Under the influence of the early Christian enemies of pagan civilization, the impression has gained ground that the average Roman or Greek was a highly immoral person who paid a shallow homage to certain nebulous Gods and for the rest spent his waking hours eating enormous dinners, drinking vast bumpers of Salernian wine and listening to the pretty prattle of Egyptian dancing girls, unless for a change he went to war and slaughtered innocent Germans and Franks and Dacians for the pure sport of shedding blood.
Of course, both in Greece and even more so in Rome, there were a great many merchants and war contractors who had accumulated their millions without much regard for those ethical principles which Socrates had so well defined before his judges. Because these people were very wealthy, they had to be put up with. This, however, did not mean that they enjoyed the respect of the community or were regarded as commendable representatives of the civilization of their day.
We dig up the villa of Epaphroditus, who amassed millions as one of the gang who helped Nero plunder Rome and her colonies. We look at the ruins of the forty room palace which the old profiteer built out of his ill-gotten gains. And we shake our heads and say, “What depravity!”
Then we sit down and read the works of Epictetus, who was one of the house slaves of the old scoundrel, and we find ourselves in the company of a spirit as lofty and as exalted as ever lived.
I know that the making of generalizations about our neighbors and about other nations is one of the most popular of indoor sports, but let us not forget that Epictetus, the philosopher, was quite as truly a representative of the time in which he lived as Epaphroditus, the imperial flunkey, and that the desire for holiness was as great twenty centuries ago as it is today.
Undoubtedly it was a very different sort of holiness from that which is practiced today. It was the product of an essentially European brain and had nothing to do with the Orient. But the “barbarians” who established it as their ideal of what they held to be most noble and desirable were our own ancestors, and they were slowly developing a philosophy of life which was highly successful if we agree that a clear conscience and a simple, straightforward life, together with good health and a moderate but sufficient income, are the best guarantee for general happiness and contentment. The future of the soul did not interest these people overmuch. They accepted the fact that they were a special sort of mammal which by reason of its intellectual application had risen high above the other creatures which crawled upon this earth. If they frequently referred to the Gods, they used the word as we use “atoms” or “electrons” or “aether.” The beginning of things has got to have a name, but Zeus in the mouth of Epictetus was as problematical a value as x or y in the problems of Euclid and meant just as much or as little.
Life it was which interested those men and next to living, art.
Life, therefore, in all its endless varieties, they studied and following the method of reasoning which Socrates had originated and made popular, they achieved some very remarkable results.
That sometimes in their zeal for a perfect spiritual world they went to absurd extremes was regrettable, but no more than human. But Plato is the only one among all the teachers of antiquity who from sheer love for a perfect world ever came to preach a doctrine of intolerance.
This young Athenian, as is well known, was the beloved disciple of Socrates and became his literary executor.