Part 18

What were some of the supports and satisfactions which Stoicism offered serious men in the disordered political and social world of the early Empire? First of all, it laid stress on conduct and frankly proposed to give rules by which men could attain to the peace they sought. Both Seneca and Epictetus inculcated daily self-examination, and this practice was not the habit of their school alone. The eclectic Sextius, who belonged to the generation before Seneca, at the end of each day asked his soul: “What fault of yours have you cured today? What vice resisted? In what way are you a better man?” Seneca himself found the same practice helpful; he would say to himself: “In that discussion you spoke with too much warmth. Do not engage again with the ignorant, for they who have never learned do not wish to learn.”[276] Epictetus quoted from the “Golden Words” of Pythagoras and reminded his hearers that the verses were not for recitation but for use: “Never let sleep come to thy languid eyes e’er thou hast considered each act of the day. ‘Where have I slipped?’ ‘What done, what failed to do?’ Begin thus and go through all; and then chide thyself for thy shameful acts, rejoice over thy good.”[277] Such a searching of one’s daily acts Epictetus regarded as an essential exercise to prepare and train a man to meet the vicissitudes of life. In the discourse in which he quotes these Pythagorean verses, he continues with the question: “What is philosophy?” “Is it not a preparation against things which may happen to a man?” He argues that a man who throws away the patience which philosophy teaches him is like an athlete who because of the blows he receives wishes to withdraw from the pancratium—still worse than he, for the athlete may avoid his contest and escape the blows; but no man can escape the buffetings of life. Therefore the preacher says that to give up philosophy is to abandon the one resource against misfortune, the only source of happiness and courage.

The pagan missionary no less than the Christian apostle to the Gentiles regarded life as a battle to be fought and a race to be run. Epictetus often compared human life to a warfare; he said that men were assigned their several places and duties in this world, just as in an army one man is obliged to stand watch, another to spy, and a third to fight, each doing his part in the place in which the great general, God, had set him,—a figure which Socrates had used five centuries earlier in his defence before his judges. In accord with this view of life as a battle or an athletic contest, the philosophers laid much weight on training. Seneca and Epictetus both exhorted their pupils to exercise themselves in the means whereby they could meet misfortune or be ready to perform any duty which the changes of life might bring them. The latter had a discourse “On Exercise,” which was apparently a favorite theme for all Stoic preachers.[278] The purpose of this exercise was to train the individual in right abstentions and the proper use of his desires, so that he would be always obedient to reason and do nothing out of season or place—in short to make him an adept in living so that he could manage his usual life with adroit uprightness and meet the sudden changes of fortune undismayed. In another discourse Epictetus pointed out that the misfortunes of life were tests sent by God to prove the individual’s fidelity in training; “God says to you, ‘Give me proof if you have duly practised athletics, if you have eaten what you should, if you have exercised, if you have obeyed the trainer.’ And then will you show yourself weak when the time for action comes? Now is the time for a fever. Bear it well. Now the time for thirst. Endure thy thirst well.”[279]

In my last lecture I spoke of the doctrine of constant advance in virtue which these later moral teachers magnified. Stoicism had come to recognize the facts of human life and in practice had abandoned the older doctrine of the sudden and complete perfection of man by philosophy. Seneca’s honest words I must quote again: “I am not yet wise, nor shall I ever be. Do not ask me to be equal to the best but rather to be better than the base. This is enough for me—to take away daily something from my faults and daily to rebuke my errors. I have not attained complete moral health, nor shall I ever attain it.”[280] It is unnecessary to point out that such teaching as is given in these words was far more tonic than the uncompromising doctrine of an earlier day, for progress in virtue each man could feel was within his power; sudden perfection he knew was beyond the strength of any man. Furthermore the philosophers gave detailed injunctions as to the ways in which one could further his moral progress, as for example when Seneca, following Epicurus, advised Lucilius to select some person of noble character like a Cato, a Scipio, or a Laelius, and to imagine that he was always present, watching and judging the novice’s every act; then when he had advanced to the point where his self-respect was sufficient to keep him from wrong-doing, he could dismiss his guardian.[281] But if Seneca recognized the limitations of human nature, he still kept clearly in view the ultimate goal of man’s effort—that perfection of the individual which according to the Stoic was attained when his reason was harmoniously developed and had become supreme.[282] Then man was to be wholly independent, happy, and serene; his mind would be like that of God.

Self-examination, self-training, daily advance in virtue, ultimate calm and peace—these were the moral habits and the attainable goals which the later Stoics tried to teach their age. Moreover the Stoic doctrine of the community between the divine and the human reason gave a dignity to man; cut off from activity in the political world he realized that he was dwelling in a world in which God and men were the citizens, that he shared in that divine polity, free in the freedom which his relationship to God gave him. Between man and God for the Stoic there was no gulf fixed; on the contrary as Seneca wrote his younger friend: “God is near you, with you, within you. This I say, Lucilius: a holy spirit sits within us, watcher of our good and evil deeds, and guardian over us. Even as we treat him, he treats us. No man is good without God. Can any one rise superior to fortune save with God’s help?”[283] A nobler concept of the worship of the gods and of man’s duty toward them arose: not by the lighting of lamps, the giving of gifts, the slaying of bullocks, or visitations to the temples were the gods to be worshipped, but by a recognition of their true nature and goodness, by rendering to them again their perfect justice, and by ascribing to them constant praise.[284] In the contemplation of God alone and in loving obedience to his commands lay the means of freeing the mind from sorrow, fear, desire, envy, avarice, and every base thought, and of securing that peace which no Caesar but only God could give.[285]

A belief in the goodness of God and the perfection of his works made the Stoic naturally regard this world as the best of all possible worlds, and urge men to accommodate themselves to the natural order, in which he saw the perfect product of the supreme reason. He could not think that the world was out of joint, but he believed that all was perfect harmony for one who would set himself in tune with the universe. So Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Everything is harmonious to me that is harmonious to thee, O Universe; nothing is too early or too late for me that is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me that thy seasons bring, O Nature; from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return. ‘Beloved city of Cecrops,’ sings the poet: Shall I not say, ‘O beloved city of God?’”[286] It is easy to understand from passages like this how stabilizing and how ennobling later Stoicism was. To reverence God, to do nothing that God would not approve, to think ever of God, and to trust in the harmonious purpose of the universe was the Emperor’s constant exhortation to himself. With this purpose was associated a similar desire to help his fellowmen; and yet in spite of the Emperor’s religious devotion and sympathetic interest in humanity, in spite of the exaltation of spirit which appears in his Meditations, there is still a note of sadness which had already been sounded by Seneca and Epictetus; there is a sense of the vanity of all things which makes itself felt again and again as we read his book. For all his belief in the harmony of this universe the Emperor exhorts himself too much to make the best of a sad and wicked world. What Marcus Aurelius felt others had been feeling for generations. The passion for assurance of protection here and salvation hereafter, the longing for union with God, would not be quieted. The West offered little satisfaction; the answers from the East will occupy our next lectures.

FOOTNOTES:

[262] Dionys. Hal. IV, 62.

[263] See p. 370 f. for an example of such a calendar.

[264] 296 B.C., Livy X, 19, 17.

[265] Livy XXII, 10, 2 ff.

[266] Livy XXII, 10, 9.

[267] _Scen._ 316 ff., Vahlen.

[268] Livy XXXIX, 8 ff.

[269] Livy XL, 29; Plin. _N. H._ XIII, 84. ff.

[270] Athen. XII, 547 A; Aelian _V. H._ IX, 12.

[271] Suet. _de rhet._ 1; Aul. Gell. XV, 11, 1.

[272] Plin. _N. H._ VII, 112; Plut. _C. M._ 22.

[273] Augustin. _Civ. Dei_ IV, 27.

[274] Epic., p. 72 Usener. Cf. p. 59, and frg. 506.

[275] _Diss._ I, 15, 1.

[276] Sen. _de Ira_ III, 36, 1-4.

[277] Epict. _Diss._ III, 10, 2.

[278] _Diss._ III, 12.

[279] _Diss._ III, 10, 8.

[280] _De vita beata_, 17.

[281] _Epist._ 11, 8-10; 25, 5, 6.

[282] _Epist._ 41, 8; 92, 2 f.; and often.

[283] _Epist._ 41, 2.

[284] Seneca _Epist._ 95, 47-50; 115, 5. Epict. _Diss._ I, 16.

[285] Epict. _Diss._ II, 16, 45-47; III, 13, 9 ff.

[286] IV, 23.

VIII

ORIENTAL RELIGIONS IN THE WESTERN HALF OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

In our previous lectures we have had occasion more than once to refer to the effect of the conquests of Alexander in opening up the nearer East to the European West, and in making easy the contact between Greeks and Orientals, especially those of Semitic and Persian stocks. Greece, Egypt, and western Asia were for a brief period united in one great empire; and although that political empire quickly broke into many units, the sway of the Greek language and of Greek ideas was permanently extended over wide areas where they had not had potent influence before, and by this extension a door was opened for the entrance of oriental ideas into the West. No doubt the Macedonian conqueror simply accelerated a process which had been going on imperceptibly through the channels of trade and of war from prehistoric times. Now with regard to the question of oriental influence on the Greek world from the earliest period, there has been much extravagant statement and conjecture: the Orphics, Pythagoras, Plato, and others too are said to have derived many of their ideas from the East. Such inaccuracies I wish to avoid. Indeed I will take this opportunity to state that apart from certain cults which we shall presently consider I am unable to see any clear proof of direct and concrete eastern influence on Greek or Roman philosophic and religious thought until the second century B.C., at the earliest; and that I believe that the amount of such influence later—up to the time when the Jewish and the Greek streams of thought united in Christian theology—has been greatly overestimated. Nevertheless it is true that in certain places, especially at Alexandria in Egypt, the greatest intellectual center in the ancient world after 300 B.C., there was some mingling of Hellenic and Semitic thought. The translation of the sacred books of the Jews into Greek, which we know as the Septuagint, began as early as the third century, but this translation was made for Hellenized Jews of the dispersion and had little interest for Greeks until the Christian period. But in the middle of the second century before our era a certain Aristobulus endeavored to reconcile Greek philosophy, especially that of the Peripatetic School, with Jewish wisdom, and to show that the Greeks drew their philosophy from the Mosaic laws and the prophets. The so-called Wisdom of Solomon also betrays the influence of Hellenic thought on Jews at Alexandria; and we have in an earlier lecture seen how the Greek and the Jew met in Philo. Moreover all the later Platonists, Pythagoreans, and similar sects were in some degree at least in accord with the Jewish thought of the time; and in general we know that the intellectual metropolis of the ancient world showed a fusion of West and East in society and ideas such as was hardly found elsewhere.

But while this mingling of the Greek and the Jew was going on at Alexandria, a new power was rising in Italy, which, having secured the mastery of the western half of the Mediterranean, turned its attention toward the East. Let us call to mind the position of Rome at the close of the Second Punic War in 202 B.C. She was mistress of practically the entire Italian peninsula from the Alps to the Straits of Messina; by her two wars with Carthage she had gained Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and a large part of Spain—in short at the end of the third century before our era Rome was the dominant power in the West. Within the next two centuries she was destined to take and in no small degree to Latinize all of modern Spain and Portugal, the whole of France and Belgium, a part of Holland, the Rhine districts, Switzerland, southern Germany, and Austria below the Danube; she was to extend her power over the greater part of the Balkan peninsula including Greece; and she was to become mistress of the most of Asia Minor, of Syria and Palestine, of Egypt, and of all northern Africa with the exception of what is now Morocco. The whole civilized world, and many lands to which this name could hardly be applied, were brought under her sway before the close of the first Christian century.

In their conquests of eastern lands Roman soldiers came directly into contact with Asiatic, Syrian, and Egyptian forms of religion, so that on their return to the West they brought with them some knowledge of eastern gods. But the influence of oriental cults had begun before Rome entered on her military conquests; for a long time she had had mercantile and diplomatic relations with Asia Minor and Egypt. Trade indeed was one of the great channels through which gods no less than goods moved from the East to the West. The Greeks of western Asia Minor, of Delos, of southern Italy and Sicily were the middlemen who assisted in these transfers. Furthermore, beginning with the second pre-christian century, enormous numbers of slaves were brought from Asia Minor and the neighboring lands to Italy and the West. These slaves were of every degree from the most ignorant to the highly cultivated, but whatever their class they brought with them their own religions, which they practised in their captivity and thus made known to their masters. At a later period, under the Empire, auxiliary troops, enlisted in the eastern provinces, were stationed at many points in the West. The remains of shrines and hundreds of inscriptions found along the Danube and the Rhine, in remotest Britain, in Spain and Portugal, as well as in France and other lands, show that these auxiliary troops did much to introduce oriental gods to the areas in which they served. So traders, slaves, and soldiers became the great agents in transfer of those oriental religions, which in the first three centuries of our era were spread over all the western part of the Roman Empire.

Yet the first oriental deity to be received at Rome was invited there by vote of the Senate. In one of the darkest hours of the Second Punic War, in 205 B.C., the Sibylline Books declared that Hannibal would be forced to leave Italy if the great Mother of the Gods could be brought from Phrygia to Rome. King Attalus of Pergamum, a friend and ally of the Romans, readily gave up the meteoric stone which represented the goddess, and in 204 this was received with great ceremony at Rome. Thirteen years later the divinity was installed in her permanent home on the Palatine, where the ruins of her temple may still be seen. The character of her worship was wholly different from that of any god hitherto known at Rome, and the citizens must have been greatly shocked when they first beheld it; Phrygian priests dancing and mutilating themselves furnished an appalling contrast to the sober ritual of the state. So offensive were these performances that no Roman was allowed to become a priest of the goddess until after the close of the Republic. Only on April 4 did a state official—the city praetor—offer sacrifice in the temple of the goddess, and on this same day sodalities formed among the aristocracy dined together in her honor; in 194 plays were presented on her festal day, and three years later with the dedication of her temple there were established in her honor the Ludi Megalenses, which, however, did not differ essentially from similar festivals in honor of Roman gods. But the temple service was restricted to the imported Phrygian priests, who were allowed on certain days to dance through the streets to the sound of their wild music, singing hymns to the goddess, and taking up collections for the support of the worship. Under the Empire Roman citizens were admitted to the priestly offices. Yet from the first the goddess was held in high esteem, for the promise of the Sibylline Books had been fulfilled—Hannibal had been forced to withdraw to Africa, and the Roman cause had triumphed with divine help.

Other divinities came in what may be described as unofficial ways, through the agencies that I have already mentioned. For example, as early as the third century before our era, the worship of the goddess Isis and her associates Serapis, Anubis, and the rest, spread from Alexandria into Sicily and southern Italy, as it had extended in the same period to Delos and the other islands of the Aegean Sea, and to the coast of Asia Minor. Before 105 B.C. a temple had been built at Puteoli, the important seaport of that day on the Bay of Naples, which had close commercial relations with Delos and other ports in the East. The temple of Isis at Pompeii was erected at about the same period. Within half a century a shrine of the goddess had been established on the very Capitol at Rome, where she maintained herself in spite of many efforts to dislodge her. This Egyptian cult had been introduced by immigrant traders and slaves, but it soon spread to other classes. About 38 A.D., a temple to the goddess was erected on the Campus Martius not far from the Pantheon. There is today in front of the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva a little east of the Pantheon an elephant carrying on his back a small obelisk at which he casts an amusing look. That obelisk originally stood before the temple of Isis, which was the chief center of the Egyptian cult at Rome to the end of paganism.

The campaigns of Sulla and Pompey in Asia Minor had brought the soldiers into contact with the worship of a Cappadocian “Mother-goddess,” Mâ, to whom the Romans gave the Italian name of Bellona. The cult of this divinity was apparently carried on privately at Rome during the last half-century of the Republic, but the goddess did not receive official recognition before the third Christian century.

It was in the first century of our era, however, that a flood of divinities came from the East to the West. Of these I can mention only a few. From northern Syria slaves and traders brought the Syrian goddess Atargatis, whom they made known as far as Britain under the name of Dea Syria. From many Syrian towns came the local Baalim, who were regularly identified with Iupiter Optimus Maximus. So Adad, the consort of Atargatis at Hierapolis in Syria, was known in the West; the Baal of Heliopolis, Baalbec, was worshipped as Iupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus, not only in Italy, but in the Balkan peninsula, along the Danube and the Rhine, and in Gaul. The Syrian port Berytus, the modern Beyrout, became apparently a center for the export, so to speak, of these oriental divinities. We have inscriptions which show that an association of Syrian merchants coming from this city was settled at Puteoli, where they formed a religious society, cultores Iovis Heliopolitani Berytenses, which carried on the worship of the Baal of Heliopolis at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century of our era. A dedication to the same god, from Nîmes in southern France, was set up by a retired centurion, who tells us that his home was Beyrout; and likewise in the third century at Zellhausen near the Rhine another centurion paid his devotions to the gods and wrote himself down as from the same place. From the little town of Doliche in Commagene, a district of northern Syria, soldiers carried their warlike god to the western borders of the Roman world; Damascus furnished Iupiter Optimus Maximus Damascenus; and I might quote many other illustrations. More important, however, than these divinities was the god Mithras, whose worship originated in Persia, but had long been established in Asia Minor. It was to become prominent in the West at the close of the first Christian century.

I have already said that these oriental gods were known over virtually all the western world. We naturally find the evidence for their worship most abundant in the great centers of trade and in those districts where soldiers were quartered. In Italy the ports of Puteoli on the Bay of Naples and of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, together with the capital, Rome, were the greatest centers. But the oriental cults were found throughout the Italian peninsula. In the provinces of the Gauls and the Germanies we find two great areas—the populous valleys of the Rhone and the upper Garonne, and the Rhine valley. The chief centers, as we should expect, were for the most part the larger towns or army headquarters: Marseilles, Arles, Orange, Die, Vaison, Vienne, Nîmes, Narbonne, and Bordeaux; Lyons, Trèves, Mayence, Heddernheim, and Cologne. Occasionally a small town showed remarkable devotion to some cult, as did Lactoure in Aquitaine, where the Great Mother of the Gods was especially popular in the latter third of the second and the first half of the third century of our era. In like fashion these cults flourished along the valley of the Danube and even in remote Dacia, which included approximately modern Rumania and Transylvania; dedications are also found in the more important towns in Africa, Spain, and Britain, being most abundant in the last named province along the line of Hadrian’s wall.