Down to Vespasian, the empire had nothing which can be called public instruction.[17.66] What it afterwards possessed was confined to a few dry grammatical exercises, and the general decline became rather accelerated than retarded. The last days of the republic and the reign of Augustus, witnessed one of the most brilliant literary epochs that has ever occurred. But after the death of the great emperor, the decline may as properly be called sudden as rapid. The intelligent and cultivated society in which had moved Cicero, Atticus, Cæsar, Mæcenas, Agrippa, and Pollio, had vanished like a dream. Doubtless enlightened men remained; men familiar with the learning of their day, and occupying high positions, such as Lucilius, Pliny, Gallio, and the Senecas, with the literary circle which gathered around them. The body of Roman law, which is codified philosophy, which is Greek rationalism reduced to practice, continued its majestic growth. The noble Roman families had preserved a basis of purer religion and a horror of what they called “superstition.”[17.67] The geographers, Strabo and Pomponius Mela; the physician and encyclopædist, Celsus; the botanist, Dioscorides; the jurist, Sempronius Proculus—were able and liberal men. But these were exceptions; leaving out a few thousand enlightened persons, the world was immersed in profound ignorance of the laws of nature.[17.68] Credulity was a universal malady.[17.69] Literary culture was dwindling into a mere rhetorical shell, which contained no kernel. The essentially moral and practical turn which philosophy had taken, banished profound speculation. Human knowledge, if we except geography, made no advances. The schooled and lettered amateur replaced the creative and original student. Here was felt the fatal influence of the great defect in Roman character. That race, so mighty to command, was secondary in genius. The most cultivated Romans, Lucretius, Vitruvius, Celsus, Pliny, Seneca, were, so far as regards positive knowledge, the pupils of the Greeks. Too often, indeed, it was second-rate Greek learning which they reproduced in a second-rate style.[17.70] Rome never possessed a great scientific school. Charlatanism reigned there almost supreme. Finally the Latin literature, which certainly displayed some admirable qualities, flourished during only a brief period, and never made its way beyond the occidental world.[17.71]
Greece fortunately continued faithful to her genius. The prodigious splendor of Roman power had dazzled and stunned, but not annihilated it. In fifty years more we shall find her reconquering the world, giving again her laws to thought, and sharing the throne of the Antonines. But at this period Greece herself was passing through one of her intervals of lassitude. Genius was scarce, and original science inferior to what it had been in preceding ages, and to what it would be in the following. The Alexandrian school, which had been declining for nearly two centuries, but still at Cæsar’s era could furnish a Sosigenes, was now dumb.
The space from the death of Augustus to the accession of Trajan must, then, be classed as a period of temporary degradation for the human intellect. The ancient world had by no means uttered its last word, but the bitter trials through which it was passing took from it both voice and courage. When brighter days return, and genius shall be delivered from the terrible sway of the Cæsars, she will take heart again. Epictetus, Plutarch, Dionysius the golden-mouthed, Quintilian, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Juvenal, Rufus of Ephesus, Aretæus, Galen, Ptolemy, Hypsicles, Theon, and Lucan, will renew the palmy days of Greece; not that inimitable Greece which existed but once for the simultaneous delight and despair of all who love the beautiful, but a Greece still fruitful and abounding, which will mingle her own gifts with the Roman genius, and produce works of novelty and originality yet able to charm the world.
The general taste was bad. Great Greek writers were wanting; and the Latin writers extant, except the satirist Persius, are of an ordinary type. Excessive declamation spoiled everything. The rule by which the public judged intellectual productions was nearly the same as it is now. Only brilliancy was looked for. Language ceased to be the simple vestment of thought, deriving all its elegance from its perfect adaptation to the idea sought to be expressed. Language began to be cultivated for its own sake. The aim of an author in his writings was to display his own talent. The excellence of a recitation or public reading was measured by the number of passages which excited applause. The cardinal principle that in art everything should serve as ornament, but that anything inserted expressly as ornament is bad, was entirely forgotten. It was a very literary period, as they say. Hardly anything was talked of but eloquence and style; and after all, nearly everybody wrote incorrectly, and there was not a solitary orator. The true orator and writer are not those who make speaking or writing their trade. At the theatre, the principal actor absorbed attention, and dramas were suppressed in order that brilliant passages might be recited. The literary fashion of the day was a silly dilettantism, a foolish vanity which led everybody to affect talent, and which did not stop short of the imperial throne. Hence extreme insipidity and interminable “Theseids,” or dramas written to be read in literary circles; and hence a dreary desert of poetical commonplace, which can be compared only to the epics and classic tragedies of sixty years ago.
Stoicism itself could not escape this disease, or at least it did not before Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius succeeded in clothing its doctrines in an elegant vesture. What strange productions are those tragedies of Seneca, in which the loftiest sentiments are expressed in the most wearisome style of literary quackery! indices at once of moral advancement and of an irremediable decline of taste. We are compelled to say the same of Lucan. The tension of mind which resulted naturally from the eminently tragic character of the epoch, gave rise to a species of inflation, in which state the only anxiety was to win applause by brilliant sentences. Something analogous to this happened amongst us during the Revolution; and the most terrible crisis which ever existed produced scarcely anything but a schoolmaster’s literature, crammed with declamation. We must not, however, stop at this point. New ideas are sometimes expressed with much ostentation. The style of Seneca is sober, simple, and pure, in comparison with that of St. Augustine. But we forgive the latter his detestable style and insipid conceits, in return for his noble sentiments.
At all events this cultivation, which was in many respects noble and superior, did not extend to the people. This would have been a minor deprivation, if the people had had at least some religious nourishment, something similar to that which the Church provides for the lowest grades of modern society. But religion was at a very low ebb in all parts of the empire. The wise policy of Rome had left unmolested the ancient forms of worship, prohibiting only those observances which were inhuman,[17.72] seditious, or injurious to others.[17.73] She had spread over them all a sort of official varnish, which gave them some general resemblance, and blended them, good and bad, together. Unfortunately these old creeds, though very diverse in origin, had one common characteristic. It was equally impossible for any and all of them to provide theological instruction, applied morality, edifying preaching, or a pastoral ministry productive of good among the people. The pagan temple was never what the synagogue and the Church were in their best days—that is, a common home, school, inn, hospital, and refuge for the poor.[17.74] It was only a chilly cell which the people seldom entered, and where they never learned anything.
The Roman worship was perhaps the least objectionable of those which were yet practised. In it, purity of soul and body was considered a part of religion.[17.75] By its gravity, its decency, and its austerity, this form of worship, leaving out a few extravagances similar to our Carnival, was far superior to the grotesque and sometimes absurd ceremonies which were secretly introduced by those seized with the mania for Oriental customs. Still, the affectation with which the Roman patricians distinguished “religion”—that is, their own rites—from those of foreigners, which they called “superstition,” cannot but appear to us puerile enough.[17.76] All the pagan forms of worship were essentially superstitious. The peasant who, in modern times, drops his penny into the contribution-box of a holy chapel, who invokes his saint in behalf of his oxen or his horses, or who drinks certain waters to cure certain diseases, is so far forth a pagan. Nearly all our superstitions are the remains of a religion anterior to Christianity, and which it has not yet succeeded in completely rooting out. If one would find at this day the image of paganism, he may seek it in some secluded village lying hid in the recesses of some unfrequented province.
The heathen religions, having no guardians but the varying traditions of the people and a few greedy sacristans, could not fail to degenerate into adulation.[17.77] Augustus, although with some reserve, permitted worship of himself in some of the provinces during his lifetime.[17.78] Tiberius allowed the decision in his own presence, of the ignoble competition of the cities of Asia, which disputed among themselves the honor of building a temple to him.[17.79] The extravagant impieties of Caligula produced no reaction.[17.80] Outside of Judaism there did not seem to be a single priest manly enough to resist such follies. Sprung for the most part from a primitive worship of the forces of nature, transformed over and over again by mixtures of all sorts, and by popular imagination, the pagan religions were confined by their antecedents. They could not afford what they never contained—the idea of real divinity, or popular instruction. The fathers of the Church occasion a smile when they animadvert upon the misdeeds of Saturn as a father, and of Jupiter as a husband. But it was certainly much more absurd to erect Jupiter (i.e. the atmosphere) into a moral divinity, who commanded, forbade, rewarded, and punished. In a state of society which was aspiring to possess a catechism, what could be done with a worship like that of Venus, which arose out of a social necessity of the early Phœnician navigation in the Mediterranean sea, but became in time an outrage on what was becoming more and more regarded as the essence of religion.
On every side, in fact, an energetic tendency was manifested towards a monotheistic religion, which should provide divine command as a foundation of morality. There occurs in this manner a crisis when the naturalistic religions have become reduced to mere childishness and the grimaces of jugglers, and can no longer answer the wants of society. Then humanity requires a moral and philosophical religion. Buddhism and Zoroasterism responded to this requirement in India and Persia. Orphism and the Mysteries had attempted the same thing in the Grecian world without achieving a lasting success. At the period we are considering, the problem presented itself to the entire world with solemn universality and imposing grandeur.
Greece, it is true, formed an exception in this respect. Hellenism was much less worn out than the other religions of the empire. Plutarch, in his little Bœotian town, lived in the practice of Hellenism—tranquil, happy, and contented as a child, and with a religious conscience entirely undisturbed. In him we see no trace of a crisis; of distraction, uneasiness, or fear of impending revolution. But it was only the Greek mind which was capable of such childlike serenity. Always pleased with herself, proud of her past and of that brilliant mythology, all of whose sacred places lay within her borders, Greece did not participate in the internal disquiet of the world. She alone did not invite Christianity; she alone would have preferred to do without it, and she alone made pretensions of doing better.[17.81] This was the result of the everlasting youthfulness, patriotic feeling, and unconquerable gaiety which always marked the genuine son of Hellas, and which to this day render the Greek a stranger to the profound anxieties which prey upon us. Hellenism was thus in a condition to attempt a renaissance, which no other religion existing at the time could hope for. In the second, third, and fourth centuries of our era, Hellenism had formed itself into an organized system of religion, by means of a welding, as it were, of the old mythology and the Grecian philosophy; and what with its miracle-working sages, its old writers elevated to the ranks of prophets, and its legends about Pythagoras and Apollonius, set up a competition with Christianity, which, though it ultimately failed, was yet one of the most dangerous obstacles that the religion of Jesus found in its way.