The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. Glover Terrot Reaveley
for the licence they wrongly supposed it gave.[159] He constantly speaks of women as a temptation, nearly always using a diminutive korásion, korasidíon– little girls – and as a temptation hardly to be resisted by young men. He speaks of their "softer voices."[160] A young philosopher is no match for a "pretty girl"; let him fly temptation.[161] "As to pleasure with women, abstain as far as you can, before marriage; but if you do indulge in it, do it in the way conformable to custom. Do not, however, be disagreeable to those who take such pleasures, nor apt to rebuke them or to say often that you do not."[162] All this may be taken as the impression left by Rome and the household of Epaphroditus upon a slave's mind. It may be observed that he makes nothing like Dio Chrysostom's condemnation of prostitution – an utterance unexampled in pagan antiquity.
It is pleasanter to turn to other features of Epictetus. He has a very striking lecture on personal cleanliness.[163] In proportion as men draw near the gods by reason, they cling to purity of soul and body. Nature has given men hands and nostrils; so, if a man does not use a handkerchief, "I say, he is not fulfilling the function of a man." Nature has provided water. "It is impossible that some impurity should not remain in the teeth after eating. 'So wash your teeth,' says Nature. Why? 'That you may be a man and not a beast – a pig.'" If a man would not bathe and use the strigil and have his clothes washed – "either go into a desert where you deserve to go, or live alone and smell yourself." He cannot bear a dirty man, – "who does not get out of his way?" It gives philosophy a bad name, he says; but it is quite clear that that was not his chief reason. He would sooner a young man came to him with his hair carefully trimmed than with it dirty and rough; such care implied "some conception of the beautiful," which it was only necessary to direct towards the things of the mind; "but if a man comes to me filthy and dirty, with a moustache down to his knees – what can I say to him?" "But whence am I to get a fine cloak? Man! you have water; wash it!"
Fame of Epictetus
Pupils gathered round him and he became famous, as we can see in the reminiscences of Aulus Gellius.[164] Sixty or seventy years after his death a man bought his old earthenware lamp for three thousand drachmas.[165] Even in his lifetime men began to come about "the wonderful old man" who were hardly serious students. They wished, he says, to occupy the time while waiting to engage a passage on a ship – they happened to be passing (párodós estin) and looked in to see him as if he were a statue. "We can go and see Epictetus too. – Then you go away and say; Oh! Epictetus was nothing! he talked bad Greek – oh! barbarous Greek!"[166] Others came to pick up a little philosophic language for use in public. Why could they not philosophize and say nothing? he asked. "Sheep do not vomit up their grass to show the shepherd how much they have eaten – no! they digest it inside, and then produce wool and milk outside."[167] He took his teaching seriously as a matter of life, and he looked upon it as a service done to mankind – quite equivalent to the production of "two or three ugly-nosed children."[168] He has a warm admiration for the Cynic philosopher's independence of encumberments – how can he who has to teach mankind go looking after a wife's confinement – or "something to heat the water in to give the baby a bath?"[169]
These then are the two great teachers of Stoicism, the outstanding figures, whose words and tones survive, whose characters are familiar to us. They are clearly preachers, both of them, intent on the practical reformation of their listeners or correspondents. For them conduct is nine-tenths of life. Much of their teaching is of course the common property of all moral teachers – the deprecation of anger, of quarrelsomeness, of self-indulgence, of grumbling, of impurity, is peculiar to no school. Others have emphasized that life is a campaign with a general to be obeyed, if you can by some instinct divine what he is signalling.[170] But perhaps it was a new thing in the Western World, when so much accent was laid on conduct. The terror of contemporary life, with its repulsiveness, its brutality and its fascination, drove men in search of the moral guide. The philosopher's school was an infirmary, not for the glad but for the sorry.[171] "That man," says Seneca, "is looking for salvation —ad salutem spectat."
Self-examination
Men sought the help of the philosopher, and relapsed. "He thinks he wishes reason. He has fallen out with luxury, but he will soon make friends with her. But he says he is offended with his own life! I do not deny it; who is not? Men love their vices and hate them at the same time."[172] So writes Seneca of a friend of Lucilius and his fugitive thoughts of amendment, and Epictetus is no less emphatic on the crying need for earnestness. The Roman world was so full of glaring vice that every serious man from Augustus onward had insisted on some kind of reformation, and now men were beginning to feel that the reformation must begin within themselves. The habit of daily self-examination became general among the Stoics, and they recommended it warmly to their pupils. Here is Seneca's account of himself.
"When the day was over and Sextius had gone to his night's rest, he used to ask his mind (animum): 'what bad habit of yours have you cured to-day? what vice have you resisted? in what respect are you better?' Anger will cease and will be more moderate, when it knows it must daily face the judge. Could anything be more beautiful than this habit of examining the whole day? What a sleep is that which follows self-scrutiny! How calm, how deep and free, when the mind is either praised or admonished, when it has looked into itself, and like a secret censor makes a report upon its own moral state. I avail myself of this power and daily try my own case. When the light is removed from my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, is silent, I survey my whole day and I measure my words again. I hide nothing from myself; I pass over nothing. For why should I be afraid of any of my errors, when I can say: 'See that you do it no more, now I forgive you. In that discussion, you spoke too pugnaciously; after this do not engage with the ignorant; they will not learn who have never learned. That man you admonished too freely, so you did him no good; you offended him. For the future, see not only whether what you say is true, but whether he to whom it is said will bear the truth.'"[173]
Similar passages might be multiplied. "Live with yourself and see how ill-furnished you are," wrote Persius (iv, 52) the pupil of Cornutus. "From heaven comes that word 'know thyself,'" said Juvenal. A rather remarkable illustration is the letter of Serenus, a friend of Seneca's, of whose life things are recorded by Tacitus that do not suggest self-scrutiny. In summary it is as follows: —
"I find myself not quite free, nor yet quite in bondage to faults which I feared and hated. I am in a state, not the worst indeed, but very querulous and uncomfortable, neither well nor ill. It is a weakness of the mind that sways between the two, that will neither bravely turn to right nor to wrong. Things disturb me, though they do not alter my principles. I think of public life; something worries me, and I fall back into the life of leisure, to be pricked to the will to act by reading some brave words or seeing some fine example. I beg you, if you have any remedy to stay my fluctuation of mind, count me worthy to owe you peace. To put what I endure into a simile, it is not the tempest that troubles me, but sea-sickness."[174]
Epictetus quotes lines which he attributes to Pythagoras —
Let sleep not come upon thy languid eyes
Ere thou has scanned the actions of the day —
Where have I sinned? What done or left undone?
From first to last examine all, and then
Blame what is wrong, in what is right, rejoice.[175]
These verses, he adds, are for use, not for
Fragment, 53.
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