Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I

SUPERSTITION

Superstition a term of shifting meaning—Plutarch’s treatise on Superstition—Why it is worse than atheism—Immense growth of superstition in the first century, following on a decay of old religion—Forgotten rites and fallen temples—The revival of Augustus—The power of astrology—The Emperors believed in it and dreaded it—Tiberius and Thrasyllus at Capreae—The attitude of Nero, Otho, and Vitellius to astrology—The superstition of the Flavian Emperors—And of Hadrian and M. Aurelius—The superstition of the literary class—The Elder Pliny—Suetonius—Tacitus—His wavering treatment of the supernatural—How it may be explained by the character of the age—Epictetus on divination—The superstition of Aelian of Praeneste—His credulity and his anathemas on the sceptics—P. Aelius Aristides—His history and character—His illness of thirteen years—Was he a simple devotee?—The influence of [pg xviii]rhetorical training on him—The temples of healing in his time—Their organisation and routine—Recipes by dreams in the temples of Asclepius, Isis, and Serapis—Medical skill combined with superstition—The amusements and cheerful social life of these temple-hospitals were powerful healers—The ailments of Aristides and his journeys in quest of health—Strange divine prescriptions astonish the medical attendants—Their own heroic remedies—Epiphanies of the Gods—The return of his rhetorical power—The debt is repaid in the Sacred Orations—The treatise on dreams by Artemidorus—His idea of founding a science of dreams—His enormous industry in collecting materials—His contempt for less scientific interpreters—His classification of dreams and methods of interpretation—The new oracles—The failure of the old was not so complete as it is sometimes represented—The revival of Delphi—The history of the oracle of Alexander of Abonoteichos—His life and character—How he played on the superstition of the Paphlagonians—The business-like management of the oracle—Its fees and revenue—Its secret methods—Its fame spreads everywhere—Oracles in many tongues—Rutilianus, a great noble, espouses Alexander’s daughter—The Epicureans resist the impostor, but in vain—The mysteries of Glycon—Alexander, a second Endymion—Immense superstition of the time—Apotheosis in the air—The cult of Antinous—And of M. Aurelius—In Croton there were more gods than men!—The growing faith in daemons and genii—The evidence of inscriptions as to the adoption of local deities all over the world—Revived honours of classic heroes—The belief in recurring miracle—Christian and pagan were equally credulous—The legend of the “Thundering Legion”—Sorcery in Thessaly—The lawless romance of Apuleius

Pages [443]-483

CHAPTER II

BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY

The conception of immortality determined by the idea of God—Religion supplies the assurance denied by philosophy—Vagueness of the conception natural and universal—“It doth not yet appear what we shall be”—Confused and various beliefs on the subject in the Early Empire—The cult of the Manes in old Italian piety—The guardianship of the tomb, and call for perpetual remembrance—The eternal sleep—The link between the living and the dead—The craving for continued human sympathy with the shade in its eternal home—The Lemures and the Lemuria—Visitations from the other world—The Mundus in every Latin town—The general belief in apparitions illustrated from the Philopseudes of Lucian, from the Younger Pliny, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and Maximus of Tyre—The eschatology of Virgil a mixture of different faiths—Scenes from the Inferno of the Aeneid—Its Pythagorean elements—How Virgil influenced later conceptions of the future state—Scepticism and credulity in the first century—Perpetuity of heathen beliefs—The inscriptions, as to the future state, must be interpreted with care and discrimination—The phrases often conventional, and springing from different orders of belief—Inscriptions frankly atheistic or sensualist—Ideas of immortality among the cultivated class—The influence of [pg xix]Lucretius—The Stoic idea of coming life, and the Peripatetic—The influence of Platonism—In the last age of the Republic, and the first of the Empire, educated opinion was often sceptical or negative—J. Caesar, the Elder Pliny, Tacitus—The feeling of Hadrian—Epictetus on immortality—Galen—His probable influence on M. Aurelius—The wavering attitude of M. Aurelius on immortality—How he could reconcile himself by a saintly ideal to the resignation of the hope of a future life—His sadness and pessimism fully justified by the circumstances of the time—“Thou hast come to shore, quit the ship”—Change in the religious character long before M. Aurelius—Seneca’s theology as it moulded his conception of immortality—A new note in Seneca—The influence of Pythagorean and Platonic conceptions in modifying Stoicism—The revival of Pythagoreanism in the first century—Its tenets and the secret of its power—Apollonius of Tyana on immortality—His meeting with the shade of Achilles—Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre on immortality—Plutarch’s arguments for the faith in it—The Delays of Divine Vengeance—But, like Plato, Plutarch feels that argument on such a subject must be reinforced by poetic imagination—The myths of Thespesius of Soli and Timarchus in Plutarch—Mythic scenery of the eternal world

Pages [484]-528

CHAPTER III