The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. Glover Terrot Reaveley
a criticism, and they meant a change of values. In the light of them, the restoration of religion by Augustus became a little thing; the popular superstition of the day was stamped as vulgar and trivial in itself, while it became the sign of deep and unsatisfied craving in the human heart; and lastly the current philosophies, in the face of Virgil's poetry, were felt to be shallow and cold, talk of the lip and trick of the brain. Of course this is not just to the philosophers who did much for the world, and without whom Virgil would not have been what he was. None the less, it was written in Virgil's poetry that the religions and philosophies of mankind must be thought over anew.
This is no light contribution to an age or to mankind. In this case it carries with it the whole story that lies before us. Such an expression of a common instinct gave new force to that instinct; it added a powerful impulse to the deepest passion that man knows; and, in spite of the uncertainties which beset the poet himself, it gave new hope to mankind that the cry of the human heart for God was one that should receive an answer.
CHAPTER II
THE STOICS
"I am entering," writes Tacitus,[98] "upon the history of a period, rich in disasters, gloomy with wars, rent with seditions, nay, savage in its very hours of peace. Four Emperors perished by the sword; there were three civil wars; there were more with foreigners – and some had both characters at once… Rome was wasted by fires, its oldest temples burnt, the very Capitol set in flames by Roman hands. There was defilement of sacred rites; adulteries in high places; the sea crowded with exiles; island rocks drenched with murder. Yet wilder was the frenzy in Rome; nobility, wealth, the refusal of office, its acceptance – everything was a crime, and virtue the surest ruin. Nor were the rewards of informers less odious than their deeds; one found his spoils in a priesthood or a consulate; another in a provincial governorship; another behind the throne; and all was one delirium of hate and terror; slaves were bribed to betray their masters, freedmen their patrons. He who had no foe was destroyed by his friend."
It was to this that Virgil's hope of a new Golden Age had come —Redeunt Saturnia regna. Augustus had restored the Republic; he had restored religion; and after a hundred years here is the outcome. Tacitus himself admits that the age was not "barren of virtues," that it "could show fine illustrations" of family love and friendship, and of heroic death. It must also be owned that the Provinces at large were better governed than under the Republic; and, further, that, when he wrote Tacitus thought of a particular period of civil disorder and that not a long one. Yet the reader of his Annals will feel that the description will cover more than the year 69; it is essentially true of the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, and it was to be true again of the reign of Domitian – of perhaps eighty years of the first century of our era. If it was not true of the whole Mediterranean world, or even of the whole of Rome, it was true at least of that half-Rome which gave its colour to the thinking of the world.
The Imperial court
Through all the elaborate pretences devised by Augustus to obscure the truth, through all the names and phrases and formalities, the Roman world had realized the central fact of despotism.[99] The Emperors themselves had grasped it with pride and terror. One at least was insane, and the position was enough to turn almost any brain. "Monarchy," in Herodotus' quaint sentence,[100] "would set the best man outside the ordinary thoughts." Plato's myth of Gyges was fulfilled – of the shepherd, who found a ring that made him invisible, and in its strength seduced a queen, murdered a king and became a tyrant. Gaius banished his own sisters, reminding them that he owned not only islands but swords; and he bade his grandmother remember that he could "do anything he liked and do it to anybody."[101] Oriental princes had been kept at Rome as hostages and had given the weaker-minded members of the Imperial family new ideas of royalty. The very word was spoken freely – in his treatise "On Clemency" Seneca uses again and again the word regnum without apology.
But what gave Despotism its sting was its uncertainty. Augustus had held a curiously complicated set of special powers severally conferred on him for specified periods, and technically they could be taken from him. The Senate was the Emperor's partner in the government of the world, and it was always conceivable that the partnership might cease, for it was not a definite institution – prince followed prince, it is true, but there was an element of accident about it all. The situation was difficult; Senate and Emperor eyed each other with suspicion – neither knew how far the other could go, or would go; neither knew the terms of the partnership. Tiberius wrote despatches to the Senate and he was an artist in concealing his meaning. The Senate had to guess what he wished; if it guessed wrong, he would resent the liberty; if it guessed right, he resented the appearance of servility. The solitude of the throne grew more and more uneasy.
Again, the republican government had been in the hands of free men, who ruled as magistrates, and the imperial government had no means of replacing them, for one free-born Roman could not take service with another. The Emperor had to fall back upon his own household. His Secretaries of State were slaves and freedmen – men very often of great ability, but their past was against them. If it had not depraved them, none the less it left upon them a social taint, which nothing could remove. They were despised by the men who courted them, and they knew it. It was almost impossible for such men not to be the gangrene of court and state. And as a fact we find that the freedman was throughout the readiest agent for all evil that Rome knew, and into the hands of such men the government of the world drifted. Under a weak, or a careless, or even an absent, Emperor Rome was governed by such men and such methods as we suppose to be peculiar to Sultanates and the East.
The honour, the property, the life of every Roman lay in the hands of eunuchs and valets, and, as these quarrelled or made friends, the fortunes of an old nobility changed with the hour. It had not been so under Augustus, nor was it so under Vespasian, nor under Trajan or his successors; but for the greater part of the first century A.D. Rome was governed by weak or vicious Emperors, and they by their servants. The spy and the informer were everywhere.
To this confusion fresh elements of uncertainty were added by the astrologer and mathematician, and it became treason to be interested in "the health of the prince." Superstition ruled the weakling – superstition, perpetually re-inforced by fresh hordes of Orientals, obsequious and unscrupulous. Seneca called the imperial court, which he knew, "a gloomy slave-gaol" (triste ergastulum).[102]
Reduced to merely registering the wishes of their rulers, the Roman nobility sought their own safety in frivolity and extravagance. To be thoughtful was to be suspected of independence and to invite danger. We naturally suppose moralists and satirists to exaggerate the vices of their contemporaries, but a sober survey of Roman morals in the first century – at any rate before 70 A.D. – reveals a great deal that is horrible. (Petronius is not exactly a moralist or a satirist, and there is plenty of other evidence.) Marriage does not thrive alongside of terror, nor yet where domestic slavery prevails, and in Rome both militated against purity of life. The Greek girl's beauty, her charm and wit, were everywhere available. For amusements, there were the gladiatorial shows, – brutal, we understand, but their horrible fascination we fortunately cannot know. The reader of St Augustine's Confessions will remember a famous passage on these games. The gladiators were the popular favourites of the day. They toured the country, they were modelled and painted. Their names survive scratched by loafers on the walls of Pompeii. The very children played at being gladiators, Epictetus said – "sometimes athletes, now monomachi, now trumpeters." The Colosseum had seats for 80,000 spectators of the games, "and is even now at once the most imposing and the most characteristic relic of pagan Rome."[103]
"Despotism tempered by epigrams"
Life was terrible in its fears and in its pleasures. If the poets drew Ages of Gold in the latter days of the Republic, now the philosophers and historians looked away to a "State of Nature," to times and places where greed and civilization were unknown. In those happy days, says Seneca, they enjoyed Nature in common; the stronger had not laid his hand upon the weaker; weapons lay unused, and human hands, unstained by human blood,
Tac.
Hdt. iii, 80. Cf. Tac.
Suetonius,
Sen.
Lecky,