Part 17

During the third and second centuries education came to mean first of all the study of the Greek language and literature. I have just spoken of some of the evidence we possess which shows that Greek was early widely known among all classes at Rome. By the Second Punic War it became customary in well-to-do and noble families to employ a private teacher (grammaticus) within the house to give instruction in the Greek language and literature; in the middle of the second century B.C., with the growth of a wider interest in the formal study of Greek literature, schools arose in which the grammatici taught a considerable number of pupils together. The Greek authors studied were first of all Homer, and then the great tragedians; among the writers of comedy Menander was the favorite; the fables of Aesop and lyric poetry also found their place. Modelled on this Greek curriculum was the study of Latin literature—Livius Andronicus, Ennius, with selections from the Roman writers of tragedy and comedy. In due season Virgil and Horace occupied the first rank. Furthermore not far from the beginning of the last century before our era Greek rhetoricians began formal instruction at Rome, and they continued to hold the field against Latin rhetoricians throughout antiquity. We see therefore that all education of every grade from the time of the Second Punic War was either Greek or modelled directly on the Greek. By it the Latin tongue was refined and perfected; but more significant for us at the present moment is the fact that thereby Latin society was made familiar with Greek social, philosophic, and religious ideas so far as they were represented in Greek literature.

I have earlier said that the temples of the Greek gods at Rome were built in Greek style by Greek architects, and that the images of the gods within were copies of famous Greek works of art. By these the Romans’ ideas as to the personality of their divinities were fixed in the Greek concepts. As Rome extended her conquests over Greek lands, first in southern Italy and Sicily, and then in Greece proper, she acquired as part of the spoils of war great treasures of Greek sculpture and painting; the number of statues and other works of art which were brought home by Memmius alone after the destruction of Corinth in 146 B.C. can hardly be estimated. A large number of them represented the gods, and intensified the process of Hellenization with which we are now concerned, for the statues and other representations of Cronos, Zeus, Hera, Ares, and Athena readily represented Saturn, Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Minerva. In cases where the similarity was not so close, the nearest Greek analogy was selected; if none was satisfactory, still the best was made of the case, as when the Greek representations of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, came to do service for the Lares Praestites. Among the spoils of war were many Greek paintings, for which mythological scenes were favorite subjects, and such frequently represented the baser, sensual side of traditional religion. The effect on the ignorant was to give them a lower concept of divinity; the intellectual classes were disgusted with the gods of such a sort and rejected them.

But the most potent influence that came from Greece to Rome was naturally philosophy. We cannot fix any date for the introduction of Greek philosophic thought at Rome, yet it certainly became influential soon after the close of the Second Punic War. We have already seen that long before this time the Greek philosophic systems were highly developed and had done much to drive the traditional gods from their high places. It was inevitable that these philosophies should have a swift effect when they once became known to the newly Hellenized Roman society of the second century B.C. The poet Ennius, who belonged to the first half of that century, was a man of strong religious bent and moral convictions, and he heartily scorned the superstitious notions of his day. He had been already influenced by Epicurean scepticism with regard to the existence of the gods, and the following words, spoken by Teucer in one of his tragedies, may well have represented his own view: “I have always said, and I shall always say, that the gods of heaven exist, but I believe that they have no care for what the race of man does. For if they had such care, it would be well with the good and ill with the wicked; which is not the case now.”[267] It is the ancient difficulty of justifying the ways of God to men. Ennius adopted the easy solution by denial, which he had already learned from Epicureanism.

The same poet also translated and made known to the Romans the Sacred History of Euhemerus. This was a romantic tale written in the third century before our era in which the author told of an imaginary voyage which he had made from Arabia to the island Panchaea in the Indian Ocean; there he found inscribed on a column the history of the supposed gods Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus, and learned that they and the other gods and heroes had been originally historical persons who were raised to their high position because of the services they had rendered mankind. This Sacred History was an interesting example of the rationalizing tendency of the age that produced it; its effect upon the Roman, whose belief in the traditional religion was already shaken, we can readily understand. Unquestionably Ennius’ work and the plays of the comedians hastened the work of unbelief, although they were only two of many factors that contributed to the ultimate result.

The first half of this same second century was also a time of religious unrest. Whatever may have been the reason, whether the common longing for mystic assurance of safety and salvation had come naturally to the front in the Roman and Italian mind, or whether the large number of Greeks, slaves, traders, and other members of the lower and immigrant classes had moved the natives by mystic practices which they had brought with them, certain it is that a considerable part of the Romans found no satisfaction for their deeper longings in the traditional religion, and turned to a form of the Greek mysteries.[268] The mysteries of Bacchus which had gradually made their way up the peninsula from the Greek cities of the south led to such excesses in 186 B.C. that the Roman senate felt obliged to adopt stern measures; yet it is significant that it did not dare to forbid the celebration of these mysteries, but attempted only to control them. The Bacchic mysteries offered essentially the same religious satisfaction that the great mysteries at Eleusis did. Their influence at this time in Italy shows how conscious men had become of larger religious desires and how little the current forms of religion satisfied them. The conservatives in the state abhorred the Bacchic rites and would have no more part in them than in philosophy, towards which they showed an amusing timidity. Five years after the regulation of the mysteries an attempt was made to introduce at Rome some philosophic books which were generally regarded as subversive in their tendencies. The method of their introduction was the same one which has been used many times for similar purposes. Some farmers plowing in their fields at the foot of the Janiculum found two stone chests or coffins with inscriptions upon them in both Latin and Greek, saying that in one King Numa Pompilius had been buried, and that in the other were the books of the sacred law established by him. On opening the sarcophagi it was discovered that the body of the king had disappeared, but in the second chest were found two rolls of seven books each; one set was in Latin and treated of the pontifical law, the other, in Greek, dealt with Greek philosophy—tradition said it was the philosophy of Pythagoras. After solemn deliberation by the officials it was found that these books tended to destroy religion, and a timid senate ordered them to be publicly burned.[269] Again about 173 B.C., the senate required the Epicurean philosophers, Aldus and Philiscus, to leave the state;[270] and once more in 161 it passed a vote banishing the Greek philosophers and rhetoricians.[271] In 156/5 an embassy from Athens included the Peripatetic philosopher Critolaus, the Academic Carneades, and the Stoic Diogenes, who during their stay at Rome exhibited their skill in disputation and their eloquence in speeches before the people. The populace was charmed, but old fashioned people were horrified at such exhibitions. Cato the Censor was so shocked that he moved in the senate that the Roman youth should not be allowed to listen to such teachings.[272] But it was too late; philosophers might be driven from the state, but philosophy had found a foothold at Rome.

The two schools that made the strongest appeal to the Romans at the end of the Republic were Epicureanism and Stoicism. The former had wide influence until the first century of our era, chiefly because its agnosticism, or rather its denial of the existence of any future life, offered a refuge from the uncertainty which prevailed now that the old beliefs were broken up and men, harrassed by political disorders, had not yet found an abiding place in any positive philosophy. The Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, it is true, but they declared that the gods, if they existed, must dwell in some remote place in the upper ether in eternal sunshine, undisturbed by any care for mortals. They explained the universe by a resort to the atomistic materialism of Democritus, a philosopher of the late fifth century. Their religious aim, if we may so define it, was to free men from the terror which their superstitious beliefs in the gods and in future punishment brought upon them. No writer sets this forth with greater genius or with greater passion than Lucretius, the contemporary of Cicero. His six books are devoted to an explanation of the universe and its phenomena, of the nature of man, and of the impossibility of immortality. This splendid poem furnishes us the best proof that in that day the mass of men still believed in immortality and longed for an assurance that their belief was not in vain.

In practical ethics the Epicureans did not differ much from the other systems of their time. They taught that happiness must be found in the avoidance of pain, and that inasmuch as some pleasures have painful results they were to be rejected, as some pains were to be accepted, for they were followed by pleasure; and they held that in self-control and choice lay the means by which man could attain to his goal, which was ἀταραξία, complete repose of the mind. So the Epicurean tried to reach an end similar to that of the Stoic, although his premises were somewhat different. Epicureanism made a natural appeal to men in a time like the last century and a half of the Republic, when the ancient confidence in the state religion was gone, when the simplicity of the earlier centuries had been replaced by a more elaborate method of living, made possible through the rapid increase of wealth, and when in every department of Roman life rapid changes were taking place.

Yet for various reasons Epicureanism gradually lost its hold. It may be that the passivity which it engendered failed to make a lasting appeal to the Roman mind, or more probably other philosophies may have offered more attractive means of attaining the same goal of happiness. At any rate, as I pointed out in an earlier lecture, the Roman temperament had an especial leaning towards Stoicism. I there spoke of the introduction of Stoicism at Rome by Panaetius during the second century B.C., and I sketched the tendencies of his system so far as popular religion was concerned. It was probably Panaetius who was responsible for that threefold theology which was set forth by the famous Scaevola, who declared that there were three classes of gods—those of the poets, those of the statesmen, and those of the philosophers. The mythical theology of the poets, he said, was full of absurd and degrading stories unworthy of the attention of men; the religion of the state was nothing but a wise device, a useful convention adopted by statesmen as suited to the necessities of the political organism; but the theology of the intelligent man, the philosopher, was alone true, yet naturally it was beyond the power of the common man to grasp. Such was the attitude of the most famous jurist and the head of the state religion at the beginning of the last century before our era.[273] A little later Varro, the famous polyhistor, in writing of the gods and religion in his great Encyclopedia of Roman Antiquities, made a similar distinction between theologies and showed throughout his treatment the pantheistic influence of the Stoic philosophy. In his works he was the first fully to combine the mythological traditions with the philosophic doctrines which the Romans had been learning for over a century.

Yet the Epicurean and the Stoic schools were not the only ones which numbered adherents among the Romans. The representatives of the later Academy, Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon, had many pupils. Cicero, Atticus, Brutus, and Varro had all heard the latter lecture at Athens. But the teachings of Plato had been greatly modified, inasmuch as these later Academicians had adopted the greater part of Stoicism into their philosophy. Furthermore the sceptical tendency which is so clearly marked among the Sophists of the fifth century had gradually developed during the fourth and third centuries into something like a philosophic system. The Sceptics, however, can hardly be called a school; they included those men in the various schools who doubted the possibility of attaining to absolute knowledge. Among the Romans they had close affinity with the tenets of the later Academicians on the one hand and with Stoic doctrines on the other. But their keen consciousness of the limitations of human knowledge made them also a factor in producing a certain agnosticism among the educated. As a matter of fact, the majority of the Romans were plain men, not given to speculation, with a fondness for the concrete rather than the abstract. They naturally selected from the various philosophies the elements which appealed to their practical sense, and which fortified them to meet the burdens and responsibilities of their daily life. On the whole Stoicism did this service more than any other of the current systems, and in the end, as we have already seen, Stoicism became the chief philosophy under the early Empire. The Stoics’ interest in grammar and logic also appealed to the legal character of the Roman mind; their system of duties, which were to be met unflinchingly, accorded with the Roman temper, and their cosmopolitan view found favor with a people that were masters of the greater part of the known world. But whatever the system of philosophy or selection of philosophic doctrines the Roman adopted, he found therein no warrant for a belief in the state religion. Philosophy could go no further than it did with Scaevola and Varro. The traditional religion was abandoned by the intellectual Romans; they substituted for it either agnosticism, some form of moral philosophy, or a pantheistic concept of the world. In truth the conquest of Greece over Rome was complete: in literature, art, philosophy, and religion captured Greece had taken her captor captive; by the beginning of our era Greek thought had penetrated to all the great centers of the Roman Empire, and under that long peace, which with comparatively few interruptions lasted for two centuries after the battle for Actium, philosophy and many new religions, including Christianity, travelled the great Roman roads from one end of the ancient world to the other.

The last century of the Republic from the time of the Gracchi to the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. was not only a period of religious change but also a time of political decay. The strength of the Republic was so far gone that democratic government no longer existed, and the rule fell into the hands of political leaders. However much the Gracchi may have been inspired by public spirit and high purpose, they set in motion a train of events that was destined to result in the loss of all public liberty and in the foundation of the Empire. The history of this last century must be read in the history of individuals—Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus; Saturninus; Marius, Cinna, and Sulla; Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus; Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus. These were the political bosses who for good or ill led the state and combined for its control. From the day that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49 to the battle of Actium in September 31 B.C., Italy and many other lands around the Mediterranean were harassed almost continuously by civil war. The Italian peninsula never fully recovered from the disasters of this time. Even with the horrors of the European struggle before us, we in this land can hardly picture to ourselves either these disasters or the joy with which the majority of the inhabitants of the Roman world hailed the pax Romana which the Emperor Augustus established. With peace came a revival of trade and a return of prosperity, to which eloquent witness is given by Virgil and Horace.

The founder of the Empire, Augustus, attempted to revive the old state religion and to introduce certain modifications to the advantage of his own position. In this he was aided by the sense of dissatisfaction which the preceding disasters had increased, and by that inherent belief which always seems to persist, even in times of great religious doubt, that somehow the prosperity of the state is inseparably connected with the rites of religion. Under his direction temples were rebuilt, old priesthoods reestablished, and the ancient ritual performed with a magnificence that men had never before seen. He also magnified the worship of Apollo and of Apollo’s sister Diana; the former god in fact he regarded as his patron divinity, and three years after his victory at Actium he dedicated a magnificent temple to him on the Palatine. But the new worship of Apollo did not attain to the supreme position to which Augustus apparently wished to raise it, and his efforts to recall the old state religion could not bring back men’s belief, although they could restore its practices. Indeed we must bear in mind that the traditional worship of the greater Roman gods continued to exist to the end of antiquity, in spite of the fact that it had lost its vitality centuries before its final downfall.

One important and permanent contribution to religion Augustus did make: as early as the year 42 B.C., the masterful youth had forced an unwilling senate to declare Julius Caesar divine; thereby he established the worship of the deified emperors—a cult which was to last nearly four centuries. The significance for us of this worship of the emperor lies in the fact that now for the first time there was introduced into the entire civilized world a common religion. From the remotest East to the farthest West, from Britain on the north to the edge of the Great Desert on the south, temples to the deified emperors had been erected before a century of the Empire had passed, and these did much to accustom men to the idea of one common worship for the whole world.

* * * * *

Thus far we have been considering almost wholly those forces which were operating in the Roman world first to obscure the original Roman religion and finally to break down faith in that traditional religion which had resulted from the victory of the gods of Greece over those of Rome. Yet the age of Augustus was far from being irreligious. Of the truth of this statement Virgil alone would be sufficient witness if all others were lacking, for the Aeneid owed its immediate popularity and its permanent high place, not only to the unmatched expression which it gave to Roman imperialism, but also to its religious tone, which the poet’s contemporaries and their successors found partly in Virgil’s exact knowledge of Roman ritual and felt still more in the sixth book of the Aeneid, where the current beliefs in a future life with rewards and punishments were set forth in combination with impressive prophecy after the event; all was planned and combined in such a way as to make a strong appeal to the Romans’ national pride and religious sense alike. Moreover under the Empire positive elements tending to elevate religious thought and to purify morals were not lacking. On many of these we have already touched in our last lecture, for they were largely to be found in philosophy, one of the greatest gifts which Greece gave to her conqueror. Even at the risk of repetition, we shall now consider briefly some of these constructive forces.

Although Epicureanism taught that man’s highest good was pleasure, it was far from being a thoroughgoing hedonism, as I pointed out a little while ago. On the contrary its founder taught that the pleasures of the mind were superior to those of the body, and that the cardinal virtue of man was correct insight, that is to say, wisdom, virtue, and justice; and that these three factors—wisdom, virtue, and justice—were necessary for a pleasant life.[274] Such doctrine as this does not properly make for religion, but it does contribute to the welfare and comfort of society. Epicureanism was the most quietistic of the later philosophic schools and so was well adapted to the conditions of the later Republic and the early Empire. We have seen how Pythagoreanism in its revival had something approaching the Christian cult of the Saints, and made sanctity an ideal of human life as well as an object of admiration. Platonism never lost its own religious fervor and missionary zeal, but had indeed communicated them to most of the eclectic later schools. Yet of all the schools perhaps Stoicism made the largest contribution directly to the moral and indirectly to the religious life of the first two centuries of our era.

The Stoic, like the Cynic, his doctrinaire and less effective intellectual cousin, at this time conceived of his task as that of a missionary to a lost world; he was a director of men’s souls. Speculation was by most regarded as unpractical and useless, save as it might help to elevate men’s minds and so contribute to their moral edification. Many of the aristocracy, whose wealth furnished only a splendid cloak for the disorder of their souls within, had in their houses philosophers who served as confessors and private chaplains—physicians to the soul. Such was Seneca, to whose real significance and merit we must not be blinded either by his own weakness or by the monstrosity of the emperor whose minister he was. He was a spiritual director, a confessor, and a guide to many of the aristocracy. His correspondence shows how he endeavored to build up his friends in virtue and moral strength, not by theoretical speculation as to the nature of virtue, but by wise instructions as to the practice of a virtuous life. Epictetus on the other hand was more of a preacher to the masses. Arrian occasionally gives us the dramatic setting of his master’s discourses, as for example: “When a man asked his advice as to the way in which he could persuade his brother to be no longer angry at him, Epictetus said,” etc.[275] These words show that the text of Epictetus’ sermons might often be furnished by the question of an individual, but the sermons themselves make it clear that any one who wished might hear the teacher. Seneca and Epictetus are simply the two examples best known to us of the philosophic director and the missionary, but it is clear that there were many of both classes. Their essential moral and religious teachings were in practical accord.