The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. Glover Terrot Reaveley

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they knew quiet nights without a sigh, while the stars moved onward above them and the splendid pageant of Night; they drank from the stream and knew no water-pipes, and their meadows were beautiful without art; their home was Nature and not terrible; while our abodes form the greatest part of our terror.[104] In Germany, writes Tacitus, the marriage-bond is strict; there are no shows to tempt virtue; adultery is rare; none there makes a jest of vice, nec corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur; none but virgins marry and they marry to bear big children and to suckle them, sera invenum venus eoque inexhausta pubertas; and the children inherit the sturdy frames of their parents.[105]

      But whatever their dreams of the Ideal, the actual was around them, and men had to accommodate themselves to it. In France before the Revolution, men spoke of the government as "despotism tempered by epigrams," and the happy phrase is as true of Imperial Rome. "Verses of unknown authorship reached the public and provoked" Tiberius,[106] who complained of the "circles and dinner-parties." Now and again the authors were discovered and were punished sufficiently. The tone of the society that produced them lives for ever in the Annals of Tacitus. It is worth noting how men and women turned to Tacitus and Seneca during the French Revolution and found their own experience written in their books.[107]

      Others unpacked their hearts with words in tyrannicide declamations and imitations of Greek tragedy. Juvenal laughs at the crowded class-room busy killing tyrants, – waiting himself till they were dead. The tragedies got nearer the mark. Here are a few lines from some of Seneca's own: —

      Who bids all pay one penalty of death

      Knows not a tyrant's trade. Nay, vary it —

      Forbid the wretch to die, and slay the happy. (H.F. 515.)

      And is there none to teach them stealth and sin?

      Why! then the throne will! (Thyestes 313.)

      Let him who serves a king, fling justice forth,

      Send every scruple packing from his heart;

      Shame is no minister to wait on kings. (Phædra 436.)

      But bitterness and epigram could not heal; and for healing and inward peace men longed more and more,[108] as they felt their own weakness, the power of evil and the terror of life; and they found both in a philosophy that had originally come into being under circumstances somewhat similar. They needed some foundation for life, some means of linking the individual to something that could not be shaken, and this they found in Stoicism. The Stoic philosopher saw a unity in this world of confusion – it was the "Generative Reason" – the spermatikós logos, the Divine Word, or Reason, that is the seed and vital principle, whence all things come and in virtue of which they live. All things came from fiery breath, pneûma diapuron, and returned to it. The whole universe was one polity —politeia tou kósmou– in virtue of the spirit that was its origin and its life, of the common end to which it tended, of the absolute and universal scope of the laws it obeyed – mind, matter, God, man, formed one community. The soul of the individual Roman partook of the very nature of God —divinæ particula auræ[109] – and in a way stood nearer to the divine than did anything else in the world, every detail of which, however, was some manifestation of the same divine essence. All men were in truth of one blood, of one family, – all and each, as Seneca says, sacred to each and all.[110] (Unum me donavit [sc. Natura rerum] omnibus, uni mihi omnes.)

      Harmony with nature

      Taught by the Stoic, the troubled Roman looked upon himself at once as a fragment of divinity,[111] an entity self-conscious and individual, and as a member of a divine system expressive of one divine idea, which his individuality subserved. These thoughts gave him ground and strength. If he seemed to be the slave and plaything of an Emperor or an imperial freedman, none the less a divine life pulsed within him, and he was an essential part of "the world." He had two havens of refuge – the universe and his own soul – both quite beyond the reach of the oppressor. Over and over we find both notes sounded in the writings of the Stoics and their followers – God within you and God without you. "Jupiter is all that you see, and all that lives within you."[112] There is a Providence that rules human and all other affairs; nothing happens that is not appointed; and to this Providence every man is related. "He who has once observed with understanding the administration of the world, and learnt that the greatest and supreme and most comprehensive community is the system (systema) of men and God, and that from God come the seeds whence all things, and especially rational beings, spring, why should not that man call himself a citizen of the world [Socrates' word kosmios], why not a son of God?"[113] And when we consider the individual, we find that God has put in his power "the best thing of all, the master thing" – the rational faculty. What is not in our power is the entire external world, of which we can alter nothing, but the use we make of it and its "appearances"[114] is our own. Confine yourself to "what is in your power" (tà epí soi), and no man can hurt you. If you can no longer endure life, leave it; but remember in doing so to withdraw quietly, not at a run; yet, says the sage, "Men! wait for God; when He shall give you the signal and release you from this service, then go to Him; but for the present endure to dwell in this place where He has set you."[115]

      To sum up; the end of man's being and his true happiness is what Zeno expressed as "living harmoniously," a statement which Cleanthes developed by adding the words "with Nature." Harmony with Nature and with oneself is the ideal life; and this the outside world of Emperors, freedmen, bereavements and accidents generally, can neither give nor take away. "The end," says Diogenes Laertius, "is to act in conformity with nature, that is, at once with the nature which is in us and with the nature of the universe, doing nothing forbidden by that common law which is the right reason that pervades all things, and which is, indeed, the same in the Divine Being who administers the universal system of things. Thus the life according to nature is that virtuous and blessed flow of existence, which is enjoyed only by one who always acts so as to maintain the harmony between the dæmon (daimôn) within the individual and the will of the power that orders the universe."[116]

      This was indeed a philosophy for men, and it was also congenial to Roman character, as history had already shown. It appealed to manhood, and whatever else has to be said of Stoics and Stoicism, it remains the fact that Stoicism inspired nearly all the great characters of the early Roman Empire, and nerved almost every attempt that was made to maintain the freedom and dignity of the human soul.[117] The government was not slow to realise the danger of men with such a trust in themselves and so free from fear.

      On paper, perhaps, all religions and philosophies may at first glance seem equally good, and it is not till we test them in life that we can value them aright. And even here there is a wide field for error. Every religion has its saints – men recognizable to everyone as saints in the beauty, manhood and tenderness of their character – and it is perhaps humiliating to have to acknowledge that very often they seem to be so through some happy gift of Nature, quite independently of any effort they make, or of the religion to which they themselves generally attribute anything that redeems them from being base. We have to take, if possible, large masses of men, and to see how they are affected by the religion which we wish to study – average men, as we call them – for in this way we shall escape being led to hasty conclusions by happy instances of natural endowment, or of virtues carefully acquired in favourable circumstances of retirement or helpful environment. Side by side with such results as we may reach from wider study, we have to set our saints and heroes, for while St Francis would have been tender and Thrasea brave under any system

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