It needed a courage springing from enthusiasm and conviction to preach such unpalatable truths to an age which gloried in its material splendour. Dion is often conscious of the difficulty of his task; and he exerts all his trained dexterity to appease opposition, and gain a hearing for his message.[1976] As regards the reform of character, Dion has no new message to deliver. His is the old gospel of renunciation for the sake of freedom, the doctrine of a right estimate of competing objects of desire and of the true ends of life. Dion, like nearly all Greek moralists from Socrates downwards, treats moral error and reform as rather a matter of the intellect than of emotional impulse. Vice is the condition of a besotted mind, which has lost the power of seeing things as they really are;[1977] [pg 371]conversion must be effected, not by appeals to the feelings, but by clarifying the mental vision. There is but little reference to religion as a means of reform, although Dion speaks of the love of God as a support of the virtuous character. As an experienced moral director, Dion knew well the necessity of constant iteration of the old truths. Just as the sick man will violate his doctor’s orders, well knowing that he does so to his hurt, so the moral patient may long refuse to follow a principle of life which his reason has accepted.[1978] And so the preacher, instead of apologising for repeating himself, will regard it as a duty and a necessity to do so.
But Dion did not aim at the formation of any cloistered virtue, concentrated on personal salvation. He has a fine passage in which he shows that retreat, (ἀναχώρησις) detachment of spirit, is quite possible without withdrawing from the noises of the world.[1979] And he felt himself charged with a mission to bring the higher principles of conduct into the civic life of the time. We know from Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan, that the great cities of Bithynia, and not least Dion’s birthplace,[1980] were then suffering from unskilful administration and wasteful finance. Dion completes the picture by showing us their miserable bickerings and jealousies about the most trivial things. He denounces the unscrupulous flattery of the masses by men whose only object was the transient distinction of municipal office, the passion for place and power, without any sober wish to serve or elevate the community. He also exposes the caprice, the lazy selfishness, and the petulant ingratitude of the crowd.[1981] Dion, it is true, is an idealist, and his ideals of society are perhaps not much nearer realisation in some of our great cities than they were then. He often delivered his message to the most unpromising audiences. Some of his finest conceptions of social reorganisation were expounded before rude gatherings on the very verge of civilisation.[1982] Once, in his wanderings, he found himself under the walls of a half-ruined Greek town, which had been attacked, the day before, by a horde of Scythian barbarians. There, on the steps of the temple of Zeus, he [pg 372]expounded to an eager throng of mean Greek traders, with all the worst vices, and only some faded traces of the culture of their race, the true meaning of city life.[1983] It is a society of men under the kingship of law, from which all greed, intemperance, and violence have been banished; a little world which, in its peaceful order and linked harmonies, should be modelled on the more majestic order of the great city of the universe, the city of gods and men.
How far from their ideal were the cities of his native land, Dion saw only too well. The urban life of Asia, as the result of the Greek conquests, has perhaps never been surpassed in external splendour and prosperity, and even in a diffusion of intellectual culture. The palmy days of the glorious spring-time of Hellenic vigour and genius in Miletus, Phocaea, and Rhodes, seemed to be reproduced even in inland places, which for 1500 years have returned to waste.[1984] Agriculture and trade combined to produce an extraordinary and prosperous activity. Education was endowed and organised, and literary culture became almost universal.[1985] Nowhere did the wandering sophist find more eager audiences, and no part of the Roman world in that age contributed so great a number of teachers, physicians, and philosophers. The single province of Bithynia, within half a century, could boast of such names as Arrian, Dion Cassius, and Dion Chrysostom himself. But moral and political improvement did not keep pace with an immense material and intellectual progress. The life of the cities indeed was very intense; but, in the absence of the wider interests of the great days of freedom, they wasted their energies in futile contests for visionary distinctions and advantages. A continual struggle was going on for the “primacy” of the province, and the name of metropolis. Ephesus, the real capital, was challenged by Smyrna, which on its coins describes itself as “first in greatness and beauty.”[1986] The feuds between Nicomedia and its near neighbour Nicaea caused Dion particular anxiety, and his speech [pg 373]to the people of Nicomedia is the best picture of the evils which we are describing.[1987]
The two cities have much in common. Their families have intermarried; they are constantly meeting in their markets and great religious festivals. They are bound together by innumerable ties of private friendship.[1988] The primacy for which they contend is the merest figment; there are no material advantages at stake. Rather, these dissensions give a corrupt Roman governor, who trades upon them, the power to injure both the rival claimants.[1989] The same is true of other cities. Tarsus is engaged in bitter contention with Mallus for a mere line of sandhills on their frontiers.[1990] Dion’s native Prusa has an exasperated quarrel with Apamea for no solid reason whatever, although the two towns are closely linked by nature to one another, and mutually dependent through their trade and manufactures. All this miserable and foolish jealousy Dion exposes with excellent skill and sense; and he employs an abundant wealth of illustration in painting the happiness which attends harmony and good-will. It is the law of the universe, from the tiny gregarious insect whose life is but for a day, to the eternal procession of the starry spheres. The ant, in the common industry of the Lilliputian commonwealth, yields to his brother toiler, or helps him on his way.[1991] The primal elements of the Cosmos are tempered to a due observance of their several bounds and laws. The sun himself hides his splendour each night to give place to the lesser radiance of the stars. This is rhetoric, of course, but it is rhetoric with a moral burden. And it is impossible not to admire the lofty tone of this heathen sophist, preaching the duty of forgiveness, of mutual love and deference, the blessing of the quiet spirit “which seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.”[1992] There is a certain pathos in remembering that, within the very walls where these elevated orations were delivered, there were shy companies of men and women meeting in the early dawn to sing hymns to One who, three generations before in Galilee, had taught a similar gospel of love [pg 374]and self-suppression, but with a strange mystic charm, denied to the pagan eloquence, and that Dion seems never to have known those with whom he had so close a kindred.[1993]
In many another oration Dion strove to raise the moral tone of his age. His speech to the Alexandrians is probably his most gallant protest against the besetting sins of a great population. Alexandria was a congeries of many races, in which probably the Hellenic type of the Ptolemies had succumbed to the enduring Egyptian morale.[1994] It was a populace at once sensual and superstitious, passionately devoted to all excitement, whether of games or orgiastic religious festival, with a jeering irreverent vein, which did not spare even the greatest Emperors. It was a curious medley—the seat of the most renowned university of the ancient world, the gathering-place and seed-ground of ideas which united the immemorial mysticism of the East with the clear, cold reason of Hellas—and yet a seething hot-bed of obscenity, which infected the Roman world, a mob who gave way to lunatic excitement over the triumph of an actor, or a singer, or the victor in a chariot-race.[1995] It required no ordinary courage to address such a crowd, and to charge them with their glaring faults. The people of Alexandria are literally intoxicated with a song. The music which, according to old Greek theory, should regulate the passions, here only maddens them.[1996] And in the races all human dignity seems to be utterly lost in the futile excitement of the spectators over some low fellow contending for a prize in solid cash.[1997] Such a mob earns only the contempt of its rulers, and men say that the Alexandrians care for nothing but the “big loaf” and the sight of a race.[1998] All the dignity which should surround a great people is forgotten in the theatre. It is useless to boast of the majestic and bounteous river, the harbours and markets crowded with the merchandise of Western or Indian seas, of the visitors from every land, from Italy, Greece, and Syria, from the Borysthenes, the Oxus, and the Ganges.[1999] They come to witness the shame of the second [pg 375]city in the world, which, in the wantonness of prosperity, has lost the temperate dignity and orderly calm that are the real glory of a great people.
As a foil to the feverish life of luxury, quarrelsome rivalry, and vulgar excitement which prevailed in the great towns, Dion has left a prose idyll to idealise the simple pleasures and virtues of the country.[2000] It is also a dirge over the decay of Greece, when crops were being reaped in the agora of historic cities, and the tall grasses grew around the statues of gods and heroes of the olden time.[2001] A traveller, cast ashore in the wreck of his vessel on the dreaded Hollows of Euboea, was sheltered, in a rude, warm-hearted fashion, by some peasants. Their fathers had been turned adrift in the confiscation of the estate of a great noble in some trouble with the emperor, and they had made themselves a lonely home on a pastoral slope, close to a stream, with the neighbouring shade of trees. They had taken into tillage a few fields around their huts; they drove their cattle to the high mountain pastures in summer time, and in the winter they turned to hunting the game along the snowy tracks. Of city life they know hardly anything. One of them, indeed, had been twice in the neighbouring town, and he tells what he saw there in a lively way. It is all a mere shadow or caricature of the old civic life of Greece. There are the rival orators, patriot or demagogue, the frivolous and capricious crowd, the vote of the privilege of dining in the town-hall. The serious purpose of the piece, however, is to idealise the simple virtue and happiness of the country folk, and to discuss the disheartening problem of the poor in great cities.[2002] It is in the main the problem of our modern urban life, and Dion had evidently thought deeply about it, and was an acute observer of the social misery which is the same from age to age. Fortified by the divine Homer and ordinary experience, he points out that the poor are more generous and helpful to the needy than are the rich out of their ample store. Too often the seeming bounty of the wealthy benefactor is of the nature of a loan, which is to be returned with due interest.[2003] The struggles and temptations of the poor in great cities suggest a [pg 376]discussion of the perpetual problem of prostitution, which probably no ancient writer ever faced so boldly. The double degradation of humanity, which it involved in the ancient world, is powerfully painted;[2004] and the plea that the indulgence in venal immorality is the only alternative to insidious attacks on family virtue is discussed with singular firmness and yet delicacy of touch.[2005] The same detachment from contemporary prejudice is shown in Dion’s treatment of slavery. He sees its fell effects on the masters, in producing sensuality, languor, and helpless dependence on others for the slightest services. He points out that there is no criterion afforded by nature to distinguish slave and free. The so-called free man of the highest rank may be the offspring of a servile amour, and the so-called slave may be ingenuous in every sense, condemned to bondage by an accident of fortune.[2006] Just as external freedom does not imply moral worth, so legal enslavement does not imply moral degradation.[2007] If moral justice always fixed the position of men in society by their deserts, master and slave would often have to change places.[2008] In Dion’s judgment as to the enervating effects of slavery on the slave-owning class, and the absence of any moral or mental distinction to justify the institution, he is in singular harmony with Seneca.
The similarity of tone between Seneca and Dion is perhaps even more marked in their treatment of monarchy. Inherited, like so much else, from the great Greek thinkers of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the ideal of a beneficent and unselfish prince, the true “shepherd of the people,” the antithesis of the lawless and sensual tyrant, had become, partly, no doubt, through the influence of the schools of rhetoric, a common possession of cultivated minds. Vespasian gave it a certain reality, if his son Domitian showed how easily the king might pass into the tyrant. The dream of an earthly providence, presiding over the Roman world, dawned in more durable splendour with the accession of Trajan, and Pliny, his panegyrist, has left us a sketch of the patriot prince, [pg 377]which is almost identical with the lines of Dion’s ideal.[2009] Both Dion and Pliny were favourites of Trajan, and some of Dion’s orations were delivered before his court. As a court preacher, he justly boasts that he is no mere flatterer, although we may suspect that his picture of the ideal monarch might have been interpreted as drawn from the character of Trajan, just as his picture of the tyrant was probably suggested by Domitian.[2010] Still, we may well believe the orator when he says that the man who had bearded the one at the cost of long exile and penury, was not likely to flatter the other for the gold or honours which he despised. And in these discourses, Dion seems full of the sense of a divine mission. Once, on his wanderings, he lost his way somewhere on the boundaries of Arcadia, and, ascending a knoll to recover the track, he found himself before a rude, ruined shrine of Heracles, hung with votive offerings of the chase.[2011] An aged woman sat by them who told him that she had a spirit of divination from the gods. The shepherds and peasants used to come to her with questions about the fate of their flocks and crops. And she now entrusted Dion with a message to the great ruler of many men whom she prophesied Dion was soon to meet.[2012] It was a tale of Heracles, the great benefactor of men from the rising to the setting sun, who, by his simple strength, crushed all lawless monsters and gave the world an ordered peace. His father inspired him with noble impulse for his task by oracle and omen, and sent Hermes once, when Heracles was still a boy at Thebes, to show him the vision of the Two Peaks, and strengthen him in his virtue.[2013] They rose from the same rocky roots, amid precipitous crags and deep ravines, and the noise of many waters. At first they seemed to be one mountain mass, but they soon parted wide asunder, the one being sacred to Zeus, the other to the lawless Typhon. On the one crest, rising into the cloudless ether, Kingship sits enthroned, in the likeness of a fair, stately woman, clad in robes of glistening white, and wielding a sceptre of brighter and purer metal than any silver or gold. Under her steady gaze of radiant dignity, the good felt a [pg 378]cheerful confidence, the bad quailed and shrank away. She was surrounded by handmaidens of a beauty like her own, Justice and Peace and Order. The paths to the other peak were many and secret, and skirted an abyss, streaming with blood or choked with corpses. Its top was wrapped in mist and cloud, and there sat Tyranny on a far higher and more pompous throne, adorned with gold and ivory and many a gorgeous colour, but a throne rocking and unstable. She strove to make herself like to Kingship, but it was all mere hollow pretence. Instead of the gracious smile, there was a servile, hypocritical leer; instead of the glance of dignity, there was a savage scowl. And around her sat a throng bearing ill-omened names, Cruelty and Lust, Lawlessness and Flattery and Sedition. On a question from Hermes, the youthful Heracles made his choice, and his father gave him his commission to be the saviour of men.
In this fashion Dion, like Aeschylus, recasts old myth to make it the vehicle of moral instruction, just as he finds in Homer the true teacher of kings.[2014] The theory of ideal monarchy is developed at such length as may have somewhat wearied the emperor. But it really is based on a few great principles. True kings, in Homer’s phrase, are sons of Zeus, and they are shepherds of the people. All genuine political power rests on virtue, and ultimately on the favour of Heaven. A king is appointed by God to work the good of his subjects. And, as his authority is divine, an image on earth of the sovereignty of Zeus, the monarch will be a scrupulously religious man in the highest sense,[2015] not merely by offering costly sacrifices, but by righteousness, diligence, and self-sacrifice in performing the duties of his solemn charge. The many titles addressed to Father Zeus represent so many aspects of royal activity and virtue. The true prince will be the father of his people, surrounded and guarded by a loving reverence, which never degenerates into fear. His only aim will be their good. He will keep sleepless watch over the weak, the careless, those who are heedless for themselves. Commanding infinite resources, he will know less of mere pleasure than any man within his realm. With such immense responsibilities, he will be the most laborious of all. His only advantage over the private citizen is in his boundless [pg 379]command of friendship; for all men must be well-wishers to one wielding such a beneficent power, with whom, from his conception of his mission, they must feel an absolute identity of interest. And the king’s greatest need is friendship, to provide him with myriads of hands and eyes in the vast work of government.[2016] Herein lies the sharpest contrast between the true king and the tyrant, a contrast which was a commonplace in antiquity, but which was stamped afresh by the juxtaposition of the reign of Domitian and the reign of Trajan. The universal hatred which pursued a bad Caesar even beyond the grave, which erased his name from monuments and closed its eyes even to intervals of serious purpose for the general weal, was a terrible illustration of the lonely friendlessness of selfish power.[2017] Instead of loyal and grateful friendship, the despot was mocked by a venal flattery which was only its mimicry. The good monarch will treat flatterers as false coiners who cause the genuine currency to be suspected. This counsel and others of Dion were often little regarded by succeeding emperors. Yet even the last shadowy princes of the fifth century professed themselves the guardians of the human race, and are oppressed by an ideal of universal beneficence which they are impotent to realise.[2018]
Hitherto we have been occupied with the preaching of Dion on personal conduct, the reform of civic life, or the duties of imperial power. It cannot be said that he discusses these subjects without reference to religious beliefs and aspirations.[2019] But religion is rather in the background; the reverence for the Heavenly Powers is rather assumed as a necessary basis for human life rightly ordered. There is one oration, however, of supreme interest to the modern mind, in which Dion goes to the root of all religion, and examines the sources of belief in God and the justification of anthropomorphic imagery in representing Him. This utterance was called forth by a visit to Olympia when Dion was advanced in years.[2020] The games of Olympia were a dazzling and [pg 380]inspiring spectacle, and the multitude which gathered there from all parts of the world was a splendid audience. But, with the sound of the sacred trumpet, and the herald’s voice, proclaiming the victor, in his ears, Dion turns away from all the glory of youthful strength and grace, even from the legendary splendour of the great festival,[2021] to the majestic figure of the Olympian Zeus, which had been graved by the hand of Pheidias more than 500 years before, and to the thoughts of the divine world which it suggested. That greatest triumph of idealism in plastic art, inspired by famous lines in the Iliad, was, by the consent of all antiquity, the masterpiece of Pheidias. Ancient writers of many ages are lost in admiration of the mingled majesty and benignity which the divine effigy expressed. To the eyes of Lucian it seemed “the very son of Kronos brought down to earth, and set to watch over the lonely plain of Elis.”[2022] There it sat watching for more than 800 years, till it was swept away in the fierce, final effort to dethrone the religion of the past. Yet the majestic image, which attracted the fury of the iconoclasts of the reign of Theodosius, inspired Dion with thoughts of the Divine nature which travelled far beyond the paganism either of poetry or of the crowd. It was not merely the masterpiece of artistic and constructive skill which had fascinated the gaze, and borne the vicissitudes, of so many centuries, that moved his admiration; it was also, and more, the moral effect of that miracle of art on the spectator. The wildest and fiercest of the brute creation might be calmed and softened by the air of majestic peace and kindness which floated around the gold and ivory. “Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life.”[2023]
But the thoughts of Dion, in presence of the majestic figure at Olympia, take a wider range. His theme is nothing [pg 381]less than the sources of our idea of God, and the place of art in religion. He pours his scorn upon hedonistic atheism. Our conception of God is innate, original, universal among all the races of men.[2024] It is the product of the higher reason, contemplating the majestic order, minute adaptation, and beneficent provision for human wants in the natural world. In that great temple, with its alternations of gloom and splendour, its many voices of joy or of terror, man is being perpetually initiated in the Great Mysteries, on a grander scale than at Eleusis, with God Himself to preside over the rites. The belief in God depends in the first instance on no human teaching, any more than does the love of child to parent. But this original intuition and belief in divine powers finds expression through the genius of inspired poets; it is reinforced by the imperative prescriptions of the founders and lawgivers of states; it takes external form in bronze or gold and ivory or marble, under the cunning hand of the great artist; it is developed and expounded by philosophy.[2025] Like all the deepest thinkers of his time, Dion is persuaded of the certainty of God’s existence, but he is equally conscious of the remoteness of the Infinite Spirit, and of the weakness of all human effort to approach, or to picture it to the mind of man. We are to Dion like “children crying in the night, and with no language but a cry.”[2026] Yet the child will strive to image forth the face of the Father, although it is hidden behind a veil which will never be withdrawn in this world. The genius of poetry, commanding the most versatile power of giving utterance to the religious imagination, is first in order and in power. Law and institution follow in its wake. The plastic arts, under cramping limitations, come later still to body forth the divine dreams of the elder bards. Dion had thought much on the relative power of poetry and the sculptor’s art to give expression to the thoughts and feelings of man about the Divine nature. The boundless power or licence of language to find a symbol for every thought or image on the phantasy is seen at its height in Homer, who [pg 382]riots in an almost lawless exercise of his gifts.[2027] But the chief importance of the discussion lies in an arraignment of Pheidias for attempting to image in visible form the great Soul and Ruler of the universe, Whom mortal eye has never seen and can never see. His defence is very interesting, both as a clear statement of the limitations of the plastic arts, and as a justification of material images of the Divine.