“Verily, Father Zeus, thou wouldst free all men from much evil, if thou wouldst teach all men what manner of spirit they are of.
“Keep from the meats aforesaid, using judgment both in cleansing and setting free the soul.
“Give heed to every matter, and set reason on high, who best holdeth the reins of guidance.[19]
“Then when thou leavest the body, and comest into the free æther, thou shalt be a god undying, everlasting, neither shall death have any more dominion over thee.”
Referring to these verses, which inculcate that the human race is itself responsible for the evils which men, for the most part, prefer to regret than to remedy, Professor Clifford, to whom we are indebted for the above version of the Golden Verses, remarks on the merits of this teaching, that it reminds us that “men suffer from preventible evils, that the people perish for lack of knowledge.”[20] Thus we find that the principal obstructions, in all ages, to human progress and perfectibility may be ever found in IGNORANCE and SELFISHNESS.
IV.
OVID. 43 B.C.–18 A.D.
THE school of Pythagoras and of Plato, although it was not the fashionable or popular religion of Rome, counted amongst its disciples some distinguished Italians, and the name of Cicero, who belonged to the “New Academy,” is sufficiently illustrious. The Italians, however, who borrowed their religion as well as their literature from the Greeks, were never distinguished, like their masters, for that refinement of thought which might have led them to attach themselves to the Pythagorean teaching. Under the bloody despotism of the Empire, the philosophy which was most affected by the literati and those who were driven to the consolations of philosophy was the stoical, which taught its disciples to consider apathy as the summum bonum of existence. This school of philosophy, whatever its other merits, was too much centred in self—paradoxical as the assertion may seem—to have much regard for the rest of mankind, much less for the non-human species. Nor, while they professed supreme contempt for the luxuries and even comforts of life, did the disciples of the “Porch,” in general, practice abstinence from any exalted motive, humanitarian or spiritual. They preached indifference for the “good things” of this life, not so much to elevate the spiritual and moral side of human nature as to show their contempt for human life altogether.
That the Italian was essentially of a more barbarous nature than the Greek is apparent in the national spectacles and amusements. The savage scenes of gladiatorial and non-human combat and internecine slaughter of the Latin amphitheatres, of which the famous Colosseum in the capital was the model of many others in the provinces, were abhorrent to the more refined Greek mind.[21] In view of scenes so sanguinary—the “Roman holiday”—it is scarcely necessary to observe that humanitarianism was a creed unknown to the Italians; and it was not likely that a people, addicted throughout their career as a dominant race to the most bloody wars, not only foreign but also internecine, with whom fighting and slaughter of their own kind was an almost daily occupation, should entertain any feeling of pity (to say nothing of justice) towards their non-human dependants. Nevertheless, even they were not wholly inaccessible, on occasion, to the prompting of pity. Referring to a grand spectacle given by Pompeius at the dedication of his theatre (B.C. 55), in which a large number of elephants, amongst others, were forced to fight, the elder Pliny tells us:—