The ancient Roman Religion, revolving round the State in this way, and moulding the life of every individual citizen into rigid external conformity with the official ideal, showed its strength in the production of a type of moral character which was perfect within the iron limits fixed by the civic authority.[38] It was dignified, austere, self-controlled, self-reverent. In the absence of great temptations, such as assail the secret strongholds of the human heart and lie beyond the influence of any external power, the ancient Virtus Romana was equal to all the demands which a somewhat restricted code of ethics made upon it. But, when a wider knowledge of the world brought with it a weakening of the chain which bound the citizen to the central power; when, at the same time, a wider possession of the world and a richer enjoyment of its pleasures increased to an enormous extent the temptations directed against the purity and completeness of the moral character:[39] then it became alarmingly clear to thoughtful men that, unless the moral life was to run to seed in vicious weeds of self-indulgence, it was necessary to invoke the aid of a subtler and stronger influence than that of the State, an influence capable of varying its appeal in accordance with the infinitely varying moral needs of individual men.[40] It was with the hope of finding inspiration of this character that Lucretius and Cicero turned the attention of their countrymen to Greek Philosophy; it was there that they wished to find an ampler and more direct sanction in reason for cultivating a life of virtue. Reason, which had not been devoid of effect in the narrow sphere of Roman Religion, was now to be made the basis of morality in general; but it was reason directed to the purification and enlargement of the springs of personal conduct, and calling into play qualities which had lain dormant, or had been restricted, during the long dominance of the State over the individual citizen. To Regulus, his religion was the State; to Cicero, the State and its demands form but a small fraction of the moral life. A revival of Religion was to Cicero a revival of Philosophy; Reason, the parent of Philosophy, was also to be the parent of Conduct; the first of all virtues is the virtue of Knowledge, of intelligent discrimination between the things that make for morality and happiness and the things that make for immorality and misery.[41] Starting from this standpoint, Cicero, though approaching Greek Philosophy more in the spirit of the student than in that of the religious reformer, though participating, as his Letters show, in that general carelessness on religious matters which marked Roman Society during the later years of the Republic, was, nevertheless, the means of giving a powerful stimulus to that movement in the direction of deliberate personal morality, which became conspicuous in the Græco-Roman world of the Early Empire, and culminated under the fostering care of Trajan and the Antonines. It then became clear that Cicero had not looked in vain to Greek Philosophy to save his countrymen from that moral degradation and disorder which, in his own words, it demanded the most earnest endeavours of every individual citizen to check and restrain.[42]
In Greece, Religion and Philosophy had early enjoyed mutual relations of an intimate character. The force of the weighty invocations which the poet of the “Works and Days”[43] addresses to his dishonourable brother Perses lies less in the conventional theology which alludes to the wrath of “broad-sighted Zeus” as tracking the footsteps of the wicked, than in the reasoned choice which the sinner is invited to make between Injustice as leading inevitably to ruin, and Virtue leading as inevitably to prosperity;[44] and the claims of individual judgment, the right of every man to subject everything to the test of his own intelligence, never found finer expression than in the verse which assigns the palm of moral perfection to him who has the courage to think for himself.[45] Pindar, the most religious poet of antiquity, applies the test of reason to the established myths of Hellas when he refuses to credit such legends as depict the gods in unseemly situations, or under the influence of degrading passions.[46] Xenophanes thought that the claims of Religion and Morality could be best advanced by cleansing the moral atmosphere of the gods whose recorded lives were so flagrantly in opposition to the dictates of purity, reason, and honour; a strain of criticism which found its most striking and notorious expression in the famous Second and Third Books of Plato’s “Republic,” but which had not been without its exponents among more whole-hearted adherents of the national Religion. But, meanwhile, the national Religion, as embodied, at least, in the national liturgy, had been coming to terms with the growing strength of Philosophy, and the vestibules of the Temple at Delphi were inscribed with those famous philosophical apophthegms, whose presence there subsequently enabled Plutarch to claim that Apollo was not only a God and a Seer, but a Philosopher.[47] The popular morality of the days of Socrates, which supplied his cross-examinees with ready-made answers to questions on the nature of Vice and Virtue, and of the vices and the virtues, was composed as much of Philosophy as of Religion in the narrower sense of the term.[48] The Theogonies of Homer and Hesiod furnished the external machinery of the supernatural world, but the moral utterances of these two poets, and not of these only, but of Simonides and Solon, of Theognis and the “Seven Sages,” contained many striking lessons, and many emphatic warnings, touching the necessity and advantages of a life of virtue. It became, in fact, quite evident, though not, of course, explicitly asserted, or perhaps even consciously admitted, that the gods, as represented in the Homeric poems and as existing in the popular imagination, were quite impossible as a foundation for Morality, though surpassingly splendid as the material of Art. It is hardly too much to say that, after the establishment of the great philosophic schools in the fourth century, all the conscious inspiration to a life of Virtue, and all the consolations which it is the more usual function of Religion to administer, were supplied by Philosophy. Sudden conversions from Vice to Philosophy mark the history of the philosophic movement in Greece as religious movements have been marked among other peoples and in other periods. An edifying discourse under a Stoic Portico, or in an Academic School, has been as effective in its practical results as a religious oration by Bossuet, or a village preaching by Whitfield.[49] Religion and Philosophy are identified, because both are identical with Morality; the lives of some Greek Philosophers furnish the nearest parallel attained in antiquity to the modern ideal of saintliness.
This application of Philosophy to the spiritual requirements of the individual man, this independence of supernatural sanctions for goodness, was aided by the almost purely liturgical character of the Greek Religion. Greek Religion made no special appeal to the individual conscience with a view to awakening that sense of personal responsibility for every part of one’s life and conduct which is the very soul and centre of Religion as understood in modern days. To attend the traditional religious festivals; to fulfil the rites prescribed for certain occasions by the sacerdotal laymen who represented the State on its religious side; to hold a vague conventional notion respecting the existence of the gods and of their separate personalities; to listen quietly, and respond reverently, while the purple-robed, myrtle-crowned, altar-ministrant intoned with solemn resonance the ancient formulæ embalming the sacred legends of some deity whose “Mysteries” were specially fostered and honoured by the State; to aid in giving effect to the dreadful imprecations pronounced against those guilty of sacrilege or parricide; to respond, in a word, to all the external demands of the national faith as a political institution: represented the religious duty of a good and patriotic citizen. A beautiful and impressive liturgy is, indeed, not without effect in surrounding with a quiet atmosphere of goodness a class of minds whose temptations are mercifully proportioned to their weakness; but real moral worth must spring from internal sources, and these internal sources were not to be found in the Greek national Religion. Hence a wider field for Philosophy in the lives of a people whose eagerness in the pursuit of virtue was as marked, if not so successful, as their aspirations after perfection of art and profundity of knowledge.
We do not ignore, in attributing this importance to Philosophy as the inspiration of goodness, either that fortunate class of people who, in Plato’s beautiful expression, are “good by the divine inspiration of their own nature,”[50] or that more numerous section of society who were directed into a certain common conventional goodness by the moral influence of the purer myths, and who were taught, like the youth in Browning’s poem, “whose Father was a scholar and knew Greek,” that
“Their aim should be to loathe, like Peleus’ son,
A lie as Hell’s Gate, love their wedded wife,
Like Hector, and so on with all the rest.”[51]
But there was another side to the myths, a side less favourable to the development of morals, and one which had been brought forward so conspicuously in the adverse criticisms of the philosophers that no one could pretend to ignore its existence.[52] The prevailing tendency of Greek myth was not moral, and it was only after the most careful pruning, such, for example, as that which Plutarch applies to it in his educational essays, that myth became safely available as a factor in ethical progress. The mainsprings of Conduct, of personal and private Morality, are to be found in Philosophy, and so great an importance did Philosophy acquire as the instrument of goodness, that that particular branch of Philosophy which exercised surveillance over the realm of Conduct became eventually recognized as Philosophy par excellence; the overwhelming significance attached by Greek philosophers, from the Sophists onwards, to the practical element in their teaching, led to a restriction of the terms “Philosophy” and “Philosopher” to an almost purely ethical connotation. The argument in the “Phædo” that, without Philosophy, Virtue is nothing more than a mere rough sketch, is so strongly emphasized in other quarters that there is formed a general conviction that the sole sphere of Philosophy is the sphere of human conduct.[53]