Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

In enlarging its rather blank and poor conception of the future state, the Latin race, as in other fields, was content to borrow rather than invent. The Sixth Book of the Aeneid was an effort not only to glorify the legendary heroes of Rome, but to appease a new or revived longing for the hope of immortality, after the desolating nihilism of the Epicurean philosophy had run its course.[2548] Virgil has some touches of old Roman faith about the dead, but the scenery of his Inferno is mainly derived from Greek poetry inspired by Orphism, and the vision is moralised, and also confused, by elements drawn from Pythagoras or Plato.[2549] The scene of Aeneas’s descent to the underworld is laid by the lake of Avernus, where, buried amid gloomy woods, was the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. Cumae was the oldest Greek colony in the West. Its foundation was placed long before the days of Romulus. Rich, prosperous, and cultivated, at a time when the Romans were a band of rude warriors, it must have early transmitted Greek [pg 492]ideas of religion to the rising power on the Tiber.[2550] The Etrurians also, who affected so profoundly the tone of Roman religion, had come under Greek influences. The spectral ferryman of the dead was a familiar figure in Etruscan art. Thus, both on the south and north, Latium had points of contact with the world of Hellenic legend. And from the early days of the Republic, the worship of Greek gods—Apollo, Asclepius, or the Dioscuri—became naturalised at Rome. Probably of even earlier date was the influence of the oracular lore of Greece through Delphi and the oracle of Cumae.[2551]

On the threshold of the underworld Aeneas and the Sibyl are confronted by the monstrous forms of Hellenic legend—Centaurs and Scyllas, Harpies and Gorgons, the fire-armed Chimaera, and the hissing hydra of Lerna.[2552] They have to pass the ninefold barrier of the Styx in Charon’s steel-grey bark. The grisly ferryman of the infernal stream, foul and unkempt, with fixed eyes of flame, is surrounded by a motley crowd, thick as autumnal leaves, all straining and eager for the further shore. Landed on a waste expanse of mud and sedge,[2553] they pass the kennel of triple-headed Cerberus, and on to the judgment seat, where Minos assigns to each soul its several doom, according to the deeds done in the body. Thence they traverse the “mourning fields,”[2554] where are those sad queens of Grecian tragedy whose wild loves have been their undoing, and among them Phoenician Dido, who, with stony silence and averted gaze, plunges into the darkness of the wood.[2555] As the dawn is breaking, they find themselves before the prison-house of the damned, rising amid the folds of the river of fire, with walls of iron and adamant, its portals watched by a sleepless Fury in blood-red robe.[2556] From within are heard the cries of anguish and the clank of chains, as the great rebels and malefactors of old-world story—Ixion, Salmoneus, and the Titans—are tortured by lash and wheel and vulture.[2557] And with them, sharing the same agony, are those who have violated the great laws on which the Roman character was built.[2558] Through other dusky ways and Cyclopean portals they at last reach the home of the blessed, as it was [pg 493]pictured long before in the apocalypse of Pindar—the meads and happy groves of Elysium, under another sun and other stars than ours, and bathed in the splendour of an ampler air.[2559] Here is the eternal home of the heroic souls of a nobler age, men who have died for fatherland, holy priests and bards and founders of the arts which soften and embellish the life of men. But though their home is radiant with a splendour not of earth, they are, in old Roman and Greek fashion, occupied with the toils or pleasures of their earthly life. Youthful forms are straining their sinews in the wrestling-ground as of old. The ancient warriors of Troy have their shadowy chariots beside them, their lances planted in the sward, their chargers grazing in the meadow. Others are singing old lays or dancing, and the bard of Thrace himself is sweeping the lyre, as in the days when he sped the Argo through the “Clashing Rocks” in the quest of the fleece of gold.[2560]

The vision closes with a scene which criticism has long recognised as irreconcilable with the eschatology of Greek legend hitherto followed by the poet, but which is drawn from a philosophy destined to govern men’s thoughts of immortality for many ages. In a wooded vale, far withdrawn, through which Lethe glided peacefully, countless multitudes are gathered drinking the “water of carelessness and oblivion.” These are they, as Anchises expounds to his son, who, having passed the thousand purgatorial years, to cleanse away the stains of flesh in a former life, and, having effaced the memory of it, now await the call of Destiny to a new life on earth.[2561] This theory of life and death, coming down from Pythagoras, and popularised by Platonism, with some Stoic elements, had gained immense vogue among educated men of the last period of the Republic. Varro had adopted it as a fundamental tenet of his theology, and Cicero had embalmed it in his dream of Scipio, which furnished a text for Neo-Platonist homilies in the last days of the Western Empire.[2562] [pg 494]A fiery spirit animates the material universe, from the farthest star in ether down to the lowest form of animal life. The souls of men are sparks or emanations from this general soul which have descended into the prison of the body, and during the period of their bondage have suffered contamination.[2563] And the prison walls hide from their eyes for a time the heaven from which they come. Nor when death releases them do they shake off the engrained corruption. For a thousand years they must suffer cleansing by punishment till the stains are washed away, the deeply festering taint burnt out as by fire. Then only may the pure residue of ethereal spirit seek to enter on another life on earth.

Virgil, in his Nekuia, mirrored the confusion of beliefs as to the future state prevailing in his time. For his poetic sensibility, the old Roman faith of the Manes, the Greek legends of Tartarus and Elysium, the Pythagorean or Orphic doctrine of successive lives and purgatorial atonement, had each their charm, and a certain truth. On a subject so dim and uncertain as the future life, the keenest minds may have wavering conceptions, and in different moods may clothe them in various guise. This is the field of the protean poetic imagination inspired by religious intuition, not of the rigorous dogmatist. But a great poet like Virgil not only expresses an age to itself: he elevates and glorifies what he expresses. He gives clear-cut form to what is vague, he spreads the warmth and richness of colour over what is dim and blank, and he imparts to the abstract teaching of philosophy a glow and penetrating power which may touch even the unthinking mass of men. The vision of the Sixth Book, moreover, like the Aeneid as a whole, has a high note of patriotism. Beside the water of Lethe are gathered, waiting for their call to earthly life, all the great souls from the Alban Silvius to the great Julius, all the Scipios, Gracchi, Decii, and Fabricii, who were destined through storm and stress to give the world the calm of the Roman peace.[2564] The poet of Roman destiny had a marvellous fame among his countrymen. Men rose up to do him honour when he entered the theatre; the [pg 495]street boys of Pompeii scratched his verses on the walls.[2565] Can we doubt that the grandest part of his great poem, which lifts for a moment the veil of the unseen world, had a profound effect on the religious imagination of the future?

The opinion long prevailed that the period of the early Empire was one of unbelief or scepticism as to the future life. The opinion was founded on literary evidence accepted without much critical care. Cicero and Seneca, Juvenal and Plutarch,[2566] had spoken of the Inferno of Greek legend, its Cerberus and Chimaera, its gloom of Tartarus, as mere old wives’ fables, in which even children had ceased to believe. But such testimony should always be taken with a good deal of reserve. The member of a comparatively small literary and thoughtful circle is apt to imagine that its ideas are more widely diffused than they really are. It may well have been that thoughtful men, steeped in Platonic or Pythagorean faith as to the coming life, rejected as anthropomorphic dreams the infernal scenery of Greek legend, just as a thoughtful Christian of our day will hardly picture his coming beatitude in the gorgeous colouring of the Book of Revelation. Yet the mass of men will always seek for concrete imagery to body forth their dim spiritual cravings. They always live in that uncertain twilight in which the boundaries of pictured symbolism and spiritual reality are blurred and effaced. Lucian was a pessimist as to spiritual progress, and he may have exaggerated the materialistic superstition of his time; he had ample excuse for doing so. Yet, artist as he was, his art would have been futile and discredited in his own time, if it had not had a solid background in widely accepted beliefs. And we cannot refuse to admit his testimony that the visions of the grim ferryman over the waters of Styx, the awful judge, the tortures of Tartarus, the asphodel meads, and the water of Lethe, the pale neutral shades who wandered expectant of the libation on the grave, filled a large space in the imagination of the crowd.[2567] Plutarch, who sometimes agrees with Juvenal and Seneca as to the general incredulity, at others holds that a large class of remorseful sinners have a wholesome fear of the [pg 496]legendary tortures of lost souls, and that they are eager to purge their guilt before the awful ordeal of the Eternal Judgment.[2568] And, however pure and etherealised his own views may have been as to the life to come, no one has left a more lurid picture of the flames, the gloom, the sounds of excruciating anguish from the prison-house of the damned, which oppressed the imagination of the multitude in his time. One part of that vision had a peculiarly tenacious hold.[2569] The belief in the gruff ferryman of the dead, who sternly exacted his fare, and drove from the banks of Styx those who had no right to cross the awful stream, was widely diffused and survived far into the medieval times. For many centuries, long before and long after the coming of Christ, the coin which was to secure the passage of the shade into the world below was placed in the mouth of the corpse.[2570]

The inscriptions might be supposed to give authoritative evidence as to the belief of ordinary men about the future state. The funerary monuments from every part of the Roman world are almost countless for the period of the early Empire. Yet such records, however abundant, are not so clear and satisfactory as they are by some taken to be. The words of a tombstone are sometimes a sincere utterance of real affection and faith. They are also not unfrequently purely conventional, representing a respectable, historic creed, which may not be that of the man who erects the slab. Just as a Frenchman, who has never from infancy entered a church, may have his wife interred with all the solemn forms with which the Catholic Church makes the peace of the passing soul, so the Roman pagan may have often inscribed on his family tomb words which expressed the ancient creed of his race rather than his personal belief. Heredity in religion is a potent influence, and may be misleading to the inquirer of a later age. An epitaph should not be construed as a confession of faith.

The great mass of these inscriptions are couched in the same phrases, with only slight variations. The dedication Dis Manibus, representing the old Roman faith, is the heading of [pg 497]the majority of them. The vault is an “eternal home,” whose peace is guarded by prayers or threats and entreaties. There is a rare dedication to the “ashes” of the dead. There are many to their “eternal repose.”[2571] But it is surely rather absurd to find in expressions which occur almost in the same form in the niches of the Catacombs a tinge of Epicureanism. The poor grammarian of Como, who left all his substance to his town, may be permitted to enjoy “the calm peace” he claims after all the troubles of his life, without a suspicion that he meant the peace of nothingness.[2572] A pious Christian may rejoice at escaping the miseries of old age, and even hail death as the last cure of all mortal ills.[2573] Death and sleep have always seemed near akin, and when the Roman spoke of the sleep of death, he probably did not often mean that it had no awaking. The morning indeed, as we have seen, to old imaginations was not very bright. “The day of eternity” was not irradiated with the golden splendour of Pindar’s Happy Isles; it was grey and sad and calm. But that it was felt to be a real existence is shown by the insistent demand on scores of monuments for the regular service of the living. Every possible precaution is taken by the testator that his family or his club shall maintain this sympathetic observance for ever.[2574] With the idea of prolonged existence, of course, is blended the imaginative hope of having a continued memory among men. And probably the majority of the funerary inscriptions express this feeling chiefly. But the same is true of the monuments of every age, and warrants no conclusion as to the opinions about immortality held by those who raised them. There is abundance of the purest affection expressed on these memorials, and sometimes, although not very often, there is the hope of reunion after death. The wife of a philologus at Narbonne confidently expects to meet him, or a mother prays her son to take her to himself.[2575] Such expressions of a natural feeling, the same from age to age, have really little value as indications of religious belief. But there are not wanting in the inscriptions references to Tartarus and the Elysian fields, to Pluto and Proserpine, to Orcus who has snatched away some one in his bloom. “One little soul has been [pg 498]received among the number of the gods.”[2576] There are others, impregnated with the prevalent philosophy, which speak of the soul returning to its source, or of being dissolved into the infinite ether, or of passing to a distant home in the stars.[2577] This, however, as M. Boissier says,[2578] must have been the dream of a small minority. The funerary inscriptions leave the impression that, down to the final triumph of the Church, the feeling of the Romans about death was still in the main the feeling of their remote ancestors of the Samnite and Punic wars. It was a social feeling, in the prospect of a dim life dependent on the memory of the living, a horror of loneliness and desertion, the longing for a passing prayer even from a stranger. Blessings are heaped on him who will not forget the pious duty to the shade. On him who refuses it is invoked the bitterest curse to Roman imagination—“May he die the last of his race.”

But no dogmatic ecclesiastical system deterred the Roman from expressing frankly his unbelief in any future state. And the rejection of all hope for the future, sometimes coupled with a coarse satisfaction with a sensual past, is the note of not a few epitaphs of this period. Matrinia, the wife of one C. Matrinius Valentius, an Epicurean philosopher, dedicates a tablet to his “eternal sleep,” which in this case is no conventional phrase.[2579] And others, in even more decided language, parade their withering faith that this brief life is only a moment of consciousness between the blank of the past and the blank of the future, and record their indifference at passing again into the nothingness from which they came. The formula is frequent—“Non fueram, non sum, nescio”; or “Non fui, fui; non sum, non curo.” Another adds “non mihi dolet.”[2580] The subjects of some of these epitaphs seem to have obeyed literally the counsel of their master Lucretius, though in a sense different from his, and to have risen up sated with the banquet of life. They express, with cynical grossness, their only faith in the joys of the flesh, and their perfect content at having made the most of them. [pg 499]“Balnea, Vina, Venus,” sums up the tale.[2581] “What I have eaten, what I have drunk, is my own. I have had my life.”[2582] And the departing voluptuary exhorts his friends to follow his example: “My friends, while we live, let us live”; “Eat, drink, disport thyself, and then join us.”[2583] A veteran of the fifth legion records, probably with much truth, that “while he lived he drank with a good will,”[2584] and he exhorts his surviving friends to drink while they live. Under the confessional of St. Peter’s at Rome, in the year 1626, was found a monument of one Agricola of Tibur and his wife. There was a figure holding a wine-cup, and an inscription so frankly sensual that the whole was destroyed by order of the Pope. From the copy which was kept, it appears that Agricola was perfectly satisfied with his life, and recommended his example to others, “since it all ends in the grave or the funeral fire.”[2585] But inscriptions such as these are the exception. The funerary records, as a whole, give a picture of a society very like our own, with warm affections of kindred or friendship, clinging to ancestral pieties, ready to hope, if sometimes not clear and confident in faith.

There was probably a much more settled faith in immortality among the ordinary masses than among the highly educated. The philosophy of Greece came to the cultivated Roman world with many different voices on the greatest problem of human destiny. And the greatest minds, from Cicero to M. Aurelius, reflect the discordance of philosophy. Nay, some of those who, in more exalted moods, have left glowing pictures of the future beatitude, have also at times revealed a mood of melancholy doubt as to any conscious future life. The prevailing philosophy in the last generation of the Republic, demoralised by an internecine strife, was that of Epicurus.[2586] It harmonised with the decay of old Roman religion, and with the more disastrous moral deterioration in the upper cultivated class. The cultivated patrician, enervated by vice and luxury, or intoxicated with the [pg 500]excitement of civil war and the dreams of disordered ambition, flung off all spiritual idealism, and accepted frankly a lawless universe and a life of pleasure or power, to be ended by death. The great poem of Lucretius, the greatest tour de force in Latin, if not in any literature, braving not only the deepest beliefs of the Latin race, but the instinctive longings of humanity, was a herculean attempt to relieve men from the horrors of Graeco-Etruscan superstition. Even the gay frivolity of the comic stage reveals the terror which the path to Acheron inspired in the thoughtless crowd[2587]—the terror from which, with all the fervid zeal of an evangelist, Lucretius sought to relieve his countrymen.[2588] The pictures of Tartarus had burnt themselves into the popular imagination. And no message of Epicurus seems to his Roman interpreter so full of peace and blessing as the gospel of nothingness after death, the “morningless and unawakening sleep” which ends the fretful fever of life. As we felt no trouble when the storm of Punic invasion burst on Italy, we shall be equally unconscious when the partnership of soul and body is dissolved, even in the clash and fusion of all the elements in some great cosmic change.[2589] The older Stoicism permitted the hope of a limited immortality until the next great cataclysm, in which, after many ages, all things will be swallowed up.[2590] But Chrysippus admitted this prolonged existence only for the greater souls. And Panaetius, in the second century B.C., among other aberrations from the old creed of his school, abandoned even this not very satisfactory hope of immortality.[2591] Aristotle, while he held the permanence of the pure thinking principle after death, had given little countenance to the hope of a separate conscious personality. And the later Peripatetics, like Alexander Aphrodisias, had gone farther even than their master in dogmatic denial of immortality.[2592] Whatever support the instinctive craving of humanity for prolonged existence could obtain from philosophy was offered by the [pg 501]Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean schools. And their influence grew with the growing tendency to a revival of faith in the supernatural. For Plato, with his intense belief in the divine affinity of the human spirit, must always be the great leader of those who seek in philosophy an interpreter and a champion of religious intuition. The Phaedo was the last consolation of many a victim of conscription or imperial tyranny. Its fine-spun arguments may not have been altogether convincing, as they hardly seem to be even to the Platonic Socrates. But Plato was not merely a dialectician, he was also a seer and a poet. And, on a subject so dim as immortality, where mere intellectual proof, it is generally recognised, can be no more than tentative and precarious, men with a deep spiritual instinct have always felt the magnetism of the poet who could clothe his intuitions in the forms of imagination, who, from a keener sensibility and a larger vision, could give authority and clearness to the spiritual intuitions of the race.[2593] The philosophy of the Porch gave to the Antonine age some of its loftiest characters. But it was not the philosophy of the future. It was too cold, and too self-centred. It had too little warmth of sympathy with religious instincts which were becoming more and more imperious. Although, as we have seen in Seneca, it was softened by elements borrowed from Platonic sources, in Epictetus and M. Aurelius, in spite of a rare spiritual elevation, it displays the old aloofness from the mass of men, and a cold temperance of reserve on the great question of the future of the soul.

There can be little doubt that in the last age of the Republic a negative philosophy conspired with a decaying religious sense to stifle the hope of immortality among the cultivated class. Lucretius was certainly not a solitary member of his order. His great poem, by its combination of dialectic subtlety, poetic charm, and lofty moral earnestness, may have made many converts to its withering creed. In the debate on the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators, Julius Caesar could assert, without fear of contradiction or disapproval, that death was the final term alike of joy and sorrow in human life.[2594] This philosophy, [pg 502]indeed, was waning in force in the time of Augustus, and its forces were spent before the close of the first century. Yet the elder Pliny, who saw the reign of Vespasian, inveighs almost fiercely against the vanity or madness which dreams of a phantom life beyond the tomb, and robs of its great charm the last kindly boon of nature.[2595] Seneca on this, as on many other questions of high moment, is not steady and consistent. In moments of spiritual exaltation he is filled with apocalyptic rapture at the vision of an eternal world. At other times he speaks with a cold resignation, which seems to have been the fashion with men of his class and time, at the possibility of extinction in death. To the toil-worn spirit, weary of the travail and disappointments of life, death will be a quiet haven of rest.[2596] The old terrors of Charon and Cerberus, of the awful Judge and the tortures of Tartarus, are no longer believed in even by children.[2597] And stripped of its mythic horrors, death, being the loss of consciousness, must be the negation of pain and desire and fear. It is, in fact, a return to the nothingness from which we come, which has left no memory. Non miser potest esse qui nullus est.[2598] The literary men and men of the world in the age of the Flavians, like their successors ever since, probably occupied themselves little with a problem so long debated and so variously solved. Quintilian treats the question of the existence of the disembodied spirit as an open one for dialectical debate.[2599] Tacitus, at once credulous and sceptical, is no clearer on the subject of immortality than he is on the subject of miracles, or omens, or Providence. In his eulogy on Agricola he expresses a faint, pious hope of eternal peace for his hero, if there is a place in some other world for pious shades, and the sages are right in thinking that great souls do not perish with the body.[2600] This is a very guarded and hypothetical hope; and, probably, the only immortality for his friend in which Tacitus had much confidence was the undying fame with which the pen of genius can invest its subject. Tacitus, like so many of his [pg 503]class, had the old Roman distrust of philosophy, and the philosophies of which men of his generation had a tincture had no very confident or comforting message about the soul’s eternal destiny.