Part 4

I have strayed rather far from the Roman shows, but the savagery of Christians in the fourteenth century (and after) should make us wonder less at Roman callousness. All our admiration is due to the few finer spirits who were repelled by the slaughter of man or beast to make a Roman’s holiday. Cicero said that he could never see what there was pleasurable in the spectacle of a noble beast struck to the heart by its merciless hunter or pitted against one of our weaker species! For a single expression of censure such as this which has come down to us, there must have been many of which we have no record. Of out-spoken censure there was doubtless little because violent condemnation of the arena would have savoured of treason to the State which patronised and supported the games just as Queen Elizabeth’s ministers supported bull-baiting.

Rome must have been one vast zoological garden, and viewing the strange animals was the first duty of the tourist. Pausanias was deeply impressed by the “Ethiopian bulls which they call rhinoceroses” and also by Indian camels in colour like leopards. He saw an all-white deer, and very much surprised he was to see it, but, to his subsequent regret, he forgot to ask where it came from. He was reminded of this white deer when he saw white blackbirds on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. I remember a white blackbird which stayed in the garden of my old English home for more than two years: a wretched “sportsman” lay in wait for it when it wandered into a neighbouring field and shot it.

The feasibility of the transport of the hosts of animals destined to the arena will always remain a mystery. At the inauguration of the Colosseum, five thousand wild beasts and six thousand tame ones were butchered, nor was this the highest figure on a single occasion. Probably a great portion of the animals was sent by the Governors of distant provinces who wished to stand well with the home authorities. But large numbers were also brought over by speculators who sold them to the highest or the most influential bidder. One reason why Cassius murdered Julius Cæsar was that Cæsar had secured some lions which Cassius wished to present to the public. Every one who aimed at political power or even simply at being thought one of the “smart set” (the odious word suits the case) spent king’s ransoms on the public games. For vulgar ostentation the wealthy Roman world eclipsed the exploits of the modern millionaire. If any one deem this impossible, let him read, in the _Satyricon_ of Petronius, the account of the fêtes to be given by a leader of fashion of the name of Titus. Not merely gladiators, but a great number of freedmen would take part in them: it would be no wretched mock combat but a real carnage! Titus was so rich that he could afford such liberality. Contempt is poured upon the head of a certain Nobarnus who offered a spectacle of gladiators hired at a low price and so old and decrepit that a breath threw them over. They all ended by wounding themselves to stop the contest. You might as well have witnessed a mere cock-fight!

I should think that not more than one animal in three survived the voyage. This would vastly increase the total number. The survivors often arrived in such a pitiable state that they could not be presented in the arena, or that they had to be presented immediately to prevent them from dying too soon. Symmachus, last of the great nobles of Rome, who, blinded by tradition, thought to revive the glories of his beloved city by reviving its shame, graphically describes the anxieties of the preparations for one of these colossal shows on which he is said to have spent what would be about £80,000 of our money. He began a year in advance: horses, bears, lions, Scotch dogs, crocodiles, chariot-drivers, hunters, actors, and the best gladiators were recruited from all parts. But when the time drew near, nothing were ready. Only a few of the animals had come, and these were half dead of hunger and fatigue. The bears had not arrived and there was no news of the lions. At the eleventh hour the crocodiles reached Rome, but they refused to eat and had to be killed all at once in order that they might not die of hunger. It was even worse with the gladiators, who were intended to provide, as in all these beast shows, the crowning entertainment. Twenty-nine of the Saxon captives whom Symmachus had chosen on account of the well-known valour of their race, strangled one another in prison rather than fight to the death for the amusement of their conquerors. And Symmachus, with all his real elevation of mind, was moved to nothing but disgust by their sublime choice! Rome in her greatest days had gloried in these shows: how could a man be a patriot who set his face against customs which followed the Roman eagles round the world? How many times since then has patriotism been held to require the extinction of moral sense!

Sometimes the humanity of beasts put to shame the inhumanity of man. There was a lion, commemorated by Statius, which had “unlearnt murder and homicide,” and submitted of its own accord to a master “who ought to have been under its feet.” This lion went in and out of its cage and gently laid down unhurt the prey which it caught: it even allowed people to put their hands into its mouth. It was killed by a fugitive slave. The Senate and people of Rome were in despair, and Imperial Cæsar, who witnessed impassible the death of thousands of animals sent hither to perish from Africa, from Scythia, from the banks of the Rhine, had tears in his eyes for a single lion! In later Roman times a tame lion was a favourite pet: their masters led them about wherever they went, whether much to the gratification of the friends on whom they called is not stated.

Another instance of a gentle beast was that of a tiger into whose cage a live doe had been placed for him to eat. But the tiger was not feeling well and, with the wisdom of sick animals, he was observing a diet. So two or three days elapsed, during which the tiger made great friends with the doe and when he recovered his health and began to feel very hungry, instead of devouring his fellow-lodger he beat with his paws against the bars of the cage in sign that he wanted food. These stories were, no doubt, true, and there may have been truth also in the well-known story of the lion which refused to attack a man who had once succoured him. Animals have good memories.

One pleasanter feature of the circus was the exhibition of performing beasts. Though the exhibitors of such animals are now sometimes charged with cruelty, it cannot be denied that the public who goes to look at them is composed of just the people who are most fond of animals. All children delight in them because, to their minds, they seem a confirmation of the strong instinctive though oftenest unexpressed belief, which lurks in every child’s soul, that between man and animals there is much less difference than is the correct, “grown-up” opinion; this is a part of the secret lore of childhood which has its origins in the childhood of the world. The amiable taste for these exhibitions—in appearance, at least, so harmless—strikes one as incongruous in the same persons who revelled in slaughter. Such a taste existed, however, and when St. James said that there was not a single beast, bird or reptile which had not been tamed, he may have been thinking of the itinerant showmen’s “learned” beasts which perambulated the Roman empire.

Horses and oxen were among the animals commonly taught to do tricks. I find no mention of monkeys as performing in the arena, though Apuleius says that in the spring fêtes of Isis, the forerunners of the Roman carnival, he saw a monkey with a straw hat and a Phrygian tunic—we can hardly keep ourselves from asking: _what had it done with the grind-organ?_ But in spite of this startlingly modern apparition, monkeys do not seem to have been popular in Rome; I imagine even, that there was some fixed prejudice against them. The cleverest of all the animal performers were, of course, the dogs, and one showman had the ingenious idea of making a dog act a part in a comedy. The effects of a drug were tried on him, the plot turning on the suspicion that the drug was poisonous, while, in fact, it was only a narcotic. The dog took the piece of bread dipped in the liquid, swallowed it, and began to reel and stagger till he finally fell flat on the ground. He gave himself a last stretch and then seemed to expire, making no sign of life when his apparently dead body was dragged about the stage. At the right moment, he began to move very slightly as if waking out of a deep sleep; then he raised his head, looked round, jumped up and ran joyously to the proper person. The piece was played at the theatre of Marcellus in the reign of old Vespasian, and Cæsar himself was delighted. I wonder that no manager of our days has turned the incident to account; I never yet saw an audience serious enough not to become young again at the sight of four-footed comedians. Even the high art-loving public at the Prince Regent’s theatre at Munich cannot resist a murmur of discreet merriment when the pack of beautiful stag-hounds led upon the stage in the hunting scene in “Tannhäuser” gravely wag their tails in time with the music!

The pet lions were only one example of the aberrations of pet-lovers in ancient Rome. Maltese lap-dogs became a scourge: Lucian tells the lamentable tale of a needy philosopher whom a fashionable lady cajoles into acting as personal attendant to her incomparable Mirrhina. The Maltese dog was an old fad; Theophrastus, in the portrait of an insufferable _élégant_, mentions that, when his pet dog dies, he inscribes “pure Maltese” on its tombstone.

Many were the birds that fell victims to the desire to keep them in richly ornamented cages in which they died of hunger, says Epictetus, sooner than be slaves. The canary which takes more kindly to captivity was unknown till it was brought to Italy in the sixteenth century. Parrots there were, but Roman parrots were not long-lived: they shared the common doom: “To each his sufferings, all are _pets_.” The parrots of Corinna and of Melior which ought to have lived to a hundred or, at any rate, to have had the chance of dying of grief at the loss of their possessors (as a parrot did that I once knew), enjoyed fame and fortune for as brief a span as Lesbia’s sparrow. Melior’s parrot not only had brilliant green feathers but also many accomplishments which are described by its master’s friend, the poet Statius. On one occasion, it sat up half the night at a banquet, hopping from one guest to another and talking in a way that excited great admiration; it even shared the good fare and on the morrow it died—which was less than surprising. I came across an old-fashioned criticism of this poem in which Statius is scolded for showing so much genuine feeling about ... a parrot! The critic was right in one thing—the genuine feeling is there; those who have known what a companion a bird may be, will appreciate the little touch: “You never felt alone, dear Melior, with its open cage beside you!” Now the cage is empty; it is “_la cage sans oiseaux_” which Victor Hugo prayed to be spared from seeing. Some translator turned this into “a nest without birds,” because he thought that a cage without birds sounded unpoetical, but Victor Hugo took care of truth and left poetry to take of itself. And whatever may be the ethics of keeping cage birds, true it is that few things are more dismal than the sight of the little mute, tenantless dwelling which was yesterday alive with fluttering love.

We owe to Roman poets a good deal of information about dogs, and especially the knowledge that the British hound was esteemed superior to all others, even to the famous breed of Epirus. This is certified by Gratius Faliscus, a contemporary of Ovid. He described these animals as remarkably ugly, but incomparable for pluck. British bull-dogs were used in the Colosseum, and in the third century Nemesianus praised the British greyhound. Most of the valuable dogs were brought from abroad; it is to be inferred that the race degenerated in the climate of Rome, as it does now. Concha, whose epitaph was written by Petronius, was born in Gaul. While Martial’s too elaborate epitaph on “The Trusty Lydia” is often quoted and translated, the more sympathetic poem of Petronius has been overlooked. He tells the perfections of Concha in a simple, affectionate manner; like Lydia, she was a mighty huntress and chased the wild boar fearlessly through the dense forest. Never did chain hamper her liberty and never a blow fell on her shapely, snow-white form. She reposed softly, stretched on the breast of her master or mistress, and at night a well-made bed refreshed her tired limbs. If she lacked speech, she could make herself understood better than any of her kind—yet no one had reason to fear her bark. A hapless mother, she died when her little ones saw the light, and now a narrow marble slab covers the earth where she rests.

Cicero’s tribute to canine worth is well known: “Dogs watch for us faithfully; they love and worship their masters, they hate strangers, their powers of tracking by scent is extraordinary; great is their keenness in the chase: what can all this mean but that they were made for man’s advantage?” It was as natural to the Roman mind to regard man as the lord of creation as to regard the Roman as the lord of man. For the rest, his normal conception of animals differed little from that of Aristotle. Cicero says that the chief distinction between man and animals, is that animals look only to the present, paying little attention to the past and future, while man looks before and after, weighs causes and effects, draws analogies and views the whole path of life, preparing things needful for passing along it. Expressed in the key of antique optimism instead of in the key of modern pessimism, the judgment is the same as that of Burns in his lines to the field-mouse:

“Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me! The present only touches thee: But, och! I backward cast my e’e On prospects drear! And forward, tho’ I canna see, I guess and fear.”

And of Leopardi in the song of the Syrian shepherd to his flock:—

“O flock that liest at rest, O blessed thou That knowest not thy fate, however hard, How utterly I envy thee!”

Cicero’s more virile mind would have spurned this craving to renounce the distinguishing human privilege for the bliss of ignorance.

Wherever we fix the limits of animal intelligence, there is no question of man’s obligation to treat sentient creatures with humanity. This was recognised by Marcus Aurelius when he wrote the golden precept: “As to animals which have no reason ... do thou, since thou hast reason, and they have none, make use of them with a generous and liberal spirit.” Here we have the broadest application of the narrowest assumption. From the time, at least, that Rome was full of Greek teachers, there were always some partisans of a different theory altogether. What Seneca calls “the illustrious but unpopular school of Pythagoras” had a little following which made up by its sincere enthusiasm for the fewness of its members. Seneca’s own master Sotio was of this school, and his teaching made a deep impression on the most illustrious of his pupils, who sums up its chief points with his usual lucidity: Pythagoras gave men a horror of crime and of parricide by telling them that they might unawares kill or devour their own fathers; all sentient beings are bound together in a universal kinship and an endless transmutation causes them to pass from one form to another; no soul perishes or ceases its activity save in the moment when it changes its envelope. Sotio took for granted that the youths who attended his classes came to him with minds unprepared to receive these doctrines, and he aimed more at making them accept the consequences of the theory than the theory itself. What if they believed none of it? What if they did not believe that souls passed through different bodies and that the thing we call death is a transmigration? That in the animal which crops the grass or which peoples the sea, a soul resides which once was human? That, like the heavenly bodies, every soul traverses its appointed circle? That nothing in this world perishes, but only changes scene and place? Let them remember, nevertheless, that great men have believed all this: “Suspend your judgment, and in the meantime, respect whatever has life.” If the doctrine be true, then to abstain from animal flesh is to spare oneself the committal of crimes; if it be false, such abstinence is commendable frugality; “all you lose is the food of lions and vultures.”

Sotio himself was a thorough Pythagorean, but there was another philosopher of the name of Sestius who was an ardent advocate of abstinence from animal food without believing in the transmigration of souls. He founded a sort of brotherhood, the members of which took the pledge to abide by this rule. He argued that since plenty of other wholesome food existed, what need was there for man to shed blood? Cruelty must become habitual when people devour flesh to indulge the palate: “let us reduce the elements of sensuality.” Health would be also the gainer by the adoption of a simpler and less various diet. Sotio used these arguments of one whom he might have called an unbeliever, to reinforce his own.

Seneca does not say if many of his schoolfellows were as much impressed as he was by this teaching. For a year he abstained from flesh, and when he got accustomed to it, he even found the new diet easy and agreeable. His mind seemed to grow more active. That he was allowed to eat what he liked without encountering interference or ridicule shows the considerable freedom in which the youth of Rome was brought up: this made them men. But at the beginning of the reign of Tiberius there went forth an edict against foreign cults, and abstinence from flesh was held to show a leaning towards religious novelties. For this reason the elder Seneca advised his son to give up vegetarianism. Seneca honestly confesses that he went back to better fare without much urging; yet he always remained frugal, and he seems never to have felt quite sure that his youthful experiment did not agree best with the counsels of perfection.

IV

PLUTARCH THE HUMANE

PLUTARCH was the Happy Philosopher—and there were not many that were happy. A life of travel, a life of teaching, an honoured old age as the priest of Apollo in his native village in Bœotia: what kinder fate than this? He was happy in the very obscurity which seems to have surrounded his life at Rome, for it saved him from spite and envy. He was happy, if we may trust the traditional effigies, even in that thing which likewise is a good gift of the gods, a gracious outward presence exactly corresponding with the soul within. A painter who wished to draw a type of illimitable compassionateness would choose the face attributed to Plutarch. Finally, this gentle sage is happy still after eighteen hundred years in doing more than any other writer of antiquity to build up character by diffusing the radiance of noble deeds. Nevertheless, were he to come back to life he would have one disappointment, and that would be to find how few people read his essays on kindness to animals: they would stand a better chance of being read if they were printed alone, but to arrive at them you must dive in the formidable depths of the _Moralia_: a very storehouse of interesting things, but hardly attractive to the general in a hurried age. Some of its treasures have been revealed by Dr. Oakesmith in his admirable monograph on “The Religion of Plutarch.” The mine of nobly humane sentiment remains, however, almost unexplored.

The essays devoted to animals are three in number, with the titles: “Whether terrestrial or aquatic animals are the more intelligent?” “That animals have the use of Reason”; “On the habit of eating flesh.” The two first are in the form of dialogues, and the third is a familiar discourse, a _conférence_, such as those which now form a popular feature of the Roman season. Through these studies there runs a vein of transparent sincerity: we feel that they were composed not to show the author’s cleverness or to startle by paradoxes, but with the real wish to make the young men for whom they were intended a little more humane. Plutarch did not take up the claims of animals because good “copy” could be made out of them. As his wish is to persuade, he does not ask for the impossible. It is the voice of the highly civilised Greek addressing the young barbarians of Rome: for to the Greek’s inmost mind the Roman must have always remained somewhat of a barbarian. There is great restraint: though Plutarch must have loathed the games of the arena, he speaks of them with guarded deprecation. He makes one of his characters say that the chase (which he did not himself like) was useful in keeping people from worse things, “such as the combats of gladiators.” He is genuinely anxious by all means to persuade some, and for this reason he refrains from scaring away his hearers or readers by extreme demands. Though he has a strong personal repugnance to flesh-eating, he does not insist on every one sharing it. Anyhow, he says, Be as humane as you can; cause as little suffering as is possible; no doubt it is not easy, all at once, to eradicate a habit which has taken hold of our sensual nature, but, at least, let us deprive it of its worst features. Let us eat flesh if we must, but for hunger, not for self-indulgence; let us kill animals but still be compassionate—not heaping up outrages and tortures “as, alas, is done every day.” He mentions how swans were blinded and then fattened with unnatural foods, which is only a little worse than things that are done now. What is certain is, that extreme and habitual luxury in food has spelt decadence from the banquets of Babylon downwards.

Plutarch goes on to ask whether it is impossible to amuse ourselves without all these excesses? Shall we expire on the spot, are the resources of men totally exhausted, if the table be not supplied with _pâtés de foies gras_? Is life not worth living without slaughter to make a feast, slaughter to find a pastime; cannot we exist without asking of certain animals that they show courage, and fight in spite of themselves, or that they massacre other animals which have not the natural energy to defend themselves? Must we for our sport tear the mother from the little ones which she suckles or hatches? Plutarch implores us not to imitate the children of whom Bion speaks, who amused themselves by throwing stones at the frogs, but the frogs were not at all amused—they simply died. “When we take our recreation, those who help in the fun ought to share in it and be amused as well.” Thus does the kind Greek philosopher exhort us

“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”

Did Wordsworth know that his thought had been expressed so long before? It matters little; the counsels of mercy never grow old.