The two schools that made the strongest appeal to the Romans at the end of the Republic were Epicureanism and Stoicism. The former had wide influence until the first century of our era, chiefly because its agnosticism, or rather its denial of the existence of any future life, offered a refuge from the uncertainty which prevailed now that the old beliefs were broken up and men, harrassed by political disorders, had not yet found an abiding place in any positive philosophy. The Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, it is true, but they declared that the gods, if they existed, must dwell in some remote place in the upper ether in eternal sunshine, undisturbed by any care for mortals. They explained the universe by a resort to the atomistic materialism of Democritus, a philosopher of the late fifth century. Their religious aim, if we may so define it, was to free men from the terror which their superstitious beliefs in the gods and in future punishment brought upon them. No writer sets this forth with greater genius or with greater passion than Lucretius, the contemporary of Cicero. His six books are devoted to an explanation of the universe and its phenomena, of the nature of man, and of the impossibility of immortality. This splendid poem furnishes us the best proof that in that day the mass of men still believed in immortality and longed for an assurance that their belief was not in vain.
In practical ethics the Epicureans did not differ much from the other systems of their time. They taught that happiness must be found in the avoidance of pain, and that inasmuch as some pleasures have painful results they were to be rejected, as some pains were to be accepted, for they were followed by pleasure; and they held that in self-control and choice lay the means by which man could attain to his goal, which was ἀταραξία, complete repose of the mind. So the Epicurean tried to reach an end similar to that of the Stoic, although his premises were somewhat different. Epicureanism made a natural appeal to men in a time like the last century and a half of the Republic, when the ancient confidence in the state religion was gone, when the simplicity of the earlier centuries had been replaced by a more elaborate method of living, made possible through the rapid increase of wealth, and when in every department of Roman life rapid changes were taking place.
Yet for various reasons Epicureanism gradually lost its hold. It may be that the passivity which it engendered failed to make a lasting appeal to the Roman mind, or more probably other philosophies may have offered more attractive means of attaining the same goal of happiness. At any rate, as I pointed out in an earlier lecture, the Roman temperament had an especial leaning towards Stoicism. I there spoke of the introduction of Stoicism at Rome by Panaetius during the second century b.c., and I sketched the tendencies of his system so far as popular religion was concerned. It was probably Panaetius who was responsible for that threefold theology which was set forth by the famous Scaevola, who declared that there were three classes of gods—those of the poets, those of the statesmen, and those of the philosophers. The mythical theology of the poets, he said, was full of absurd and degrading stories unworthy of the attention of men; the religion of the state was nothing but a wise device, a useful convention adopted by statesmen as suited to the necessities of the political organism; but the theology of the intelligent man, the philosopher, was alone true, yet naturally it was beyond the power of the common man to grasp. Such was the attitude of the most famous jurist and the head of the state religion at the beginning of the last century before our era.[273] A little later Varro, the famous polyhistor, in writing of the gods and religion in his great Encyclopedia of Roman Antiquities, made a similar distinction between theologies and showed throughout his treatment the pantheistic influence of the Stoic philosophy. In his works he was the first fully to combine the mythological traditions with the philosophic doctrines which the Romans had been learning for over a century.
Yet the Epicurean and the Stoic schools were not the only ones which numbered adherents among the Romans. The representatives of the later Academy, Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon, had many pupils. Cicero, Atticus, Brutus, and Varro had all heard the latter lecture at Athens. But the teachings of Plato had been greatly modified, inasmuch as these later Academicians had adopted the greater part of Stoicism into their philosophy. Furthermore the sceptical tendency which is so clearly marked among the Sophists of the fifth century had gradually developed during the fourth and third centuries into something like a philosophic system. The Sceptics, however, can hardly be called a school; they included those men in the various schools who doubted the possibility of attaining to absolute knowledge. Among the Romans they had close affinity with the tenets of the later Academicians on the one hand and with Stoic doctrines on the other. But their keen consciousness of the limitations of human knowledge made them also a factor in producing a certain agnosticism among the educated. As a matter of fact, the majority of the Romans were plain men, not given to speculation, with a fondness for the concrete rather than the abstract. They naturally selected from the various philosophies the elements which appealed to their practical sense, and which fortified them to meet the burdens and responsibilities of their daily life. On the whole Stoicism did this service more than any other of the current systems, and in the end, as we have already seen, Stoicism became the chief philosophy under the early Empire. The Stoics’ interest in grammar and logic also appealed to the legal character of the Roman mind; their system of duties, which were to be met unflinchingly, accorded with the Roman temper, and their cosmopolitan view found favor with a people that were masters of the greater part of the known world. But whatever the system of philosophy or selection of philosophic doctrines the Roman adopted, he found therein no warrant for a belief in the state religion. Philosophy could go no further than it did with Scaevola and Varro. The traditional religion was abandoned by the intellectual Romans; they substituted for it either agnosticism, some form of moral philosophy, or a pantheistic concept of the world. In truth the conquest of Greece over Rome was complete: in literature, art, philosophy, and religion captured Greece had taken her captor captive; by the beginning of our era Greek thought had penetrated to all the great centers of the Roman Empire, and under that long peace, which with comparatively few interruptions lasted for two centuries after the battle for Actium, philosophy and many new religions, including Christianity, travelled the great Roman roads from one end of the ancient world to the other.
The last century of the Republic from the time of the Gracchi to the battle of Actium in 31 b.c. was not only a period of religious change but also a time of political decay. The strength of the Republic was so far gone that democratic government no longer existed, and the rule fell into the hands of political leaders. However much the Gracchi may have been inspired by public spirit and high purpose, they set in motion a train of events that was destined to result in the loss of all public liberty and in the foundation of the Empire. The history of this last century must be read in the history of individuals—Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus; Saturninus; Marius, Cinna, and Sulla; Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus; Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus. These were the political bosses who for good or ill led the state and combined for its control. From the day that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49 to the battle of Actium in September 31 b.c., Italy and many other lands around the Mediterranean were harassed almost continuously by civil war. The Italian peninsula never fully recovered from the disasters of this time. Even with the horrors of the European struggle before us, we in this land can hardly picture to ourselves either these disasters or the joy with which the majority of the inhabitants of the Roman world hailed the pax Romana which the Emperor Augustus established. With peace came a revival of trade and a return of prosperity, to which eloquent witness is given by Virgil and Horace.
The founder of the Empire, Augustus, attempted to revive the old state religion and to introduce certain modifications to the advantage of his own position. In this he was aided by the sense of dissatisfaction which the preceding disasters had increased, and by that inherent belief which always seems to persist, even in times of great religious doubt, that somehow the prosperity of the state is inseparably connected with the rites of religion. Under his direction temples were rebuilt, old priesthoods reestablished, and the ancient ritual performed with a magnificence that men had never before seen. He also magnified the worship of Apollo and of Apollo’s sister Diana; the former god in fact he regarded as his patron divinity, and three years after his victory at Actium he dedicated a magnificent temple to him on the Palatine. But the new worship of Apollo did not attain to the supreme position to which Augustus apparently wished to raise it, and his efforts to recall the old state religion could not bring back men’s belief, although they could restore its practices. Indeed we must bear in mind that the traditional worship of the greater Roman gods continued to exist to the end of antiquity, in spite of the fact that it had lost its vitality centuries before its final downfall.
One important and permanent contribution to religion Augustus did make: as early as the year 42 b.c., the masterful youth had forced an unwilling senate to declare Julius Caesar divine; thereby he established the worship of the deified emperors—a cult which was to last nearly four centuries. The significance for us of this worship of the emperor lies in the fact that now for the first time there was introduced into the entire civilized world a common religion. From the remotest East to the farthest West, from Britain on the north to the edge of the Great Desert on the south, temples to the deified emperors had been erected before a century of the Empire had passed, and these did much to accustom men to the idea of one common worship for the whole world.
Thus far we have been considering almost wholly those forces which were operating in the Roman world first to obscure the original Roman religion and finally to break down faith in that traditional religion which had resulted from the victory of the gods of Greece over those of Rome. Yet the age of Augustus was far from being irreligious. Of the truth of this statement Virgil alone would be sufficient witness if all others were lacking, for the Aeneid owed its immediate popularity and its permanent high place, not only to the unmatched expression which it gave to Roman imperialism, but also to its religious tone, which the poet’s contemporaries and their successors found partly in Virgil’s exact knowledge of Roman ritual and felt still more in the sixth book of the Aeneid, where the current beliefs in a future life with rewards and punishments were set forth in combination with impressive prophecy after the event; all was planned and combined in such a way as to make a strong appeal to the Romans’ national pride and religious sense alike. Moreover under the Empire positive elements tending to elevate religious thought and to purify morals were not lacking. On many of these we have already touched in our last lecture, for they were largely to be found in philosophy, one of the greatest gifts which Greece gave to her conqueror. Even at the risk of repetition, we shall now consider briefly some of these constructive forces.
Although Epicureanism taught that man’s highest good was pleasure, it was far from being a thoroughgoing hedonism, as I pointed out a little while ago. On the contrary its founder taught that the pleasures of the mind were superior to those of the body, and that the cardinal virtue of man was correct insight, that is to say, wisdom, virtue, and justice; and that these three factors—wisdom, virtue, and justice—were necessary for a pleasant life.[274] Such doctrine as this does not properly make for religion, but it does contribute to the welfare and comfort of society. Epicureanism was the most quietistic of the later philosophic schools and so was well adapted to the conditions of the later Republic and the early Empire. We have seen how Pythagoreanism in its revival had something approaching the Christian cult of the Saints, and made sanctity an ideal of human life as well as an object of admiration. Platonism never lost its own religious fervor and missionary zeal, but had indeed communicated them to most of the eclectic later schools. Yet of all the schools perhaps Stoicism made the largest contribution directly to the moral and indirectly to the religious life of the first two centuries of our era.