Part 40

And here we come upon another weak point in Stoicism as presented to the Roman world in this last century B.C. It was an age in which gentleness, tenderness, pity, and the philanthropic spirit were most sadly needed, and it cannot be said of Stoicism that it had any mission to encourage their growth. The Stoics looked on the mass of men as ignorant and wicked, and it never occurred to them that it was a duty of the Good Man to teach and redeem them,—to sacrifice his life, if need be, in the work of enlightenment. They seem to have thought even of women and children as hardly partaking of Reason; their ideally good man was virtuous in a strictly virile way, and it never occurred to them that training in goodness must begin from the earliest years, and be gradually developed with infinite sympathy and tenderness. If a man is to learn that there is something within him which partakes of God, and which should naturally lead him to right conduct, he must begin to learn this truth in his infancy. But the absence of a place for emotion and sympathy in the Stoic system, resulting from the purely intellectual nature of their central doctrine of Reason, meant also the absence of any spirit of enthusiastic propaganda. Their notion that emotion or passion is "a movement of mind contrary to reason and nature," lamed their whole system as a progressive force in the world of that day. Such religious power as it could exercise worked simply through the radiating influence of a few wise and good men, by nature pure and unselfish, who gradually familiarised the educated part of society with a nobler idea of God than the old religion had ever been able to supply, and with that other inspiring idea of the near relation of Man to God as partaking of His nature. But the active enthusiasm of a real religion—the effective desire to be in right relation with the Power—was strange to Stoicism. In one way or another it had many excellent results; it cleared the ground, for example, for a new and universal religion by putting into the shade, if not altogether out of the way, the old local cults with their narrow and limited civic force: it glorified the idea of law and order in an age when the Roman world seemed to be forgetting what these sacred words meant; but a real active enthusiasm of humanity was wanting in it. Hence there is a certain hopelessness about Stoicism, which increased rather than diminished as the world went on, and such as is seen in a kind of sad grandeur in Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor. Of him it may be said, both as emperor and philosopher, as has been said of the Stoic in general, that "he was essentially a soldier left to hold a fort surrounded by overpowering hosts of the enemy. He could not conquer or drive them away, but he could hold out to the last and die at his post."

NOTES TO LECTURE XVI.

See, e.g. Livy iii. 20: "Sed nondum haec, quae nunc tenet saeculum, neglegentia deum venerat; nec interpretando sibi quisque iusiurandum et leges aptas faciebat, sed suos potius mores ad ea accommodabat." Cp. Cic. de Off. iii. 111.

Two Epicureans were expelled from Rome in 173 (probably), Athenaeus, p. 547. Cicero, Tusc. iv. 3, 7, gives some idea of the later popularity of the school in the first half of the last century B.C.

So Masson, Lucretius, i. 263, 271.

See Masson i. ch. xii. and ii. p. 141 foll.; Mayor's Cicero de Nat. Deor. vol. i. xlviii. and 138 foll.; Guyau, La Morale d'Epicure (ed. 4), p. 171 foll.

Cic. N.D. i. 19, 49 foll., and many other passages; Diog. Laert. x. 55; Zeller, Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, p. 441 foll.; Masson i. 292, who aptly quotes Cotta the academic critic in Cicero's dialogue: "When Epicurus takes away from the gods the power of helping and doing good, he extirpates the very roots of religion from the minds of men" (Cic. N.D. i. 45. 121). One may add with Dr. Masson (i. 416 foll.) that a machine cannot command worship; the Natura of Lucretius, i.e., was really a machine.

Masson i. p. 284, and citations of Philodemus there given.

Mayor's Cic. N.D. vol. i. p. xlix.

Lucr. vi. 68 foll.

Masson i. p. 285.

Cic. N.D. i. 2. 3.

Cic. N.D. i. 37. 102; to believe the gods idle "etiam homines inertes efficit."

For this profound reverence for Epicurus see also Cic. N.D. i. 8. 18. It amounted to a faith. In this passage the Epicurean is described as "nihil tam verens quam ne dubitare aliqua de re videretur, tanquam modo ex deorum concilio et ex Epicuri intermundiis descendisset." See also sec. 43 and Mayor's note; Cic. de Finibus, i. 5. 14; Masson i. 354-5, who quotes the most striking passages from Lucretius, e.g. v. 8-10:

deus ille fuit, deus, inclyte Memmi, qui princeps vitae rationem invenit eam quae nunc appellatur sapientia, etc.

In a paper entitled "Die Bekehrung (conversion) im klassischen Altertum," by W. A. Heidel (Zeitschrift fuer Religionspsychologie, vol. iii. Heft 2), the author, an American disciple of W. James, argues that the exordium of Bk. iii. indicates a psychological conversion of Lucretius.

See Masson's chapter (p. 399 foll.) on the teaching and personality of Lucretius. Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 327 foll., and references there given. I may note here that the power of Epicurism as a faith depended also largely on the directness, downrightness, and audacity of its system, working on minds weary of philosophers' disputations and political quarrels.

Cic. de Finibus, i. viii. to end (translation by J. S. Reid, Camb. Univ. Press). The following sentence in ch. 18, sec. 57, puts the Epicurean ethics in a nutshell: "Clamat Epicurus, is quem vos nimis voluptatibus esse deditum dicitis, non posse iucunde vivi nisi sapienter, honeste, iusteque vivatur, nec sapienter, honeste, iuste, nisi iucunde."

What this quietism might mean for a Roman may be gathered from the following passage in Cic. de Finibus, i. 13. 43, in which sapientia is practical wisdom, the Aristotelian [Greek: phronesis] or the ars vivendi, as Cicero has explained it just before: "Sapientia est adhibenda, quae, et terroribus cupiditatibusque detractis et omnium falsarum opinionum temeritate derepta, certissimam se ducem praebeat ad voluptatem. Sapientia enim est una, quae maestitiam pellat ex animis, quae nos exhorrescere metu non sinat; qua praeceptrice in tranquillitate vivi potest, omnium cupiditatum ardore restincto. Cupiditates enim sunt insatiabiles, quae non modo singulos homines, sed universas familias evertunt, totam etiam labefactant saepe rempublicam. Ex cupiditatibus odia discidia discordiae seditiones bella nascuntur." And so on to the end of the chapter. The message of Lucretius to the Roman was practically the same. The remedy was the wrong one in that age; though it does not necessarily entail withdrawal from public life with all its enticements and risks, it must inevitably have a strong tendency to suggest it; and such withdrawal had, as a matter of fact, been one of the characteristics of the Epicurean life. See Zeller, Stoics, etc., ch. xx.; Guyau, La Morale d'Epicure, p. 141 foll.

History of European Morals (1899), vol. i. p. 225. The treatment of Stoicism in this work, though not, strictly speaking, philosophical, is in many ways most instructive.

F. Leo, Die griechische und lateinische Literatur, p. 337. See the author's Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 105.

Polybius xxxii. 9-16.

See a discussion by the author of the meaning of [Greek: tyche] in Polybius, Classical Review, vol. xvii. p. 445, and the passages there quoted relating to the growth of the Roman dominion.

See Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, p. 3 foll.

Ib. p. 6, note 3.

See above, p. 251.

Cic. N.D. ii., end of sec. 19. He is translating the Greek [Greek: pneuma], which in Stoicism is not a spiritual conception, but a material one, in harmony with their theory of the universe as being itself material, including reason and the soul. This is one of the weak points of the Stoic idea of Unity. For the meaning of spiritus see Mayor's note on the passage; it is "the ether or warm air which penetrates and gives life to all things, and connects them together in one organic whole."

Cic. N.D. ii. xiii. 36 ad fin. On all this department of the Stoic teaching see Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 135 foll.; Caird, Gifford Lectures, vol. ii., Lectures 16 and 17.

Marcus Aurelius and the Later Stoics, by F. W. Bussell p. 42.

Cic. N.D. ii. ch. 28 (secs. 70-72), with Mayor's commentary; Zeller, op. cit. p. 327 foll.; Mayor, introduction to vol. ii. of his edition of Cic. N.D. xi. foll.; Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 334 foll. It is important to note the distinction drawn by Cicero between religion and superstition; what Lucretius called religio as a whole Cicero (and Varro too, cf. Aug. Civ. Dei, vi. 9) thus divided. See Mayor's valuable note, vol. ii. p. 183. Some interesting remarks on the Stoic way of dealing with popular mythology will be found in Oakesmith's Religion of Plutarch, p. 68 foll.

See above, p. 118 foll.

See Mayor's note on Cic. N.D. ii. 15. 39 (vol. i. p. 130), with quotation from Philodemus. Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 337 foll.

Cic. de Legibus, i. 7. 22.

Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Paris, 1883. I have borrowed the beautiful translation of my friend Hastings Crossley, printed p. 183 foll. of his Golden Sayings of Epictetus, in Macmillan's Golden Treasury Series.

Gifford Lectures, ii. p. 94.

So Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, p. 61 foll. The evidence is not conclusive, and the process of argument is one of elimination; but it raises a fairly strong probability.

Cic. de Rep. i. 21. 34.

See Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 294 foll.

Cic. de Rep. iii. 22. 33.

Cic. de Legibus, i. 7. 22 foll.: "Est igitur, quoniam nihil est ratione melius, eaque in homine et in deo, prima homini cum deo rationis societas. Inter quos autem ratio, inter eosdem etiam recta ratio communis est," etc.

Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 226 foll.

Social Life at Rome, p. 117.

Ib. p. 118 foll.

I may take this opportunity of noting that a Roman might better understand this notion of his Reason as the voice of God within him, or conscience, from his own idea of his "other soul," or genius; see above, p. 75. But we do not know for certain that it was presented to him in this way by Panaetius, though Posidonius (ap. Galenum, 469) used the word [Greek: daimon] in this sense, as did the later Stoics; see Mulder, de Conscientiae notione, p. 71. Seneca, Ep. 41. 2, uses the word spiritus: "Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet ... in unoquoque virorum bonorum, quis deus incertum est, habitat deus" (from Virg. Aen. viii. 352). Cp. Marcus Aurelius iii. 3. Seneca uses the word genius clearly in this sense in Ep. 110 foll. On the Stoic daemon consult Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 332 foll.; Oakesmith, Religion of Plutarch, ch. vi.

See, e.g., Zeller, p. 268.

This habit of illustrating by historical examples had an educational value of its own, but serves well to show how comparatively feeble was the appeal of Stoicism to the conscience. It may be seen well in Valerius Maximus, whose work, compiled of fact and fiction for educational purposes, is far indeed from being an inspiring one. See Social Life at Rome, p. 189.

Arrian, Discourses, i. 3. 1-6 (Golden Sayings of Epictetus, No. 9).

Schmekel, Die mittlere Stoa, p. 190 foll. (Panaetius), and 244 foll. (Posidonius), Zeller 160 foll. This is the Fate or Providence on which the moral lesson of the Aeneid is based; see below, p. 409 foll. Aeneas is the servant of Destiny. If he had persisted in rebelling against it by remaining at Carthage with Dido, that would not have changed the inevitable course of things, but it would have ruined him.

Gifford Lectures, ii. 96.

Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 255. This, of course, did not diminish the duty of general benevolence, ib. p. 310 and references, where fine passages of Cicero and Seneca are quoted about duties to one's inferiors. But an enthusiasm of humanity was none the less wanting in Stoicism, and this was largely owing no doubt to their hard and fast distinction between virtue and vice, and their want of perception of a growth or evolution in society. See Caird, op. cit. ii. 99; Lecky, Hist. of European Morals, i. 192 foll.; Zeller 251 foll.

See some excellent remarks in Lecky, op. cit. i. p. 242 foll.

See above, note 40.

Zeller, Stoics, etc., p. 229. Cic. de Finibus, iii, 10, 35; Tusc. Disp. iv. 28, 60.

LECTURE XVII

MYSTICISM—IDEAS OF A FUTURE LIFE

We have now reached the end of the period of the Republic; but before I go on to the age of Augustus, with which I must bring these lectures to an end, I must ask attention to a movement which can best be described by the somewhat vague term Mysticism, but is generally known to historians of philosophy as Neo-pythagoreanism. The fact is that such tendency as there ever was at Rome towards Mysticism—which was never indeed a strong one till Rome had almost ceased to be Roman—seems to have taken the form of thinking known as Pythagorean. The ideas at the root of the Pythagorean doctrine, the belief in a future life, the conception of this life as only preparatory to another, the conviction of the need of purgation in another life and of the preparatory discipline and asceticism to be practised while we are here,—these are truly religious ideas; and even among Romans the religious instinct, though it might be hypnotised, could never be entirely destroyed. When it awoke from time to time in the minds of thinking men it was apt to express itself in Pythagorean tones. With the ignorant and vulgar it might find a baser expression in superstition pure and simple,—in the finding of portents, in astrology, in Dionysiac orgies; but with these Pythagoreanism must not be reckoned. These, as they appeared on the soil of Italy, were the bastard children of quasi-religious thought. But the movement of which I speak marks a reaction, among men who could both feel and think, against the whole tendency of Roman religious experience as we have been tracing it; against the extreme formalism, now meaningless, of the Roman State religion; against the extreme scepticism and indifference so obvious in the last century and a half of the republican era; against the purely intellectual appeal of the ethical systems of which I have been recently speaking. Stoicism indeed, as we shall see, held out a hand to the new movement, simply because Stoicism had a religious side which was wanting in Epicurism. But the thought that our senses and our reason are not after all the sole fountains of our knowledge, a thought which is the essence of mysticism, was really foreign to Stoicism; and when this thought did find a soil in the mind of a thinking Roman of this age, it was likely to spring up in a transcendental form which we may call Pythagoreanism.

South Italy was indeed the true home of the Pythagorean teaching. There its founder had established it, and there, mixed up with more popular Orphic doctrine and practice, it must have remained latent for centuries. "Tenuit magnam illam Graeciam," says Cicero of Pythagoras, "cum honore disciplinae, tum etiam auctoritate; multaque saecula post sic viguit Pythagoreorum nomen, ut nulli alii docti viderentur." To South Italy Plato is said to have travelled to study this philosophy, and to learn the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and the story is generally accepted as true. But of any missionary attempt of Pythagoreanism on Rome we know nothing—and probably there was nothing to tell—till that mysterious plot to introduce it after the Hannibalic war which I mentioned in a recent lecture. That war brought Rome into close contact with Tarentum and southern Italy, and it is likely enough that the attempt to connect King Numa with the philosopher, both in the familiar legend and in the alleged discovery of the stone coffin with its forged manuscripts, had its origin in this contact. The Senate could not object to the legend, but it promptly stamped out this grotesque attempt at propagandism. Then we hear no more of the doctrine for a century at least; but in the last century B.C. we know that there appeared a number of Pythagorean writings, falsely attributed to the founder himself or his disciples,—a method of propagandism which, like that of the previous century, may perhaps be taken as marking the religious nature of the doctrine, which needed the ipse dixit of the founder or something as near it as possible. But of the immediate influence of these writings we know nothing. The person really responsible for the tendency to this kind of mysticism was undoubtedly the great Posidonius, philosopher, historian, traveller, who more than any other man dominated the Roman world of thought in the first half of the last century B.C., and whose writings, now surviving in a few fragments only, lie at the back of nearly all the serious Roman literature of his own and indeed of the following age. Panaetius, there can be little doubt, had done something to leaven Stoicism with Platonic-Aristotelian psychology, the general tendency of which was towards a dualism of Soul and Body. The Stoics, in the strict sense of the name, "could not be content with any philosophy which divided heaven from earth, the spiritual from the material." "They rebelled against the idea of a transcendent God and a transcendent ideal world, as modern thought has rebelled against the supernaturalism of mediaeval religion and philosophy." In their passion for unity they would not separate soul and body. But when once Panaetius had hinted at a reversion to the older mode of thought, it was natural and easy to follow his lead in a society which had long ago abandoned burial for cremation, and bidden farewell to the primitive notion that the body lived on under the earth: in a society, too, which had always believed in that "other soul," the Genius of a man, as distinct from his bodily self of this earthly life.

Now as soon as this dualism of body and soul was suggested, it was taken up by Posidonius into what we may call his neo-Stoic system, and at once gave mysticism,—or transcendentalism, if we choose so to call it—its chance. For in such a dualistic psychology it is the soul that gains in value, the body that loses. Life becomes an imprisonment of the soul in the body; the soul seeks to escape, death is but the beginning of a new life, and the imagination is set to work to fathom the mysteries of Man's future existence, nay, in some more fanciful minds, those of his pre-existence as well. This kind of speculation, half philosophic, half poetical, is the transcendental side of the Platonic psychology, and in the last age of the Republic was able to connect Platonism and Pythagoreanism without deserting Stoicism. We can see it reflected from Posidonius in the Dream of Scipio, the beautiful myth, imitated from those of Plato, with which Cicero concluded his treatise on the State, written in the year 54 B.C., after his retirement from political life. In this, and again in the first book of his Tusculan Disputations, composed nearly ten years later, Cicero is beyond doubt on the tracks of Posidonius, and therefore also of Pythagoreanism. Listen to the words put into the mouth of the elder Scipio and addressed to his younger namesake: "Tu vero enitere et sic habeto, non esse te mortalem, sed corpus hoc; non enim tu es, quem forma ista declarat; sed mens cuiusque is est quisque, non ea figura quae digito demonstrari potest." Here is the body plainly losing, the soul gaining importance. But he goes still further: "deum igitur te scito esse: si quidem deus est qui viget qui sentit qui meminit: qui providet, qui tam regit et moderatur et movet id corpus cui propositus est, quam hunc mundum ille princeps deus, et ut mundum ex quadam parte mortalem ipse deus aeternus, sic fragile corpus animus sempiternus movet."

With such a view of the soul in relation to the body, we can understand how in this myth it is described as flying upwards, released from corporeal bondage, and ascending through heavenly stations to pure aether, if at least (and here we may note the characteristic Roman touch) its abode on earth has been the body of a good citizen. All that is of earth earthy, all old ideas of burial, all notions of a gloomy abode below the earth, are here fairly left behind. So too in the first book of the Tusculans, written after the death of his beloved daughter, Cicero would persuade himself and others that death cannot be an evil if we once allow the soul to be immortal: for from its very nature it must rise into aethereal realms, cannot sink like the body into the earth. Into its experiences in the aether I do not need to go here. Enough has been said to show that, as it were, the heavens were opened, and with the psychological separation of soul from body the imaginative faculty was released also; not indeed that any Roman, or even Posidonius himself, could revel in cosmological dreams as did Plato, but they found in him all they needed, and it would seem that they made much use of it. Plato's Timaeus was made by Posidonius the subject of a commentary, and by Cicero himself it was in part at least translated, about the time when he was writing the Tusculans, and still deeply moved by his recent loss. Of this translation a fragment survives; and in the introductory sentences he indicates a second stimulus to his Pythagorean tendencies, besides Posidonius. He tells how he had met at Ephesus, when on his way to his province of Cilicia, the famous Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus, and had enjoyed conversation with him. Nigidius was an old friend, who had helped Cicero in his consulship; he was one of those "polyhistores" who are characteristic of the age, like Posidonius and Varro, and wrote works on all kinds of subjects of which but few fragments remain. But his reputation as a Pythagorean survived for centuries; and this mention of him by Cicero is only another proof of the direction the thoughts of the latter were taking in these last two years of his life.