Greek and Roman stoicism and some of its disciples: Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius

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Preface

Stoicism was the noblest system of morals developed within the pale of Greek philosophy. For over two centuries it was the creed, if not the philosophy, of the Roman people, whose type of character from the first was moulded on the Stoic lines.

The multitude of great and memorable truths taught by the Spanish courtier, the Phrygian slave, and the Roman emperor, inculcating as they did the loftiest morality, high standards of action, of absolute self-sacrifice for the sake of virtue, and representing most powerfully the moral and religious convictions of the age, no doubt prepared the way for Christianity, as well as tinctured the thought of modern ages.

Stoicism contributed the noblest men, and the loftiest conceptions of virtue and morality that we meet with in history before the time of Paul. In fact, Stoicism is not only a system

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PREFACE

of philosophy, but also of religion, and as such it was regarded by its first adherents.

In order that the reader may better comprehend the origin and progress of the Stoic doctrines, a brief account is given of the Greek religion and philosophy, both of which undoubtedly had a considerable influence upon the rise of the Stoic philosophy.

The selections from Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius have been made with great care, and they comprise some of the noblest thoughts of these disciples of Stoicism.

C. H.S. D.

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GREEK AND ROMAN STOICISM AND SOME OF ITS DISCIPLES

Herbert Spencer has shown that man's imperishable love of life and his aspirations for a higher, a harmonious, and an assured individual existence, constitute the primal fountain of all human motives, and is the great incentive of all human endeavor and progress. Ethics or philosophy does not inspire men with an assured hope in an unending existence, and no system can prevail that has not had its foundations already laid upon the primitive rocks of human nature.

We find in the history of all religions that the underlying belief was an effort to relieve and raise humanity, and however lofty the ideal of the old teachers of religion, it is still nothing more than an ideal. Plato said, " To desire is to love that which as yet we do not possess, that which is not and of which we feel the lack." The intense yearning after the

Divine, a cause, the principle which gave us being, we find showing itself all through the pagan world, and illumined here and there by a few immortal truths. From the beginning man has blindly and in ignorance groped his way slowly onward and upward after what has ever been beyond his power to define.

Paul said of certain people, "that they should seek the Lord if haply they may feel after him and find him." The ethnic religions are the effort of man to feel after God. They partially satisfied a great hunger of the human heart, and, no doubt, in a great degree, they directed the human conscience toward the right. We find in the sacred books of all nations, the Bible, Koran, Vedas, Zendavesta, the laws of Confucius, a vast amount of finished truth, in the most childlike form, without any attempt at formal reasoning, poured forth from the mind by spontaneous inspiration. All Oriental religions are the natural products of the religious instinct in man working itself out in accordance with the principle of natural evolution. And in process of time religious progress as well as advance in philosophy, proves that their growths are an increment of both, and also a cleansing from mythology. A writer has said, that a religion should not be judged by the amount of ancient mythic dross clinging to it, or the puerilities of superadded theological dogmatism and priestly discipline, but from the amount of pure spiritual food it contains, also the practical help it gives towards righteous happy living. We read in the Fravashis, " We worship the souls of the holy men and women, born at any time or in any place, whose consciences struggle, or will struggle, or have struggled for the good."

Over five thousand years ago the sacred books of Egypt taught the unity and spirituality of God, a recognition of the Divine in nature, the feeling that the Deity is in all life, in all form, in all change as well as in what is permanent and stable. The oldest of the religious texts which have come down to us, dating at least 3000 B.C., teaches the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and it appears as a completed system with a long history of development behind it. We find a belief in a future judgment besides a morality of justice and mercy. The Egyptian religion throughout breathes a lofty morality, and a grand conception of law and responsibility. The scribe Pentaur wrote, " Thou alone existant, the creator of being." " In thy rest, thou watched over men, and considered what is best for the beasts. ... As high as heaven, as wide stretching as the earth, as deep as the sea, the gods fall down before thy majesty, extolling the spirit of him who has created all things. . . . Praise to thy spirit because thou hast made us ; we are thy creatures, thou hast placed us in the world."

In the Prisse Papyrus, dating from the Xllth Dynasty (2400 B.C.), the Fourth Commandment is found in almost identical terms: " The son who hearkens to the word of his father, he shall grow old thereby." Other texts exhort to the study of wisdom, to regard and respect parents and superiors, to mercifulness, generosity, discretion, integrity, sobriety, chastity, and the like. We read in the Book of the Decide " I did that which was right ; I hated evil ; I gave bread to the hungry and water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, succor to him who was in need. ,, " I harmed not a child. I injured not a widow ; there was neither beggar nor needy in my time ; none were anhungered, widows were cared for as though their husbands were still alive. ,, "I did that which was pleasing to my parents ; I was the joy of my brethren, the friend of my companions, honorably minded towards all my fellow citizens. I gave bread to the hungry and shelter to the traveler ; my door stood open to him who entered from without, and I refreshed him." Many of the Vedic hymns rise to the purest heights of moral consciousness, and faith in immortality is often expressed. In ancient Brahmanism, its hymns and prayers, its epics, its philosophy, were all intensely spiritual, and the same tendency to spiritual worship exists unchanged in the Hindu mind to-day. The Laws of Manu thus sum up the system of morals of the Brahmins : "Contentment, the act of returning good for evil, temperance, purity, repression of that which is sensual, the knowledge of the holy books, union with the supreme soul, and the avoidance of anger — these are the virtues which constitute our duty."

Buddha, through his personal influence and his ability to speak to the heart, his unsullied purity, and the spirit of his life and work, inculcated a lofty system of morals which exerted a mighty influence upon millions of people, who were thus saved from the depths of barbarism, brutality, and selfishness. 1

We read in the Lalita Vis tar a: <c From east to west the air thrills with the accents of Buddha, a sweet, melodious sound which goes straight to the heart." Said Buddha :

" The real treasure is that laid up by man or woman

Through charity and piety, temperance and self-control.

The treasure thus hid is secure and passes not away,

Though he leaves the fleeting riches of this world : thus man takes with him

1 Says Max Miiller : " If I were asked under what sky the human mind has developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the great problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India."

A treasure that no wrong of others, and no thief

can steal.

Let the wise man do good deeds — the treasure

that follows of itself."

The religion of Zoroaster had in it sublime anticipations of truth which made it an elevating and salutary influence over the great nation professing it.

The doctrines of Egypt, India, and Persia, and the thoughts and aspirations of generations of people who had been blindly seeking after a higher and better life, are doubtless discovered in the philosophy of Greece, but the spirit of Greek philosophy is essentially Greek, and Oriental doctrines were a subsequent and late admixture and infusion. 1

The general ideas of our Aryan or Indo- European forefathers are manifestly reproduced in the fundamental features of Greek mythology and religion, but from the earliest history of Greece we find a religion that had

1 Professor Lefevre has shown us the relationship between the Hellenic and Hindu, Assyrian and Egyptian divinities. Vestiges of Phoenician, Thracian, and Syrian legends can also be traced in Greek mythology. See Lefevre, La Grece Antique. Entretiens sur les Origines et les Croyances.

outgrown the naturalistic religion of the primitive Aryans, and had become monotheistic, with a divinity essentially human, but which became in time specialized and idealized. In the beginning, religion as well as philosophy had to pass through a mythological period. They were founded at a time when science and methods of inquiry did not as yet exist. But with rare insight the ancient prophets and philosophers taught many moral truths which, even in their imperfect form, proved an invaluable source of solace and help in the tribulations of life.

The main idea in the Greek religion was the sight of something divine in human nature. Each god represented some human quality carried to its perfection. To the Greeks everything beautiful was holy ; they worshipped the ideal in nature and human life ; everything pleasant to man was acceptable to the gods. The love of beauty was their religion, and it was an active religious faith that was the origin of Greek art. Their creed was a deification of the human faculties and the passions and affections of mankind. The Greek

IO ideal was that of development, the artistic culture of all human emotions and energies, the bringing forth of that divineness that lay within the nature of man. Says Schiller: —

" When o'er the form of naked Truth

The Muse had spread her magic veil, Creation throbbed with life and youth,

And feeling warmed the insensible. Then nature, formed for love's embrace,

The earth in brighter glory trod; All was enchanted ground, each trace

The footsteps of a god."

The Greeks taught first in poetry and then in plastic art, that man should not bow down to anything beneath him, and that nature can only become fit to be worshipped by being idealized and made human. Greek art originated with the images of the gods, and was the offspring of human emotion and aspiration, and the statues the Greeks wrought and the temples they erected, to commemorate the acts and attributes of some special deity, became living objects of beauty. In fact, both sculpture and architecture emanated from the same grand ideal conception, namely, to embody in imperishable forms the attributes and

1 1 acts of their hero-gods. The elemental character of the Greek religion was no doubt greatly influenced by the sculptors, and kept always before the eyes of a worshipping people the divine attributes of purity, wisdom, serene benignity, and noble elevation of soul. cc What the philosophers did to lead upward the minds of the thoughtful, the sculptors accomplished for the mass of the Greek people. " Art, however, with the Greeks was a sentiment. It was the embodiment of physical beauty in its most perfect forms, and artistically rendered human emotion, but it did not touch the heart. It had its root rather in human philosophy than in divine spirituality. But the Greeks opened to themselves and posterity an entirely new world wherein the human mind had free development.

No doubt the amalgamation of two races of dissimilar mental development, quickened mental impulse, enlivened sensuous emotion, and created new images in the world of imagination. In healthful exuberance and power, body and mind co-operated with each other, and the ideas of beauty were the generic principles which emanated from the perfect rhythm of their physical, moral, and mental organization. "The ancient Greek saw in the floating cloud a moving wing, in the summer wind a goddess's whisper, and in the noise and bubble of the waves, the voice of the old man of the sea; to his simple idea of the things in the world around him he added a new sense, fresh and beautiful, and so created a poetry of vivid and intense loveliness, a religion of winds and waves, a morality of sunlight and spring glories."

The exuberant imagination of the Greeks inhabited a land well suited to foster and nurture the fancy and imagination. It displays a variety of surface and coast-line such as is possessed by scarcely any other country in the world. The climate and the aspects of nature were favorable to develop an active imagination, and to suggest images of beauty. The ever changing color, in which the deep, intense blue constitutes the ground tone, and at sunset the sides of the mountains bathed in a deep, soft, yet quite vivid violet hue; this, with the absolutely intoxicating fragrance exhaled in spring by the spicy pines and blooming shrubs, could not help but appeal to the exuberant imagination of the Greeks.

Every city, every mountain, every fertile plain, every shady grove, or crystal stream, was celebrated in song as the haunt of one or more of the numberless divinities. Air, water, earth, wood, cornfield, and the homes of men, were full of divine life. " They placed Jupiter in Olympus, Apollo in the sun, Neptune in the sea, Bacchus in the vintage, and Ceres among the yellow corn. Their imagination filled the fountains with Naiades, the woods with Dryades, and made the sea teem with the children of Nereus." The Greeks had no doubt of the actual presence of the gods in these places consecrated to them. Says Lehrs (Gott, Gotter und Ddmonen), "When your Greek contemplated nature and the feebleness and dependence of man, there arose before him not one God . . . but there was a spontaneous outbreak of the fullness of life divine. He saw a world of gods."

As all the deities were the creations of a poetic imagination, Herodotus tells us that Homer and Hesiod were the framers of the Greek theogony, as it was their work which greatly assisted in moulding into form the popular ideas regarding the various gods which peopled heaven and earth, and the sea, and the regions under the earth. Says Gladstone, "The Iliad of Homer was a main instrument in establishing the dominant features of the Hellenic religion."

The Greek religion was filled with forms of beauty and nobleness. " It was a heaven so near at hand, that their own heroes had climbed into it, and became demi-gods. It was a heaven peopled with such a variety of noble forms, that they could choose among them the protector whom they liked best, and possibly themselves be selected as favored by some guardian deity. The fortunate hunter, of a moonlight night, might even behold the graceful figure of Diana flashing through the woods in pursuit of game, and the happy inhabitant of Cyprus come suddenly on the fair form of Venus resting in a laurel-grove. The Dryads could be seen glancing among the trees, the Oreads heard shouting on the mountains, and the

Naiads found asleep by the side of their streams."

There is much that is noble and beautiful in Greek legendary faith, and it led in time to a spiritual conception of one sole Supreme Being, the Ruler of human destiny. To the Greek, Zeus was the Supreme Being, Ruler and Preserver of the universe, and Source of Wisdom and Justice. We read of him in the Iliad and Odyssey as the "Cloud-veiled One," " Cloud Compeller " " Thunderer," " Supreme Lord," " Father of Gods and Men." The poorest and most abandoned might rely on his care, and the homeless beggar could claim his powerful protection (Odyssey, vi, 208). For several centuries, no rational speculation seems to have been entered upon, nor any inquiry made, with respect to the origin of the world, or the first principle of things, beyond what Homer and Hesiod had intimated in their poems.

But the Greeks finally, as Erdmann says, "when the unquestioning acceptance of life had yielded to reflection," came to believe in the rule of a Divine Providence, according to justice and mercy, and while they were devoted to ritual and outward observances, and as every religion is deeper and purer than its ritual, so we must not judge the piety of the Greeks by their art, literature, or superstitions. The poets of the fifth and sixth century b.c. reflect the conviction which all the higher minds of Greece were coming to hold, that the world is under the rule of one Divine Being, and to the educated Greeks the old religion had in its essence passed away. The religious sentiment of Greece rose gradually, by following its own moral institutions, to a very elevated conception of deity, and we can trace all through Greek poetry down to the age of Pericles, the development of the Greek conscience side by side with advancing civilization and aesthetic culture. The religion of Greece taught that Nature worked in obedience to the Divine laws, and there was recognized an indwelling of the Divine presence in all natural phenomena and every visible created thing, therefore the philosophic mind of Greece was thus prepared to inquire into and speculate upon the laws themselves. It was the Greeks who first attempted to comprehend the nature of the human mind, and the first to attempt to solve the riddle of the universe. The Greeks were also the first to afford us the picture of personal inner development.