The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. Glover Terrot Reaveley
reason, the Muses crafts and Athene thought. Do you see, then, the abyss of atheism that lies at our feet, if we resolve each of the gods into a passion or a force or a virtue?'"[263]
Such an utterance is unmistakeable – it means a conservative re-action, and in another place we find its justification in religious emotion. "Nothing gives us more joy than what we see and do ourselves in divine service, when we carry the emblems, or join in the sacred dance, or stand by at the sacrifice or initiation… It is when the soul most believes and perceives that the god is present, that she most puts from her pain and fear and anxiety, and gives herself up to joy, yes, even as far as intoxication and laughter and merriment… In sacred processions and sacrifices not only the old man and the old woman, nor the poor and lowly,
The thick-legged drudge that sways her at the mill,
but and household slaves and hirelings are uplifted by joy and triumph. Rich men and kings have always their own banquets and feasts – but the feasts in the temples and at initiations, when men seem to touch the divine most nearly in their thought, with honour and worship, have a pleasure and a charm far more exceeding. And in this no man shares who has renounced belief in Providence. For it is not abundance of wine, nor the roasting of meat, that gives the joy in the festivals, but also a good hope, and a belief that the god is present and gracious, and accepts what is being done with a friendly mind."[264]
Continuity of religion
One of Chateaubriand's critics says that his plea could be advanced on behalf of any religion; and Plutarch had already made it on behalf of his own. He looks past the Stoics, and he finds in memory and association arguments that outweigh anything they can say. The Spermaticos Logos was a mere Être Suprème – a sublime conception perhaps, but it had no appeal to emotion, it waked no memories, it touched no chord of personal association. We live so largely by instinct, memory and association, that anything that threatens them seems to strike at our life,
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Some such thought is native to every heart, and the man who does not cling to his own past seems wanting in something essentially human. The gods were part of the past of the ancient world, and if Reason took them away, what was left? There was so much, too, that Reason could not grasp; so much to be learnt in ritual and in mystery that to the merely thinking mind had no meaning, – that must be received. Reason was invoked so lightly, and applied so carelessly and harshly, that it could take no account of the tender things of the heart. Reason destroyed but did not create, questioned without answering, and left life without sanction or communion. It was too often a mere affair of cleverness. It had its use and place, no doubt, in correcting extravagances of belief, but it was by no means the sole authority in man's life, and its function was essentially to be the handmaid of religion. "We must take Reason from philosophy to be our mystagogue and then in holy reverence consider each several word and act of worship."[265]
Plutarch is our representative man in this revival of religion, and some survey of his life and environment will enable us to enter more fully into his thought, and through him to understand better the beginnings of a great religious movement, of which students too often have lost sight.
For centuries the great men of Greek letters were natives of every region of the eastern Mediterranean except Greece, and Plutarch stands alone in later literature a Hellen of the motherland – Greek by blood, birth, home and instinct, proud of his race and his land, of their history, their art and their literature. When we speak of the influence of the past, it is well to remember to how great a past this man looked back, and from what a present. Long years of faction and war, as he himself says, had depopulated Greece, and the whole land could hardly furnish now the three thousand hoplites that four centuries before Megara alone had sent to Platæa. In regions where oracles of note had been, they were no more; their existence would but have emphasized the solitude – what good would an oracle be at Tegyra, or about Ptoum, where in a day's journey you might perhaps come on a solitary shepherd?[266] It was not only that wars and faction fights had wasted the life of the Greek people, but with the opening of the far East by Alexander, and the development of the West under Roman rule, Commerce had shifted its centres, and the Greeks had left their old homes for new regions. Still keen on money, philosophy and art, they thronged Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, and a thousand other cities. The Petrie papyri have revealed a new feature of this emigration, for the wills of the settlers often mention the names of their wives, and these were Greek women and not Egyptian, as the names of their fathers and homes prove.[267] Julius Cæsar had restored Corinth a century after Mummius destroyed it, and Athens was still as she had been and was to be for centuries, the resort of every one who loved philosophy and literature.[268] These were the two cities of Greece; the rest were reminders of what had been. In one of these forsaken places Plutarch was born, and there he was content to live and die, a citizen and a magistrate of Chæronea in Boeotia.
His family circle
His family was an old one, long associated with Chæronea. From childhood his life was rooted in the past by the most natural and delightful of all connexions. His great-grandfather, Nicarchus, used to tell how his fellow-citizens were commandeered to carry wheat on their own backs down to Anticyra for Antony's fleet – and were quickened up with the whip as they went; and "then when they had taken one consignment so, and the second was already done up into loads and ready, the news came that Antony was defeated, and that saved the city; for at once Antony's agents and soldiers fled, and they divided the grain among themselves."[269] The grandfather, Lamprias, lived long and saw the grandson a grown man. He appears often in Plutarch's Table Talk– a bright old man and a lively talker – like incense, he said, he was best when warmed up.[270] He thought poorly of the Jews for not eating pork – a most righteous dish, he said.[271] He had tales of his own about Antony, picked up long ago from one Philotas, who had been a medical student in Alexandria and a friend of one of the royal cooks, and eventually medical attendant to a son of Antony's by Fulvia.[272] Plutarch's father was a quiet, sensible man, who maintained the practice of sacrificing,[273] kept good horses,[274] knew his Homer, and had something of his son's curious interest in odd problems. It is perhaps an accident that Plutarch never mentions his name, but, though he often speaks of him, it is always of "my father" or "our father" – the lifelong and instinctive habit. There were also two brothers. The witty and amiable Lamprias loved laughter and was an expert in dancing – a useful man to put things right when the dance went with more spirit than music.[275] Of Timon we hear less, but Plutarch sets Timon's goodness of heart among the very best gifts Fortune has sent him.[276] He emphasizes the bond that brothers have in the family sacrifices, ancestral rites, the common home and the common grave.[277] That Plutarch always had friends, men of kindly nature and intelligence, and some of them eminent, is not surprising. Other human relationships, to be mentioned hereafter, completed his circle. He was born, and grew up, and lived, in a network of love and sympathy, the record of which is in all his books.
Plutarch was born about the year 50 A.D., and, when Nero went on tour through Greece in 66 A.D., he was a student at Athens under Ammonius.[278] He recalls that among his fellow-students
Mahaffy,
Horace is the best known of Athenian students. The delightful letters of Synesius show the hold Athens still retained upon a very changed world in 400 A.D.
Life of Antony, 68.