans had a very narrow

and imperfect standard of duty, but their patriotism, their military

system, and their enforced simplicity of life had made that standard

essentially popular. The later Romans had attained a very high and

spiritual conception of duty, but the philosopher with his group of

disciples, or the writer with his few readers, had scarcely any point of

contact with the people. The great practical problem of the ancient

philosophers was how they could act upon the masses. Simply to tell men

what is virtue, and to extol its beauty, is insufficient. Something more

must be done if the characters of nations are to be moulded and inveterate

vices eradicated.

This problem the Roman Stoics were incapable of meeting, but they did what

lay in their power, and their efforts, though altogether inadequate to the

disease, were by no means contemptible. In the first place they raised up

many great and good rulers who exerted all the influence of their position

in the cause of virtue. In most cases these reforms were abolished on the

accession of the first bad emperor, but there were at least some that

remained. It has been observed that the luxury of the table, which had

acquired the most extravagant proportions during the period that elapsed

between the battle of Actium and the reign of Galba, began from this

period to decline, and the change is chiefly attributed to Vespasian, who

had in a measure reformed the Roman aristocracy by the introduction of

many provincials, and who made his court an example of the strictest

frugality.(541) The period from the accession of Nerva to the death of

Marcus Aurelius, comprising no less than eighty-four years, exhibits a

uniformity of good government which no other despotic monarchy has

equalled. Each of the five emperors who then reigned deserves to be placed

among the best rulers who have ever lived. Trajan and Hadrian, whose

personal characters were most defective, were men of great and conspicuous

genius. Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius, though less distinguished as

politicians, were among the most perfectly virtuous men who have ever sat

on a throne. During forty years of this period, perfect, unbroken peace

reigned over the entire civilised globe. The barbarian encroachments had

not yet begun. The distinct nationalities that composed the Empire,

gratified by perfect municipal and by perfect intellectual freedom, had

lost all care for political liberty, and little more than three hundred

thousand soldiers guarded a territory which is now protected by much more

than three millions.(542)

In creating this condition of affairs, Stoicism, as the chief moral agent

of the Empire, had a considerable though not a preponderating influence.

In other ways its influence was more evident and exclusive. It was a

fundamental maxim of the sect, “that the sage should take part in public

life,”(543) and it was therefore impossible that Stoicism should flourish

without producing a resuscitation of patriotism. The same moral impulse

which transformed the Neoplatonist into a dreaming mystic and the Catholic

into a useless hermit, impelled the Stoic to the foremost post of danger

in the service of his country. While landmark after landmark of Roman

virtue was submerged, while luxury and scepticism and foreign habits and

foreign creeds were corroding the whole framework of the national life,

amid the last paroxysms of expiring liberty, amid the hideous carnival of

vice that soon followed upon its fall, the Stoic remained unchanged, the

representative and the sustainer of the past. A party which had acquired

the noble title of the Party of Virtue, guided by such men as Cato or

Thrasea or Helvidius or Burrhus, upheld the banner of Roman virtue and

Roman liberty in the darkest hours of despotism and of apostasy. Like all

men who carry an intense religious fervour into politics, they were often

narrow-minded and intolerant, blind to the inevitable changes of society,

incapable of compromise, turbulent and inopportune in their demands,(544)

but they more than redeemed their errors by their noble constancy and

courage. The austere purity of their lives, and the heroic grandeur of

their deaths, kept alive the tradition of Roman liberty even under a Nero

or a Domitian. While such men existed it was felt that all was not lost.

There was still a rallying point of freedom, a seed of virtue that might

germinate anew, a living protest against the despotism and the corruption

of the Empire.

A third and still more important service which Stoicism rendered to

popular morals was in the formation of Roman jurisprudence.(545) Of all

the many forms of intellectual exertion in which Greece and Rome struggled

for the mastery this is perhaps the only one in which the superiority of

the latter is indisputable. “To rule the nations” was justly pronounced by

the Roman poet the supreme glory of his countrymen, and their

administrative genius is even now unrivalled in history. A deep reverence

for law was long one of their chief moral characteristics, and in order

that it might be inculcated from the earliest years it was a part of the

Roman system of education to oblige the children to repeat by rote the

code of the decemvirs.(546) The laws of the Republic, however, being an

expression of the contracted, local, military, and sacerdotal spirit that

dominated among the people, were necessarily unfit for the political and

intellectual expansion of the Empire, and the process of renovation which

was begun under Augustus by the Stoic Labeo,(547) was continued with great

zeal under Hadrian and Alexander Severus, and issued in the famous

compilations of Theodosius and Justinian. In this movement we have to

observe two parts. There were certain general rules of guidance laid down

by the great Roman lawyers which constituted what may be called the ideal

of the jurisconsults—the ends to which their special enactments tended—the

principles of equity to guide the judge when the law was silent or

ambiguous. There were also definite enactments to meet specific cases. The

first part was simply borrowed from the Stoics, whose doctrines and method

thus passed from the narrow circle of a philosophical academy and became

the avowed moral beacons of the civilised globe. The fundamental

difference between Stoicism and early Roman thought was that the former

maintained the existence of a bond of unity among mankind which

transcended or annihilated all class or national limitations. The

essential characteristic of the Stoical method was the assertion of the

existence of a certain law of nature to which it was the end of philosophy

to conform. These tenets were laid down in the most unqualified language

by the Roman lawyers. “As far as natural law is concerned,” said Ulpian,

“all men are equal.”(548) “Nature,” said Paul, “has established among us a

certain relationship.”(549) “By natural law,” Ulpian declared, “all men

are born free.”(550) “Slavery” was defined by Florentinus as “a custom of

the law of nations, by which one man, contrary to the law of nature, is

subjected to the dominion of another.”(551) In accordance with these

principles it became a maxim among the Roman lawyers that in every

doubtful case where the alternative of slavery or freedom was at issue,

the decision of the judge should be towards the latter.(552)

The Roman legislation was in a twofold manner the child of philosophy. It

was in the first place itself formed upon the philosophical model, for,

instead of being a mere empirical system adjusted to the existing

requirements of society, it laid down abstract principles of right to

which it endeavoured to conform;(553) and, in the next place, these

principles were borrowed directly from Stoicism. The prominence the sect

had acquired among Roman moralists, its active intervention in public

affairs, and also the precision and brevity of its phraseology, had

recommended it to the lawyers,(554) and the union then effected between

the legal and philosophical spirit is felt to the present day. To the

Stoics and the Roman lawyers is mainly due the clear recognition of the

existence of a law of nature above and beyond all human enactments which

has been the basis of the best moral and of the most influential though

most chimerical political speculation of later ages, and the renewed study

of Roman law was an important element in the revival that preceded the

Reformation.

It is not necessary for my present purpose to follow into very minute

detail the application of these principles to practical legislation. It is

sufficient to say, that there were few departments into which the catholic

and humane principles of Stoicism were not in some degree carried. In the

political world, as we have already seen, the right of Roman citizenship,

with the protection and the legal privileges attached to it, from being

the monopoly of a small class, was gradually but very widely diffused. In

the domestic sphere, the power which the old laws had given to the father

of the family, though not destroyed, was greatly abridged, and an

important innovation, which is well worthy of a brief notice, was thus

introduced into the social system of the Empire.

It is probable that in the chronology of morals, domestic virtue takes the

precedence of all others; but in its earliest phase it consists of a

single article—the duty of absolute submission to the head of the

household. It is only at a later period, and when the affections have been

in some degree evoked, that the reciprocity of duty is felt, and the whole

tendency of civilisation is to diminish the disparity between the

different members of the family. The process by which the wife from a

simple slave becomes the companion and equal of her husband, I shall

endeavour to trace in a future chapter. The relations of the father to his

children are profoundly modified by the new position the affections assume

in education, which in a rude nation rests chiefly upon authority, but in

a civilised community upon sympathy. In Rome the absolute authority of the

head of the family was the centre and archetype of that whole system of

discipline and subordination which it was the object of the legislator to

sustain. Filial reverence was enforced as the first of duties. It is the

one virtue which Virgil attributed in any remarkable degree to the founder

of the race. The marks of external respect paid to old men were scarcely

less than in Sparta.(555) It was the boast of the lawyers that in no other

nation had the parent so great an authority over his children.(556) The

child was indeed the absolute slave of his father, who had a right at any

time to take away his life and dispose of his entire property. He could

look to no time during the life of his father in which he would be freed

from the thraldom. The man of fifty, the consul, the general, or the

tribune, was in this respect in the same position as the infant, and might

at any moment be deprived of all the earnings of his labour, driven to the

most menial employments, or even put to death, by the paternal

command.(557)

There can, I think, be little question that this law, at least in the

latter period of its existence, defeated its own object. There are few

errors of education to which more unhappy homes may be traced than

this—that parents have sought to command the obedience, before they have

sought to win the confidence, of their children. This was the path which

the Roman legislator indicated to the parent, and its natural consequence

was to chill the sympathies and arouse the resentment of the young. Of all

the forms of virtue filial affection is perhaps that which appears most

rarely in Roman history. In the plays of Plautus it is treated much as

conjugal fidelity was treated in England by the playwriters of the

Restoration. An historian of the reign of Tiberius has remarked that the

civil wars were equally remarkable for the many examples they supplied of

the devotion of wives to their husbands, of the devotion of slaves to

their masters, and of the treachery or indifference of sons to their

fathers.(558)

The reforms that were effected during the pagan empire did not reconstruct

the family, but they at least greatly mitigated its despotism. The

profound change of feeling that had taken place on the subject is shown by

the contrast between the respectful, though somewhat shrinking,

acquiescence, with which the ancient Romans regarded parents who had put

their children to death,(559) and the indignation excited under Augustus

by the act of Erixo. Hadrian, apparently by a stretch of despotic power,

banished a man who had assassinated his son.(560) Infanticide was

forbidden, though not seriously repressed, but the right of putting to

death an adult child had long been obsolete, when Alexander Severus

formally withdrew it from the father. The property of children was also in

some slight degree protected. A few instances are recorded of wills that

were annulled because they had disinherited legitimate sons,(561) and

Hadrian, following a policy that had been feebly initiated by his two

predecessors, gave the son an absolute possession of whatever he might

gain in the military service. Diocletian rendered the sale of children by

the fathers, in all cases, illegal.(562)

In the field of slavery the legislative reforms were more important. This

institution, indeed, is one that meets us at every turn of the moral

history of Rome, and on two separate occasions in the present chapter I

have already had occasion to notice it. I have shown that the great

prominence of the slave element in Roman life was one of the causes of the

enlargement of sympathies that characterises the philosophy of the Empire,

and also that slavery was in a very high degree, and in several distinct

ways, a cause of the corruption of the free classes. In considering the

condition of the slaves themselves, we may distinguish, I think, three

periods. In the earlier and simpler days of the Republic, the head of the

family was absolute master of his slaves, but circumstances in a great

measure mitigated the evil of the despotism. The slaves were very few in

number. Each Roman proprietor had commonly one or two who assisted him in

cultivating the soil, and superintended his property when he was absent in

the army. In the frugal habits of the time, the master was brought into

the most intimate connection with his slaves. He shared their labours and

their food, and the control he exercised over them, in most cases probably

differed little from that which he exercised over his sons. Under such

circumstances, great barbarity to slaves, though always possible, was not

likely to be common, and the protection of religion was added to the force

of habit. Hercules, the god of labour, was the special patron of slaves.

There was a legend that Sparta had once been nearly destroyed by an

earthquake sent by Neptune to avenge the treacherous murder of some

Helots.(563) In Rome, it was said, Jupiter had once in a dream

commissioned a man to express to the senate the divine anger at the cruel

treatment of a slave during the public games.(564) By the pontifical law,

slaves were exempted from field labours on the religious festivals.(565)

The Saturnalia and Matronalia, which were especially intended for their

benefit, were the most popular holidays in Rome, and on these occasions

the slaves were accustomed to sit at the same table with their

masters.(566)

Even at this time, however, it is probable that great atrocities were

occasionally committed. Everything was permitted by law, although it is

probable that the censor in cases of extreme abuse might interfere, and

the aristocratic feelings of the early Roman, though corrected in a

measure by the associations of daily labour, sometimes broke out in a

fierce scorn for all classes but his own. The elder Cato, who may be

regarded as a type of the Romans of the earlier period, speaks of slaves

simply as instruments for obtaining wealth, and he encouraged masters,

both by his precept and his example, to sell them as useless when aged and

infirm.(567)

In the second period, the condition of slaves had greatly deteriorated.

The victories of Rome, especially in the East, had introduced into the

city innumerable slaves(568) and the wildest luxury, and the despotism of

the master remained unqualified by law, while the habits of life that had

originally mitigated it had disappeared. The religious sentiments of the

people were at the same time fatally impaired, and many new causes

conspired to aggravate the evil. The passion for gladiatorial shows had

begun, and it continually produced a savage indifference to the infliction

of pain. The servile wars of Sicily, and the still more formidable revolt

of Spartacus, had shaken Italy to the centre, and the shock was felt in

every household. “As many enemies as slaves,” had become a Roman proverb.

The fierce struggles of barbarian captives were repaid by fearful

punishments, and many thousands of revolted slaves perished on the cross.

An atrocious law, intended to secure the safety of the citizens, provided

that if a master were murdered, all the slaves in his house, who were not

in chains or absolutely helpless through illness, should be put to

death.(569)

Numerous acts of the most odious barbarity were committed. The well-known

anecdotes of Flaminius ordering a slave to be killed to gratify, by the

spectacle, the curiosity of a guest; of Vedius Pollio feeding his fish on

the flesh of slaves; and of Augustus sentencing a slave, who had killed

and eaten a favourite quail, to crucifixion, are the extreme examples that

are recorded; for we need not regard as an historical fact the famous

picture in Juvenal of a Roman lady, in a moment of caprice, ordering her

unoffending servant to be crucified. We have, however, many other very

horrible glimpses of slave life at the close of the Republic and in the

early days of the Empire. The marriage of slaves was entirely unrecognised

by law, and in their case the words adultery, incest, or polygamy had no

legal meaning. Their testimony was in general only received in the

law-courts when they were under torture. When executed for a crime, their

deaths were of a most hideous kind. The ergastula, or private prisons, of

the masters were frequently their only sleeping-places. Old and infirm

slaves were constantly exposed to perish on an island of the Tiber. We

read of slaves chained as porters to the doors, and cultivating the fields

in chains. Ovid and Juvenal describe the fierce Roman ladies tearing their

servants’ faces, and thrusting the long pins of their brooches into their

flesh. The master, at the close of the Republic, had full power to sell

his slave as a gladiator, or as a combatant with wild beasts.(570)

All this is very horrible, but it must not be forgotten that there was

another side to the picture. It is the custom of many ecclesiastical

writers to paint the pagan society of the Empire as a kind of pandemonium,

and with this object they collect the facts I have cited, which are for

the most part narrated by Roman satirists or historians, as examples of

the most extreme and revolting cruelty; they represent them as fair

specimens of the ordinary treatment of the servile class, and they simply

exclude from their consideration the many qualifying facts that might be

alleged. Although the marriage of a slave was not legally recognised, it

was sanctioned by custom, and it does not appear to have been common to

separate his family.(571) Two customs to which I have already referred

distinguish ancient slavery broadly from that of modern times. The

peculium, or private property of slaves, was freely recognised by masters,

to whom, however, after the death of the slave, part or all of it usually

reverted,(572) though some masters permitted their slaves to dispose of it

by will.(573) The enfranchisement of slaves was also carried on to such an

extent as seriously to affect the population of the city. It appears from

a passage in Cicero that an industrious and well-conducted captive might

commonly look forward to his freedom in six years.(574) Isolated acts of

great cruelty undoubtedly occurred; but public opinion strongly

reprehended them, and Seneca assures us that masters who ill-treated their

slaves were pointed at and insulted in the streets.(575) The slave was not

necessarily the degraded being he has since appeared. The physician who

tended the Roman in his sickness, the tutor to whom he confided the

education of his son, the artists whose works commanded the admiration of

the city, were usually slaves. Slaves sometimes mixed with their masters

in the family, ate habitually with them at the same table,(576) and were

regarded by them with the warmest affection. Tiro, the slave and

afterwards the freedman of Cicero, compiled his master’s letters, and has

preserved some in which Cicero addressed him in terms of the most sincere

and delicate friendship. I have already referred to the letter in which

the younger Pliny poured out his deep sorrow for the death of some of his

slaves, and endeavoured to console himself with the thought that as he had

emancipated them before their death, at least they had died free.(577)

Epictetus passed at once from slavery to the friendship of an

emperor.(578) The great multiplication of slaves, though it removed them

from the sympathy of their masters, must at least have in most cases

alleviated their burdens. The application of torture to slave witnesses,

horrible as it was, was a matter of rare occurrence, and was carefully

restricted by law.(579) Much vice was undoubtedly fostered, but yet the

annals of the civil wars and of the Empire are crowded with the most

splendid instances of the fidelity of slaves. In many cases they refused

the boon of liberty and defied the most horrible tortures rather than

betray their masters, accompanied them in their flight when all others had

abandoned them, displayed undaunted courage and untiring ingenuity in

rescuing them from danger, and in some cases saved the lives of their

owners by the deliberate sacrifice of their own.(580) This was, indeed,

for some time the pre-eminent virtue of Rome, and it proves conclusively

that the masters were not so tyrannical, and that the slaves were not so

degraded, as is sometimes alleged.

The duty of humanity to slaves had been at all times one of those which

the philosophers had most ardently inculcated. Plato and Aristotle, Zeno

and Epicurus, were, on this point, substantially agreed.(581) The Roman

Stoics gave the duty a similar prominence in their teaching, and Seneca

especially has filled pages with exhortations to masters to remember that

the accident of position in no degree affects the real dignity of men,

that the slave may be free by virtue while the master may be a slave by

vice, and that it is the duty of a good man to abstain not only from all

cruelty, but even from all feeling of contempt towards his slaves.(582)

But these exhortations, in which some have imagined that they have

discovered the influence of Christianity, were, in fact, simply an echo of

the teaching of ancient Greece, and especially of Zeno, the founder of

Stoicism, who had laid down, long before the dawn of Christianity, the

broad principles that ’all men are by nature equal, and that virtue alone

establishes a difference between them.’(583) The softening influence of

the peace of the Antonines assisted this movement of humanity, and the

slaves derived a certain incidental benefit from one of the worst features

of the despotism of the Cæsars. The emperors, who continually apprehended

plots against their lives or power, encouraged numerous spies around the

more important of their subjects, and the facility with which slaves could

discover the proceedings of their masters inclined the Government in their

favour.

Under all these influences many laws were promulgated which profoundly

altered the legal position of the slaves, and opened what may be termed

the third period of Roman slavery. The Petronian law, which was issued by

Augustus, or, more probably, by Nero, forbade the master to condemn his

slave to combat with wild beasts without a sentence from a judge.(584)

Under Claudius, some citizens exposed their sick slaves on the island of

Æsculapius in the Tiber, to avoid the trouble of tending them, and the

emperor decreed that if the slave so exposed recovered from his sickness

he should become free, and also, that masters who killed their slaves

instead of exposing them should be punished as murderers.(585) It is

possible that succour was afforded to the abandoned slave in the temple of

Æsculapius,(586) and it would appear from these laws that the wanton

slaughter of a slave was already illegal. About this time the statue of

the emperor had become an asylum for slaves.(587) Under Nero, a judge was

appointed to hear their complaints, and was instructed to punish masters

who treated them with barbarity, made them the instruments of lust, or

withheld from them a sufficient quantity of the necessaries of life.(588)

A considerable pause appears to have ensued; but Domitian made a law,

which was afterwards reiterated, forbidding the Oriental custom of

mutilating slaves for sensual purposes, and the reforms were renewed with

great energy in the period of the Antonines. Hadrian and his two

successors formally deprived masters of the right of killing their slaves;

forbade them to sell slaves to the lanistæ, or speculators in gladiators;

destroyed the ergastula, or private prisons; ordered that, when a master

was murdered, those slaves only should be tortured who were within

hearing;(589) appointed officers through all the provinces to hear the

complaints of slaves; enjoined that no master should treat his slaves with

excessive severity; and commanded that, when such severity was proved, the

master should be compelled to sell the slave he had ill-treated.(590) When

we add to these laws the broad maxims of equity asserting the essential

equality of the human race, which the jurists had borrowed from the

Stoics, and which supplied the principles to guide the judges in their

decisions, it must be admitted that the slave code of Imperial Rome

compares not unfavourably with those of some Christian nations.

While a considerable portion of the principles, and even much of the

phraseology, of Stoicism passed into the system of public law, the Roman

philosophers had other more direct means of acting on the people. On

occasions of family bereavement, when the mind is most susceptible of

impressions, they were habitually called in to console the survivors.

Dying men asked their comfort and support in the last hours of their life.

They became the directors of conscience to numbers who resorted to them

for a solution of perplexing cases of practical morals, or under the

influence of despondency or remorse.(591) They had their special

exhortations for every vice, and their remedies adapted to every variety

of character. Many cases were cited of the conversion of the vicious or

the careless, who had been sought out and fascinated by the

philosopher,(592) and who, under his guidance, had passed through a long

course of moral discipline, and had at last attained a high degree of

virtue. Education fell in a great degree into their hands. Many great

families kept a philosopher among them in what in modern language might be

termed the capacity of a domestic chaplain,(593) while a system of popular

preaching was created and widely diffused.

Of these preachers there were two classes who differed greatly in their

characters and their methods. The first, who have been very happily termed

the “monks of Stoicism,”(594) were the Cynics, who appear to have assumed

among the later moralists of the Pagan empire a position somewhat

resembling that of the mendicant orders in Catholicism. In a singularly

curious dissertation of Epictetus,(595) we have a picture of the ideal at

which a Cynic should aim, and it is impossible in reading it not to be

struck by the resemblance it bears to the missionary friar. The Cynic

should be a man devoting his entire life to the instruction of mankind. He

must be unmarried, for he must have no family affections to divert or to

dilute his energies. He must wear the meanest dress, sleep upon the bare

ground, feed upon the simplest food, abstain from all earthly pleasures,

and yet exhibit to the world the example of uniform cheerfulness and

content. No one, under pain of provoking the Divine anger, should embrace

such a career, unless he believes himself to be called and assisted by

Jupiter. It is his mission to go among men as the ambassador of God,

rebuking, in season and out of season, their frivolity, their cowardice,

and their vice. He must stop the rich man in the market-place. He must

preach to the populace in the highway. He must know no respect and no

fear. He must look upon all men as his sons, and upon all women as his

daughters. In the midst of a jeering crowd, he must exhibit such a placid

calm that men may imagine him to be of stone. Ill-treatment, and exile,

and death must have no terror in his eyes, for the discipline of his life

should emancipate him from every earthly tie; and, when he is beaten, “he

should love those who beat him, for he is at once the father and the

brother of all men.”

A curious contrast to the Cynic was the philosophic rhetorician, who

gathered around his chair all that was most brilliant in Roman or Athenian

society. The passion for oratory which the free institutions of Greece had

formed, had survived the causes that produced it, and given rise to a very

singular but a very influential profession; which, though excluded from

the Roman Republic, acquired a great development after the destruction of

political liberty. The rhetoricians were a kind of itinerant lecturers,

who went about from city to city, delivering harangues that were often

received with the keenest interest. For the most part, neither their

characters nor their talents appear to have deserved much respect.

Numerous anecdotes are recorded of their vanity and rapacity, and their

success was a striking proof of the decadence of public taste.(596) They

had cultivated the histrionic part of oratory with the most minute

attention. The arrangement of their hair, the folds of their dresses, all

their postures and gestures were studied with artistic care. They had

determined the different kinds of action that are appropriate for each

branch of a discourse and for each form of eloquence. Sometimes they

personated characters in Homer or in ancient Greek history, and delivered

speeches which those characters might have delivered in certain

conjunctures of their lives. Sometimes they awakened the admiration of

their audience by making a fly, a cockroach, dust, smoke, a mouse, or a

parrot the subject of their eloquent eulogy.(597) Others, again, exercised

their ingenuity in defending some glaring paradox or sophism, or in

debating some intricate case of law or morals, or they delivered literary

lectures remarkable for a minute but captious and fastidious criticism.

Some of the rhetoricians recited only harangues prepared with the most

elaborate care, others were ready debaters, and they travelled from city

to city, challenging opponents to discuss some subtle and usually

frivolous question. The poet Juvenal and the satirist Lucian had both for

a time followed this profession. Many of the most eminent acquired immense

wealth, travelled with a splendid retinue, and excited transports of

enthusiasm in the cities they visited. They were often charged by cities

to appear before the emperor to plead for a remission of taxes, or of the

punishment due for some offence. They became in a great measure the

educators of the people, and contributed very largely to form and direct

their taste.

It had been from the first the custom of some philosophers to adopt this

profession, and to expound in the form of rhetorical lectures the

principles of their school. In the Flavian period and in the age of the

Antonines, this alliance of philosophy, and especially of Stoical

philosophy, with rhetoric became more marked, and the foundation of

liberally endowed chairs of rhetoric and philosophy by Vespasian, Hadrian,

and Marcus Aurelius contributed to sustain it. Discourses of the Platonist

Maximus of Tyre, and of the Stoic Dion Chrysostom, have come down to us,

and they are both of a high order of intrinsic merit. The first turn

chiefly on such subjects as the comparative excellence of active and

contemplative life, the pure and noble conceptions of the Divine nature

which underlie the fables or allegories of Homer, the dæmon of Socrates,

the Platonic notions of the Divinity, the duty of prayer, the end of

philosophy, and the ethics of love.(598) Dion Chrysostom, in his orations,

expounded the noblest and purest theism, examined the place which images

should occupy in worship, advocated humanity to slaves, and was, perhaps,

the earliest writer in the Roman Empire who denounced hereditary slavery

as illegitimate.(599) His life was very eventful and very noble. He had

become famous as a sophist and rhetorician, skilled in the laborious

frivolities of the profession. Calamity, however, and the writings of

Plato induced him to abandon them and devote himself exclusively to the

improvement of mankind. Having defended with a generous rashness a man who

had been proscribed by the tyranny of Domitian, he was compelled to fly

from Rome in the garb of a beggar; and, carrying with him only a work of

Plato and a speech of Demosthenes, he travelled to the most distant

frontiers of the empire. He gained his livelihood by the work of his

hands, for he refused to receive money for his discourses; but he taught

and captivated the Greek colonists who were scattered among the

barbarians, and even the barbarians themselves. Upon the assassination of

Domitian, when the legions hesitated to give their allegiance to Nerva,

the eloquence of Dion Chrysostom overcame their irresolution. By the same

eloquence he more than once appeased seditions in Alexandria and the Greek

cities of Asia Minor. He preached before Trajan on the duties of royalty,

taking a line of Homer for his text. He electrified the vast and polished

audience assembled at Athens for the Olympic games as he had before done

the rude barbarians of Scythia. Though his taste was by no means untainted

by the frivolities of the rhetorician, he was skilled in all the arts that

awaken curiosity and attention, and his eloquence commanded the most

various audiences in the most distant lands. His special mission, however,

was to popularise Stoicism by diffusing its principles through the masses

of mankind.(600)

The names, and in some cases a few fragments, of the writings of many

other rhetorical philosophers, such as Herod Atticus, Favorinus, Fronto,

Taurus, Fabianus, and Julianus, have come down to us, and each was the

centre of a group of passionate admirers, and contributed to form a

literary society in the great cities of the empire. We have a vivid

picture of this movement in the “Attic Nights” of Aulus Gellius—a work

which is, I think, one of the most curious and instructive in Latin

literature, and which bears to the literary society of the period of the

Antonines much the same relation as the writings of Helvétius bear to the

Parisian society on the eve of the Revolution. Helvétius, it is said,

collected the materials for his great work on “Mind” chiefly from the

conversation of the drawing-rooms of Paris at a time when that

conversation had attained a degree of perfection which even Frenchmen had

never before equalled. He wrote in the age of the “Encyclopædia,” when the

social and political convulsions of the Revolution were as yet unfelt;

when the first dazzling gleams of intellectual freedom had flashed upon a

society long clouded by superstition and aristocratic pride; when the

genius of Voltaire and the peerless conversational powers of Diderot,

irradiating the bold philosophies of Bacon and Locke, had kindled an

intellectual enthusiasm through all the ranks of fashion;(601) and when

the contempt for the wisdom and the methods of the past was only equalled

by the prevailing confidence in the future. Brilliant, graceful,

versatile, and superficial, with easy eloquence and lax morals, with a

profound disbelief in moral excellence, and an intense appreciation of

intellectual beauty, disdaining all pedantry, superstition, and mystery,

and with an almost fanatical persuasion of the omnipotence of analysis, he

embodied the principles of his contemporaries in a philosophy which

represents all virtue and heroism as but disguised self-interest; he

illustrated every argument, not by the pedantic learning of the schools,

but by the sparkling anecdotes and acute literary criticisms of the

drawing-room, and he thus produced a work which, besides its intrinsic

merits, was the most perfect mirror of the society from which it

sprang.(602) Very different, both in form, subject, and tendency, but no

less truly representative, was the work of Aulus Gellius. It is the

journal, or common-place book, or miscellany of a scholar moving in the

centre of the literary society of both Rome and Athens during the latter

period of the Antonines, profoundly imbued with its spirit, and devoting

his leisure to painting its leading figures, and compiling the substance

of their teaching. Few books exhibit a more curious picture of the

combination of intense child-like literary and moral enthusiasm with the

most hopeless intellectual degeneracy. Each prominent philosopher was

surrounded by a train of enthusiastic disciples, who made the lecture-room

resound with their applause,(603) and accepted him as their monitor in all

the affairs of life. He rebuked publicly every instance of vice or of

affectation he had observed in their conduct, received them at his own

table, became their friend and confidant in their troubles, and sometimes

assisted them by his advice in their professional duties.(604) Taurus,

Favorinus, Fronto, and Atticus were the most prominent figures, and each

seems to have formed, in the centre of a corrupt society, a little company

of young men devoted with the simplest and most ardent earnestness to the

cultivation of intellectual and moral excellence. Yet this society was

singularly puerile. The age of genius had closed, and the age of pedantry

had succeeded it. Minute, curious, and fastidious verbal criticism of the

great writers of the past was the chief occupation of the scholar, and the

whole tone of his mind had become retrospective and even archaic. Ennius

was esteemed a greater poet than Virgil, and Cato a greater prose writer

than Cicero. It was the affectation of some to tesselate their

conversation with antiquated and obsolete words.(605) The study of

etymologies had risen into great favour, and curious questions of grammar

and pronunciation were ardently debated. Logic, as in most ages of

intellectual poverty, was greatly studied and prized. Bold speculations

and original thought had almost ceased, but it was the delight of the

philosophers to throw the arguments of great writers into the form of

syllogisms, and to debate them according to the rules of the schools. The

very amusements of the scholars took the form of a whimsical and puerile

pedantry. Gellius recalls, with a thrill of emotion, those enchanting

evenings when, their more serious studies being terminated, the disciples

of Taurus assembled at the table of their master to pass the happy hours

in discussing such questions as when a man can be said to die, whether in

the last moment of life or in the first moment of death; or when he can be

said to get up, whether when he is still on his bed or when he has just

left it.(606) Sometimes they proposed to one another literary questions,

as what old writer had employed some common word in a sense that had since

become obsolete; or they discussed such syllogisms as these:—“You have

what you have not lost; you have not lost horns, therefore you have

horns.” “You are not what I am. I am a man; therefore you are not a

man.”(607) As moralists, they exhibited a very genuine love of moral

excellence, but the same pedantic and retrospective character. They were

continually dilating on the regulations of the censors and the customs of

the earliest period of the Republic. They acquired the habit of never

enforcing the simplest lesson without illustrating it by a profusion of

ancient examples and by detached sentences from some philosopher, which

they employed much as texts of Scripture are often employed in the

writings of the Puritans.(608) Above all, they delighted in cases of

conscience, which they discussed with the subtilty of the schoolmen.

Lactantius has remarked that the Stoics were especially noted for the

popular or democratic character of their teaching.(609) To their success

in this respect their alliance with the rhetoricians probably largely

contributed; but in other ways it hastened the downfall of the school. The

useless speculations, refinements, and paradoxes which the subtle genius

of Chrysippus had connected with the simple morals of Stoicism, had been

for the most part thrown into the background by the early Roman Stoics;

but in the teaching of the rhetoricians they became supreme. The

endowments given by the Antonines to philosophers attracted a multitude of

impostors, who wore long beards and the dress of the philosopher, but

whose lives were notoriously immoral. The Cynics especially, professing to

reject the ordinary conventionalities of society, and being under none of

that discipline or superintendence which in the worst period has secured

at least external morality among the mendicant monks, continually threw

off every vestige of virtue and of decency. Instead of moulding great

characters and inspiring heroic actions, Stoicism became a school of the

idlest casuistry, or the cloak for manifest imposture.(610) The very

generation which saw Marcus Aurelius on the throne, saw also the

extinction of the influence of his sect.

The internal causes of the decadence of Stoicism, though very powerful,

are insufficient to explain this complete eclipse. The chief cause must be

found in the fact that the minds of men had taken a new turn, and their

enthusiasm was flowing rapidly in the direction of Oriental religions,

and, under the guidance of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, of

a mythical philosophy which was partly Egyptian and partly Platonic. It

remains for me, in concluding this review of the Pagan empire, to indicate

and explain this last transformation of Pagan morals.

It was in the first place a very natural reaction against the extreme

aridity of the Stoical casuistry, and also against the scepticism which

Sextus Empiricus had revived, and in this respect it represents a law of

the human mind which has been more than once illustrated in later times.

Thus, the captious, unsatisfying, intellectual subtleties of the schoolmen

were met by the purely emotional and mystical school of St. Bonaventura,

and afterwards of Tauler, and thus the adoration of the human intellect,

that was general in the philosophy of the last century, prepared the way

for the complete denial of its competency by De Maistre and by Lamennais.

In the next place, mysticism was a normal continuation of the

spiritualising movement which had long been advancing. We have already

seen that the strong tendency of ethics, from Cato to Marcus Aurelius, was

to enlarge the prominence of the emotions in the type of virtue. The

formation of a gentle, a spiritual, and, in a word, a religious character

had become a prominent part of moral culture, and it was regarded not

simply as a means, but as an end. Still, both Marcus Aurelius and Cato

were Stoics. They both represented the same general cast or conception of

virtue, although in Marcus Aurelius the type had been profoundly modified.

But the time was soon to come when the balance between the practical and

the emotional parts of virtue, which had been steadily changing, should be

decisively turned in favour of the latter, and the type of Stoicism was

then necessarily discarded.

A concurrence of political and commercial causes had arisen, very

favourable to the propagation of Oriental beliefs. Commerce had produced a

constant intercourse between Egypt and Italy. Great numbers of Oriental

slaves, passionately devoted to their national religions, existed in Rome;

and Alexandria, which combined a great intellectual development with a

geographical and commercial position exceedingly favourable to a fusion of

many doctrines, soon created a school of thought which acted powerfully

upon the world. Four great systems of eclecticism arose; Aristobulus and

Philo tinctured Judaism with Greek and Egyptian philosophy. The Gnostics

and the Alexandrian fathers united, though in very different proportions,

Christian doctrines with the same elements; while Neoplatonism, at least

in its later forms, represented a fusion of the Greek and Egyptian mind. A

great analogy was discovered between the ideal philosophy of Plato and the

mystical philosophy that was indigenous to the East, and the two systems

readily blended.(611)

But the most powerful cause of the movement was the intense desire for

positive religious belief, which had long been growing in the Empire. The

period when Roman incredulity reached its extreme point had been the

century that preceded and the half century that followed the birth of

Christ. The sudden dissolution of the old habits of the Republic effected

through political causes, the first comparison of the multitudinous

religions of the Empire and also the writings of Euhemerus had produced an

absolute religious disbelief which Epicureanism represented and

encouraged. This belief, however, as I have already noticed, co-existed

with numerous magical and astrological superstitions, and the ignorance of

physical science was so great, and the conception of general laws so

faint, that the materials for a great revival of superstition still

remained. From the middle of the first century, a more believing and

reverent spirit began to arise. The worship of Isis and Serapis forced its

way into Rome in spite of the opposition of the rulers. Apollonius of

Tyana, at the close of the Flavian period, had endeavoured to unite moral

teaching with religious practices; the oracles, which had long ceased,

were partially restored under the Antonines; the calamities and visible

decline of the Empire withdrew the minds of men from that proud patriotic

worship of Roman greatness, which was long a substitute for religious

feeling; and the frightful pestilence that swept over the land in the

reigns of Marcus Aurelius and his successor was followed by a blind,

feverish, and spasmodic superstition. Besides this, men have never

acquiesced for any considerable time in a neglect of the great problems of

the origin, nature, and destinies of the soul, or dispensed with some form

of religious worship and aspiration. That religious instincts are as truly

a part of our nature as are our appetites and our nerves, is a fact which

all history establishes, and which forms one of the strongest proofs of

the reality of that unseen world to which the soul of man continually

tends. Early Roman Stoicism, which in this respect somewhat resembled the

modern positive school, diverted for the most part its votaries from the

great problems of religion, and attempted to evolve its entire system of

ethics out of existing human nature, without appealing to any external

supernatural sanction. But the Platonic school, and the Egyptian school

which connected itself with the name of Pythagoras, were both essentially

religious. The first aspired to the Deity as the source and model of

virtue, admitted dæmons or subordinate spiritual agents acting upon

mankind, and explained and purified, in no hostile spirit, the popular

religions. The latter made the state of ecstasy or quietism its ideal

condition, and sought to purify the mind by theurgy or special religious

rites. Both philosophies conspired to effect a great religious

reformation, in which the Greek spirit usually represented the rational,

and the Egyptian the mystical, element.

Of the first, Plutarch was the head. He taught the supreme authority of

reason. He argued elaborately that superstition is worse than atheism, for

it calumniates the character of the Deity, and its evils are not negative,

but positive. At the same time, he is far from regarding the Mythology as

a tissue of fables. Some things he denies. Others he explains away. Others

he frankly accepts. He teaches for the most part a pure monotheism, which

he reconciles with the common belief, partly by describing the different

divinities as simply popular personifications of Divine attributes, and

partly by the usual explanation of dæmons. He discarded most of the fables

of the poets, applying to them with fearless severity the tests of human

morality, and rejecting indignantly those which attribute to the Deity

cruel or immoral actions. He denounces all religious terrorism, and draws

a broad line of distinction between both the superstitious and idolatrous

conception of the Deity on the one hand, and the philosophical conception

on the other. “The superstitious man believes in the gods, but he has a

false idea of their nature. Those good beings whose providence watches

over us with so much care, those beings so ready to forget our faults, he

represents as ferocious and cruel tyrants, taking pleasure in tormenting

us. He believes the founders of brass, the sculptors of stone, the

moulders of wax; he attributes to the gods a human form; he adorns and

worships the image he has made, and he listens not to the philosophers,

and men of knowledge who associate the Divine image, not with bodily

beauty, but with grandeur and majesty, with gentleness and goodness.”(612)

On the other hand, Plutarch believed that there was undoubtedly a certain

supernatural basis in the Pagan creed; he believed in oracles; he

defended, in a very ingenious essay, hereditary punishment, and the

doctrine of a special Providence; he admitted a future retribution, though

he repudiated the notion of physical torment; and he brought into clear

relief the moral teaching conveyed in some of the fables of the poets.

The position which Plutarch occupied under Trajan, Maximus of Tyre

occupied in the next generation. Like Plutarch, but with a greater

consistency, he maintained a pure monotheistic doctrine, declaring that

“Zeus is that most ancient and guiding mind that begot all things—Athene

is prudence—Apollo is the sun.”(613) Like Plutarch, he developed the

Platonic doctrine of dæmons as an explanation of much of the mythology,

and he applied an allegorical interpretation with great freedom to the

fables of Homer, which formed the text-book or the Bible of Paganism. By

these means he endeavoured to clarify the popular creed from all elements

inconsistent with a pure monotheism, and from all legends of doubtful

morality, while he sublimated the popular worship into a harmless

symbolism. “The gods,” he assures us, “themselves need no images,” but the

infirmity of human nature requires visible signs “on which to rest.”

“Those who possess such faculties, that with a steady mind they can rise

to heaven, and to God, are in no need of statues. But such men are very

rare.” He then proceeds to recount the different ways by which men have

endeavoured to represent or symbolise the Divine nature, as the statues of

Greece, the animals of Egypt, or the sacred flame of Persia. “The God,” he

continues, “the Father and the Founder of all that exists, older than the

sun, older than the sky, greater than all time, than every age, and than

all the works of nature, whom no words can express, whom no eye can

see.... What can we say concerning his images? Only let men understand

that there is but one Divine nature; but whether the art of Phidias

chiefly preserves his memory among the Greeks, or the worship of animals

among the Egyptians, a river among these, or a flame among those, I do not

blame the variety of the representations—only let men understand that

there is but one; only let them love one, let them preserve one in their

memory.”(614)

A third writer who, nearly at the same time as Maximus of Tyre, made some

efforts in the same direction, was Apuleius, who, however, both as a moral

teacher, and in his freedom from superstition, was far inferior to the

preceding. The religion he most admired was the Egyptian; but in his

philosophy he was a Platonist, and in that capacity, besides an exposition

of the Platonic code of morals, he has left us a singularly clear and

striking disquisition on the doctrine of dæmons. “These dæmons,” he says,

“are the bearers of blessings and prayers between the inhabitants of earth

and heaven, carrying prayers from the one and assistance from the

other.... By them also, as Plato maintained in his ‘Banquet,’ all

revelations, all the various miracles of magicians, all kinds of omens,

are ruled. They have their several tasks to perform, their different

departments to govern; some directing dreams, others the disposition of

the entrails, others the flight of birds.... The supreme deities do not

descend to these things—they leave them to the intermediate

divinities.”(615) But these intermediate spirits are not simply the agents

of supernatural phenomena—they are also the guardians of our virtue and

the recorders of our actions. “Each man has in life witnesses and guards

of his deeds, visible to no one, but always present, witnessing not only

every act but every thought. When life has ended and we must return whence

we came, the same genius who had charge over us, takes us away and hurries

us in his custody to judgment, and then assists us in pleading our cause.

If any thing is falsely asserted he corrects it—if true, he substantiates

it, and according to his witness our sentence is determined.”(616)

There are many aspects in which these attempts at religious reform are

both interesting and important. They are interesting, because the doctrine

of dæmons, mingled, it is true, with the theory of Euhemerus about the

origin of the deities, was universally accepted by the Fathers as the true

explanation of the Pagan theology, because the notion and, after the third

century, even the artistic type of the guardian genius reappeared in that

of the guardian angel, and because the transition from polytheism to the

conception of a single deity acting by the delegation or ministration of

an army of subsidiary spirits, was manifestly fitted to prepare the way

for the reception of Christianity. They are interesting, too, as showing

the anxiety of the human mind to sublimate its religious creed to the

level of the moral and intellectual standard it had attained, and to make

religious ordinances in some degree the instruments of moral improvement.

But they are interesting above all, because the Greek and Egyptian methods

of reform represent with typical distinctness the two great tendencies of

religious thought in all succeeding periods. The Greek spirit was

essentially rationalistic and eclectic; the Egyptian spirit was

essentially mystical and devotional. The Greek sat in judgment upon his

religion. He modified, curtailed, refined, allegorised, or selected. He

treated its inconsistencies or absurdities, or immoralities, with

precisely the same freedom of criticism as those he encountered in

ordinary life. The Egyptian, on the other hand, bowed low before the

Divine presence. He veiled his eyes, he humbled his reason, he represented

the introduction of a new element into the moral life of Europe, the

spirit of religious reverence and awe.

“The Egyptian deities,” it was observed by Apuleius, “were chiefly

honoured by lamentations, and the Greek divinities by dances.”(617) The

truth of the last part of this very significant remark appears in every

page of Greek history. No nation had a richer collection of games and

festivals growing out of its religious system; in none did a light,

sportive, and often licentious fancy play more fearlessly around the

popular creed, in none was religious terrorism more rare. The Divinity was

seldom looked upon as holier than man, and a due observance of certain

rites and ceremonies was deemed an ample tribute to pay to him. In the

Egyptian system the religious ceremonies were veiled in mystery and

allegory. Chastity, abstinence from animal food, ablutions, long and

mysterious ceremonies of preparation or initiation, were the most

prominent features of worship. The deities representing the great forces

of nature, and shrouded by mysterious symbols, excited a degree of awe

which no other ancient religion approached.

The speculative philosophy, and the conceptions of morals, that

accompanied the inroad of Oriental religions, were of a kindred nature.

The most prominent characteristic of the first was its tendency to

supersede the deductions of the reason by the intuitions of ecstasy.

Neoplatonism, and the philosophies that were allied to it, were

fundamentally pantheistic,(618) but they differed widely from the

pantheism of the Stoics. The Stoics identified man with God, for the

purpose of glorifying man—the Neoplatonists for the purpose of

aggrandising God. In the conception of the first, man, independent,

self-controlled, and participating in the highest nature of the universe,

has no superior in creation. According to the latter, man is almost a

passive being, swayed and permeated by a divine impulse. Yet he is not

altogether divine. The divinity is latent in his soul, but dulled, dimmed,

and crushed by the tyranny of the body. “To bring the God that is in us

into conformity with the God that is in the universe,” to elicit the ideas

that are graven in the mind, but obscured and hidden by the passions of

the flesh—above all, to subdue the body, which is the sole obstacle to our

complete fruition of the Deity—was the main object of life. Porphyry

described all philosophy as an anticipation of death—not in the Stoical

sense of teaching us to look calmly on our end, but because death realises

the ideal of philosophy, the complete separation of soul and body. Hence

followed an ascetic morality, and a supersensual philosophy. “The greatest

of all evils,” we are told, “is pleasure; because by it the soul is nailed

or riveted to the body, and thinks that true which the body persuades it,

and is thus deprived of the sense of divine things.”(619) “Justice,

beauty, and goodness, and all things that are formed by them, no eye has

ever seen, no bodily sense can apprehend. Philosophy must be pursued by

pure and unmingled reason and with deadened senses; for the body disturbs

the mind, so that it cannot follow after wisdom. As long as it is lost and

mingled in the clay, we shall never sufficiently possess the truth we

desire.”(620)

But the reason which is thus extolled as the revealer of truth must not be

confounded with the process of reasoning. It is something quite different

from criticism, analysis, comparison, or deduction. It is essentially

intuitive, but it only acquires its power of transcendental intuition

after a long process of discipline. When a man passes from the daylight

into a room which is almost dark, he is at first absolutely unable to see

the objects around him; but gradually his eye grows accustomed to the

feeble light, the outline of the room becomes dimly visible, object after

object emerges into sight, until at last, by intently gazing, he acquires

the power of seeing around him with tolerable distinctness. In this fact

we have a partial image of the Neoplatonic doctrine of the knowledge of

divine things. Our soul is a dark chamber, darkened by contact with the

flesh, but in it there are graven divine ideas, there exists a living

divine element. The eye of reason, by long and steady introspection, can

learn to decipher these characters; the will, aided by an appointed course

of discipline, can evoke this divine element, and cause it to blend with

the universal spirit from which it sprang. The powers of mental

concentration, and of metaphysical abstraction, are therefore the highest

intellectual gifts; and quietism, or the absorption of our nature in God,

is the last stage of virtue. “The end of man,” said Pythagoras, “is God.”

The mysterious ’One,’ the metaphysical abstraction without attributes and

without form which constitutes the First Person of the Alexandrian

Trinity, is the acme of human thought, and the condition of ecstasy is the

acme of moral perfection. Plotinus, it was said, had several times

attained it. Porphyry, after years of discipline, once, and but once.(621)

The process of reasoning is here not only useless, but pernicious. “An

innate knowledge of the gods is implanted in our minds prior to all

reasoning.”(622) In divine things the task of man is not to create or to

acquire, but to educe. His means of perfection are not dialectics or

research, but long and patient meditation, silence, abstinence from the

distractions and occupations of life, the subjugation of the flesh, a life

of continual discipline, a constant attendance on those mysterious rites

which detach him from material objects, overawe and elevate his mind, and

quicken his realisation of the Divine presence.(623)

The system of Neoplatonism represents a mode of thought which in many

forms, and under many names, may be traced through the most various ages

and creeds. Mysticism, transcendentalism, inspiration, and grace, are all

words expressing the deep-seated belief that we possess fountains of

knowledge apart from all the acquisitions of the senses; that there are

certain states of mind, certain flashes of moral and intellectual

illumination, which cannot be accounted for by any play or combination of

our ordinary faculties. For the sobriety, the timidity, the fluctuations

of the reasoning spirit, Neoplatonism substituted the transports of the

imagination; and, though it cultivated the power of abstraction, every

other intellectual gift was sacrificed to the discipline of asceticism. It

made men credulous, because it suppressed that critical spirit which is

the sole barrier to the ever-encroaching imagination; because it

represented superstitious rites as especially conducive to that state of

ecstasy which was the condition of revelation; because it formed a

nervous, diseased, expectant temperament, ever prone to hallucinations,

ever agitated by vague and uncertain feelings that were readily attributed

to inspiration. As a moral system it carried, indeed, the purification of

the feelings and imagination to a higher perfection than any preceding

school, but it had the deadly fault of separating sentiment from action.

In this respect it was well fitted to be the close, the final suicide, of

Roman philosophy. Cicero assigned a place of happiness in the future world

to all who faithfully served the State.(624) The Stoics had taught that

all virtue was vain that did not issue in action. Even Epictetus, in his

portrait of the ascetic cynic—even Marcus Aurelius, in his minute

self-examination—had never forgotten the outer world. The early

Platonists, though they dwelt very strongly on mental discipline, were

equally practical. Plutarch reminds us that the same word is used for

light, and for man,(625) for the duty of man is to be the light of the

world; and he shrewdly remarked that Hesiod exhorted the husbandman to

pray for the harvest, but to do so with his hand upon the plough.

Apuleius, expounding Plato, taught “that he who is inspired by nature to

seek after good must not deem himself born for himself alone, but for all

mankind, though with diverse kinds and degrees of obligation, for he is

formed first of all for his country, then for his relations, then for

those with whom he is joined by occupation or knowledge.” Maximus of Tyre

devoted two noble essays to showing the vanity of all virtue which

exhausts itself in mental transports without radiating in action among

mankind. “What use,” he asked, “is there in knowledge unless we do those

things for which knowledge is profitable? What use is there in the skill

of the physician unless by that skill he heals the sick, or in the art of

Phidias unless he chisels the ivory or the gold.... Hercules was a wise

man, but not for himself, but that by his wisdom he might diffuse benefits

over every land and sea.... Had he preferred to lead a life apart from

men, and to follow an idle wisdom, Hercules would indeed have been a

Sophist, and no one would call him the son of Zeus. For God himself is

never idle; were He to rest, the sky would cease to move, and the earth to

produce, and the rivers to flow into the ocean, and the seasons to pursue

their appointed course.”(626) But the Neoplatonists, though they sometimes

spoke of civic virtues, regarded the condition of ecstasy as not only

transcending, but including all, and that condition could only be arrived

at by a passive life. The saying of Anaxagoras, that his mission was “to

contemplate the sun, the stars, and the course of nature, and that this

contemplation was wisdom,” was accepted as an epitome of their

philosophy.(627) A senator named Rogantianus, who had followed the

teaching of Plotinus, acquired so intense a disgust for the things of

life, that he left all his property, refused to fulfil the duties of a

prætor, abandoned his senatorial functions, and withdrew himself from

every form of business and pleasure. Plotinus, instead of reproaching him,

overwhelmed him with eulogy, selected him as his favourite disciple, and

continually represented him as the model of a philosopher.(628)

The two characteristics I have noticed—the abandonment of civic duties,

and the discouragement of the critical spirit—had from a very early period

been manifest in the Pythagorean school.(629) In the blending philosophies

of the third and fourth centuries, they became continually more apparent.

Plotinus was still an independent philosopher, inheriting the traditions

of Greek thought, though not the traditions of Greek life, building his

system avowedly by a rational method, and altogether rejecting theurgy or

religious magic. His disciple, Porphyry, first made Neoplatonism

anti-Christian, and, in his violent antipathy to the new faith, began to

convert it into a religious system. Iamblichus, who was himself an

Egyptian priest, completed the transformation,(630) resolved all moral

discipline into theurgy, and sacrificed all reasoning to faith.(631)

Julian attempted to realise the conception of a revived Paganism, blending

with and purified by philosophy. In every form the appetite for miracles

and for belief was displayed. The theory of dæmons completely superseded

the old Stoical naturalism, which regarded the different Pagan divinities

as allegories or personifications of the Divine attributes. The Platonic

ethics were again, for the most part, in the ascendant, but they were

deeply tinctured by a foreign element. Thus, suicide was condemned by the

Neoplatonists, not merely on the principle of Plato, that it is an

abandonment of the post of duty to which the Deity has called us, but also

on the quietist ground, that perturbation is necessarily a pollution of

the soul, and that, as mental perturbation accompanies the act, the soul

of the suicide departs polluted from the body.(632) The belief in a future

world, which was the common glory of the schools of Pythagoras and of

Plato, had become universal. As Roman greatness, in which men had long

seen the reward of virtue, faded rapidly away, the conception of “a city

of God” began to grow more clearly in the minds of men, and the countless

slaves who were among the chief propagators of Oriental faiths, and who

had begun to exercise an unprecedented influence in Roman life, turned

with a natural and a touching eagerness towards a happier and a freer

world.(633) The incredulity of Lucretius, Cæsar, and Pliny had

disappeared. Above all, a fusion had been effected between moral

discipline and religion, and the moralist sought his chief means of

purification in the ceremonies of the temple.

I have now completed the long and complicated task to which the present

chapter has been devoted. I have endeavoured to exhibit, so far as can be

done, by a description of general tendencies, and by a selection of

quotations, the spirit of the long series of Pagan moralists who taught at

Rome during the period that elapsed between the rise of Roman philosophy

and the triumph of Christianity. My object has not been to classify these

writers with minute accuracy, according to their speculative tenets, but

rather, as I had proposed, to exhibit the origin, the nature, and the

fortunes of the general notion or type of virtue which each moralist had

regarded as supremely good. History is not a mere succession of events

connected only by chronology. It is a chain of causes and effects. There

is a great natural difference of degree and direction in both the moral

and intellectual capacities of individuals, but it is not probable that

the general average of natural morals in great bodies of men materially

varies. When we find a society very virtuous or very vicious—when some

particular virtue or vice occupies a peculiar prominence, or when

important changes pass over the moral conceptions or standard of the

people—we have to trace in these things simply the action of the

circumstances that were dominant. The history of Roman ethics represents a

steady and uniform current, guided by the general conditions of society,

and its progress may be marked by the successive ascendancy of the Roman,

the Greek, and the Egyptian spirit.

In the age of Cato and Cicero the character of the ideal was wholly Roman,

although the philosophical expression of that character was derived from

the Greek Stoics. It exhibited all the force, the grandeur, the hardness,

the practical tendency which Roman circumstances had early created,

combined with that catholicity of spirit which resulted from very recent

political and intellectual changes. In the course of time, the Greek

element, which represented the gentler and more humane spirit of

antiquity, gained an ascendancy. It did so by simple propagandism, aided

by the long peace of the Antonines, by the effeminate habits produced by

the increasing luxury, by the attractions of the metropolis, which had

drawn multitudes of Greeks to Rome, by the patronage of the Emperors, and

also by the increasing realisation of the doctrine of universal

brotherhood, which Panætius and Cicero had asserted, but of which the full

consequences were only perceived by their successors. The change in the

type of virtue was shown in the influence of eclectic, and for the most

part Platonic, moralists, whose special assaults were directed against the

Stoical condemnation of the emotions, and in the gradual softening of the

Stoical type. In Seneca the hardness of the sect, though very apparent, is

broken by precepts of a real and extensive benevolence, though that

benevolence springs rather from a sense of duty than from tenderness of

feeling. In Dion Chrysostom the practical benevolence is not less

prominent, but there is less both of pride and of callousness. Epictetus

embodied the sternest Stoicism in his Manual, but his dissertations

exhibit a deep religious feeling and a wide range of sympathies. In Marcus

Aurelius the emotional elements had greatly increased, and the amiable

qualities began to predominate over the heroic ones. We find at the same

time a new stress laid upon purity of thought and imagination, a growing

feeling of reverence, and an earnest desire to reform the popular

religion.

This second stage exhibits a happy combination of the Roman and Greek

spirits. Disinterested, strictly practical, averse to the speculative

subtilties of the Greek intellect, Stoicism was still the religion of a

people who were the rulers and the organisers of the world, whose

enthusiasm was essentially patriotic, and who had learnt to sacrifice

everything but pride to the sense of duty. It had, however, become

amiable, gentle, and spiritual. It had gained much in beauty, while it had

lost something in force. In the world of morals, as in the world of

physics, strength is nearly allied to hardness. He who feels keenly is

easily moved, and a sensitive sympathy which lies at the root of an

amiable character is in consequence a principle of weakness. The race of

great Roman Stoics, which had never ceased during the tyranny of Nero or

Domitian, began to fail. In the very moment when the ideal of the sect had

attained its supreme perfection, a new movement appeared, the philosophy

sank into disrepute, and the last act of the drama began.

In this, as in the preceding ones, all was normal and regular. The long

continuance of despotic government had gradually destroyed the active

public spirit of which Stoicism was the expression. The predominance of

the subtle intellect of Greece, and the multiplication of rhetoricians,

had converted the philosophy into a school of disputation and of

casuistry. The increasing cultivation of the emotions continued, till what

may be termed the moral centre was changed, and the development of feeling

was deemed more important than the regulation of actions. This cultivation

of the emotions predisposed men to religion. A reaction, intensified by

many minor causes, set in against the scepticism of the preceding

generation, and Alexandria gradually became the moral capital of the

empire. The Roman type speedily disappeared. A union was effected between

superstitious rites and philosophy, and the worship of Egyptian deities

prepared the way for the teaching of the Neoplatonists, who combined the

most visionary part of the speculations of Plato with the ancient

philosophies of the East. In Plotinus we find most of the first; in

Iamblichus most of the second. The minds of men, under their influence,

grew introspective, credulous, and superstitious, and found their ideal

states in the hallucinations of ecstasy and the calm of an unpractical

mysticism.

Such were the influences which acted in turn upon a society which, by

despotism, by slavery, and by atrocious amusements, had been debased and

corrupted to the very core. Each sect which successively arose contributed

something to remedy the evil. Stoicism placed beyond cavil the great

distinctions between right and wrong. It inculcated the doctrine of

universal brotherhood, it created a noble literature and a noble

legislation, and it associated its moral system with the patriotic spirit

which was then the animating spirit of Roman life. The early Platonists of

the Empire corrected the exaggerations of Stoicism, gave free scope to the

amiable qualities, and supplied a theory of right and wrong, suited not

merely for heroic characters and for extreme emergencies, but also for the

characters and the circumstances of common life. The Pythagorean and

Neoplatonic schools revived the feeling of religious reverence, inculcated

humility, prayerfulness, and purity of thought, and accustomed men to

associate their moral ideals with the Deity, rather than with themselves.

The moral improvement of society was now to pass into other hands. A

religion which had long been increasing in obscurity began to emerge into

the light. By the beauty of its moral precepts, by the systematic skill

with which it governed the imagination and habits of its worshippers, by

the strong religious motives to which it could appeal, by its admirable

ecclesiastical organisation, and, it must be added, by its unsparing use

of the arm of power, Christianity soon eclipsed or destroyed all other

sects, and became for many centuries the supreme ruler of the moral world.

Combining the Stoical doctrine of universal brotherhood, the Greek

predilection for the amiable qualities, and the Egyptian spirit of

reverence and religious awe, it acquired from the first an intensity and

universality of influence which none of the philosophies it had superseded

had approached. I have now to examine the moral causes that governed the

rise of this religion in Rome, the ideal of virtue it presented, the

degree and manner in which it stamped its image upon the character of

nations, and the perversions and distortions it underwent.