Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

But even in heathendom, long before M. Aurelius was born, the drift of thought towards the goal of a personal immortality was strong and intense. And this was only one consequence of a movement which had profoundly affected human thought, and had compelled Stoicism to recast itself, as in the teaching of Seneca. Pure reason could not explain the relation of man to the universe, it could not satisfy the deepest human instincts. The maxim, “live according to Nature,” was interpreted by the Stoic to mean a life in accordance with our own higher nature, the Divine element within us. Yet this interpretation only brought out the irreconcilable discordance between the two conceptions of Nature in the physical universe and in the human spirit. There are depths and mysteries in the one which have no answering correspondence in the other. Something more than reason is needed to solve the problems of human destiny, the mysterious range of human aspiration. Nature, as a system of cold impersonal processes, has no sympathy with man, she may be icily indifferent or actively hostile. To conform one’s [pg 512]life to the supposed dictates of an abstract Reason, asserting itself in physical laws, which seem often to make a mockery of the noblest effort and aspiration of man, demanded a servility of submission in human nature, and called upon it to disown a large part of its native powers and instincts. Man, a mere ghost of himself, attenuated to a bloodless shade, finds himself in presence of a power cold, relentless, unmoral, according to human standards, a power which makes holocausts of individual lives to serve some abstract and visionary ideal of the whole. The older Stoicism provided no object of worship. For worship cannot be paid to an impersonal law without moral attributes. You may in abject quietism submit to it, but you cannot revere or adore it. It is little wonder that the Stoic sage, who could triumph over all material obstructions by moral enthusiasm, was sometimes exalted above the Zeus who represented mere passionless physical law. Such an idea—for it cannot be called a Being—has no moral import, it supplies no example, succour, or inspiration. The sage may for a moment have a superhuman triumph, in his defiance of the temptations or calamities with which Nature has surrounded him, but it is a lonely triumph of inhuman pride.[2642] It may be the divine element within him which has given him the victory, but this is conceived as the mere effluence of that subtle material force which moves under all the phenomena of physical Nature. In surrendering yourself to the impulse of such a power you are merely putting yourself in line with the other irrational subjects of impersonal law. There is here, it need not be said, no stimulus to moral life, there is the absolute negation of it. The affinity of the human soul with the soul of the world is a mere physical doctrine, however refined and subtle be the “fiery breath” which is the common element of both. But prolonged ethical study and analysis combined with the infiltration of Platonism by degrees to modify profoundly the Stoic conception of the nature of God, and of the relation of man to Him. God tended to become more and more a person, a moral power, a father. And the indwelling God became the voice of conscience, consoling, prompting, supporting, inspiring an ideal of fuller communion in another sphere. Was the longing for continued life, in communion with kindred souls, [pg 513]with a Divine Spirit, which has made us what we are, to be relegated to the limbo of anthropomorphic dreams?

Seneca, as we have seen in a former chapter, still retains some of the hard orthodoxy of the older Stoicism. In his letters to Lucilius he occasionally uses the language of the old Stoic materialism.[2643] But there can be little doubt that Seneca had assimilated other conceptions antagonistic to it. God becomes more a Person, distinct from the world, which He has created, which He governs, which He directs to moral ends.[2644] He is not merely the highest reason, He is also the perfect wisdom, holiness, and love. He is no longer a mere blind force or fate; He is the loving, watchful Father, and good men are His sons. The apparent calamities which they have to suffer are only a necessary discipline, for, “whom He loves He tries and hardens by chastisement.”[2645] God can never really injure, for His nature is love, and we are continually loaded with His benefits.[2646] In his view of the constitution of man, Seneca has deviated even further from the creed of his school. He appears indeed to assert sometimes that the soul is material, but it is matter so fine and subtle as to be indistinguishable from what we call spirit. And the ethical studies of Seneca compelled him to abandon the Stoic doctrine of the simple unity of the soul for the Platonic dualism, with the opposition of reason and animal impulse. The latter has its seat in the body, or the flesh, as he often calls it. And of the flesh he speaks with all the contempt of the Phaedo. It is a mere shell, a fetter, a prison; or a humble hostelry which the soul occupies only for a brief space.[2647] With the flesh the spirit must wage perpetual war, as the alien power which cramps its native energies, darkens its vision, and perverts its judgment of the truth. The true life of the spirit will, as in the theology of Plato, only begin when the unequal partnership is dissolved.[2648]

The orthodox Stoic doctrine allowed a limited immortality, till the next great cosmic conflagration. But it was doubtful whether even this continued existence was real personal life, and with some Stoic doctors it was a privilege confined to the [pg 514]greater souls.[2649] Like nearly all philosophers of this age, Seneca occasionally seems to admit the possibility of a return to antenatal nothingness at death. “Non potest miser esse qui nullus est” is a consolation often administered even by those who have the hope of something better than the peace of annihilation.[2650] It was a consolation which might be a very real one to men living in the reign of Nero. Taken at the worst, death can only be dissolution, for the rivers of fire and the tortures of Tartarus are mere figments of poetic fancy. The mind trained in submission to universal law will not shrink from a fate which awaits the universe by fire or cataclysmal change. Its future fate can only be either to dwell calmly for ever among kindred souls, or to be reabsorbed into the general whole.[2651] But in moments of spiritual exaltation, such an alternative does not satisfy Seneca. He has got far beyond the grim submission, or graceful contempt, of aristocratic suicide, or even the faith in a bounded immortality. He has a hope at times apparently more clear than any felt by the Platonic Socrates on the last evening in prison. Death is no longer a sleep, a blank peace following the futile agitations of life: it is the gateway to eternal peace. The brief sojourn in the body is the prelude to a longer and nobler life.[2652] The hour, at which you shudder as the last, is really the birthday of eternity, when the mind, bursting from its fetters, will expatiate in all the joy of its freedom in the light, and have unrolled before it all the secrets and splendour of starry worlds, without a haunting shadow.[2653] Nay, the vision is moralised almost in Christian fashion. The thought of eternity compels us to think of God as witness of every act, to remember that “decisive hour” when, with all veils and disguises removed, the verdict on our life will be pronounced. It also gives the hope of purging away for ever the taint of the flesh and entering on communion with the spirits of the blessed.[2654] Thus as though [pg 515]with the Eternal eyes upon him, a man should shrink from all the baser and meaner side of his corporeal life, and so prepare himself for the great ordeal, and the beatitude of the life to come.

In the apocalypse of Seneca a new note is struck in pagan meditation on the immortality. We have left far behind the thought of the Manes haunting the ancestral tomb, and soothed in returning years by the jet of wine or the bunch of violets. We are no longer watching, with Pindar or Virgil, the spirits basking in Elysian meads and fanned by ocean breezes. We are far on the way to the City of God, cujus fundamenta in montibus sanctis. And indeed Seneca has probably travelled as far towards it as any one born in heathendom ever did. It is not wonderful that, in the fierce religious struggle of the fourth century, his moral enthusiasm, his view of this life as a probation for the next, his glowing vision of an almost Christian heaven, should have suggested an imaginary intercourse with St Paul.[2655]

What were the influences which really moulded his highest conception of the future state, how much was due to a pure and vigorous spiritual intuition, how much to Platonic and Pythagorean sources, we cannot pretend to say. In Seneca’s most enraptured previsions of immortality, the very exuberance of the rhetoric seems to be the expression of intense personal feeling. But Seneca’s was a very open and sensitive mind. One of his teachers was Sotion, who, like his master Sextius, was called a Pythagorean, and who, on true Pythagorean principles, taught Seneca to abstain from animal food.[2656] We may be sure that no Pythagorean teacher of that age would fail to discuss with his pupil the problem of the future life. It is true that Seneca only once or twice alludes to the doctrine of a previous life, and he only mentions the Pythagorean school to record the fact that in his day it was without a head.[2657] But that does not preclude the supposition that he may have felt its influence in the formative years of youth. And the Pythagoreans of the early empire were a highly eclectic school. [pg 516]They still reproduced the spirit of their founder in mathematical symbolism, in the ideal of asceticism, in a pronounced religious tendency.[2658] But they had absorbed much from Platonism, as well as from the Lyceum and the Porch. These mingled influences also account for the profound alterations which Stoicism had undergone in the mind of Seneca. And his contempt for the body or the flesh, and many of the phrases in which its cramping, lowering influences are described, savour of the Pythagorean and Platonist schools.

But Seneca is an inconsistent, though eloquent and powerful, expounder of that faith in personal immortality, with its moral consequences, which goes back through many ages to Plato, to Pythagoras, to the obscure apostles of the Orphic revelation, perhaps to Egypt.[2659] The mythical Orpheus represents, in the field of religion and in the theory of life and death, an immense revolution in Greek thought and an enduring spirit which produced a profound effect down to the last years of paganism in the West.[2660] With the names of Orpheus and Pythagoras are connected the assured faith in immortality, the conception of this life as only preparatory and secondary to the next, the need for purgation and expiation for deeds done in the body, the doctrine of transmigration and successive lives, possibly in animal forms. Orpheus was also the mythical founder of mysteries in whose secret lore the initiated were always supposed to receive some comforting assurance of a life to come.[2661] A spokesman in one of Cicero’s dialogues recalls with intense gratitude the light of hope and cheerfulness which the holy rites had shed for him both on life and death.[2662] And Plutarch, on the death of their daughter, reminded his wife of the soothing words which they had together heard from the hierophant in the Dionysiac mysteries.[2663] Long before their day Plato had often, on these high themes, sought a kind of high ecclesiastical sanction or suggestion for the tentative conclusions of dialectic.[2664] The great name of Orpheus, [pg 517]and the mystic lore of this esoteric faith, had indeed in Plato’s day been sadly cheapened and degraded by a crowd of mercenary impostors.[2665] And even the venerable rites of Eleusis may have contained an element of coarseness, descending from times when the processes of nature were regarded unveiled.[2666] But philosophy and reason, which purged and elevated religion as a whole, did the same service for the mysteries, and Orphic and Pythagorean became almost convertible.[2667] The systems represent a converging effort to solve those great questions which lie on the borderland of religion and philosophy, questions on which the speculative intellect is so often foiled, and has to fall back on the support of faith and religious intuition.[2668] In an age which had forsaken curious speculation, whose whole interest was concentrated on the moral life, an age which longed for spiritual vision and supernatural support, an essentially religious philosophy like the new Pythagoreanism was sure to be a great power. Gathering up impartially whatever suited its main end from the ancient schools, maintaining a scrupulous reverence for all the devotion of the past, it shed over all a higher light, issuing, as its votaries believed, from the lands of the dawn.[2669] Keeping a consecrated place for all the gods of popular tradition, linking men to the Infinite by a graduated hierarchy of spirits with their home in the stars, it rose to the conception of the One, pure, passionless Being to whom no bloody sacrifice is to be offered, who is to be worshipped best by silent adoration and a life of purity. And in cultivating this purity, the grossness of the body must be attenuated by a strict rule of life.[2670] And though the Highest be so remote and so ethereal, He has not left us without messengers and interpreters to bridge the vast interval between us and the Infinite, by means of dream and vision and oracle. A world of strange daemonic life surrounds us, a world of spirits and heroic souls akin to ours.[2671] For though we are immersed in the alien element of the flesh, yet our complex soul has a divine part, which may even here below have converse with the Divine. During its [pg 518]period of duress and probation, it may indeed become irremediably tainted by contact with matter. It may also, hearkening to the voice of philosophy, hold itself clear and pure from such defilement. When the mortal severance of the two natures comes, the divine part does not perish with its mouldering prison, but it may have a very different destiny in the ages to come, according to the manner of its earthly life. This life and the eternal state are linked in an inevitable moral sequence; as we sow, so shall we reap in successive lives. There is a Great Judgment in the unseen world, with momentous, age-long effects. The spirit which has refused to yield to the seductions of the flesh may, in the coming life, rise to empyrean heights beyond human imagination to picture. The soul which has been imbruted by its environment may have to pass a long ordeal of three thousand years, and then return to another sojourn in human form, or it may sink hopelessly to ever lower depths of degradation.

The biography of Apollonius of Tyana is, of course, in one sense a romance.[2672] Yet its tales of miracle should hardly be allowed to obscure its value as a picture of the beliefs of that age. We cannot doubt that the Pythagorean apostle of the time of the Flavians went all over the Roman world, preaching his gospel of moral and ritual purity, kindling or satisfying the faith in the world of spirit, striving in a strange fashion to reconcile a mystic monotheism and devotion to a pure life of the soul with a scrupulous reverence for all the mythologies. It may, at first sight, appear strange that a mystic like Apollonius, of the Pythagorean school, should so seldom allude to the subject of immortality. The truth is that Apollonius was not a dogmatic preacher; he dealt little in theories. His chief business, as he conceived it, was with practical morality, and the reform or restoration of ritual where it had fallen into desuetude and decay.[2673] Penetrated as he was with the faith in a spiritual world, he seems to assume as a postulate the eternity of the soul, and its incarnation for a brief space on earth. During its sojourn in the flesh, it is visited by visions from on high, [pg 519]and such revelations are vouchsafed in proportion to its ascetic purity.[2674] What conception of the life to come Apollonius entertained we cannot say; but its reality to him was a self-evident truth. We are surrounded by the spirits of the departed, although we know it not. Sailing among the islands of the Aegean, he once gratified his disciples by the tale of his having met the shade of Achilles at his tomb in the Troad.[2675] Men said that the hero was really dead, and in the old home of the Myrmidons, his worship was forgotten. But Apollonius, in a prayer which he had learnt from the sages on the Ganges, called upon the heroic shade to dispel all doubts by appearing at his call. At once an earthquake shook the tomb, and a fair youthful form was by his side of wondrous beauty and superhuman stature, clothed in a Thessalian mantle. His stature grew more majestic, and his beauty more glorious as Apollonius gazed. But the sage had no weak fears in the presence even of so august a spirit, and pressed him with questions which savour far more of antiquarian than spiritual interest. Was Helen really in Troy? Why does not Homer mention Palamedes? The hero resolved his doubts, sent a warning message to the Thessalians to restore his forgotten honours, and in a soft splendour vanished at the first cock-crow.[2676]

The biography of Apollonius closes with a tale which throws a strong light on the spiritual cravings of that age. The sage firmly believed in transmigration and immortality, although he discouraged debate on these high themes.[2677] After his death, the youth of Tyana were much occupied with solemn thoughts. But there was a sceptic among them who had vainly besought the departed philosopher to return from spiritland and dispel his doubts as to the future life. At last one day he fell asleep among his companions, and then suddenly started up as one demented, with the cry—“I believe thee.” Then he told his friends that he had seen the spirit of the sage, that he had been actually among them, though they knew it not, chanting a marvellous song of life and death. It told of the escape of the soul from the mouldering frame and [pg 520]of its swift flight to ethereal worlds. “Thou shalt know all when thou art no more; but while thou art yet among the living, why seek to pierce the mystery?”[2678]

The new Platonist school, with Plutarch and Maximus at their head, were, in this age, the great apostles of the hope of immortality. Platonists in their theory of mind and God, Neo-Pythagorean in their faith in the openness of the human spirit at its best to supernatural influences, they felt the doctrine of the coming life to be axiomatic. It is true that the author of the Consolation to Apollonius, seems at times to waver, as Seneca did, between the idea of extinction at death and the hope of eternal beatitude.[2679] This piece is full of pessimist thoughts of life, and embalms many a sad saying of the Greek poets on its shortness and its misery.[2680] Bringing far more sorrow than joy, life may well be regarded as a mysterious punishment. That Thracian tribe which mourned at each birth as others do at death, had a true philosophy of man’s estate. The great consolation is that, in the phrase of Heraclitus, death and life are one, we are dying every moment from our birth. Death is the great healer, in the words of Aeschylus, the deliverer from the curse of existence, whether it be an eternal sleep or a far journey into an unknown land. The prospect of blank nothingness offers no terrors; for the soul only returns to its original unconsciousness. But this was hardly a congenial mood to the author, and before the close, he falls back on the solace of mystic tradition or poetic vision, that, for the nobler sort, there is a place prepared in the ages to come, after the Great Judgment, when all souls, naked and stripped of all trappings and disguises, shall have to answer for the deeds done in the body.[2681] The same faith is professed by Plutarch to his wife in the Consolation on the death of their little daughter, which took place while Plutarch was from home. The loss of a pure bright young soul, full of love and kindness to all, even to her lifeless toys, was evidently a heavy blow.[2682] But Plutarch praises his wife’s simple restraint and abstinence from the effusive parade of conventional mourning. All such displays seemed to him a rather vulgar intemperance [pg 521]and self-indulgence.[2683] And why grieve for one who is spared all grief? She had her little joys, and, knowing no other, she suffers no pain of loss. Yet Plutarch would not have his wife accept the cold consolation that death brings unconsciousness. He reminds her of the brighter, more cheering vision which they have enjoyed together as communicants in the Dionysiac mysteries. If the soul is undying, if it is of divine parentage and has a divine destiny, then the shortness of its imprisonment and exile is a blessing. The captive bird may come by use and wont actually to love its cage. And the worst misery of old age is not grey hairs and weakness, but a dull absorption in the carnal and forgetfulness of divine things. “Whom the gods love die young.” By calling them back early, they save them from long wanderings.[2684]

Plutarch’s belief in immortality is a religious faith, a practical postulate. He nowhere discusses the bases of the belief in an exhaustive way. It is rather inseparable from his conception of God and His justice, and the relation of the human soul to God.[2685] He admits that the prospect of reward or punishment in another world has but little influence on men’s conduct.[2686] Few believe in the tales of tortures of the damned. And those who do can soothe their fears, and purchase a gross immortality, by initiations and indulgences.[2687] Yet it is impossible to doubt that to Plutarch the hope of the eternal life was a precious possession. He assails with force, and even asperity, the Epicurean school for their attempt to rob humanity of it, on the pretext of relieving men of a load of superstitious fears. They are like men on board a ship who, letting the passengers know that they have no pilot, console them with the further information that it does not matter, as they are bound to drive upon the rocks.[2688] The great promise of Epicurus was to free men from the spectral terrors with which poetic fancy had filled the scenery of the under world. But in doing so, he invested death with a new horror infinitely worse than the fabled tortures of the damned. It was a subtle fallacy which taught that, as annihilation involves the extinction of consciousness, the lamented loss of the joys and vivid energy [pg 522]of life was a mere imagination projected on a blank future where no regret could ever disturb the tranquillity of nothingness[2689]. Plutarch took his stand on psychology. The passion for continued existence is, as a matter of fact, the most imperious in our nature. With the belief in immortality, Epicurus sweeps away the strongest and dearest hopes of the mass of men. This life is indeed full of pain and sorrow; yet men cling to it passionately, merely as life, in the darkest hours. And they are ready to brave the worst horrors of Cerberus and Chimaera for the chance of continued existence.[2690] The privation of a dream of happiness in another world is a real loss, even though, when the grey day of nothingness dawns, the consciousness of loss be gone. Is it a light thing to tell the nobler spirits, the moral athletes, who have battled with evil all life long, that they have been contending for a visionary crown?[2691] Is it nothing to the idealist who, amid all the obstructions of the life in the flesh, has been fostering his nobler powers, in the hope of eternal freedom and the full vision of truth, that that real life to which he fancied death was only the gateway is, after all, a mere illusion? Nor does Plutarch disdain to take account of that vivacity of love which in all ages has sought to soften the bitterness of parting by the hope of reunion and recognition in other worlds.[2692]