CHAPTER III.Ethical aspect of Græco-Roman Society in the period of Plutarch: difficulty of obtaining an impartial view of it—Revival of moral earnestness concurrent with the establishment of the Empire: the reforms of Augustus a formal expression of actual tendencies—Evidences of this in philosophical and general literature—The differences between various Schools modified by the importance of the ethical end to which all their efforts were directed—Endeavour made to base morality on sanctions already consecrated by the philosophies and religious traditions of the Past—Plutarch’s “Ethics” the result of such an endeavour.
Ethical aspect of Græco-Roman Society in the period of Plutarch: difficulty of obtaining an impartial view of it—Revival of moral earnestness concurrent with the establishment of the Empire: the reforms of Augustus a formal expression of actual tendencies—Evidences of this in philosophical and general literature—The differences between various Schools modified by the importance of the ethical end to which all their efforts were directed—Endeavour made to base morality on sanctions already consecrated by the philosophies and religious traditions of the Past—Plutarch’s “Ethics” the result of such an endeavour.
Few ages have left to posterity a character less easy to define, or more subjected to the ravages of mutually destructive schools of criticism, than that which gave the Religion of Christ to the Western world, and witnessed the moulding of Pagan Religion and Philosophy—or rather of Pagan religions and philosophies—into that systematized shape which they afterwards presented against the progress of Christianity. Many ancient and some modern apologists of Christianity have appeared to think it essential to the honour and glory of their Creed that the world, before its rise, should be regarded as sunk in iniquity to such a depth that nothing but a Divine Revelation could serve toelevate and purify it.[98]It has been maintained, on the other hand, and that too by Christian writers, that no epoch of Western civilization has been so marked, not only by the material well-being of the mass of mankind, but “by virtue in the highest places and by moderation and sobriety in the ranks beneath,” as that during which the new Creed was generally regarded as a base and superstitious sort of Atheism.[99]It may be conceded that the original authors of this period who have been most read in modern times have easily been construed into vigorous and effective testimony in support of the former position. The poets and rhetoricians of the Empire have had their most exaggerated phrases turned into evidence against the morals of their own days, and their less emphatic expressions have been regarded as hinting at the perpetration of vices toomonstrous to be more clearly indicated. If, by chance an author has left writings marked by a lofty conception of morality, and breathing the purest and most disinterested love of virtue, this very fact has been sufficient to justify a denial of their Pagan origin, and the assertion that the true source of their inspiration must have been Judæa. Hence the curious struggles of many intelligent men to establish a personal connexion between Paul and Seneca, and to demonstrate that the Ethics of Plutarch are coloured by Christian modes of thought.[100]Other authors of the period whofurnish material for correcting this one-sided impression have been less known to the multitude and less consulted by the learned. Even were the worst true that Juvenal, and Tacitus, and Martial, and Suetonius, and Petronius have said about Roman courts and Roman society; even were it not possible to supply a corrective colouring to the picture from the pages of Seneca, and Lucan, and Pliny, and Persius, and even Juvenal himself: yet it should be easy to remember that, just as the Palace of the Cæsars was not the City, so the City was not the Empire.Exeat aula qui volet esse piusis a maxim that could with advantage be applied to the sphere of historical criticism as well as to that of practical Ethics; and if we leave the factions and scandals of the Court and the City under the worst of the Emperors, and follow Dion into the huts of lonelyherdsmen on the deserted hills of Eubœa, or linger with Plutarch at some modest gathering of family friends in Athens or the villages of Bœotia, we shall find innumerable examples of that virtue which the Republican poet sarcastically denies to the highest rulers. Even after the long reign of Christianity, vice has been centralized in the great capitals of civilization; and Rome and Alexandria and Antioch are not without their parallels among the cities of Modern Europe. In Alexandria itself, the populace who could listen to discourses like those of Dion must have been endowed with a considerable capacity for virtue; the tone of the orator, indeed, frequently reminds us of those modern preachers who provoke an agreeable sensation of excitement in the minds of their highly respectable audiences, by depicting them as involved in such wickedness as only the most daring of mankind would find courage to perpetrate.[101]We propose to deal elsewhere with the testimony of Plutarch as to the moral character of the age in which he lived, and at present confine our observations to the assertion that his “Ethical” writings are crowded with examples of the purest and most genuine virtue; not such virtue as shows itself on striking and public occasions only, but such also as irradiates the daily life of the common people in their homes and occupations. And although he is, perhaps, in some of his precepts, a little in advance of the general trend of his times, inculcating, in these instances,virtues which, though not unpractised and unknown, are still so far limited in their application that he wishes to draw them from their shy seclusion in some few better homes, and to establish them in the broad and popular light of recognized customs;[102]yet it is clear to every one of the few students of his pages that the virtues he depicts are the common aim of the people he meets in the streets and houses of Chæronea, and that the failings he corrects are the failings of the good people who are not too good to have to struggle against the temptations incident to humanity. The indications conveyed by Plutarch and Dion respecting the moral progress of obscure families and unknown villagers point to the widespread existence through the Empire of that same strenuous longing after goodness, which had already received emphatic expression in the writings of philosophers and poets whose activities had been confined to Rome.
For there can be no doubt that the establishment of the Empire had been accompanied by a strenuous moral earnestness which is in marked contrast to the flippant carelessness of the last days of the Republican Era. The note of despair—despair none the less because its external aspect was gay anddebonnaire—so frequently raised by Ovid and Propertius and Tibullus; the reckless cry,Interea, dum fata sinunt, jungamus amores; Iam veniet tenebris Mors adoperta caput, is thelast word of a dying epoch.[103]These three great poets utter the swan song of the moribund Republic. Their beliefs are sceptical, or frankly materialistic; they shut their eyes at the prospect of death to open them on the nearer charms of the sensual life: devoting their days and their genius to the pleasures of a passionately voluptuous love of women. In their higher moods they turn to the Past, but with an antiquarian interest only, like Ovid and Propertius, or, like Tibullus, to delight in the religious customs that still linger in the rural parts of Italy, the relics of a simpler and devouter time. If they turn their thoughts to the Afterworld at all, it is to depict in glowing verses the conventional charms of the classic Elysium, or to find occasion for striking description in the fabled woes of Ixion and Tantalus.[104]Even these descriptions change by a natural gradation into an appeal for more passionate devotion on the part of Corinna, or Delia, or Cynthia.[105]If Propertius thinks of death, it is but to hope that Cynthia will show her regard for his memory by visiting his tomb in her old age; to regret, with infinite pathos, the thousands of “dear dead women” who have become the prey of the Infernal Deities—sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum; to lament that his deserted mistress will call in vain upon his scattereddust; or to postpone all consideration of such matters until age shall have exhausted his capacity for more passionate enjoyment. If he mentions the mighty political events of his time, it is with the air of one who watches a triumphal procession while resting his head on his mistress’s shoulder.[106]But these poets, wrapped in all the physical pleasures which their age had to supply, are not ignorant of the malady from which it suffers; they know that their despair and their materialism are born of the misery of long years of sanguinary strife; and Tibullus, in one of the sweetest of his Elegies, utters a wish which is the Ave of the storm-tossed Republic to the approaching peace of the Empire:—At nobis, Pax alma, veni.[107]
Cum domino Pax ista venit.[108]Virgil and Horace are poets of the Empire, and strike the dominant note of the new epoch. It was not the mere courtly complaisance of genius for its patrons that led Virgil and Horace to identify their muse with the religious and moral reforms of Augustus. It was rather a conscious recognition of the spiritual needs of the new age which led poets and statesmen alike to further this joint work. It is the custom to regard the labours of Augustus as resulting in the superimposition on the social fabric of mere forms and rituals which would have been appropriate were society only a fabric, but which were utterly inadequate to serve as anything better than a superficial ornament to an expanding anddeveloping organism.[109]But, taken in conjunction with the poems of Virgil and Horace, they show their real character as outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. It is true that Horace at times attributes the disasters from which his countrymen have suffered to their disregard of the ancient religious ceremonies; to their neglect of thetempla ædesque labentes deorum et fœda nigro simulacra fumo;[110]but in the six famous Odes which stand at the head of Book III he emphasizes the national necessity of chastity, fidelity, mercy, loyalty to duty; and he utters not less emphatic warnings against the general danger from avarice, ambition, luxury. The essentially religious character of the Æneid is evident to every reader. That is no mere formalism which inspires with moral vigour the splendid melodies of the Sixth Book.[111]Although the Poet uses the conventional machinery of Elysium and Tartarus to emphasize the contrast between Virtue and Vice by contrasting the fates thatawait them hereafter; yet justice, piety, patriotism, chastity, self-devotion; fidelity to friend and wife and client; filial and fraternal love: never received advocacy more strenuous and sincere, never were sanctioned by praise more eloquent, or reprehension more terrible, than in those immortal verses which it is an impertinence to praise. The question which presented itself to Augustus, to his ministers and to his poets, was how to re-invigorate and preserve those qualities by her practice of which Rome had becomepulcherrima rerum. And we cannot wonder that an important part of their answer to this question lay in the direction of restoring those ancient religious ceremonies and moral practices which had been most conspicuously displayed when Rome was making her noblest efforts to accomplish her great destiny. The sanction of antiquity is the most permanent of all appeals that are ever made to humanity; and, even in times of revolution, its authority has been invoked by those most eager to sweep away existing institutions.Pro magno teste vetustas creditur.[112]But if Augustus and his friends appealed to antiquity, it was not merely to recall the shadows of the ancient forms and customs, but to revivify them with the new life of virtue that was welling up in their time, and which, in its turn, received external grace and strength by its embodiment in the ancestral forms.
The strong chord of moral earnestness struck by Horace and Virgil grows more resonant as the new eraadvances, until, in literature at least, it attains the persistence of a dominant. Juvenal is so passionately moral that he frequently renders himself liable to Horace’s censure of those who worship virtue too much; but, in his best moods, as in the famous lines which close the Tenth Satire, he depicts the virtuous man in a style which is not the less earnest and sincere because it is also dignified and calm. Persius, whose disposition was marked by maidenly modesty and gentleness, and who is also described asfrugi et pudicus, shows, even when hampered by a disjointed style which only allows him to utter his thought in fragments, that devotion to the highest moral aims which we should expect from a writer brought up under the influences which he enjoyed;[113]and though he, too, exhibits some of the savage ferocity of Juvenal in his strictures of vice, he yet pays, in his Fifth Satire, that tribute to virtue in the person of Cornutus which “proves the goodness of the writer and the gracefulness with which he could write.”[114]Lucan, too, whose youth, like that of Persius, had the inestimable advantage of receiving a share of the wisdom which Cornutus had gained by nights devoted to philosophic studies, exhibits a spirit of the loftiest morality under the rhetorical phrasing of his great Republican Epic.[115]Looking back, with something of regret, to the days of a dominantoligarchy, he does not conceal the licentiousness which society harboured beneath the sway of the later Optimates, and he turns mostly to Cato as the type which he would fain accept as representative of the true Roman patrician:—
“Nam cui crediderim Superos arcana daturosDicturosque magis quam sancto vera Catoni?”[116]
“Nam cui crediderim Superos arcana daturosDicturosque magis quam sancto vera Catoni?”[116]
“Nam cui crediderim Superos arcana daturosDicturosque magis quam sancto vera Catoni?”[116]
“Nam cui crediderim Superos arcana daturos
Dicturosque magis quam sancto vera Catoni?”[116]
The noble lines in which Cato refuses to consult the Libyan oracle—Non exploratum populis Ammona relinquens—are well known, and express a highly ethical view of the divine administration of the world:—
“Hæremus cuncti superis, temploque tacenteNil facimus non sponte Dei: nec vocibus ullisNumen agit: dixitque semel nascentibus auctorQuicquid scire licet: steriles nec legit arenasUt caneret paucis, mersitque hoc pulvere verum.Estne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aerEt cælum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra?Juppiter est quodcunque vides quocunque moveris.”[117]
“Hæremus cuncti superis, temploque tacenteNil facimus non sponte Dei: nec vocibus ullisNumen agit: dixitque semel nascentibus auctorQuicquid scire licet: steriles nec legit arenasUt caneret paucis, mersitque hoc pulvere verum.Estne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aerEt cælum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra?Juppiter est quodcunque vides quocunque moveris.”[117]
“Hæremus cuncti superis, temploque tacenteNil facimus non sponte Dei: nec vocibus ullisNumen agit: dixitque semel nascentibus auctorQuicquid scire licet: steriles nec legit arenasUt caneret paucis, mersitque hoc pulvere verum.Estne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aerEt cælum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra?Juppiter est quodcunque vides quocunque moveris.”[117]
“Hæremus cuncti superis, temploque tacente
Nil facimus non sponte Dei: nec vocibus ullis
Numen agit: dixitque semel nascentibus auctor
Quicquid scire licet: steriles nec legit arenas
Ut caneret paucis, mersitque hoc pulvere verum.
Estne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aer
Et cælum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra?
Juppiter est quodcunque vides quocunque moveris.”[117]
His biting sarcasms on those who exercise the art of Magic are conceived in the same spirit of lofty reverence for the Divine Nature,[118]and he would fain believein the immortality of the soul as a stimulus to virtue and self-abnegation in the present life.[119]
The philosophers are marked by the same strenuous seriousness as the poets. The letters of Seneca to Lucilius are still an Enchiridion for those that love virtue, and though there were, doubtless, in the ranks of the philosophers some who deserved the ferocity of Juvenal; some who laid themselves open to the sarcasms of Seneca’s friend, Marcellinus;[120]some like Euxenus, an early teacher of Apollonius of Tyana, “who did not care much to conform the actions of his life” to the tenets of the philosophy he professed;[121]some who resembled the Cynics who haunted the streets and temple gates of Alexandria, and did nothing, as Dion said, “but teach fools to laugh at Philosophy;”[122]yet it is beyond controversy that philosophers at this time were generally recognized as the moral teachers of society, and contributed largely, both as domestic chaplains like Fronto, and evangelistic preachers like Apollonius of Tyana, to the spread of that virtue whose praise and admiration are so conspicuous and sincere in the Greek and Roman writers of the period. The contrast presented by the Sophists, with their artificial graces and their luxurious lives, only served to emphasize the worth of the true philosopher, and when aSophist turned round upon his career, and determined to lead a virtuous life, he joined the ranks of those who professed philosophy.[123]
One of the most frequently recurrent signs of the essential love of virtue exhibited by this age is the constant and strenuous insistence that practice must conform to profession; and that hypocrisy is almost in the condition of a cardinal vice. It may, of course, be asserted that the passionate eagerness displayed touching the importance of being true in act to the explicit utterances of Philosophy is but a sign of conscious weakness in well-doing; and that a truer virtue would have given effect to itself without all this noisy preaching. But a recognition of one’s own feebleness has subsequently become one of the most lauded elements of the saintly character, and it is given to very few to blossom gently and naturally into that goodness which does neither strive nor cry. Juvenal’s diatribes against the Egnatii of Rome are not very different in language, and hardly different at all in spirit, from the attacks of New Testament writers on hypocritical members of the Churches. So far as Greece was concerned, this love of sincerity was but a return—from a somewhat distant lapse—to the ideal of personal openness presented in the famous words of Achilles:—
“For like hell mouth I loathWho holds not in his words and thoughts one indistinguished troth.”[124]
“For like hell mouth I loathWho holds not in his words and thoughts one indistinguished troth.”[124]
“For like hell mouth I loathWho holds not in his words and thoughts one indistinguished troth.”[124]
“For like hell mouth I loath
Who holds not in his words and thoughts one indistinguished troth.”[124]
And not only is practice regarded as the culmination of theory, the habit formed upon the active principle, Philosophy, but the question of personal honour is involved in the harmony between creed and deed; and one mark of distinction between sophist and philosopher is that the external apparatus of the former—“his contracted brows and studied gravity of aspect”—do not indicate the possession of the virtues which are the pride of the latter.[125]
Plutarch frequently lays strenuous weight on this point;[126]Seneca, Dion, Aurelius, Epictetus, Apuleius, are crowded with sermons on its importance.[127]And if pure professions are to be carried out into pure actions,there is a growing sense that neither may impure words be indulged in, even by those whose lives are pure. Even so far as the composition of light verse was concerned, a new sensitiveness was making itself evident. Catullus had said in the old days that a chaste and pious man might legitimately write verses of a licentious character, and the catchword had been repeated by all the society poets down to Martial.[128]But, even when addressing Domitian, Martial, who asserts that his life is pure, begs the Emperor to regard his lightest epigrams with the toleration due to the licence of a court jester. Pliny, the excellent and respectable Pliny, could not read his naughty hendecasyllables “merely to a few friends in my private chamber” without subjecting his compositions to serious criticisms in the homes of these friends, criticisms which he strives to meet by a long display of great names who have sinned in the same direction; but beneath this display his uneasiness peeps forth at every word.[129]
The moral reformation officially inaugurated by Augustus appears, in the light of these indications, as corresponding to an increased tendency to virtueactually leavening Græco-Roman society. The formal acts of the Cæsar, the policy of his ministers, the religious sentiment of Horace and Virgil, the Stoic fervour of Seneca and Lucan, the martyr spirit of the Thraseas and the Arrias, the tyrannizing morality of Juvenal, the kindly humanity of Pliny the Younger, the missionary enthusiasm of Dion, the gentle persuasiveness of Plutarch, are all common indications of the good that still interfused the Roman world; all point, as indeed, many other signs also point, to the existence of a widespread belief that virtuous ideals and virtuous actions were an inheritance of which mankind ought not to allow itself to be easily deprived. Philosophers and politicians, as they were at one in recognizing the value of this heritage, so they were also at one touching the general means by which its precious elements were to be invigorated and maintained. As we have already suggested, it is a remarkable characteristic of the philosophic writers of this period—of Seneca and Dion, of Plutarch, and even of Epictetus—that there is in them no pedantic adhesion to the fixed tenets of a particular school. The half-playful boast of Horace at one end of the period—nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri[130]—is reiterated with something of sarcastic emphasis in Epictetus at the other: “Virtue does not consist in having understood Chrysippus.”[131]Seneca gives expression to this prevalent spirit of compromise with great courage andclearness. After quotingsuo morea certainnobilis sententiaof Epicurus, he says: “You must not regard these expressions as peculiar to Epicurus; they are common property. The practice which obtains in the Senate should, I think, be adopted in Philosophy. When a speaker says something with which I partly agree, I ask him to compromise, and then I go with him.”[132]Anything in the whole gathered wealth of the Past which promised support to a man in his efforts to regulate his life in accordance with the dictates of reason and virtue was welcomed and made available for the uses of morality by the selective power of Philosophy. Hence Plutarch levies contributions on philosophers, poets, legislators; on Hellenic and Barbarian Religions; on Mysteries, Oracles, private utterances; on the whole complex civilization of the Græco-Roman world, and the civilizations which it had absorbed or dominated; on everything, in fact, which, from its antiquity, or its possession of national or individual authority, could be made available for establishing the practice of virtue on the sanction of an ancient andinalienable foundation. The object of the following pages is to scrutinize the results of this appeal to the Past, as they are presented in the “Ethics” of Plutarch, and to arrange in some kind of order the various elements of which they are composed.