History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

It is a commonplace of history that at the time of the Roman conquest of the East the great semi-Hellenized cities of the Orient were sinks of moral corruption. Brought into close contact with these morally debased communities, Roman civilization was at once infected with the fatal virus. Streams of impurity overflowed every country of the once moral West. The Orontes emptied into the Tiber. Oriental vices and luxury came in as a flood. The primitive Roman virtues of frugality and simplicity disappeared. Greek cooks, we are told, brought a higher price than Greek philosophers.

Almost every element of the Greco-Oriental culture seemed to bear within it the seeds of moral deterioration and decay. Greek philosophy, pervaded in general by a spirit of skepticism, tended to unsettle still more positively the already shaken faith of the Romans in their ancestral gods. Roman morality, in so far as it was supported by religious belief, was thus fatally impaired. The Epicurean philosophy, if not—as taught by most of the Sophists—a direct incentive to vice, afforded at least a ready apology for indulgence in coarse and gluttonous pleasures.

The plays presented on the Roman comic stage were mostly pieces of the Greek drama, which, in the process of adaptation to a Roman audience, had been made coarse and dissolute. Thus the theater became one of the most effective agencies of social corruption. In the words of Mommsen, it was “the great school at once of Hellenism and of vice.”[544]

Modifications in the moral type itself

A much more important fact in the moral history of the later Republic than this lowering of the standard of conduct is the change which was being effected in the moral ideal itself. While certain causes were at work depressing the moral standard to the lowest point, perhaps, that it ever touched in the long history of Rome, there were other causes in operation which were slowly modifying the old Roman type of character and creating a new type made up largely of new virtues. We speak of this change in the ideal as a fact of greater significance than that of moral degeneracy, for the reason that a decline in actual morality, the failure of a people to live up to the best they know, is always a superficial and transient phenomenon compared with the changes effected by different influences in the moral type itself, since these changes constitute the very essence of the ethical evolution.

The causes at work modifying the old Roman ideal of character were various; but more vital than all other influences were those that came through the contact of Rome with Greek culture and the civilizations of the Orient. At the heart of these ancient cultures were ethical elements of inestimable value. Among these were the Greek humanitarian spirit and the various intellectual virtues which characterized the Greek type of excellence; and, in the Oriental theosophic cultures, a deeply religious spirit and the religious virtues which marked the moral ideals of the Eastern nations, particularly the Egyptian, the Persian, and the Hebrew. We recognize the supreme importance for the later moral history of Rome, as well as for that of the whole Western world, of the ethical products of the religious culture of Judea, but we do not recognize as fully the importance of the ethical elements of the secular culture of Greece and of the theosophic civilizations of Egypt and Persia. But Rome’s ethical debt to these older cultures was also indisputably great.

But since these Greco-Oriental influences which were at work modifying the old Roman type of character had not wrought their full effects before the close of the third century of the imperial period, we shall reserve further comment on them, and on the new composite type they were contributing to create, for the next division of this chapter, in which we shall follow the trend of the moral evolution under the pagan Empire.

IV. The Moral Evolution under the Pagan Empire

The bad bequest

Roman society throughout the first century of the pagan Empire, as mirrored in the literature of the period, presents a picture of frightful moral degeneracy. This state of things was largely an inheritance from the Republic. It was the continuation of that moral decline which began in the second century B.C., and some of the contributing causes of which, such as slavery, the spectacles of the amphitheater, the free distribution of corn, together with contact with the dissolute civilizations of the Orient, were considered briefly in the preceding pages. Since all these causes of moral degradation were still at work in the society of the early Empire, and as fresh agencies of malign influence were added to them, it was inevitable that the moral anarchy should not only continue but should grow worse.