THE STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY.
We have gleaned from Seneca's own writings what facts we could
respecting his early education. But in the life of every man there are
influences of a far more real and penetrating character than those which
come through the medium of schools or teachers. The spirit of the age;
the general tone of thought, the prevalent habits of social intercourse,
the political tendencies which were moulding the destiny of the
nation,--these must have told, more insensibly indeed but more
powerfully, on the mind of Seneca than even the lectures of Sotion and
of Attalus. And, if we have had reason to fear that there was much which
was hollow in the fashionable education, we shall see that the general
aspect of the society by which our young philosopher was surrounded from
the cradle was yet more injurious and deplorable.
The darkness is deepest just before the dawn, and never did a grosser
darkness or a thicker mist of moral pestilence brood over the surface of
Pagan society than at the period when the Sun of Righteousness arose
with healing in His wings. There have been many ages when the dense
gloom of a heartless immorality seemed to settle down with unusual
weight; there have been many places where, under the gaslight of an
artificial system, vice has seemed to acquire an unusual audacity; but
never probably was there any age or any place where the worst forms of
wickedness were practiced with a more unblushing effrontery than in the
city of Rome under the government of the Caesars. A deeply-seated
corruption seemed to have fastened upon the very vitals of the national
existence. It is surely a lesson of deep moral significance that just as
they became most polished in their luxury they became most vile in their
manner of life. Horace had already bewailed that "the age of our
fathers, worse than that of our grandsires, has produced us who are yet
baser, and who are doomed to give birth to a still more degraded
offspring." But fifty years later it seemed to Juvenal that in his times
the very final goal of iniquity had been attained, and he exclaims, in a
burst of despair, that "posterity will add _nothing_ to our immorality;
our descendents can but do and desire the same crimes as ourselves." He
who would see but for a moment and afar off to what the Gentile world
had sunk, at the very period when Christianity began to spread, may form
some faint and shuddering conception from the picture of it drawn in the
Epistle to the Romans.
We ought to realize this fact if we would judge of Seneca aright. Let us
then glance at the condition of the society in the midst of which he
lived. Happily we can but glance at it. The worst cannot be told. Crimes
may be spoken of; but things monstrous and inhuman should for ever be
concealed. We can but stand at the cavern's mouth, and cast a single ray
of light into its dark depths. Were we to enter, our lamp would be
quenched by the foul things which would cluster round it.
In the age of Augustus began that "long slow agony," that melancholy
process of a society gradually going to pieces under the dissolving
influence of its own vices which lasted almost without interruption till
nothing was left for Rome except the fire and sword of barbaric
invasions. She saw not only her glories but also her virtues "star by
star expire." The old heroism, the old beliefs, the old manliness and
simplicity, were dead and gone; they had been succeeded by prostration
and superstition by luxury and lust.
"There is the moral of all human tales,
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First freedom, and then glory; when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption,--barbarism at last:
And history, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page; 'tis better written here
Where gorgeous tyranny hath thus amassed
All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear,
Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask."
The mere elements of society at Rome during this period were very
unpromising. It was a mixture of extremes. There was no middle class. At
the head of it was an emperor, often deified in his lifetime, and
separated from even the noblest of the senators by a distance of
immeasurable superiority. He, was, in the startling language of Gibbon,
at once "a priest, an atheist, and a god." [8] Surrounding his person and
forming his court were usually those of the nobility who were the most
absolutely degraded by their vices, their flatteries, or their abject
subservience. But even these men were not commonly the repositories of
political power. The people of the greatest influence were the freedmen
of the emperors--men who had been slaves, Egyptians and Bithynians who
had come to Rome with bored ears and with chalk on their naked feet to
show that they were for sale, or who had bawled "sea-urchins all alive"
in the Velabrum or the Saburra--who had acquired enormous wealth by
means often the most unscrupulous and the most degraded, and whose
insolence and baseness had kept pace with their rise to power. Such a
man was the Felix before whom St. Paul was tried, and such was his
brother Pallas,[9] whose golden statue might have been seen among the
household gods of the senator, afterwards the emperor, Vitellius.
Another of them might often have been observed parading the streets
between two consuls. Imagine an Edward II. endowed with absolute and
unquestioned powers of tyranny,--imagine some pestilent Piers Gaveston,
or Hugh de le Spenser exercising over nobles and people a hideous
despotism of the back stairs,--and you have some faint picture of the
government of Rome under some of the twelve Caesars. What the barber
Olivier le Diable was under Louis XI., what Mesdames du Barri and
Pompadour were under Louis XV., what the infamous Earl of Somerset was
under James I., what George Villiers became under Charles I., will
furnish us with a faint analogy of the far more exaggerated and
detestable position held by the freedman Glabrio under Domitian, by the
actor Tigellinus under Nero, by Pallus and Narcissus under Claudius, by
the obscure knight Sejanus under the iron tyranny of the
gloomy Tiberius.
[Footnote 8:
"To the sound
Of fifes and drums they danced, or in the shade
Sung Caesar great and terrible in war,
Immortal Caesar! 'Lo, a god! a god!
He cleaves the yielding skies!' Caesar meanwhile
Gathers the ocean pebbles, or the gnat
Enraged pursues; or at his lonely meal
Starves a wide province; tastes, dislikes, and flings
To dogs and sycophants. 'A god! a god!'
The flowery shades and shrines obscene return."
DYER, _Ruins of Rome_.]
[Footnote 9: The pride of this man was such that he never deigned to
speak a word in the presence of his own slaves, but only made known his
wishes by signs!--TACITUS.]
I. It was an age of the most enormous wealth existing side by side with
the most abject poverty. Around the splendid palaces wandered hundreds
of mendicants, who made of their mendicity a horrible trade, and even
went so far as to steal or mutilate infants in order to move compassion
by their hideous maladies. This class was increased by the exposure of
children, and by that overgrown accumulation of landed property which
drove the poor from their native fields. It was increased also by the
ambitious attempt of people whose means were moderate to imitate the
enormous display of the numerous millionaires. The great Roman conquests
in the East, the plunder of the ancient kingdoms of Antiochus, of
Attalus, of Mithridates, had caused a turbid stream of wealth to flow
into the sober current of Roman life. One reads with silent astonishment
of the sums expended by wealthy Romans on their magnificence or their
pleasures. And as commerce was considered derogatory to rank and
position, and was therefore pursued by men who had no character to lose,
these overgrown fortunes were often acquired by wretches of the meanest
stamp--by slaves brought from over the sea, who had to conceal the holes
bored in their ears;[10] or even by malefactors who had to obliterate,
by artificial means, the three letters[11] which had been branded by the
executioner on their foreheads. But many of the richest men in Rome, who
had not sprung from this convict origin, were fully as well deserving of
the same disgraceful stigma. Their houses were built, their coffers were
replenished, from the drained resources of exhausted provincials. Every
young man of active ambition or noble birth, whose resources had been
impoverished by debauchery and extravagance, had but to borrow fresh
sums in order to give magnificent gladiatorial shows, and then, if he
could once obtain an aedileship, and mount to the higher offices of the
State, he would in time become the procurator or proconsul of a
province, which he might pillage almost at his will. Enter the house of
a Felix or a Verres. Those splendid pillars of mottled green marble were
dug by the forced labour of Phrygians from the quarry of Synnada; that
embossed silver, those murrhine vases, those jeweled cups, those
masterpieces of antique sculpture, have all been torn from the homes or
the temples of Sicily or Greece. Countries were pilaged and nations
crushed that an Apicius might dissolve pearls[12] in the wine he drank,
or that Lollia Paulina might gleam in a second-best dress of emeralds
and pearls which had cost 40,000,000 sesterces, or more than
32,000_l_.[13]
[Footnote 10: This was a common ancient practice; the very words
"thrall," "thralldom," are etymologically connected with the roots
"thrill," "trill," "drill," (Compare Exod. xxi. 6; Deut. xv. 17; Plut.
_Cic_. 26; and Juv. _Sat_. i. 104.)]
[Footnote 11: _Fur_, "thief." (See Martial, ii. 29.)]
[Footnote 12: "Dissolved pearls, Apicius' diet 'gainst the
epilepsy."--BEN JONSON.]
[Footnote 13: Pliny actually saw her thus arrayed. (Nat. Hist. ix. 35,
36.)]
Each of these "gorgeous criminals" lived in the midst of an humble
crowd of flatterers, parasites, clients, dependents, and slaves. Among
the throng that at early morning jostled each other in the marble
_atrium_ were to be found a motley and hetrogeneous set of men. Slaves
of every age and nation--Germans, Egyptians, Gauls, Goths, Syrians,
Britons, Moors, pampered and consequential freedmen, impudent
confidential servants, greedy buffoons, who lived by making bad jokes at
other people's tables; Dacian gladiators, with whom fighting was a
trade; philosophers, whose chief claim to reputation was the length of
their beards; supple Greeklings of the Tartuffe species, ready to
flatter and lie with consummate skill, and spreading their vile
character like a pollution wherever they went: and among all these a
number of poor but honest clients, forced quietly to put up with a
thousand forms of contumely[14] and insult, and living in discontented
idleness on the _sportula_ or daily largesse which was administered by
the grudging liberality of their haughty patrons. The stout old Roman
burgher had well-nigh disappeared; the sturdy independence, the manly
self-reliance of an industrial population were all but unknown. The
insolent loungers who bawled in the Forum were often mere stepsons of
Italy, who had been dragged thither in chains,--the dregs of all
nations, which had flowed into Rome as into a common sewer,[15] bringing
with them no heritage except the specialty of their national vices.
Their two wants were bread and the shows of the circus; so long as the
_sportula_ of their patron, the occasional donative of an emperor, and
the ambition of political candidates supplied these wants, they lived in
contented abasement, anxious neither for liberty nor for power.
[Footnote 14: Few of the many sad pictures in the _Satires_ of Juvenal
are more pitiable than that of the wretched "Quirites" struggling at
their patrons' doors for the pittance which formed their daily dole.
(Sat i. 101.)]
[Footnote 15: See Juv. _Sat_. iii. 62. Scipio, on being interrupted by
the mob in the Forum, exclaimed,--"Silence, ye stepsons of Italy! What!
shall I fear these fellows now they are free, whom I myself have brought
in chains to Rome?" (See Cic. _De Orat_. ii. 61.)]
II. It was an age at once of atheism and superstition. Strange to say,
the two things usually go together. Just as Philippe Egalité, Duke of
Orleans, disbelieved in God, and yet tried to conjecture his fate from
the inspection of coffee-grounds at the bottom of a cup,--just as Louis
XI. shrank from no perjury and no crime, and yet retained a profound
reverence for a little leaden image which he carried in his cap,--so the
Romans under the Empire sneered at all the whole crowd of gods and
goddesses whom their fathers had worshipped, but gave an implicit
credence to sorcerers, astrologers, spirit-rappers, exorcists, and every
species of imposter and quack. The ceremonies of religion were performed
with ritualistic splendour, but all belief in religion was dead and
gone. "That there are such things as ghosts and subterranean realms not
even boys believe," says Juvenal, "except those who are still too young
to pay a farthing for a bath." [16] Nothing can exceed the cool
impertinence with which the poet Martial prefers the favour of Domitian
to that of the great Jupiter of the Capitol. Seneca, in his lost book
"Against Superstitions,"[17] openly sneered at the old mythological
legends of gods married and gods unmarried, and at the gods Panic and
Paleness, and at Cloacina, the goddess of sewers, and at other deities
whose cruelty and license would have been infamous even in mankind. And
yet the priests, and Salii, and Flamens, and Augurs continued to fulfil
their solemn functions, and the highest title of the Emperor himself was
that of _Pontifex Maximus_, or Chief Priest, which he claimed as the
recognized head of the national religion. "The common worship was
regarded," says Gibbon, "by the people as equally true, by the
philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally
useful." And this famous remark is little more than a translation from
Seneca, who, after exposing the futility of the popular beliefs, adds:
"And yet the wise man will observe them all, not as pleasing to the
gods, but as commanded by the laws. We shall so adore _all that ignoble
crowd of gods_ which long superstition has heaped together in a long
period of years, as to remember that their worship has more to do with
custom than with reality." "Because he was an illustrious senator of the
Roman people," observes St. Augustine, who has preserved for us this
fragment, "he worshipped what he blamed, he did what he refuted, he
adored that with which he found fault." Could anything be more hollow or
heartless than this? Is there anything which is more certain to sap the
very foundations of morality than the public maintenance of a creed
which has long ceased to command the assent, and even the respect of its
recognized defenders? Seneca, indeed, and a few enlightened
philosophers, might have taken refuge from the superstitions which they
abandoned in a truer and purer form of faith. "Accordingly," says
Lactantius, one of the Christian Fathers, "he has said many things like
ourselves concerning God." [18] He utters what Tertullian finely calls
"the testimony of A MIND NATURALLY CHRISTIAN." But, meanwhile, what
became of the common multitude? They too, like their superiors, learnt
to disbelieve or to question the power of the ancient deities; but, as
the mind absolutely requires _some_ religion on which to rest, they gave
their real devotion to all kinds of strange and foreign deities,--to
Isis and Osiris, and the dog Anubus, to Chaldaean magicians, to Jewish
exercisers, to Greek quacks, and to the wretched vagabond priests of
Cybele, who infested all the streets with their Oriental dances and
tinkling tambourines. The visitor to the ruins of Pompeii may still see
in her temple the statue of Isis, through whose open lips the gaping
worshippers heard the murmured answers they came to seek. No doubt they
believed as firmly that the image spoke, as our forefathers believed
that their miraculous Madonnas nodded and winked. But time has exposed
the cheat. By the ruined shrine the worshipper may now see the secret
steps by which the priest got to the back of the statue, and the pipe
entering the back of its head through which he whispered the answers of
the oracle.
[Footnote 16: JUV. _Sat_. ii. 149. Cf. Sen. _Ep_. xxiv. "Nemo tam puer
est at Cerberum timeat, et tenebras," &c.]
[Footnote 17: Fragm. xxxiv.]
[Footnote 18: Lactantius, _Divin. Inst_. i. 4.]
III. It was an age of boundless luxury,--an age in which women
recklessly vied with one another in the race of splendour and
extravagance, and in which men plunged headlong, without a single
scruple of conscience, and with every possible resource at their
command, into the pursuit of pleasure. There was no form of luxury,
there was no refinement of vice invented by any foreign nation, which
had not been eagerly adopted by the Roman patricians. "The softness of
Sybaris, the manners of Rhodes and Antioch, and of perfumed, drunken,
flower-crowned Miletus," were all to be found at Rome. There was no
more of the ancient Roman severity and dignity and self-respect. The
descendants of Aemilius and Gracchus--even generals and consuls and
praetors--mixed familiarly with the lowest _canaille_ of Rome in their
vilest and most squalid purlieus of shameless vice. They fought as
amateur gladiators in the arena. They drove as competing charioteers on
the race-course. They even condescended to appear as actors on the
stage. They devoted themselves with such frantic eagerness to the
excitement of gambling, that we read of their staking hundreds of pounds
on a single throw of the dice, when they could not even restore the
pawned tunics to their shivering slaves. Under the cold marble statues,
or amid the waxen likenesses of their famous stately ancestors, they
turned night into day with long and foolish orgies, and exhausted land
and sea with the demands of their gluttony. "Woe to that city," says an
ancient proverb, "in which a fish costs more than an ox;" and this
exactly describes the state of Rome. A banquet would sometimes cost the
price of an estate; shell-fish were brought from remote and unknown
shores, birds from Parthia and the banks of the Phasis; single dishes
were made of the brains of the peacocks and the tongues of nightingales
and flamingoes. Apicius, after squandering nearly a million of money in
the pleasures of the table, committed suicide, Seneca tells us, because
he found that he had only 80,000_l_. left. Cowley speaks of--
"Vitellius' table, which did hold
As many creatures as the ark of old."
"They eat," said Seneca, "and then they vomit; they vomit, and then
they eat." But even in this matter we cannot tell anything like the
worst facts about--
"Their sumptuous gluttonies and gorgeous feasts
On citron tables and Atlantic stone,
Their wines of Setia, Gales, and Falerne,
Chios, and Crete, and how they quaff in gold,
Crystal, and myrrhine cups, embossed with gems
And studs of pearl." [19]
Still less can we pretend to describe the unblushing and unutterable
degradation of this period as it is revealed to us by the poets and the
satirists. "All things," says Seneca, "are full of iniquity and vice;
more crime is committed than can be remedied by restraint. We struggle
in a huge contest of criminality: daily the passion for sin is greater,
the shame in committing it is less.... Wickedness is no longer committed
in secret: it flaunts before our eyes, and
"The citron board, the bowl embossed with gems,
... whatever is known
Of rarest acquisition; Tyrian garbs,
Neptunian Albion's high testaceous food,
And flavoured Chian wines, with incense fumed,
To slake patrician thirst: for these their rights
In the vile atreets they prostitute for sale,
Their ancient rights, their dignities, their laws,
Their native glorious freedom.
has been sent forth so openly into public sight, and has prevailed so
completely in the breast of all, that innocence is not _rare_, but
_non-existent_."
[Footnote 19: Compare the lines in Dyer's little-remembered _Ruins of
Rome_.]
IV. And it was an age of deep sadness. That it should have been so is an
instructive and solemn lesson. In proportion to the luxury of the age
were its misery and its exhaustion. The mad pursuit of pleasure was the
death and degradation of all true happiness. Suicide--suicide out of
pure _ennui_ and discontent at a life overflowing with every possible
means of indulgence--was extraordinarily prevalent. The Stoic
philosophy, especially as we see it represented in the tragedies
attributed to Seneca, rang with the glorification of it. Men ran to
death because their mode of life had left them no other refuge. They
died because it seemed so tedious and so superfluous to be seeing and
doing and saying the same things over and over again; and because they
had exhausted the very possibility of the only pleasures of which they
had left themselves capable. The satirical epigram of Destouches,--
"Ci-gît Jean Rosbif, écuyer,
Qui se pendit pour se désennuyer,"
was literally and strictly true of many Romans during this epoch.
Marcellinus, a young and wealthy noble, starved himself, and then had
himself suffocated in a warm bath, merely because he was attacked with a
perfectly curable illness. The philosophy which alone professed itself
able to heal men's sorrows applauded the supposed courage of a voluntary
death, and it was of too abstract, too fantastic, and too purely
theoretical a character to furnish them with any real or lasting
consolations. No sentiment caused more surprise to the Roman world than
the famous one preserved in the fragment of Maecenas,--
"Debilem facito manu,
Debilem pede, coxâ,
Tuber adstrue gibberum,
Lubricos quate dentes;
Vita dum superest bene est;
Hanc mihi vel acutâ
Si sedeam cruce sustine;"
which may be paraphrased,--
"Numb my hands with palsy,
Rack my feet with gout,
Hunch my back and shoulder,
Let my teeth fall out;
Still, if _Life_ be granted,
I prefer the loss;
Save my life, and give me
Anguish on the cross."
Seneca, in his 101st Letter, calls this "a most disgraceful and most
contemptible wish;" but it may be paralleled out of Euripides, and still
more closely out of Homer. "Talk not," says the shade of Achilles to
Ulysses in the Odyssey,--
"'Talk not of reigning in this dolorous gloom,
Nor think vain lies,' he cried, 'can ease my doom.
_Better by far laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air,
Slave to the meanest hind that begs his bread,
Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead_.'"
But this falsehood of extremes was one of the sad outcomes of the
popular Paganism. Either, like the natural savage, they dreaded death
with an intensity of terror; or, when their crimes and sorrows had made
life unsupportable, they slank to it as a refuge, with a cowardice which
vaunted itself as courage.
V. And it was an age of cruelty. The shows of gladiators, the sanguinary
combats of wild beasts, the not unfrequent spectacle of savage tortures
and capital punishments, the occasional sight of innocent martyrs
burning to death in their shirts of pitchy fire, must have hardened and
imbruted the public sensibility. The immense prevalence of slavery
tended still more inevitably to the general corruption. "Lust," as
usual, was "hard by hate." One hears with perfect amazement of the
number of slaves in the wealthy houses. A thousand slaves was no
extravagant number, and the vast majority of them were idle, uneducated
and corrupt. Treated as little better than animals, they lost much of
the dignity of men. Their masters possessed over them the power of life
and death, and it is shocking to read of the cruelty with which they
were often treated. An accidental murmur, a cough, a sneeze, was
punished with rods. Mute, motionless, fasting, the slaves had to stand
by while their masters supped; A brutal and stupid barbarity often
turned a house into the shambles of an executioner, sounding with
scourges, chains, and yells.[20] One evening the Emperor Augustus was
supping at the house of Vedius Pollio, when one of the slaves, who was
carrying a crystal goblet, slipped down, and broke it. Transported with
rage Vedius at once ordered the slave to be seized, and plunged into the
fish-pond as food to the lampreys. The boy escaped from the hands of his
fellow-slaves, and fled to Caesar's feet to implore, not that his life
should be spared--a pardon which he neither expected nor hoped--but that
he might die by a mode of death less horrible than being devoured by
fishes. Common as it was to torment slaves, and to put them to death,
Augustus, to his honor be it spoken, was horrified by the cruelty of
Vedius, and commanded both that the slave should be set free, that every
crystal vase in the house of Vedius should be broken in his presence and
that the fish pond should be filled up. Even women inflicted upon their
female slaves punishments of the most cruel atrocity for faults of the
most venial character. A brooch wrongly placed, a tress of hair
ill-arranged, and the enraged matron orders her slave to be lashed and
crucified. If her milder husband interferes, she not only justifies the
cruelty, but asks in amazement: "What! is a slave so much of a human
being?" No wonder that there was a proverb, "As many slaves, so many
foes." No wonder that many masters lived in perpetual fear, and that
"the tyrant's devilish plea, necessity," might be urged in favor of that
odious law which enacted that, if a master was murdered by an unknown
hand, the whole body of his slaves should suffer death,--a law which
more than once was carried into effect under the reigns of the Emperors.
Slavery, as we see in the case of Sparta and many other nations, always
involves its own retribution. The class of free peasant proprietors
gradually disappears. Long before this time Tib. Gracchus, in coming
home from Sardinia, had observed that there was scarcely a single
freeman to be seen in the fields. The slaves were infinitely more
numerous than their owners. Hence arose the constant dread of servile
insurrections; the constant hatred of a slave population to which any
conspirator revolutionist might successfully appeal; and the constant
insecurity of life, which must have struck terror into many hearts.
[Footnote 20: Juv. _Sat_. i. 219--222.]
Such is but a faint and broad outline of some of the features of
Seneca's age; and we shall be unjust if we do not admit that much at
least of the life he lived, and nearly all the sentiments he uttered,
gain much in grandeur and purity from the contrast they offer to the
common life of--
"That people victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal, who, once just,
Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquered well,
But govern ill the nations under yoke,
Peeling their provinces, exhausted all
By lust and rapine; first ambitious grown
Of triumph, that insulting vanity;
Then cruel, by their sports to blood inured
Of fighting beasts, and men to beasts exposed,
Luxurious by their wealth, and greedier still,
And from the daily scene effeminate.
What wise and valient men would seek to free
These thus degenerate, by themselves enslaved;
Or could of inward slaves make outward free?"
MILTON, _Paradise Regained_, iv. 132-145.