Evidences in literature of the softening of the moral feelings
The two great changes in the moral type consisted, as Lecky observes, in the greater prominence accorded the benevolent or amiable virtues, and in the broadening of the moral sympathies.[548] The effect of the action of the humanitarian Greek spirit upon the old Roman ideal of character was to soften its harsher features and to cause the heroic virtues to yield place, in a measure, to the benevolent qualities, that is to say, to those virtues which in the course of three centuries or more, largely under Hebrew-Christian influences, were destined to assume a dominant place in the accepted ideal of moral excellence.[549]
Cicero, Vergil, Juvenal, and Seneca may be considered the truest representatives of this new-forming social conscience. Cicero, writing just at the end of the Republic and after Rome for more than three generations had been under the influence of Greek culture and philosophy, exhibits unmistakably the effect upon the Roman character of the comparatively humane and gentle spirit of Hellas. In his treatise De Officiis, “concerning duties,” in which he interprets and enlarges for the benefit of his son Marcus the ethical work of the Greek philosopher Panætius, he gives his sanction to moral doctrines which could hardly have been approved by a Roman moralist before Rome had felt the influence of the ethical spirit of Greece. The work is a glorification of the virtues of pity, gentleness, and benevolence.
The softening movement finds another representative in Vergil. His great poem is in its ethical spirit more Greek than Roman. In the “transformation of the goddess of lawless self-pleasing love into a goddess of a maternal compassionate love,” Wedgwood would have us see summed up the change in moral feeling of the classical world during the centuries that separated the age of the Iliad from that of the Æneid.[550]
Juvenal,[551] too, applauds the moral qualities of pity and tenderness. “His moral tone appears to unite the spirit of two different ages.”[552] Seneca denounced the gladiatorial games as inhuman and degrading. He constantly lays emphasis upon those amiable virtues which belong rather to the Greek than to the Roman ideal of moral excellence.
Ethical theory finds embodiment in practice
Nor was this moral evolution confined to ethical theory; these precepts of the moralists found generous embodiment in practice. Especially was the age of the Antonines a benevolent age, one in which all kinds of charities abounded. Respecting private benefactions in this period Professor Samuel Dill asserts that we may well doubt whether they were less numerous and generous than at the present day, and that “there has probably seldom been a time when wealth was more generally regarded as a trust, a possession in which the community at large has a right to share.”[553] These numerous gifts and legacies assumed the form of baths, theaters, libraries, markets, colonnades, aqueducts, fountains, temples, basilicas, and other monuments of utility or adornment.
The motives which led to all this public giving were of course mixed, just as are the motives of givers of to-day, but we may without much hesitation assume with the historian Dill that they sprang largely from genuine altruistic feeling, from a recognition of the true uses of wealth, and from a sense of the duty of the rich to the poor and dependent—from the same motives, in a word, that a century or two later were to cover these same lands with churches and monasteries and oratories.[554]
The broadening movement: ethical universalism as the outcome of the world empire and of Stoicism
The second important ethical movement in the pre-Christian Roman world consisted, as we have seen, in the widening of the moral sympathies. The two most efficient causes of this movement were the establishment of the world empire and the ascendancy at Rome of Greek philosophy, particularly the philosophy of the Stoics.