_To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford_.
Dear Martin,--"How individuals found religious consolation from the
creeds of ancient Greece and Rome" is, as you quote C. O. Muller, "a very
curious question." It is odd that while we have countless books on the
philosophy and the mythology and the ritual of the classic peoples, we
hear about their religion in the modern sense scarcely anything from
anybody. We know very well what gods they worshipped, and what
sacrifices they offered to the Olympians, and what stories they told
about their deities, and about the beginnings of things. We know, too,
in a general way, that the gods were interested in morality. They would
all punish offences in their own department, at least when it was a case
of _numine laeso_, when the god who protected the hearth was offended by
breach of hospitality, or when the gods invoked to witness an oath were
offended by perjury.
But how did a religiously minded man regard the gods? What hope or what
fears did he entertain with regard to the future life? Had he any sense
of _sin_, as more than a thing that could be expiated by purification
with the blood of slaughtered swine, or by purchasing the prayers and
"masses," so to speak, of the mendicant clergy or charlatans, mentioned
by Plato in the "Republic"? About these great questions of the religious
life--the Future and man's fortunes in the future, the punishment or
reward of justice or iniquity--we really know next to nothing.
That is one reason why the great poem of Lucretius seems so valuable to
me. The _De Rerum Natura_ was written for no other purpose than to
destroy Religion, as Lucretius understood it, to free men's minds from
all dread as to future punishment, all hope of Heaven, all dread or
desire for the interference of the gods in this mortal life of ours on
earth. For no other reason did Lucretius desire to "know the causes of
things," except that the knowledge would bring "emancipation," as people
call it, from the gods, to whom men had hitherto stood in the relation of
the Roman son to the Roman sire, under the _patria potestas_ or _in manu
patris_.
As Lucretius wrought all his arduous work to this end, it follows that
his fellow-countrymen _must_ have gone in a constant terror about
spiritual penalties, which we seldom associate in thought with the
"blithe" and careless existence of the ancient peoples. In every line of
Lucretius you read the joy and the indignation of the slave just escaped
from an intolerable thraldom to fear. Nobody could well have believed on
any other evidence that the classical people had a gloomy Calvinism of
their own time. True, as early as Homer, we hear of the shadowy
existence of the souls, and of the torments endured by the notably
wicked; by impious ghosts, or tyrannical, like Sisyphus and Tantalus. But
when we read the opening books of the "Republic," we find the educated
friends of Socrates treating these terrors as old-wives' fables. They
have heard, they say, that such notions circulate among the people, but
they seem never for a moment to have themselves believed in a future of
rewards and punishments.
The remains of ancient funereal art, in Etruria or Attica, usually show
us the semblances of the dead lying at endless feasts, or receiving
sacrifices of food and wine (as in Egypt) from their descendants, or,
perhaps, welcoming the later dead, their friends who have just rejoined
them. But it is only in the descriptions by Pausanias and others of
certain old wall-paintings that we hear of the torments of the wicked, of
the demons that torture them and, above all, of the great chief fiend,
coloured like a carrion fly. To judge from Lucretius, although so little
remains to us of this creed, yet it had a very strong hold of the minds
of people, in the century before Christ. Perhaps the belief was
reinforced by the teaching of Socrates, who, in the vision of Er, in the
"Republic," brings back, in a myth, the old popular faith in a
_Purgatorio_, if not in an _Inferno_.
In the "Phaedo," for certain, we come to the very definite account of a
Hell, a place of eternal punishment, as well as of a Purgatory, whence
souls are freed when their sins are expiated. "The spirits beyond
redemption, for the multitude of their murders or sacrileges, Fate hurls
into Tartarus, whence they never any more come forth." But souls of
lighter guilt abide a year in Tartarus, and then drift out down the
streams Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon. Thence they reach the marsh of
Acheron, but are not released until they have received the pardon of the
souls whom in life they had injured.
All this, and much more to the same purpose in other dialogues of
Plato's, appears to have been derived by Socrates from the popular
unphilosophic traditions, from Folk-lore in short, and to have been
raised by him to the rank of "pious opinion," if not of dogma. Now,
Lucretius represents nothing but the reaction against all this dread of
future doom, whether that dread was inculcated by Platonic philosophy or
by popular belief. The latter must have been much the more powerful and
widely diffused. It follows that the Romans, at least, must have been
haunted by a constant dread of judgment to come, from which, but for the
testimony of Lucretius and his manifest sincerity, we might have believed
them free.
Perhaps we may regret the existence of this Roman religion, for it did
its best to ruin a great poet. The sublimity of the language of
Lucretius, when he can leave his attempts at scientific proof, the
closeness of his observation, his enjoyment of life, of Nature, and his
power of painting them, a certain largeness of touch, and noble amplitude
of manner--these, with a burning sincerity, mark him above all others
that smote the Latin lyre. Yet these great qualities are half-crushed by
his task, by his attempt to turn the atomic theory into verse, by his
unsympathetic effort to destroy all faith and hope, because these were
united, in his mind, with dread of Styx and Acheron.
It is an almost intolerable philosophy, the philosophy of eternal sleep,
without dreams and without awakening. This belief is wholly divorced
from joy, which inspires all the best art. This negation of hope has
"close-lipped Patience for its only friend."
In vain does Lucretius paint pictures of life and Nature so large, so
glowing, so majestic that they remind us of nothing but the "Fete
Champetre" of Giorgione, in the Louvre. All that life is a thing we must
leave soon, and forever, and must be hopelessly lapped in an eternity of
blind silence. "I shall let men see the certain end of all," he cries;
"then will they resist religion, and the threats of priests and
prophets." But this "certain end" is exactly what mortals do not desire
to see. To this sleep they prefer even _tenebras Orci, vastasque
lacunas_.
They will not be deprived of gods, "the friends of man, merciful gods,
compassionate." They will not turn from even a faint hope in those to
the Lucretian deities in their endless and indifferent repose and divine
"delight in immortal and peaceful life, far, far away from us and
ours--life painless and fearless, needing nothing we can give, replete
with its own wealth, unmoved by prayer and promise, untouched by anger."
Do you remember that hymn, as one may call it, of Lucretius to Death, to
Death which does not harm us. "For as we knew no hurt of old, in ages
when the Carthaginian thronged against us in war, and the world was
shaken with the shock of fight, and dubious hung the empire over all
things mortal by sea and land, even so careless, so unmoved, shall we
remain, in days when we shall no more exist, when the bond of body and
soul that makes our life is broken. Then naught shall move us, nor wake
a single sense, not though earth with sea be mingled, and sea with sky."
There is no hell, he cries, or, like Omar, he says, "Hell is the vision
of a soul on fire."
Your true Tityus, gnawed by the vulture, is only the slave of passion and
of love; your true Sisyphus (like Lord Salisbury in _Punch_) is only the
politician, striving always, never attaining; the stone rolls down again
from the hill-crest, and thunders far along the plain.
Thus his philosophy, which gives him such a delightful sense of freedom,
is rejected after all these years of trial by men. They feel that since
those remotest days
"_Quum Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum_,"
they have travelled the long, the weary way Lucretius describes to little
avail, if they may not keep their hopes and fears. Robbed of these we
are robbed of all; it serves us nothing to have conquered the soil and
fought the winds and waves, to have built cities, and tamed fire, if the
world is to be "dispeopled of its dreams." Better were the old life we
started from, and dreams therewith, better the free days--
"_Novitas tum florida mundi_
_Pabula dia tulit, miseris mortablibus ampla_;"
than wealth or power, and neither hope nor fear, but one certain end of
all before the eyes of all.
Thus the heart of man has answered, and will answer Lucretius, the
noblest Roman poet, and the least beloved, who sought, at last, by his
own hand, they say, the doom that Virgil waited for in the season
appointed.