History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne Volume I Part 4

One of the first facts that must strike a student who examines the ethical teaching of the ancient civilisations is how imperfectly that teaching was represented, and how feebly it was influenced by the popular creed. The moral ideas had at no time been sought in the actions of the G.o.ds, and long before the triumph of Christianity, polytheism had ceased to have any great influence upon the more cultivated intellects of mankind.

In Greece we may trace from the earliest time the footsteps of a religion of nature, wholly different from the legends of the mythology. The language in which the first Greek dramatists a.s.serted the supreme authority and universal providence of Zeus was so emphatic, that the Christian Fathers commonly attributed it either to direct inspiration or to a knowledge of the Jewish writings, while later theologians of the school of Cudworth have argued from it in favour of the original monotheism of our race. The philosophers were always either contemptuous or hostile to the prevailing legends. Pythagoras is said to have declared that he had seen Hesiod tied to a brazen pillar in h.e.l.l, and Homer hung upon a tree surrounded by serpents, on account of the fables they had invented about the G.o.ds.(148) Plato, for the same reason, banished the poets from his republic. Stilpo turned to ridicule the whole system of sacrifices,(149) and was exiled from Athens for denying that the Athene of Phidias was a G.o.ddess.(150) Xenophanes remarked that each nation attributed to the G.o.ds its distinctive national type, the G.o.ds of the aethiopians being black, the G.o.ds of the Thracians fair and blue-eyed.(151) Diagoras and Theodorus are said to have denied, and Protagoras to have questioned the existence of the G.o.ds,(152) while the Epicureans deemed them wholly indifferent to human affairs, and the Pyrrhonists p.r.o.nounced our faculties absolutely incapable of attaining any sure knowledge, either human or divine. The Cynic Antisthenes said that there were many popular G.o.ds, but there was only one G.o.d of nature.(153) The Stoics, reproducing an opinion which was supported by Aristotle and attributed to Pythagoras,(154) believed in an all-pervading soul of nature, but unlike some modern schools which have adopted this view, they a.s.serted in emphatic language the doctrine of Providence, and the self-consciousness of the Deity.

In the Roman republic and empire, a general scepticism had likewise arisen among the philosophers as the first fruit of intellectual development, and the educated cla.s.ses were speedily divided between avowed or virtual atheists, like the Epicureans,(155) and pure theists, like the Stoics and the Platonists. The first, represented by such writers as Lucretius and Petronius, regarded the G.o.ds simply as the creations of fear, denied every form of Providence, attributed the world to a concurrence of atoms, and life to spontaneous generation, and regarded it as the chief end of philosophy to banish as illusions of the imagination every form of religious belief. The others formed a more or less pantheistic conception of the Deity, a.s.serted the existence of a Providence,(156) but treated with great contempt the prevailing legends which they endeavoured in various ways to explain. The first systematic theory of explanation appears to have been that of the Sicilian Euhemerus, whose work was translated by Ennius. He pretended that the G.o.ds were originally kings, whose history and genealogies he professed to trace, and who after death had been deified by mankind.(157) Another attempt, which in the first period of Roman scepticism was more generally popular, was that of some of the Stoics, who regarded the G.o.ds as personifications of the different attributes of the Deity, or of different forces of nature. Thus Neptune was the sea, Pluto was fire, Hercules represented the strength of G.o.d, Minerva His wisdom, Ceres His fertilising energy.(158) More than a hundred years before the Empire, Varro had declared that "the soul of the world is G.o.d, and that its parts are true divinities."(159) Virgil and Manilius described, in lines of singular beauty, that universal spirit, the principle of all life, the efficient cause of all motion, which permeates and animates the globe. Pliny said that "the world and sky, in whose embrace all things are enclosed, must be deemed a G.o.d, eternal, immense, never begotten, and never to perish. To seek things beyond this is of no profit to man, and they transcend the limits of his faculties."(160) Cicero had adopted the higher Platonic conception of the Deity as mind freed from all taint of matter,(161) while Seneca celebrated in magnificent language "Jupiter the guardian and ruler of the universe, the soul and spirit, the lord and master of this mundane sphere, ... the cause of causes, upon whom all things hang.... Whose wisdom oversees the world that it may move uncontrolled in its course, ... from whom all things proceed, by whose spirit we live, ... who comprises all we see."(162) Lucan, the great poet of stoicism, rose to a still higher strain, and to one which still more accurately expressed the sentiments of his school, when he described Jupiter as that majestic, all-pervasive spirit, whose throne is virtue and the universe.(163) Quintilian defended the subjugation of the world beneath the sceptre of a single man, on the ground that it was an image of the government of G.o.d. Other philosophers contented themselves with a.s.serting the supreme authority of Jupiter Maximus, and reducing the other divinities to mere administrative and angelic functions, or, as the Platonists expressed it, to the position of daemons. According to some of the Stoics, a final catastrophe would consume the universe, the resuscitated spirits of men and all these minor G.o.ds, and the whole creation being absorbed into the great parent spirit, G.o.d would be all in all. The very children and old women ridiculed Cerberus and the Furies(164) or treated them as mere metaphors of conscience.(165) In the deism of Cicero the popular divinities were discarded, the oracles refuted and ridiculed, the whole system of divination p.r.o.nounced a political imposture, and the genesis of the miraculous traced to the exuberance of the imagination, and to certain diseases of the judgment.(166) Before the time of Constantine, numerous books had been written against the oracles.(167) The greater number of these had actually ceased, and the ablest writers justly saw in this cessation an evidence of the declining credulity of the people, and a proof that the oracles had been a fruit of that credulity.(168) The Stoics, holding, as was their custom, aloof from direct religious discussion, dissuaded their disciples from consulting them, on the ground that the gifts of fortune were of no account, and that a good man should be content with his conscience, making duty and not success the object of his life.(169) Cato wondered that two augurs could meet with gravity.(170) The Roman general Sertorius made the forgery of auspicious omens a continual resource in warfare.(171) The Roman wits made divination the favourite subject of their ridicule.(172) The denunciation which the early Greek moralists launched against the popular ascription of immoral deeds to the G.o.ds was echoed by a long series of later philosophers,(173) while Ovid made these fables the theme of his mocking _Metamorphoses_, and in his most immoral poem proposed Jupiter as a model of vice. With an irony not unlike that of Isaiah, Horace described the carpenter deliberating whether he should convert a shapeless log into a bench or into a G.o.d.(174) Cicero, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, and Dion Chrysostom either denounced idolatry or defended the use of images simply on the ground that they were signs and symbols of the Deity,(175) well suited to aid the devotions of the ignorant. Seneca(176) and the whole school of Pythagoras objected to the sacrifices.

These examples will be sufficient to show how widely the philosophic cla.s.ses in Rome were removed from the professed religion of the State, and how necessary it is to seek elsewhere the sources of their moral life. But the opinions of learned men never reflect faithfully those of the vulgar, and the chasm between the two cla.s.ses was even wider than at present before the dawn of Christianity and the invention of printing. The atheistic enthusiasm of Lucretius and the sceptical enthusiasm of some of the disciples of Carneades were isolated phenomena, and the great majority of the ancient philosophers, while speculating with the utmost freedom in private, or in writings that were read by the few, countenanced, practised, and even defended the religious rites that they despised. It was believed that many different paths adapted to different nations and grades of knowledge converge to the same Divinity, and that the most erroneous religion is good if it forms good dispositions and inspires virtuous actions. The oracle of Delphi had said that the best religion is that of a man's own city. Polybius and Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, who regarded all religions simply as political agencies, dilated in rapturous terms upon the devotion of the Romans and the comparative purity of their creed.(177) Varro openly professed the belief that there are religious truths which it is expedient that the people should not know, and falsehoods which they should believe to be true.(178) The Academic Cicero and the Epicurean Caesar were both high officers of religion. The Stoics taught that every man should duly perform the religious ceremonies of his country.(179)

But the Roman religion, even in its best days, though an admirable system of moral discipline, was never an independent source of moral enthusiasm.

It was the creature of the State, and derived its inspiration from political feeling. The Roman G.o.ds were not, like those of the Greeks, the creations of an unbridled and irreverent fancy, nor, like those of the Egyptians, representations of the forces of nature; they were for the most part simple allegories, frigid personifications of different virtues, or presiding spirits imagined for the protection of different departments of industry. The religion established the sanct.i.ty of an oath, it gave a kind of official consecration to certain virtues, and commemorated special instances in which they had been displayed; its local character strengthened patriotic feeling, its wors.h.i.+p of the dead fostered a vague belief in the immortality of the soul,(180) it sustained the supremacy of the father in the family, surrounded marriage with many imposing solemnities, and created simple and reverent characters profoundly submissive to an over-ruling Providence and scrupulously observant of sacred rites. But with all this it was purely selfish. It was simply a method of obtaining prosperity, averting calamity, and reading the future.

Ancient Rome produced many heroes, but no saint. Its self-sacrifice was patriotic, not religious. Its religion was neither an independent teacher nor a source of inspiration, although its rites mingled with and strengthened some of the best habits of the people.

But these habits, and the religious reverence with which they were connected, soon disappeared amid the immorality and decomposition that marked the closing years of the Republic and the dawn of the Empire. The stern simplicity of life, which the censors had so zealously and often so tyrannically enforced,(181) was exchanged for a luxury which first appeared after the return of the army of Manlius from Asia,(182) increased to immense proportions after the almost simultaneous conquests of Carthage, Corinth, and Macedonia,(183) received an additional stimulus from the example of Antony,(184) and at last, under the Empire, rose to excesses which the wildest Oriental orgies have never surpa.s.sed.(185) The complete subversion of the social and political system of the Republic, the anarchy of civil war, the ever-increasing concourse of strangers, bringing with them new philosophies, customs, and G.o.ds, had dissolved or effaced all the old bonds of virtue. The simple juxtaposition of many forms of wors.h.i.+p effected what could not have been effected by the most sceptical literature or the most audacious philosophy. The moral influence of religion was almost annihilated. The feeling of reverence was almost extinct. Augustus solemnly degraded the statue of Neptune because his fleet had been wrecked.(186) When Germanicus died, the populace stoned or overthrew the altars of the G.o.ds.(187) The idea of sanct.i.ty was so far removed from the popular divinities that it became a continual complaint that prayers were offered which the most depraved would blush to p.r.o.nounce aloud.(188) Amid the corruption of the Empire, we meet with many n.o.ble efforts of reform made by philosophers or by emperors, but we find scarcely a trace of the moral influence of the old religion. The apotheosis of the emperors consummated its degradation. The foreign G.o.ds were identified with those of Rome, and all their immoral legends a.s.sociated with the national creed.(189) The theatre greatly extended the area of scepticism. Cicero mentions the a.s.senting plaudits with which the people heard the lines of Ennius, declaring that the G.o.ds, though real beings, take no care for the things of man.(190) Plutarch tells of a spectator at a theatre rising up with indignation after a recital of the crimes of Diana, and exclaiming to the actor, "May you have a daughter like her whom you have described!"(191) St. Augustine and other of the Fathers long after ridiculed the pagans who satirised in the theatres the very G.o.ds they wors.h.i.+pped in the temples.(192) Men were still profoundly superst.i.tious, but they resorted to each new religion as to a charm or talisman of especial power, or a system of magic revealing the future.

There existed, too, to a very large extent, a kind of superst.i.tious scepticism which occupies a very prominent place in religious history.

There were mult.i.tudes who, declaring that there were no G.o.ds, or that the G.o.ds never interfered with human affairs, professed with the same breath an absolute faith in all portents, auguries, dreams, and miracles.

Innumerable natural objects, such as comets, meteors, earthquakes, or monstrous births, were supposed to possess a kind of occult or magical virtue, by which they foreshadowed, and in some cases influenced, the destinies of men. Astrology, which is the special representative of this mode of thought, rose to great prominence. The elder Pliny notices that in his time a belief was rapidly gaining ground, both among the learned and among the vulgar, that the whole destiny of man is determined by the star that presides over his nativity; that G.o.d, having ordained this, never interferes with human affairs, and that the reality of the portents is due to this pre-ordainment.(193) One of the later historians of the Empire remarks that numbers who denied the existence of any divinity believed nevertheless that they could not safely appear in public, or eat or bathe, unless they had first carefully consulted the almanac to ascertain the position of the planet Mercury, or how far the moon was from the Crab.(194) Except, perhaps, among the peasants in the country districts, the Roman religion, in the last years of the Republic, and in the first century of the Empire, scarcely existed, except in the state of a superst.i.tion, and he who would examine the true moral influence of the time must turn to the great schools of philosophy which had been imported from Greece.

The vast place which the rival systems of Zeno and Epicurus occupy in the moral history of mankind, and especially in the closing years of the empire of paganism, may easily lead us to exaggerate the creative genius of their founders, who, in fact, did little more than give definitions or intellectual expression to types of excellence that had at all times existed in the world. There have ever been stern, upright, self-controlled, and courageous men, actuated by a pure sense of duty, capable of high efforts of self-sacrifice, somewhat intolerant of the frailties of others, somewhat hard and unsympathising in the ordinary intercourse of society, but rising to heroic grandeur as the storm lowered upon their path, and more ready to relinquish life than the cause they believed to be true. There have also always been men of easy tempers and of amiable disposition, gentle, benevolent, and pliant, cordial friends and forgiving enemies, selfish at heart, yet ever ready, when it is possible, to unite their gratifications with those of others, averse to all enthusiasm, mysticism, utopias, and superst.i.tion, with little depth of character or capacity for self-sacrifice, but admirably fitted to impart and to receive enjoyment, and to render the course of life easy and harmonious. The first are by nature Stoics, and the second Epicureans, and if they proceed to reason about the _summum bonum_ or the affections, it is more than probable that in each case their characters will determine their theories. The first will estimate self-control above all other qualities, will disparage the affections, and will endeavour to separate widely the ideas of duty and of interest, while the second will systematically prefer the amiable to the heroic, and the utilitarian to the mystical.

But while it is undoubtedly true that in these matters character usually determines opinion, it is not less true that character is itself in a great measure governed by national circ.u.mstances. The refined, artistic, sensual civilisations of Greece and Asia Minor might easily produce fine examples of the Epicurean type, but Rome was from the earliest times pre-eminently the home of stoicism. Long before the Romans had begun to reason about philosophy, they had exhibited it in action, and in their speculative days it was to this doctrine that the n.o.blest minds naturally tended. A great nation engaged in perpetual wars in an age when success in warfare depended neither upon wealth nor upon mechanical genius, but upon the constant energy of patriotic enthusiasm, and upon the unflinching maintenance of military discipline, the whole force of the national character tended to the production of a single definite type. In the absolute authority accorded to the father over the children, to the husband over the wife, to the master over the slave, we may trace the same habits of discipline that proved so formidable in the field. Patriotism and military honour were indissolubly connected in the Roman mind. They were the two sources of national enthusiasm, the chief ingredients of the national conception of greatness. They determined irresistibly the moral theory which was to prove supreme.

Now war, which brings with it so many demoralising influences, has, at least, always been the great school of heroism. It teaches men how to die.

It familiarises the mind with the idea of n.o.ble actions performed under the influence, not of personal interest, but of honour and of enthusiasm.

It elicits in the highest degree strength of character, accustoms men to the abnegation needed for simultaneous action, compels them to repress their fears, and establish a firm control over their affections.

Patriotism, too, leads them to subordinate their personal wishes to the interests of the society in which they live. It extends the horizon of life, teaching men to dwell among the great men of the past, to derive their moral strength from the study of heroic lives, to look forward continually, through the vistas of a distant future, to the welfare of an organisation which will continue when they have pa.s.sed away. All these influences were developed in Roman life to a degree which can now never be reproduced. War, for the reasons I have stated, was far more than at present the school of heroic virtues. Patriotism, in the absence of any strong theological pa.s.sion, had a.s.sumed a transcendent power. The citizen, pa.s.sing continually from political to military life, exhibited to perfection the moral effects of both. The habits of command formed by a long period of almost universal empire, and by the aristocratic organisation of the city, contributed to the elevation, and also to the pride, of the national character.

It will appear, I think, sufficiently evident, from these considerations, that the circ.u.mstances of the Roman people tended inevitably to the production of a certain type of character, which, in its essential characteristics, was the type of stoicism. In addition to the predisposition which leads men in their estimate of the comparative excellence of different qualities to select for the highest eulogy those which are most congruous to their own characters, this fact derives a great importance from the large place which the biographical element occupied in ancient ethical teaching. Among Christians the ideals have commonly been either supernatural beings or men who were in constant connection with supernatural beings, and these men have usually been either Jews or saints, whose lives were of such a nature as to isolate them from most human sympathies, and to efface as far as possible the national type. Among the Greeks and Romans the examples of virtue were usually their own fellow-countrymen; men who had lived in the same moral atmosphere, struggled for the same ends, acquired their reputation in the same spheres, exhibited in all their intensity the same national characteristics as their admirers. History had a.s.sumed a didactic character it has now almost wholly lost. One of the first tasks of every moralist was to collect traits of character ill.u.s.trating the precepts he enforced. Valerius Maximus represented faithfully the method of the teachers of antiquity when he wrote his book giving a catalogue of different moral qualities, and ill.u.s.trating each by a profusion of examples derived from the history of his own or of foreign nations.

"Whenever," said Plutarch, "we begin an enterprise, or take possession of a charge, or experience a calamity, we place before our eyes the example of the greatest men of our own or of bygone ages, and we ask ourselves how Plato or Epaminondas, Lycurgus or Agesilaus, would have acted. Looking into these personages as into a faithful mirror, we can remedy our defects in word or deed.... Whenever any perplexity arrives, or any pa.s.sion disturbs the mind, the student of philosophy pictures to himself some of those who have been celebrated for their virtue, and the recollection sustains his tottering steps and prevents his fall."(195)

Pa.s.sages of this kind continually occur in the ancient moralists,(196) and they show how naturally the highest type of national excellence determined the prevailing school of moral philosophy, and also how the influence of the heroic period of national history would act upon the best minds in the subsequent and wholly different phases of development. It was therefore not surprising that during the Empire, though the conditions of national life were profoundly altered, Stoicism should still be the philosophical religion, the great source and regulator of moral enthusiasm. Epicureanism had, indeed, spread widely in the Empire,(197) but it proved little more than a principle of disintegration or an apology for vice, or at best the religion of tranquil and indifferent natures animated by no strong moral enthusiasm. It is indeed true that Epicurus had himself been a man of the most blameless character, that his doctrines were at first carefully distinguished from the coa.r.s.e sensuality of the Cyrenaic school which had preceded them, that they admitted in theory almost every form of virtue, and that the school had produced many disciples who, if they had not attained the highest grades of excellence, had at least been men of harmless lives, intensely devoted to their master, and especially noted for the warmth and constancy of their friends.h.i.+ps.(198) But a school which placed so high a value on ease and pleasure was eminently unfit to struggle against the fearful difficulties that beset the teachers of virtue amid the anarchy of a military despotism, and the virtues and the vices of the Romans were alike fatal to its success. All the great ideals of Roman excellence belonged to a different type. Such men as a Decius or a Regulus would have been impossible in an Epicurean society, for even if their actuating emotion were no n.o.bler than a desire for posthumous fame, such a desire could never grow powerful in a moral atmosphere charged with the shrewd, placid, unsentimental utilitarianism of Epicurus. On the other hand, the distinctions the Epicureans had drawn between more or less refined pleasures and their elevated conceptions of what const.i.tutes the true happiness of men, were unintelligible to the Romans, who knew how to sacrifice enjoyment, but who, when pursuing it, gravitated naturally to the coa.r.s.est forms. The mission of Epicureanism was therefore chiefly negative. The anti-patriotic tendency of its teaching contributed to that destruction of national feeling which was necessary to the rise of cosmopolitanism, while its strong opposition to theological beliefs, supported by the genius and enthusiasm of Lucretius, told powerfully upon the decaying faith.

Such being the functions of Epicureanism, the constructive or positive side of ethical teaching devolved almost exclusively upon Stoicism; for although there were a few philosophers who expressed themselves in strong opposition to some portions of the Stoical system, their efforts usually tended to no more than a modification of its extreme and harshest features. The Stoics a.s.serted two cardinal principles-that virtue was the sole legitimate object to be aspired to, and that it involved so complete an ascendancy of the reason as altogether to extinguish the affections.

The Peripatetics and many other philosophers, who derived their opinions chiefly from Plato, endeavoured to soften down the exaggeration of these principles. They admitted that virtue was an object wholly distinct from interest, and that it should be the leading motive of life; but they maintained that happiness was also a good, and a certain regard for it legitimate. They admitted that virtue consisted in the supremacy of the reason over the affections, but they allowed the exercise of the latter within restricted limits. The main distinguis.h.i.+ng features, however, of Stoicism, the unselfish ideal and the controlling reason, were acquiesced in, and each represents an important side of the ancient conception of excellence which we must now proceed to examine.

In the first we may easily trace the intellectual expression of the high spirit of self-sacrifice which the patriotic enthusiasm had elicited. The spirit of patriotism has this peculiar characteristic, that, while it has evoked acts of heroism which are both very numerous and very sublime, it has done so without presenting any prospect of personal immortality as a reward. Of all the forms of human heroism, it is probably the most unselfish. The Spartan and the Roman died for his country because he loved it. The martyr's ecstasy of hope had no place in his dying hour. He gave up all he had, he closed his eyes, as he believed, for ever, and he asked for no reward in this world or in the next. Even the hope of posthumous fame-the most refined and supersensual of all that can be called reward-could exist only for the most conspicuous leaders. It was examples of this nature that formed the culminations or ideals of ancient systems of virtue, and they naturally led men to draw a very clear and deep distinction between the notions of interest and of duty. It may, indeed, be truly said, that while the conception of what const.i.tuted duty was often very imperfect in antiquity, the conviction that duty, as distinguished from every modification of selfishness, should be the supreme motive of life was more clearly enforced among the Stoics than in any later society.

The reader will probably have gathered from the last chapter that there are four distinct motives which moral teachers may propose for the purpose of leading men to virtue. They may argue that the disposition of events is such that prosperity will attend a virtuous life, and adversity a vicious one-a proposition they may prove by pointing to the normal course of affairs, and by a.s.serting the existence of a special Providence in behalf of the good in the present world, and of rewards and punishments in the future. As far as these latter arguments are concerned, the efficacy of such teaching rests upon the firmness with which certain theological tenets are held, while the force of the first considerations will depend upon the degree and manner in which society is organised, for there are undoubtedly some conditions of society in which a perfectly upright life has not even a general tendency to prosperity. The peculiar circ.u.mstances and dispositions of individuals will also influence largely the way in which they receive such teaching, and, as Cicero observed, "what one utility has created, another will often destroy."

They may argue, again, that vice is to the mind what disease is to the body, and that a state of virtue is in consequence a state of health. Just as bodily health is desired for its own sake, as being the absence of a painful, or at least displeasing state, so a well-ordered and virtuous mind may be valued for its own sake, and independently of all the external good to which it may lead, as being a condition of happiness; and a mind distracted by pa.s.sion and vice may be avoided, not so much because it is an obstacle in the pursuit of prosperity, as because it is in itself essentially painful and disturbing. This conception of virtue and vice as states of health or sickness, the one being in itself a good and the other in itself an evil, was a fundamental proposition in the ethics of Plato.(199) It was admitted, but only to a subsidiary place, by the Stoics,(200) and has pa.s.sed more or less into all the succeeding systems.

It is especially favourable to large and elevating conceptions of self-culture, for it leads men to dwell much less upon isolated acts of virtue or vice than upon the habitual condition of mind from which they spring.

It is possible, in the third place, to argue in favour of virtue by offering as a motive that sense of pleasure which follows the deliberate performance of a virtuous act. This emotion is a distinct and isolated gratification following a distinct action, and may therefore be easily separated from that habitual placidity of temper which results from the extinction of vicious and perturbing impulses. It is this theory which is implied in the common exhortations to enjoy 'the luxury of doing good,'

and though especially strong in acts of benevolence, in which case sympathy with the happiness created intensifies the feeling, this pleasure attends every kind of virtue.

These three motives of action have all this common characteristic, that they point as their ultimate end to the happiness of the agent. The first seeks that happiness in external circ.u.mstances; the second and third in psychological conditions. There is, however, a fourth kind of motive which may be urged, and which is the peculiar characteristic of the intuitive school of moralists and the stumbling-block of its opponents. It is a.s.serted that we are so const.i.tuted that the notion of duty furnishes in itself a natural motive of action of the highest order, wholly distinct from all the refinements and modifications of self-interest. The coactive force of this motive is altogether independent of surrounding circ.u.mstances, and of all forms of belief. It is equally true for the man who believes and for the man who rejects the Christian faith, for the believer in a future world and for the believer in the mortality of the soul. It is not a question of happiness or unhappiness, of reward or punishment, but of a generically different nature. Men feel that a certain course of life is the natural end of their being, and they feel bound, even at the expense of happiness, to pursue it. They feel that certain acts are essentially good and n.o.ble, and others essentially base and vile, and this perception leads them to pursue the one and to avoid the other, irrespective of all considerations of enjoyment.

I have recurred to these distinctions, which were more fully discussed in the last chapter, because the school of philosophy we are reviewing furnishes the most perfect of all historical examples of the power which the higher of these motives can exercise over the mind. The coa.r.s.er forms of self-interest were in stoicism absolutely condemned. It was one of the first principles of these philosophers that all things that are not in our power should be esteemed indifferent; that the object of all mental discipline should be to withdraw the mind from all the gifts of fortune, and that prudence must in consequence be altogether excluded from the motives of virtue. To enforce these principles they continually dilated upon the vanity of human things, and upon the majesty of the independent mind, and they indulged, though scarcely more than other sects, in many exaggerations about the impa.s.sive tranquillity of the sage.(201) In the Roman empire stoicism flourished at a period which, beyond almost any other, seemed unfavourable to such teaching. There were reigns when, in the emphatic words of Tacitus, "virtue was a sentence of death." In no period had brute force more completely triumphed, in none was the thirst for material advantages more intense, in very few was vice more ostentatiously glorified. Yet in the midst of all these circ.u.mstances the Stoics taught a philosophy which was not a compromise, or an attempt to moderate the popular excesses, but which was rather in its austere sanct.i.ty the extreme ant.i.thesis of all that the prevailing examples and their own interests could dictate. And these men were no impa.s.sioned fanatics, fired with the prospect of coming glory. They were men from whose motives of action the belief in the immortality of the soul was resolutely excluded. In the scepticism that accompanied the first introduction of philosophy into Rome, in the dissolution of the old fables about Tartarus and the Styx, and the dissemination of Epicureanism among the people, this doctrine had sunk very low, notwithstanding the beautiful reasonings of Cicero and the religious faith of a few who clung like Plutarch to the mysteries in which it was perpetuated. An interlocutor in Cicero expressed what was probably a common feeling when he acknowledged that, with the writings of Plato before him, he could believe and realise it; but when he closed the book, the reasonings seemed to lose their power, and the world of spirits grew pale and unreal.(202) If Ennius could elicit the plaudits of a theatre when he proclaimed that the G.o.ds took no part in human affairs, Caesar could a.s.sert in the senate, without scandal and almost without dissent, that death was the end of all things.(203) Pliny, perhaps the greatest of Roman scholars, adopting the sentiment of all the school of Epicurus, describes the belief in a future life as a form of madness, a puerile and a pernicious illusion.(204) The opinions of the Stoics were wavering and uncertain. Their first doctrine was that the soul of man has a future and independent, but not an eternal existence, that it survives until the last conflagration which was to destroy the world, and absorb all finite things into the all-pervading soul of nature.

Chrysippus, however, restricted to the best and n.o.blest souls this future existence, which Cleanthes had awarded to all,(205) and among the Roman Stoics even this was greatly doubted. The belief that the human soul is a detached fragment of the Deity naturally led to the belief that after death it would be reabsorbed into the parent Spirit. The doctrine that there is no real good but virtue deprived the Stoics of the argument for a future world derived from unrequited merit and unpunished crime, and the earnestness with which they contended that a good man should act irrespectively of reward inclined them, as it is said to have inclined some Jewish thinkers,(206) to the denial of the existence of the reward.(207) Panaetius, the founder of Roman stoicism, maintained that the soul perished with the body,(208) and his opinion was followed by Epictetus,(209) and Cornutus.(210) Seneca contradicted himself on the subject.(211) Marcus Aurelius never rose beyond a vague and mournful aspiration. Those who believed in a future world believed in it faintly and uncertainly, and even when they accepted it as a fact, they shrank from proposing it as a motive. The whole system of Stoical ethics, which carried self-sacrifice to a point that has scarcely been equalled, and exercised an influence which has rarely been surpa.s.sed, was evolved without any a.s.sistance from the doctrine of a future life.(212) Pagan antiquity has bequeathed us few n.o.bler treatises of morals than the "De Officiis" of Cicero, which was avowedly an expansion of a work of Panaetius.(213) It has left us no grander example than that of Epictetus, the sickly, deformed slave of a master who was notorious for his barbarity, enfranchised late in life, but soon driven into exile by Domitian; who, while sounding the very abyss of human misery, and looking forward to death as to simple decomposition, was yet so filled with the sense of the Divine presence that his life was one continued hymn to Providence, and his writings and his example, which appeared to his contemporaries almost the ideal of human goodness, have not lost their consoling power through all the ages and the vicissitudes they have survived.(214)

There was, however, another form of immortality which exercised a much greater influence among the Roman moralists. The desire for reputation, and especially for posthumous reputation-that "last infirmity of n.o.ble minds"(215)-a.s.sumed an extraordinary prominence among the springs of Roman heroism, and was also the origin of that theatrical and overstrained phraseology which the greatest of ancient moralists rarely escaped.(216) But we should be altogether in error if we inferred, as some have done, that paganism never rose to the conception of virtue concealing itself from the world, and consenting voluntarily to degradation. No characters were more highly appreciated in antiquity than those of men who, through a sense of duty, opposed the strong current of popular favour; of men like Fabius, who consented for the sake of their country to incur the reputation that is most fatal to a soldier;(217) of men like Cato, who remained unmoved among the scoffs, the insults, and the ridicule of an angry crowd.(218) Cicero, expounding the principles of Stoicism, declared that no one has attained to true philosophy who has not learnt that all vice should be avoided, "though it were concealed from the eyes of G.o.ds and men,"(219) and that no deeds are more laudable than those which are done without ostentation, and far from the sight of men.(220) The writings of the Stoics are crowded with sentences to the same effect. "Nothing for opinion, all for conscience."(221) "He who wishes his virtue to be blazed abroad is not labouring for virtue but for fame."(222) "No one is more virtuous than the man who sacrifices the reputation of a good man rather than sacrifice his conscience."(223) "I do not shrink from praise, but I refuse to make it the end and term of right."(224) "If you do anything to please men, you have fallen from your estate."(225) "Even a bad reputation n.o.bly earned is pleasing."(226) "A great man is not the less great when he lies vanquished and prostrate in the dust."(227) "Never forget that it is possible to be at once a divine man, yet a man unknown to all the world."(228) "That which is beautiful is beautiful in itself; the praise of man adds nothing to its quality."(229) Marcus Aurelius, following an example that is ascribed to Pythagoras, made it a special object of mental discipline, by continually meditating on death, and evoking, by an effort of the imagination, whole societies that had pa.s.sed away, to acquire a realised sense of the vanity of posthumous fame. The younger Pliny painted faithfully the ideal of Stoicism when he described one of his friends as a man "who did nothing for ostentation, but all for conscience; who sought the reward of virtue in itself, and not in the praise of man."(230) Nor were the Stoics less emphatic in distinguis.h.i.+ng the obligation from the attraction of virtue. It was on this point that they separated from the more refined Epicureans, who were often willing to sublimate to the highest degree the kind of pleasure they proposed as an object, provided only it were admitted that pleasure is necessarily the ultimate end of our actions. But this the Stoics firmly denied. "Pleasure," they argued, "is the companion, not the guide, of our course."(231) "We do not love virtue because it gives us pleasure, but it gives us pleasure because we love it."(232) "The wise man will not sin, though both G.o.ds and men should overlook the deed, for it is not through the fear of punishment or of shame that he abstains from sin. It is from the desire and obligation of what is just and good."(233) "To ask to be paid for virtue is as if the eye demanded a recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking."(234) In doing good, man "should be like the vine which has produced grapes, and asks for nothing more after it has produced its proper fruit."(235) His end, according to these teachers, is not to find peace either in life or in death. It is to do his duty, and to tell the truth.

The second distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of Stoicism I have noticed was the complete suppression of the affections to make way for the absolute ascendancy of reason. There are two great divisions of character corresponding very nearly to the Stoical and Epicurean temperaments I have described-that in which the will predominates, and that in which the desires are supreme. A good man of the first cla.s.s is one whose will, directed by a sense of duty, pursues the course he believes to be right, in spite of strong temptations to pursue an opposite course, arising either from his own pa.s.sions and tendencies, or from the circ.u.mstances that surround him. A good man of the second cla.s.s is one who is so happily const.i.tuted that his sympathies and desires instinctively tend to virtuous ends. The first character is the only one to which we can, strictly speaking, attach the idea of merit, and it is also the only one which is capable of rising to high efforts of continuous and heroic self-sacrifice; but on the other hand there is a charm in the spontaneous action of the unforced desires which disciplined virtue can perhaps never attain. The man who is consistently generous through a sense of duty, when his natural temperament impels him to avarice and when every exercise of benevolence causes him a pang, deserves in the very highest degree our admiration; but he whose generosity costs him no effort, but is the natural gratification of his affections, attracts a far larger measure of our love.

Corresponding to these two casts of character, we find two distinct theories of education, the aim of the one being chiefly to strengthen the will, and that of the other to guide the desires. The princ.i.p.al examples of the first are the Spartan and Stoical systems of antiquity, and, with some modifications, the asceticism of the Middle Ages. The object of these systems was to enable men to endure pain, to repress manifest and acknowledged desires, to relinquish enjoyments, to establish an absolute empire over their emotions. On the other hand, there is a method of education which was never more prevalent than in the present day, which exhausts its efforts in making virtue attractive, in a.s.sociating it with all the charms of imagination and of prosperity, and in thus insensibly drawing the desires in the wished-for direction. As the first system is especially suited to a disturbed and military society, which requires and elicits strong efforts of the will, and is therefore the special sphere of heroic virtues, so the latter belongs naturally to a tranquil and highly organised civilisation, which is therefore very favourable to the amiable qualities, and it is probable that as civilisation advances, the heroic type will, in consequence, become more and more rare, and a kind of self-indulgent goodness more common. The circ.u.mstances of the ancient societies led them to the former type, of which the Stoics furnished the extreme expression in their doctrine that the affections are of the nature of a disease(236)-a doctrine which they justified by the same kind of arguments as those which are now often employed by metaphysicians to prove that love, anger, and the like can only be ascribed by a figure of speech to the Deity. Perturbation, they contended, is necessarily imperfection, and none of its forms can in consequence be ascribed to a perfect being.

We have a clear intuitive perception that reason is the highest, and should be the directing, power of an intelligent being; but every act which is performed at the instigation of the emotions is withdrawn from the empire of reason. Hence it was inferred that while the will should be educated to act habitually in the direction of virtue, even the emotions that seem most fitted to second it should be absolutely proscribed. Thus Seneca has elaborated at length the distinction between clemency and pity, the first being one of the highest virtues, and the latter a positive vice. Clemency, he says, is an habitual disposition to gentleness in the application of punishments. It is that moderation which remits something of an incurred penalty, it is the opposite of cruelty, which is an habitual disposition to rigour. Pity, on the other hand, bears to clemency the same kind of relation as superst.i.tion to religion. It is the weakness of a feeble mind that flinches at the sight of suffering. Clemency is an act of judgment, but pity disturbs the judgment. Clemency adjudicates upon the proportion between suffering and guilt. Pity contemplates only suffering, and gives no thought to its cause. Clemency, in the midst of its n.o.blest efforts, is perfectly pa.s.sionless; pity is unreasoning emotion. Clemency is an essential characteristic of the sage; pity is only suited for weak women and for diseased minds. "The sage will console those who weep, but without weeping with them; he will succour the s.h.i.+pwrecked, give hospitality to the proscribed, and alms to the poor, ... restore the son to the mother's tears, save the captive from the arena, and even bury the criminal; but in all this his mind and his countenance will be alike untroubled. He will feel no pity. He will succour, he will do good, for he is born to a.s.sist his fellows, to labour for the welfare of mankind, and to offer to each one his part.... His countenance and his soul will betray no emotion as he looks upon the withered legs, the tattered rags, the bent and emaciated frame of the beggar. But he will help those who are worthy, and, like the G.o.ds, his leaning will be towards the wretched.... It is only diseased eyes that grow moist in beholding tears in other eyes, as it is no true sympathy, but only weakness of nerves, that leads some to laugh always when others laugh, or to yawn when others yawn."(237)

Cicero, in a sentence which might be adopted as the motto of Stoicism, said that Homer "attributed human qualities to the G.o.ds; it would have been better to have imparted divine qualities to men." The remarkable pa.s.sage I have just cited serves to show the extremes to which the Stoics pushed this imitation. And indeed, if we compare the different virtues that have flourished among Pagans and Christians, we invariably find that the prevailing type of excellence among the former is that in which the will and judgment, and among the latter that in which the emotions, are most prominent. Friends.h.i.+p rather than love, hospitality rather than charity, magnanimity rather than tenderness, clemency rather than sympathy, are the characteristics of ancient goodness. The Stoics, who carried the suppression of the emotions farther than any other school, laboured with great zeal to compensate the injury thus done to the benevolent side of our nature, by greatly enlarging the sphere of reasoned and pa.s.sionless philanthropy. They taught, in the most emphatic language, the fraternity of all men, and the consequent duty of each man consecrating his life to the welfare of others. They developed this general doctrine in a series of detailed precepts, which, for the range, depth, and beauty of their charity, have never been surpa.s.sed. They even extended their compa.s.sion to crime, and adopting the paradox of Plato, that all guilt is ignorance,(238) treated it as an involuntary disease, and declared that the only legitimate ground of punishment is prevention.(239) But, however fully they might reconcile in theory their principles with the widest and most active benevolence, they could not wholly counteract the practical evil of a system which declared war against the whole emotional side of our being, and reduced human virtue to a kind of majestic egotism; proposing as examples Anaxagoras, who, when told that his son had died, simply observed, "I never supposed that I had begotten an immortal;"(240) or Stilpo, who, when his country had been ruined, his native city captured, and his daughters carried away as slaves or as concubines, boasted that he had lost nothing, for the sage is independent of circ.u.mstances. The framework or theory of benevolence might be there, but the animating spirit was absent. Men who taught that the husband or the father should look with perfect indifference on the death of his wife or his child, and that the philosopher, though he may shed tears of pretended sympathy in order to console his suffering friend, must suffer no real emotion to penetrate his breast,(241) could never found a true or lasting religion of benevolence. Men who refused to recognise pain and sickness as evils were scarcely likely to be very eager to relieve them in others.

In truth, the Stoics, who taught that all virtue was conformity to nature, were, in this respect, eminently false to their own principle. Human nature, as revealed to us by reason, is a composite thing, a const.i.tution of many parts differing in kind and dignity, a hierarchy in which many powers are intended to co-exist, but in different positions of ascendancy or subordination. To make the higher part of our nature our whole nature, is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils. As philanthropists, the Stoics, through their pa.s.sion for unity, were led to the extirpation of those emotions which nature intended as the chief springs of benevolence.

As speculative philosophers, they were entangled by the same desire in a long train of pitiable paradoxes. Their famous doctrines that all virtues are equal, or, more correctly, are the same, that all vices are equal, that nothing is an evil which does not affect our will, and that pain and bereavement are, in consequence, no ills,(242) though partially explained away and frequently disregarded by the Roman Stoics, were yet sufficiently prominent to give their teaching something of an unnatural and affected appearance. Prizing only a single object, and developing only a single side of their nature, their minds became narrow and their views contracted. Thus, while the Epicureans, urging men to study nature in order to banish superst.i.tion, endeavoured to correct that ignorance of physical science which was one of the chief impediments to the progress of the ancient mind, the Stoics for the most part disdained a study which was other than the pursuit of virtue.(243) While the Epicurean poet painted in magnificent language the perpetual progress of mankind, the Stoic was essentially retrospective, and exhausted his strength in vain efforts to restore the simplicity of a by-gone age. While, too, the school of Zeno produced many of the best and greatest men who have ever lived, it must be acknowledged that its records exhibit a rather unusual number of examples of high professions falsified in action, and of men who, displaying in some forms the most undoubted and transcendent virtue, fell in others far below the average of mankind. The elder Cato, who, though not a philosopher, was a model of philosophers, was conspicuous for his inhumanity to his slaves.(244) Brutus was one of the most extortionate usurers of his time, and several citizens of Salamis died of starvation, imprisoned because they could not pay the sum he demanded.(245) No one eulogised more eloquently the austere simplicity of life which Stoicism advocated than Sall.u.s.t, who in a corrupt age was notorious for his rapacity. Seneca himself was const.i.tutionally a nervous and timid man, endeavouring, not always with success, to support himself by a sublime philosophy. He guided, under circ.u.mstances of extreme difficulty, the cause of virtue, and his death is one of the n.o.blest antiquity records; but his life was deeply marked by the taint of flattery, and not free from the taint of avarice, and it is unhappily certain that he lent his pen to conceal or varnish one of the worst crimes of Nero. The courage of Lucan failed signally under torture, and the flattery which he bestowed upon Nero, in his "Pharsalia," ranks with the Epigrams of Martial as probably the extreme limit of sycophancy to which Roman literature descended.

While, too, the main object of the Stoics was to popularise philosophy, the high standard of self-control they exacted rendered their system exceedingly unfit for the great majority of mankind, and for the ordinary condition of affairs. Life is history, not poetry. It consists mainly of little things, rarely illumined by flashes of great heroism, rarely broken by great dangers, or demanding great exertions. A moral system, to govern society, must accommodate itself to common characters and mingled motives.

It must be capable of influencing natures that can never rise to an heroic level. It must tincture, modify, and mitigate where it cannot eradicate or transform. In Christianity there are always a few persons seeking by continual and painful efforts to reverse or extinguish the ordinary feelings of humanity, but in the great majority of cases the influence of the religious principle upon the mind, though very real, is not of a nature to cause any serious strain or struggle. It is displayed in a certain acquired spontaneity of impulse. It softens the character, purifies and directs the imagination, blends insensibly with the habitual modes of thought, and, without revolutionising, gives a tone and bias to all the forms of action. But Stoicism was simply a school of heroes. It recognised no gradations of virtue or vice. It condemned all emotions, all spontaneity, all mingled motives, all the principles, feelings, and impulses upon which the virtue of common men mainly depends. It was capable of acting only on moral natures that were strung to the highest tension, and it was therefore naturally rejected by the mult.i.tude.

The central conception of this philosophy of self-control was the dignity of man. Pride, which looks within, making man seek his own approbation, as distinguished from vanity, which looks without, and shapes its conduct according to the opinions of others, was not only permitted in Stoicism, it was even its leading moral agent. The sense of virtue, as I have elsewhere observed, occupies in this system much the same place as the sense of sin in Christianity. Sin, in the conception of the ancients, was simply disease, and they deemed it the part of a wise man to correct it, but not to dwell upon its circ.u.mstances. In the many disquisitions which Epictetus and others have left us concerning the proper frame of mind in which man should approach death, repentance for past sin has absolutely no place, nor do the ancients appear to have ever realised the purifying and spiritualising influence it exercises upon character. And while the reality of moral disease was fully recognised, while a lofty and indeed unattainable ideal was continually proposed, no one doubted the essential excellence of human nature, and very few doubted the possibility of man acquiring by his own will a high degree of virtue. In this last respect there was a wide difference between the teaching of the Roman moralists and of the Greek poets.(246) Homer continually represents courage, anger, and the like, as the direct inspiration of Heaven. aeschylus, the great poet of fatalism, regards every human pa.s.sion as but a single link in the great chain of causes forged by the inexorable will of Zeus. There are, indeed, few grander things in poetry than his picture of the many and various motives that urged Clytemnestra to the slaughter of Agamemnon-revenge for her murdered daughter, love for aegisthus, resentment at past breaches of conjugal duty, jealousy of Ca.s.sandra, all blending in that fierce hatred that nerved her arm against her husband's life; while above all this tumult of pa.s.sion the solemn song of Ca.s.sandra proclaimed that the deed was but the decree of Heaven, the harvest of blood springing from the seed of crime, the accomplishment of the ancient curse that was destined to cling for ever to the hapless race of Atreus. Before the body of the murdered king, and in presence of the wildest paroxysms of human pa.s.sion, the bystanders bowed their heads, exclaiming, "Zeus has willed it-Zeus the supreme Ruler, the G.o.d who does all; for what can happen in the world without the will of Zeus?"

But conceptions of this kind had little or no place in the philosophy of Rome. The issue of human enterprises and the disposition of the gifts of fortune were recognised as under the control of Providence; but man was master of his own feelings, and was capable of attaining such excellence that he might even challenge comparison with the G.o.ds. Audacious as such sentiments may now appear, they were common to most schools of Roman moralists. "We boast justly of our own virtue," said the eclectic Cicero, "which we could not do if we derived it from the Deity and not from ourselves."

"All mortals judge that fortune is to be received from the G.o.ds and wisdom from ourselves."(247) The Epicurean Horace, in his n.o.blest ode, described the just man, confident in his virtue, undaunted amid the crash of worlds, and he tells us to pray only for those things which Jupiter gives and takes away. "He gives life, he gives wealth; an untroubled mind I secure for myself."(248) "The calm of a mind blest in the consciousness of its virtue," was the expression of supreme felicity the Epicureans had derived from their master.(249) Lucretius, in a magnificent pa.s.sage, designates Epicurus as a G.o.d, and boasts that the popular divinities dwindle into insignificance before him. Ceres, he says, gave men corn, and Bacchus wine, but Epicurus the principles of virtue. Hercules conquered monsters, Epicurus conquered vice.(250) "Pray," said Juvenal, "for a healthy mind in a healthy body. Ask for a brave soul unscared by death.... But there are things you can give yourself."(251) "Misfortune, and losses, and calumny,"

said Seneca, "disappear before virtue as the taper before the sun."(252) "In one point the sage is superior to G.o.d. G.o.d owes it to His nature not to fear, but the sage owes it to himself. Sublime condition! he joins the frailty of a man to the security of a G.o.d."(253) "Except for immortality,"

he elsewhere writes, "the sage is like to G.o.d."(254) "It is the characteristic of a wise man," added Epictetus, "that he looks for all his good and evil from himself."(255) "As far as his rational nature is concerned, he is in no degree inferior to the G.o.ds."(256)

There were, however, other veins of thought exhibited in stoicism which greatly modified and sometimes positively contradicted this view of the relations of man to the Deity. The theology of the Stoics was an ill-defined, uncertain, and somewhat inconsistent Pantheism; the Divinity was especially wors.h.i.+pped under the two aspects of Providence and moral goodness, and the soul of man was regarded as "a detached fragment of the Deity,"(257) or as at least pervaded and accompanied by a divine energy.

"There never," said Cicero, "was a great man, without an inspiration from on high."(258) "Nothing," said Seneca, "is closed to G.o.d. He is present in our conscience. He intervenes in our thoughts."(259) "I tell thee, Lucilius," he elsewhere writes, "a sacred spirit dwells within us, the observer and the guardian of our good and evil deeds.... No man is good without G.o.d. Who, save by His a.s.sistance, can rise above fortune? He gives n.o.ble and lofty counsels. A G.o.d (what G.o.d I know not) dwells in every good man."(260) "Offer to the G.o.d that is in thee," said Marcus Aurelius, "a manly being, a citizen, a soldier at his post ready to depart from life as soon as the trumpet sounds."(261) "It is sufficient to believe in the Genius who is within us, and to honour him by a pure wors.h.i.+p."(262)

Pa.s.sages of this kind are not unfrequent in Stoical writings. More commonly, however, virtue is represented as a human act imitating G.o.d.

This was the meaning of the Platonic maxim, "follow G.o.d," which the Stoics continually repeated, which they developed in many pa.s.sages of the most touching and beautiful piety, and to which they added the duty of the most absolute and unquestioning submission to the decrees of Providence. Their doctrine on this latter point harmonised well with their antipathy to the emotional side of our being. "To weep, to complain, to groan, is to rebel;"(263) "to fear, to grieve, to be angry, is to be a deserter."(264) "Remember that you are but an actor, acting whatever part the Master has ordained. It may be short, or it may be long. If He wishes you to represent a poor man, do so heartily; if a cripple, or a magistrate, or a private man, in each case act your part with honour."(265) "Never say of anything that you have lost it, but that you have restored it; your wife and child die-you have restored them; your farm is taken from you-that also is restored. It is seized by an impious man. What is it to you by whose instrumentality He who gave it reclaims it?"(266) "G.o.d does not keep a good man in prosperity; He tries, He strengthens him, He prepares him for Himself."(267) "Those whom G.o.d approves, whom He loves, He hardens, He proves, He exercises; but those whom He seems to indulge and spare, He preserves for future ills."(268) With a beautiful outburst of submissive grat.i.tude, Marcus Aurelius exclaims, "Some have said, Oh, dear city of Cecrops!-but thou, canst thou say, Oh, dear city of Jupiter?... All that is suitable to thee, oh world, is suitable to me."(269)

These pa.s.sages, which might be indefinitely multiplied, serve to show how successfully the Stoics laboured, by dilating upon the conception of Providence, to mitigate the arrogance which one aspect of their teaching unquestionably displayed. But in this very attempt another danger was incurred, upon which a very large proportion of the moral systems of all ages have been wrecked. A doctrine which thus enjoins absolute submission to the decrees of Providence,(270) which proscribes the affections, and which represents its disciples as altogether independent of surrounding circ.u.mstances, would in most conditions of society have led necessarily to quietism, and proved absolutely incompatible with active virtue.

Fortunately, however, in the ancient civilisations the idea of virtue had from the earliest times been so indissolubly connected with that of political activity that the danger was for a long period altogether avoided. The State occupied in antiquity a prominence in the thoughts of men which it never has attained in modern times. The influence of patriotism thrilled through every fibre of moral and intellectual life.

The most profound philosophers, the purest moralists, the most sublime poets, had been soldiers or statesmen. Hence arose the excessive predominance occasionally accorded to civic virtues in ancient systems of ethics, and also not a few of their most revolting paradoxes. Plato advocated community of wives mainly on the ground that the children produced would be attached more exclusively to their country.(271) Aristotle may be almost said to have made the difference between Greek and barbarian the basis of his moral code. The Spartan legislation was continually extolled as an ideal, as the Venetian const.i.tution by the writers of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, the contact of the spheres of speculation and of polit