The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

It is clear that Seneca was not what we call a strong man. A fragile youth, a spirit of great delicacy and sensibility, were no outfit for exile. Nor is it very easy to understand what exile was to the educated Roman. Some were confined to mere rocks, to go round and round them for ever and never leave them. Seneca had of course more space, but what he endured, we may in some measure divine from the diaries and narratives that tell of Napoleon's life on St Helena. The seclusion from the world, the narrow range, the limited number of faces, the red coats, the abhorred monotony, told heavily on every temper, on gaoler and prisoner alike, even on Napoleon; and Seneca's temperament was not of stuff so stern. We may wish he had not broken down, but we cannot be surprised that he did. It was human of him. Perhaps the memory of his own weakness and failure contributed to make him the most sympathetic and the least arrogant of all Stoics.

Nero

At last Messalina reached her end, and the new Empress, Agrippina, recalled the exile in 49 A.D., and made him tutor of her son, Nero; and from now till within two years of his death Seneca lived in the circle of the young prince. When Claudius died in 54, Seneca and Burrus became the guardians of the Emperor and virtually ruled the Empire. It was a position of great difficulty. Seneca grew to be immensely rich, and his wealth and his palaces and gardens[¹³¹] weakened his influence, while they intensified the jealousy felt for a minister so powerful. Yet perhaps none of his detractors guessed the limits of his power as surely as he came to feel them himself. Some measure of the situation may be taken from what befell when the freedwoman Claudia Acte became the mistress of Nero. "His older friends did not thwart him," says Tacitus, "for here was a girl, who, without harm to anyone, gratified his desires, since he was utterly estranged from his wife Octavia."[¹³²] Later on, we learn, Seneca had to avail himself of Acte's aid to prevent worse scandals.

In February 55 A.D. the young prince Britannicus was poisoned at Nero's table. He was the son of Claudius and the brother of Octavia – a possible claimant therefore to the Imperial throne. Nero, not more than eighteen years old, told the company quite coolly that it was an epileptic seizure, and the feast went on, while the dead boy was carried out and buried there and then in the rain – in a grave prepared before he had entered the dining-hall.[¹³³] Ten months later Seneca wrote his tractate on Clemency. Nero should ask himself "Am I the elected of the gods to be their vice-gerent on earth? The arbiter of life and death to the nations?" and so forth. He is gently reminded of the great light that fronts the throne; that his anger would be as disastrous as war; that "Kings gain from kindness a greater security, while their cruelty swells the number of their enemies." Seneca wanders a good deal, but his drift is clear – and the wretchedness of his position.

That Burrus and he had no knowledge of Nero's design to do away with his mother, is the verdict of Nero's latest historian, but to Seneca fell the horrible task of writing the explanatory letter which Nero sent to the Senate when the murder was done. Perhaps to judge him fairly, one would need to have been a Prime Minister. It may have been a necessary thing to do, in order to maintain the world's government, but the letter imposed on nobody, and Thrasea Pætus at once rose from his seat and walked conspicuously out.

From the year 59 Nero was more than ever his own master. His guardians' repeated condonations had set him free, and the lad, who had "wished he had never learned writing" when he had to sign his first death-warrant, began from now to build up that evil fame for which the murders of his brother and his mother were only the foundation. For three years Seneca and Burrus kept their places – miserably enough. Then Burrus found a happy release in death, and with him died the last of Seneca's influence.[¹³⁴] Seneca begged the Emperor's leave to retire from the Court, offering him the greater part of his wealth, and it was refused. It had long been upon his mind that he was too rich. In 58 a furious attack was made upon him by "one who had earned the hate of many," Publius Suillius; this man asked in the Senate "by what kind of wisdom or maxims of philosophy" Seneca had amassed in four years a fortune equal to two and a half millions sterling; and he went on to accuse him of intrigue with princesses, of hunting for legacies, and of "draining Italy and the provinces by boundless usury."[¹³⁵] There was probably a good deal of inference in these charges, if one may judge by the carelessness of evidence which such men show in all ages. Still Seneca felt the taunt, and in a book "On the Happy Life," addressed to his brother Gallic, he dealt with the charge. He did not claim to be a sage (17, 3); his only hope was day by day to lessen his vices – he was still in the thick of them; perhaps he might not reach wisdom, but he would at least live for mankind "as one born for others,"[¹³⁶] would do nothing for glory, and all for conscience, would be gentle and accessible even to his foes; as for wealth, it gave a wise man more opportunity, but if his riches deserted him, they would take nothing else with them; a philosopher might have wealth, "if it be taken forcibly from no man, stained with no man's blood, won by no wrong done to any, gained without dishonour; if its spending be as honest as its getting, if it wake no envy but in the envious."[¹³⁷] The treatise has a suggestion of excitement, and there is a good deal of rhetoric in it. Now he proposed to the Emperor to put his words into action, and Nero would not permit him – he was not ready for the odium of despoiling his guardian, and the old man's name might still be of use to cover deeds in which he had no share. Seneca was not to resign his wealth nor to leave Rome. Nero's words as given by Tacitus are pleasant enough, but we hardly need to be told their value.[¹³⁸]

Seneca's last days

It was merely a reservation of the death sentence, and Seneca must have known it. The only thing now was to wait till he should receive the order to die, and Seneca occupied the time in writing. If what he wrote has a flushed and excited air, it is not surprising. The uncertainty of his position had preyed upon him while he was still Minister – "there are many," he had written, "who must hold fast to their dizzy height; it is only by falling that they can leave it."[¹³⁹] He had fallen, and still he had to live in uncertainty; he had always been a nervous man.

The end came in 65, in connexion with the conspiracy of Piso. Tacitus is not altogether distinct as to the implication of Seneca in this plot, but modern historians have inclined to believe in his guilt – if guilt it was.[¹⁴⁰] Mr Henderson, in particular, is very severe on him for this want of "gratitude" to his benefactor and pupil, but it is difficult to see what Nero had done for him that he would not have preferred undone.[¹⁴¹] Perhaps at the time, and certainly later on, Seneca was regarded as a possible substitute for Nero upon the throne;[¹⁴²] but he was well over sixty and frail, nor is it clear that the world had yet decided that a man could be Emperor without being a member of the Julian or Claudian house. Seneca, in fact any man, must have felt that any one would be better than Nero, but he had himself conspicuously left the world, and, with his wife, was living the philosophic life – a vegetarian again, and still a water-drinker.[¹⁴³] Seneca was ready for the death-summons and at once opened his veins. Death came slowly, but it came; and he died, eloquent to the last —novissimo quoque momenta suppeditante eloquentia.

Such is the story of Seneca. Even in bare outline it shows something of his character – his kindliness and sensibility, his weakness and vanity; but there are other features revealed in his books and his many long letters to Lucilius. No Roman, perhaps, ever laid more stress on the duty of gentleness and forgiveness.[¹⁴⁴] "Look at the City of Rome," he says, "and the crowds unceasingly pouring through its broad streets – what a solitude, what a wilderness it would be, were none left but whom a strict judge would acquit. We have all done wrong (peccavimus), some in greater measure, some in less, some on purpose, some by accident, some by the fault of others; we have not stood bravely enough by our good resolutions; despite our will and our resistance, we have lost our innocence. Nor is it only that we have acted amiss; we shall do so to the end."[¹⁴⁵] He is anxious to make Stoicism available for his friends; he tones down its gratuitous harshness, accommodates, conciliates. He knows what conscience is; he is recognized as a master in dealing with the mind at variance with itself, so skilfully does he analyse and lay bare its mischiefs. Perhaps he analyses too much – the angel, who bade Hermas cease to ask concerning sins and ask of righteousness, might well have given him a word. But he is always tender with the man to whom he is writing. If he was, as Quintilian suggests, a "splendid assailant of the faults of men," it is the faults of the unnamed that he assails; his friends' faults suggest his own, and he pleads and sympathizes. His style corresponds with the spirit in which he thinks. "You complain," he writes to Lucilius, "that my letters are not very finished in style. Who talks in a finished style unless he wishes to be affected? What my talk would be, if we were sitting or walking together, unlaboured and easy, that is what I wish my letters to be, without anything precious or artificial in them."[¹⁴⁶] And he has in measure succeeded in giving the air of talk to his writing – its ease, its gaiety, even its rambling and discursiveness. He always sees the friend to whom he writes, and talks to him – sometimes at him – and not without some suggestion of gesticulation. He must have talked well – though one imagines that, like Coleridge on Highgate Hill, he probably preferred the listener who sat "like a passive bucket to be pumped into." Happily the reader is not obliged to be quite so passive.

But we shall not do him justice if we do not recognize his high character. In an age when it was usual to charge every one with foulness, natural and unnatural, Dio Cassius alone among writers suggests it of Seneca; and, quite apart from his particular bias in this case, Dio is not a high authority, – more especially as he belonged to a much later generation. If his talk is of "virtue! virtue!" Seneca's life was deliberately directed to virtue. In the midst of Roman society, and set in the highest place but one in the world, he still cherished ideals, and practised self-discipline, daily self-examination. "This is the one goal of my days and of my nights: this is my task, my thought – to put an end to my old faults."[¹⁴⁷] His whole philosophy is practical, and directed to the reformation of morals. The Stoic paradoxes, and with them every part of philosophy which has no immediate bearing upon conduct, he threw aside. His language on the accumulation of books recalls the amusement of St Francis at the idea of possessing a breviary. And further, we may note that whatever be charged against him as a statesman, not his own master, and as a writer, not always quite in control of his rhetoric, Seneca was fundamentally truthful with himself. He never hid his own weakness; he never concealed from himself the difficulty of his ideals; he never tried to delude himself with what he could not believe. The Stoics had begun long since to make terms with popular religion, but Seneca is entirely free from delusions as to the gods of popular belief. He saw clearly enough that there was no truth in them, and he never sought help from anything but the real. He is a man, trained in the world,[¹⁴⁸] in touch with its problems of government, with the individual and his questions of character, death and eternity, – a man tender, pure and true – too great a man to take the purely negative stand of Thrasea, or to practise the virtue of the schools in "arrogant indolence." But he has hardly reached the inner peace which he sought.

The story of Epictetus can be more briefly told, for there is very little to tell.[¹⁴⁹] He was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia: – he was the slave of Nero's freedman Epaphroditus, and somehow managed to hear the lectures of the Stoic Musonius. Eventually he was set free, and when Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, he went to Nicopolis in Epirus,[¹⁵⁰] where he lived and taught – lame, neat, poor and old. How he taught is to be seen in the discourses which Arrian took down in the reign of Trajan, – "Whatever I heard him say, I tried to write down exactly, and in his very words as far as I could – to keep them as memorials for myself of his mind and of his outspokenness. So they are, as you would expect, very much what a man would say to another on the spur of the moment – not what he would write for others to read afterwards… His sole aim in speaking was to move the minds of his hearers to the best things. If then these discourses should achieve this, they would have the effect which I think a philosopher's words should have. But if they do not, let my readers know that, when he spoke them, the hearer could not avoid being affected as Epictetus wished him to be. If the discourses do not achieve this, perhaps it will be my fault, or perhaps it may be inevitable. Farewell."

Epictetus on children and women

Such, save for a sentence or two omitted, is Arrian's preface, – thereafter no voice is heard but that of Epictetus. To place, time or persons present the barest allusions only are made. "Someone said … And Epictetus spoke." The four books of Arrian give a strong impression of fidelity. We hear the tones of the old man, and can recognize "the mind and the outspokenness," which Arrian cherished in memory – we understand why, as we read. The high moral sense of the teacher, his bursts of eloquence, his shrewdness, his abrupt turns of speech, his apostrophes – "Slave!" he cries, as he addresses the weakling – his diminutives of derision, produce the most lively sense of a personality. There is wit, too, but like Stoic wit in general it is hard and not very sympathetic; it has nothing of the charm and delicacy of Plato's humour, nor of its kindliness.

Here and there are words and thoughts which tell of his life. More than once he alludes to his age and his lameness – "A lame old man like me." But perhaps nowhere in literature are there words that speak so loud of a man without experience of woman or child. "On a voyage," he says, "when the ship calls at a port and you go ashore for water, it amuses you to pick up a shell or a plant by the way; but your thoughts ought to be directed to the ship, and you must watch lest the captain call, and then you must throw away all those things, that you may not be flung aboard, tied like the sheep. So in life, suppose that instead of some little shell or plant, you are given something in the way of wife or child (antì bolbaríou kaì kochlidiou gynaikárion kaì paidíon) nothing need hinder. But, if the captain call, run to the ship letting them all go and never looking round. If you are old, do not even go far from the ship, lest you fail to come when called."[¹⁵¹] He bids a man endure hunger; he can only die of it. "But my wife and children also suffer hunger, (ohi emoì peinéousi). What then? does their hunger lead to any other place? Is there not for them the same descent, wherever it lead? Below, is it not the same for them as for you?"[¹⁵²] "If you are kissing your child, or brother, or friend, never give full licence to the appearance (tèn phantasían); check your pleasure … remind yourself that you love a mortal thing, a thing that is not your own (ouden tôn sautoû)… What harm does it do to whisper, as you kiss the child, 'To-morrow you will die'?" This is a thought he uses more than once,[¹⁵³] though he knows the attractiveness of lively children.[¹⁵⁴] He recommends us to practise resignation – beginning on a broken jug or cup, then on a coat or puppy, and so up to oneself and one's limbs, children, wife or brothers.[¹⁵⁵] "If a man wishes his son or his wife not to do wrong, he really wishes what is another's not to be another's."[¹⁵⁶]

As to women, a few quotations will show his detachment. He seems hardly to have known a good woman. "Do not admire your wife's beauty, and you are not angry with the adulterer. Learn that a thief and an adulterer have no place among the things that are yours, but among those which are not yours and not in your power,"[¹⁵⁷] and he illustrates his philosophy with an anecdote of an iron lamp stolen from him, which he replaced with an earthenware one. From fourteen years old, he says, women think of nothing and aim at nothing but lying with men.[¹⁵⁸] Roman women liked Plato's Republic for the licence they wrongly supposed it gave.[¹⁵⁹] He constantly speaks of women as a temptation, nearly always using a diminutive korásion, korasidíon– little girls – and as a temptation hardly to be resisted by young men. He speaks of their "softer voices."[¹⁶⁰] A young philosopher is no match for a "pretty girl"; let him fly temptation.[¹⁶¹] "As to pleasure with women, abstain as far as you can, before marriage; but if you do indulge in it, do it in the way conformable to custom. Do not, however, be disagreeable to those who take such pleasures, nor apt to rebuke them or to say often that you do not."[¹⁶²] All this may be taken as the impression left by Rome and the household of Epaphroditus upon a slave's mind. It may be observed that he makes nothing like Dio Chrysostom's condemnation of prostitution – an utterance unexampled in pagan antiquity.

It is pleasanter to turn to other features of Epictetus. He has a very striking lecture on personal cleanliness.[¹⁶³] In proportion as men draw near the gods by reason, they cling to purity of soul and body. Nature has given men hands and nostrils; so, if a man does not use a handkerchief, "I say, he is not fulfilling the function of a man." Nature has provided water. "It is impossible that some impurity should not remain in the teeth after eating. 'So wash your teeth,' says Nature. Why? 'That you may be a man and not a beast – a pig.'" If a man would not bathe and use the strigil and have his clothes washed – "either go into a desert where you deserve to go, or live alone and smell yourself." He cannot bear a dirty man, – "who does not get out of his way?" It gives philosophy a bad name, he says; but it is quite clear that that was not his chief reason. He would sooner a young man came to him with his hair carefully trimmed than with it dirty and rough; such care implied "some conception of the beautiful," which it was only necessary to direct towards the things of the mind; "but if a man comes to me filthy and dirty, with a moustache down to his knees – what can I say to him?" "But whence am I to get a fine cloak? Man! you have water; wash it!"

Fame of Epictetus

Pupils gathered round him and he became famous, as we can see in the reminiscences of Aulus Gellius.[¹⁶⁴] Sixty or seventy years after his death a man bought his old earthenware lamp for three thousand drachmas.[¹⁶⁵] Even in his lifetime men began to come about "the wonderful old man" who were hardly serious students. They wished, he says, to occupy the time while waiting to engage a passage on a ship – they happened to be passing (párodós estin) and looked in to see him as if he were a statue. "We can go and see Epictetus too. – Then you go away and say; Oh! Epictetus was nothing! he talked bad Greek – oh! barbarous Greek!"[¹⁶⁶] Others came to pick up a little philosophic language for use in public. Why could they not philosophize and say nothing? he asked. "Sheep do not vomit up their grass to show the shepherd how much they have eaten – no! they digest it inside, and then produce wool and milk outside."[¹⁶⁷] He took his teaching seriously as a matter of life, and he looked upon it as a service done to mankind – quite equivalent to the production of "two or three ugly-nosed children."[¹⁶⁸] He has a warm admiration for the Cynic philosopher's independence of encumberments – how can he who has to teach mankind go looking after a wife's confinement – or "something to heat the water in to give the baby a bath?"[¹⁶⁹]

These then are the two great teachers of Stoicism, the outstanding figures, whose words and tones survive, whose characters are familiar to us. They are clearly preachers, both of them, intent on the practical reformation of their listeners or correspondents. For them conduct is nine-tenths of life. Much of their teaching is of course the common property of all moral teachers – the deprecation of anger, of quarrelsomeness, of self-indulgence, of grumbling, of impurity, is peculiar to no school. Others have emphasized that life is a campaign with a general to be obeyed, if you can by some instinct divine what he is signalling.[¹⁷⁰] But perhaps it was a new thing in the Western World, when so much accent was laid on conduct. The terror of contemporary life, with its repulsiveness, its brutality and its fascination, drove men in search of the moral guide. The philosopher's school was an infirmary, not for the glad but for the sorry.[¹⁷¹] "That man," says Seneca, "is looking for salvation —ad salutem spectat."

Self-examination

Men sought the help of the philosopher, and relapsed. "He thinks he wishes reason. He has fallen out with luxury, but he will soon make friends with her. But he says he is offended with his own life! I do not deny it; who is not? Men love their vices and hate them at the same time."[¹⁷²] So writes Seneca of a friend of Lucilius and his fugitive thoughts of amendment, and Epictetus is no less emphatic on the crying need for earnestness. The Roman world was so full of glaring vice that every serious man from Augustus onward had insisted on some kind of reformation, and now men were beginning to feel that the reformation must begin within themselves. The habit of daily self-examination became general among the Stoics, and they recommended it warmly to their pupils. Here is Seneca's account of himself.

"When the day was over and Sextius had gone to his night's rest, he used to ask his mind (animum): 'what bad habit of yours have you cured to-day? what vice have you resisted? in what respect are you better?' Anger will cease and will be more moderate, when it knows it must daily face the judge. Could anything be more beautiful than this habit of examining the whole day? What a sleep is that which follows self-scrutiny! How calm, how deep and free, when the mind is either praised or admonished, when it has looked into itself, and like a secret censor makes a report upon its own moral state. I avail myself of this power and daily try my own case. When the light is removed from my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, is silent, I survey my whole day and I measure my words again. I hide nothing from myself; I pass over nothing. For why should I be afraid of any of my errors, when I can say: 'See that you do it no more, now I forgive you. In that discussion, you spoke too pugnaciously; after this do not engage with the ignorant; they will not learn who have never learned. That man you admonished too freely, so you did him no good; you offended him. For the future, see not only whether what you say is true, but whether he to whom it is said will bear the truth.'"[¹⁷³]

Similar passages might be multiplied. "Live with yourself and see how ill-furnished you are," wrote Persius (iv, 52) the pupil of Cornutus. "From heaven comes that word 'know thyself,'" said Juvenal. A rather remarkable illustration is the letter of Serenus, a friend of Seneca's, of whose life things are recorded by Tacitus that do not suggest self-scrutiny. In summary it is as follows: —

"I find myself not quite free, nor yet quite in bondage to faults which I feared and hated. I am in a state, not the worst indeed, but very querulous and uncomfortable, neither well nor ill. It is a weakness of the mind that sways between the two, that will neither bravely turn to right nor to wrong. Things disturb me, though they do not alter my principles. I think of public life; something worries me, and I fall back into the life of leisure, to be pricked to the will to act by reading some brave words or seeing some fine example. I beg you, if you have any remedy to stay my fluctuation of mind, count me worthy to owe you peace. To put what I endure into a simile, it is not the tempest that troubles me, but sea-sickness."[¹⁷⁴]

Epictetus quotes lines which he attributes to Pythagoras —

 
Let sleep not come upon thy languid eyes
Ere thou has scanned the actions of the day —
Where have I sinned? What done or left undone?
From first to last examine all, and then
Blame what is wrong, in what is right, rejoice.[¹⁷⁵]
 

These verses, he adds, are for use, not for quotation. Elsewhere he gives us a parody of self-examination – the reflections of one who would prosper in the world – "Where have I failed in flattery? Can I have done anything like a free man, or a noble-minded? Why did I say that? Was it not in my power to lie? Even the philosophers say nothing hinders a man from telling a lie."[¹⁷⁶]

But self-examination may take us further.[¹⁷⁷] We come into the world, he says, with some innate idea (émphutos énnoia) of good and evil, as if Nature had taught us; but we find other men with different ideas, – Syrians and Egyptians, for instance. It is by a comparison of our ideas with those of other men that philosophy comes into being for us. "The beginning of philosophy – with those at least who enter upon it aright – by the door – is a consciousness of one's own weakness and insufficiency in necessary things (astheneías kaì adunamías)." We need rules or canons, and philosophy determines these for us by criticism.[¹⁷⁸]

This reference to Syrians and Egyptians is probably not idle. The prevalence of Syrian and Egyptian religions, inculcating ecstatic communion with a god and the soul's need of preparation for the next world, contributed to the change that is witnessed in Stoic philosophy. The Eastern mind is affecting the Greek, and later Stoicism like later Platonism has thoughts and ideals not familiar to the Greeks of earlier days. It was with religions, as opposed to city cults, that Stoicism had now to compete for the souls of men; and while it retains its Greek characteristics in its intellectualism and its slightly-veiled contempt for the fool and the barbarian, it has taken on other features. It was avowedly a rule of life rather than a system of speculation; and it was more, for the doctrine of the Spermaticos Logos (the Generative Reason) gave a new meaning to conduct and opened up a new and rational way to God. Thus Stoicism, while still a philosophy was pre-eminently a religion, and even a gospel – Good News of emancipation from the evil in the world and of union with the Divine.

The true worship of the gods

Stoicism gave its convert a new conception of the relation of God and man. One Divine Word was the essence of both – Reason was shared by men and gods, and by pure thought men came into contact with the divine mind. Others sought communion in trance and ritual – the Stoic when he was awake, at his highest and best level, with his mind and not his hand, in thoughts, which he could understand and assimilate, rather than in magical formulae, which lost their value when they became intelligible. God and men formed a polity, and the Stoic was the fellow-citizen of the gods, obeying, understanding and adoring, as they did, one divine law, one order – a partaker of the divine nature, a citizen of the universe, a free man as no one else was free, because he knew his freedom and knew who shared it with him. He stood on a new footing with the gods, and for him the old cults passed away, superseded by a new worship which was divine service indeed.

"How the gods are to be worshipped, men often tell us. Let us not permit a man to light lamps on the Sabbath, for the gods need not the light, and even men find no pleasure in the smoke. Let us forbid to pay the morning salutation and to sit at the doors of the temples; it is human interest that is courted by such attentions: God, he worships who knows Him. Let us forbid to take napkins and strigils to Jove, to hold the mirror to Juno. God seeks none to minister to him; nay! himself he ministers to mankind; everywhere he is, at the side of every man. Let a man hear what mode to keep in sacrifices, how far to avoid wearisomeness and superstition: never will enough be done, unless in his mind he shall have conceived God as he ought, as in possession of all things, as giving all things freely. What cause is there that the gods should do good? Nature. He errs, who thinks they can not do harm; they will not. They cannot receive an injury nor do one. To hurt and to be hurt are one thing. Nature, supreme and above all most beautiful, has exempted them from danger and from being dangerous. The beginning of worship of the gods is to believe gods are; then to attribute to them their own majesty, to attribute to them goodness, without which majesty is not, to know it is they who preside over the universe, who rule all things by their might, who are guardians of mankind; at times[¹⁷⁹] thoughtful of individuals. They neither give nor have evil; but they chastise, they check, they assign penalties and sometimes punish in the form of blessing. Would you propitiate the gods? Be good! He has worshipped them enough who has imitated them."[¹⁸⁰]

This is not merely a statement of Stoic dogma; it was a proclamation of freedom. Line after line of this fine passage directly counters what was asserted and believed throughout the world by the adherents of the Eastern religions. Hear Seneca once more.