III. THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE…

III. THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE

The Populus or Plebs of a municipal town of the early Empire is often mentioned in the inscriptions along with the Ordo and the Augustales, generally in demanding some benefaction, or in doing honour to some benevolent patron.(1416) They also appear as recipients of a smaller share at public feasts and distributions. They occasionally engage in a fierce conflict with the higher orders, as at Puteoli in the reign of Nero, when the discord was so menacing as to call for the presence of a praetorian cohort.(1417) The election placards of Pompeii also disclose a keen popular interest in the municipal elections.(1418) But the common people are now as a rule chiefly known to us from the inscriptions on their tombs. Fortunately there is an immense profusion, in all the provinces as well as in Italy, of these brief memorials of obscure lives. And although Roman literature, which was the product of the aristocratic class or of their dependents, generally pays but little attention to the despised mass engaged in menial services or petty trades, we have seen that the novel of Petronius flashes a brilliant light upon it in the reign of Nero.

The immense development of the free proletariat, in the time of the early Empire, is one of the most striking social phenomena which the study of the inscriptions has brought to light. It has sometimes been the custom to speak of that society as depending for the supply of its wants entirely on slave labour. And undoubtedly at one time slave labour occupied the largest part of the field of industry. A household in the time of the Republic, of even moderate wealth, might have 400 slaves, while a Crassus would have as many as 20,000, whom he hired out in various industries.(1419) But several causes conspired gradually to work a great industrial revolution. From the days of Augustus, the wars beyond the frontier, which added fresh territory and yielded crowds of captives to the slave-markets, had become less frequent. And it is probable that births among the slave class hardly sufficed to maintain its numbers against the depletion caused by mortality and manumission. The practice of emancipating slaves of the more intelligent class went on so rapidly that it had even to be restrained by law.(1420) Masters found it economically profitable to give skilful slaves an interest in the profits of their industry, and the peculium, which was thus accumulated, soon provided the means of purchasing emancipation. At the same time, the dispersion of colossal fortunes, gained in the age of rapine and conquest, and squandered in luxury and excess, together with the exploitation of the resources of favoured regions, which were now enjoying the blessings of unimpeded commerce, rapid intercommunication, and perfect security, must have given an immense stimulus to free industry. A very casual glance at the inscriptions, under the heading Artes et Opificia,(1421) will show the enormous and flourishing development of skilled handicrafts, with all the minutest specialisation of the arts that wait on a highly-organised and luxurious society. The epitaphs of these obscure toilers have been brought to light in every part of the Roman world, in remote towns in Spain, Gaul, Noricum, Dacia, and North Africa, as well as in the ancient centres of refinement in Italy or the Greek East. On a single page or two you can read the simple record of the bridle-maker or flask-maker of Narbonne, the cabriolet-driver of Senegallia, the cooper of Trèves, the stone-cutter of Nîmes, the purple-dealer of Augsburg, beside those of the wool-comber of Brescia, the oculist of Bologna, the plumber of Naples, or the vendors of unguents in the Via Sacra, and the humble fruiterer of the Circus Maximus.(1422) Many of these people had risen from slavery into the freedman class. Most of them are evidently humble folk, although, like a certain female pearl-dealer of the Via Sacra, they may have freedmen and freedwomen of their own, for whom they provide a last resting-place beside themselves.(1423) The barber, or auctioneer, or leather-seller, who had become the owner of lands and houses, and who could even give gladiatorial shows, excited the contempt of Juvenal and Martial.(1424) But these insignificant people, although despised by the old world of aristocratic tradition, were proud of their crafts. They tell posterity who and what they were, without any vulgar concealment; nay, they have left expensive tombs, with the emblems or instruments of their petty trades proudly blazoned upon them like the armorial devices of our families of gentle birth. In the museum of S. Germain may be seen the effigy of the apple-seller commending his fruit to the attention of the ladies of the quarter; the cooper, with a cask upon his shoulder; the smith, hammer in hand, at the forge; the fuller, treading out and dressing the cloth.(1425) This pride in honest industry is a new and healthy sign, as a reaction from the contempt for it which was engrained in old Roman society, and which is always congenial to an aristocratic caste supported by slave labour. In spite of the grossness and base vulgarity of sudden wealth, portrayed by Petronius and Juvenal, the new class of free artisans and traders had often, so far as we can judge by stone records, a sound and healthy life, sobered and dignified by honest toil, and the pride of skill and independence. Individually weak and despised, they were finding the means of developing an organisation, which at once cultivated social feeling, heightened their self-respect, and guarded their collective interests. While the old aristocracy were being rapidly thinned by vice and extravagance, or by confiscation, the leaders of the new industrial movement probably founded many a senatorial house, which, in the fourth and fifth centuries, in an ever-recurring fashion, came to regard manual industry with sublime contempt, and traced themselves to Aemilius Paullus or Scipio, or even to Aeneas or Agamemnon.(1426)

The organisation of industry through the colleges attained an immense development in the Antonine age, and still more in the third century, after the definite sanction and encouragement given to these societies by Alexander Severus. The records of the movement are numerous, and we can, after the scholarly sifting of recent years, now form a tolerably complete and vivid conception of these corporations which, springing up at first spontaneously, in defiance of government, or with its reluctant connivance, were destined, under imperial control, to petrify into an intolerable system of caste servitude in the last century of the Empire of the West.(1427)

The sodalitia and collegia were of immemorial antiquity. Certain industrial colleges and sacred sodalities were traced back to Numa, and even to the foundation of Rome.(1428) In the flourishing days of the Republic they multiplied without restraint or suspicion, the only associations at which the law looked askance being those which met secretly or by night. It was only in the last century of the Republic that the colleges came to be regarded as dangerous to the public peace, and they were, with some necessary exceptions, suppressed by a decree of the Senate in 64 B.C. They were revived again for factious or revolutionary purposes in 58 B.C. by Clodius.(1429) The emperors Julius and Augustus abolished the free right of association, except in the case of a few consecrated by their antiquity or their religious character.(1430) And it was enacted that new colleges could not be created without special authorisation. In the middle of the second century, the jurist Gaius lays it down that the formation of new colleges was restrained by laws, decrees of the Senate, and imperial constitutions, although a certain number of societies, both in Rome and the provinces, such as those of the miners, salt workers, bakers, and boatmen, were authorised.(1431) And down to the time of Justinian, the right of free association was jealously watched as a possible menace to the public peace. The refusal of Trajan to sanction the formation of a company of firemen in Nicomedia, with the reasons which he gave to Pliny for his decision, furnishes the best concrete illustration of the imperial policy towards the colleges.(1432) That the danger from the colleges to the public order was not an imaginary one, is clear from the passage in Tacitus describing the bloody riots between the people of Nuceria and Pompeii in the reign of Nero, which had evidently been fomented by “illicit” clubs.(1433) It is seen even more strikingly in the serious troubles of the reign of Aurelian, when 7000 people were killed in the organised outbreak of the workmen of the mint.(1434) Yet it is pretty clear that, in spite of legislation, and imperial distrust, the colleges were multiplying, not only in Rome, but in remote, insignificant places, and even in the camps, from which the legislator was specially determined to avert their temptations. In the blank wilderness, created by a universal despotism, the craving for sympathy and mutual succour inspired a great social movement, which legislation was powerless to check. Just as in the reigns of Theodosius and Honorius, imperial edicts and rescripts were paralysed by the impalpable, quietly irresistible force of a universal social need or sentiment. One simple means of evasion was provided by the government itself, probably as early as the first century. In an inscription of Lanuvium, of the year 136 A.D., there is a recital of a decree of the Senate according the right of association to those who wish to form a funerary college, provided the members did not meet more than once a month to make their contributions.(1435) It appears from Marcian’s reference to this law that other meetings for purposes of religious observance might be held, the provisions of the senatusconsultum against illicit colleges being carefully observed.(1436) Mommsen has shown that many other pious and charitable purposes could be easily brought within the scope of the funerary association. And it was not difficult for a society which desired to make a monthly contribution for any purpose to take the particular form recognised by the law. In the reign of M. Aurelius, although membership of two colleges is still prohibited, the colleges obtained the legal right to receive bequests, and to emancipate their slaves. And finally, Alexander Severus organised all the industrial colleges and assigned them defensores.(1437)

The law against illicit associations, with all its serious penalties, remained in the imperial armoury. But the Empire, which had striven to prevent combination, really furnished the greatest incentive to combine. In the face of that world-wide and all-powerful system, the individual subject felt, ever more and more, his loneliness and helplessness. The imperial power might be well-meaning and beneficent, but it was so terrible and levelling in the immense sweep of its forces, that the isolated man seemed, in its presence, reduced to the insignificance of an insect or a grain of sand. Moreover, the aristocratic constitution of municipal society became steadily more and more exclusive. If the rich decurions catered for the pleasures of the people, it was on the condition that they retained their monopoly of political power and social precedence. The plebeian crowd, recruited from the ranks of slavery, and ever growing in numbers and, in their higher ranks, in wealth, did not indeed dream of breaking down these barriers of exclusiveness; but they claimed, and quietly asserted, the right to organise a society of their own, for protection against oppression, for mutual sympathy and support, for relief from the deadly dulness of an obscure and sordid life. Individually weak and despised, they might, by union, gain a sense of collective dignity and strength. To our eyes, as perhaps to the eyes of the Roman aristocrat, the dignity might seem far from imposing. But these things are greatly a matter of imagination, and depend on the breadth of the mental horizon. When the brotherhood, many of them of servile grade, met in full conclave, in the temple of their patron deity, to pass a formal decree of thanks to a benefactor, and regale themselves with a modest repast, or when they passed through the streets and the forum with banners flying, and all the emblems of their guild, the meanest member felt himself lifted for the moment above the dim, hopeless obscurity of plebeian life.

No small part of old Roman piety consisted in a scrupulous reverence for the dead, and a care to prolong their memory by solid memorial and solemn ritual, it might be to maintain some faint tie of sympathy with the shade which had passed into a dim and rather cheerless world. The conception of that other state was always vague, often purely negative. It is not often that a spirit is sped on its way to join a loved one in the Elysian fields, and we may fear that such phrases, when they do occur, are rather literary and conventional.(1438) The hope of blessed reunion after death seldom meets us till we come to some monument of a Christian freedman.(1439) But two of the deepest feelings in the Roman mind did duty for a clear faith in the life beyond the tomb: one was family piety, the other the passionate desire of the parting spirit to escape neglect and oblivion. Whoever will cast his eyes over some pages of the sepulchral inscriptions will be struck with the intensity and warmth of affection, the bitterness of loss and grief, which have been committed to the stone. The expressions, of course, are often conventional, like obituary memorials in every age. The model wife appears again and again, loving, chaste, pious, a woman of the antique model, a keeper at home, who spun among her maids and suckled her own children, who never gave her husband a moment’s vexation, except when she died.(1440) Good husbands seem to have been not less common. And the wife’s grief sometimes far outruns the regular forms of eulogy or regret. In one pathetic memorial of a union formed in earliest youth, the lonely wife begs the unseen Powers to let her have the vision of her spouse in the hours of night, and bring her quickly to his side.(1441) There is just the same pure affection in the less regular, but often as stable, unions of the slaves and soldiers, and the contubernalis is lamented with the same honourable affection as the great lady, although the faulty Latin sometimes betrays the class to which the author belongs. The slave world must always have its shame and tragedy; yet many an inscription shows, by a welcome gleam of light, that even there human love and ties of family were not always desecrated.(1442) The slave nurse erects a monument to her little foster child; or a master and mistress raise an affectionate memorial to two young vernae who died on one day. A freedman bewails, with warm sincerity, a friendship begun in the slave market, and never interrupted till the last fatal hour.(1443) The common tragedies of affection meet us on these slabs, as they are reproduced from age to age with little variation. The prevalent note is, Vale vale in aeternum, with thoughts of the ghostly ferryman and the infernal stream and hopeless separation. Now and then, but seldom, a soul passes cheerfully from the light which it has loved, happy to escape the burden of old age.(1444) And sometimes, too, but seldom, we meet with a cold, hard grossness, which looks back with perfect content upon a full life of the flesh and takes the prospect of nothingness with a cheerful acquiescence.(1445)

The true Roman had a horror of the loneliness of death, of the day when no kindly eye would read his name and style upon the slab, when no hand for evermore would bring the annual offering of wine and flowers. It is pathetic to see how universal is the craving to be remembered felt even by slaves, by men plying the most despised or unsavoury crafts. The infant Julius Diadumenus, who has only drawn breath for four hours, receives an enduring memorial. A wife consoles her grief with the thought that her husband’s name and fame will be forever prolonged by the slab which she dedicates.(1446) On another monument the traveller along the Flaminian Way is begged to stop and read again the epitaph on a boy of nine.(1447) Many are tortured by the fear of the desertion or the violation of their “eternal home.” An old veteran bequeaths from his savings a sum of about £80, to provide a supply of oil for the lamp above his tomb.(1448) An unguent seller of Montferrat leaves a fine garden to afford to the guardians of his grave an annual feast upon his birthday, and the roses which are to be laid upon it for ever.(1449) Many a prayer, by the gods of the upper and the lower worlds, appeals to the passing wayfarer not to disturb the eternal rest.(1450) The alienation or desecration of a tomb is forbidden with curses or the threat of heavy penalties.(1451) A place of burial was a coveted possession, which was not easily attainable by the poor and friendless, and practical persons guarded their repose against lawless intrusion by requiring the delinquent to pay a heavy fine to the municipal or to the imperial treasury, or to the pontifical college. It was the most effectual way of securing the peace of the dead. For the public authorities had a direct pecuniary interest in enforcing the penalty for the desecration. But it would be interesting to know how long these provisions to protect for ever the peace of the departed fulfilled the hopes of the testator.

The primary object of a multitude of colleges, like that of the worshippers of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium, was undoubtedly, after the reign of Nerva, the care of the memory of their members after death. In the remarkable inscription of Lanuvium, as we have seen, the formal permission by decree of the Senate, to meet once a month for the purpose of a funerary contribution is recorded.(1452) It was a momentous concession, and carried consequences which the legislator may or may not have intended.(1453) The jurist Marcian, who gives an imperfect citation of this part of the decree, goes on to add, that meetings for a religious purpose were not prohibited, provided that the previous legislation against illicit societies was observed.(1454) And the law of the Lanuvian College shows how often such meetings might take place. It did not need much ingenuity to multiply occasions for reunion. The anniversary of the foundation, the birthday of founders or benefactors, the feast of the patron deity, the birthday of the emperor, these and the like occasions furnished legal pretexts for meetings of the society, when the members might have a meal together, and when the conversation would not always be confined to the funerary business of the college. At a time when, according to juristic theory, a special permission was needed for each new foundation, and when the authority was grudgingly accorded, the whole vast plebeian mass of petty traders, artisans, freedmen, and slaves were at one stroke allowed to organise their societies for burial. We may fairly assume that, liberally interpreted, the new law was allowed to cover with its sanction many a college of which funeral rites were not the sole, or even the primary object. And this would be made all the easier because many of the industrial colleges, and perhaps still more of the strictly religious colleges, had a common burial-place, and often received bequests for funerary purposes. This is the case, for example, with a college of worshippers of Hercules at Interamna, and a similar college at Reate.(1455) A young Belgian, belonging to the guild of armourers of the 20th legion, was buried by his college at Bath.(1456) One C. Valgius Fuscus gave a burial-ground at Forum Sempronii, in Umbria, to a college of muleteers of the Porta Gallica, for their wives or concubines, and their posterity.(1457) There is even a burial-place, duly defined by exact measurement, for those “who are in the habit of dining together,” a description which, as time went on, would have applied as accurately as any other to many of these clubs.(1458)

We are, by a rare piece of good fortune, admitted to the interior of one of the purely funerary colleges. In the reign of Hadrian there was at Lanuvium a college which, by a curious fancy, combined the worship of the pure Diana with that of the deified minion of the emperor. It was founded in A.D. 133, three years after the tragic death of the young favourite. And in 136, the patron of the society, who was also a magnate of the town, caused it to be convened in the temple of Antinous. There he announced the gift of a sum of money, the interest of which was to be spent at the festivals of the patron deities; and he directed that the deed of foundation should be inscribed on the inner walls of the portico of the temple, so that newly admitted members might be informed of their rights and their obligations. This document, discovered among the ruins of the ancient Lanuvium in 1816, reveals many important facts in the constitution and working of funerary colleges.(1459) It recites, as we have seen, a part of the senatusconsultum, which authorised the existence of such colleges, and after loyal wishes for the prosperity of the emperor and his house, it prays for an honest energy in contributing to the due interment of the dead, that by regular payments the society may prolong its existence.

The entrance fee of the college is to be 100 sesterces (16s. 8d.), together with a flagon of good wine. A monthly subscription of five asses is appointed. It is evident that the members are of the humblest class, and one clause shows that they have even a sprinkling of slaves among them, who, with the permission of their masters, might connect themselves with these burial clubs.(1460) The brethren could not aspire to the erection even of a columbarium, still less to the possession of a common burial-ground. They confined themselves to making a funeral grant of HS.300 to the appointed heir of each member who had not intermitted his payments to the common fund.(1461) Out of this sum, HS.50 are to be paid to members present at the funeral. The member dying intestate will be buried by the society, and no claim upon his remaining interest in it will be recognised. The slave, whose body was retained by his master after death, was to have a funus imaginarium, and probably a cenotaph. In the case of a member dying within a radius of twenty miles from Lanuvium, three members, on timely notice, were deputed to arrange for the funeral, and required to render an account of the expenses so incurred. A fee of HS.20 was granted to each. But if any fraud were discovered in their accounts, a fine of quadruple the amount was imposed. Lastly, when a member died beyond the prescribed limit, the person who had arranged his funeral, on due attestation by seven Roman citizens, and security given against any further claims, received the burial grant, with certain deductions.(1462) In such precise and orderly fashion, with all the cautious forms of Roman law, did this poor little society order its performance of duty to the dead.

Our knowledge of the funerary colleges is still further amplified by an inscription of a date twenty years later than that of Lanuvium.(1463) In the reign of Antoninus Pius a lady named Salvia Marcellina resolved to commemorate her husband by a gift to the college of Aesculapius and Hygia. She presented to it the site for a shrine close to the Appian Way, a marble statue of Aesculapius, and a hall opening on a terrace, where the banquets of the brotherhood should be held. To this benefaction Marcellina, along with one P. Aelius Zeno, who apparently was her brother, added two donations of HS.15,000 and HS.10,000 respectively, the interest of which was to be distributed in money, or food and wine, at six different festivals. The proportions assignable to each rank in the college were determined at a full meeting, held in the shrine of the “Divine Titus.” Marcellina attaches certain conditions to her gift. The society is to be limited to sixty members, and the place of each member, on his decease, is to be filled by the co-optation of his son. If any member chooses to bequeath his place and interest, his choice is confined to his son, his brother, or his freedman, and he is required to pay for this limited freedom of selection by refunding one-half of his burial grant to the chest of the college.(1464) The college of Aesculapius is nominally a religious and funerary corporation, yet there is only a single reference, in a long document, to the subject of burial. No information is given as to the amount of the funeraticium or burial grant, the sources from which it is derived, or the conditions on which it is to be paid. The chief object of Marcellina seems to have been to connect the memory of her husband with a number of festivals, for the perpetuity of which she makes provision, to promote social intercourse, and to prevent the intrusion of strangers by making membership practically hereditary.

The colleges, of whose inner working we have tried to give a picture, are classed as religious corporations in the collections of the inscriptions. They bear the name of a god, and they provide a solemn interment for their members. But in these respects they do not differ from many other colleges which are regarded as purely secular. The truth is, that any attempt to make a sharp division of these societies on such lines seems futile. Sepulture and religion being admitted by the government as legitimate objects for association, any college, however secular in its tone, might, and probably would, screen itself under sacred names. Nor would this be merely a hypocritical pretence. It is clear that many of the purely industrial colleges, composed as they were of poor people who found it impossible to purchase a separate burial-place, and not easy, unaided, to bear the expense of the last rites, at once consulted their convenience, and gratified the sentiment of fraternity, by arranging for a common place of interment. And with regard to religion, it is a commonplace to point out that all Graeco-Roman societies, great or small, rested on religion. The state, the clan, the family, found their ideal and firmest bond in reverence for divine or heroic ancestors, a reverent piety towards the spirits who had passed into the unseen world. The colleges, as we shall see presently, were formed on the lines of the city which they almost slavishly imitated.(1465) It would be strange and anomalous if they should desert their model in that which was its most original and striking characteristic. And just as Cleisthenes found divine and heroic patrons for his new tribes and demes,(1466) so would a Roman college naturally place itself under the protection of one of the great names of the Roman pantheon. Sometimes, no doubt, there may not have been much sincerity in this conformity to ancient pieties. But do we need to remind ourselves how long a life the form of ancient pieties may have, even when the faith which gave birth to them has become dim and faint?

The usual fashion of writing Roman history has concentrated attention on the doings of the emperor, the life of the noble class in the capital, or on the stations of the legions and the political organisation of the provinces. It is a stately and magnificent panorama. But it is apt to throw the life of the masses into even deeper shadow than that in which time has generally enwrapped them. We are prone to forget that, behind all this stately life, there was a quiet yet extraordinarily busy industrial activity which was its necessary basis and which catered for all its caprices. In the most cursory way Tacitus tells us that a great part of Italy was gathered for the great fair at Cremona, on the fateful days when the town was stormed by the army of Vespasian.(1467) Yet what a gathering it must have been! There were laid out in the booths the fine woollens of Parma and Mutina, the mantles of Canusium, the purples of Tarentum, the carpets of Patavium. Traders from Ilva brought their iron wares, Pompeii sent its fish sauces, and Lucania its famous sausages. Nor would there be missing in the display the oil of Venafrum, and the famous Setine and Falernian vintages.(1468) The improvement of the great roads in the reign of Trajan must have given a vast stimulus to inland commerce. And we may be sure that many a petty merchant with his pack was to be seen along the Aemilian or Flaminian ways, like the travelling vendor of honey and cheese, whom Lucius, in the tale of Apuleius, meets hurrying to Hypata.(1469) The great roads of Spain, since the days of Augustus, carried an immense traffic, which made even the distant Gades a magnificent emporium and one of the richest places in the Roman world.(1470)

The wandering traders in Germany, Spain, or Syria, by a natural instinct drew together in their exile. In the revolt of Julius Civilis, they are found settled among the Batavians, and a collegium peregrinorum has left its memorial on the lower Rhine.(1471) The sodalicium urbanum at Bracara Augusta is a similar society.(1472) Another mercantile college meets us at Apulum in Dacia.(1473) The Syrians of Berytus had a club at Puteoli, and there were at least two clubs of Syrian traders at Malaga.(1474) The graves of Syrian traders have been found at Sirmium in Pannonia, and, on the other hand, there are memorials of Roman merchants at Apamea and Tralles, at Salamis and Mitylene.(1475) Immense stimulus to this transmarine trade must have been given by the Emperor Claudius, who provided insurance against loss by storms, and a liberal system of bounties and rewards for shipping enterprise.(1476) Apollonius of Tyana once expostulated with a young Spartan, who claimed descent from Callicratidas, for having forsaken the true career of a man of his race, to soil himself with the trade of Carthage and Sicily. It is the sentiment of Juvenal who treats as a lunatic the man who will venture his life with a cargo on the wintry Aegean.(1477) But the antiquarian rhetoric attributed to Apollonius embalms the fact that at the opening of a springtime in the reign of Domitian, a great merchant fleet was lying at Malea, ready to sail to the western seas.(1478) These wandering merchants, wherever they went, banded themselves in colleges for mutual protection and for society. In the same way, old soldiers, on their return from long service on the frontiers, gathered in military brotherhoods at such places as Ostia or Misenum.(1479) The veterans of Augustus seem to have become a distinct and recognised class, like the Augustales.(1480) Colleges of youth sprang up everywhere from the days of Nero, at Beneventum, Cremona, and Ameria, or at Moguntiacum, Lauriacum, and Poetovio.(1481) They were formed, like our own sporting clubs, for exercise and healthy rivalry, often under the patronage of the divine hero who, to all the moralists of that age, had become the mythic type of the continent vigour of early manhood. There is one sodality at least devoted to the preservation of chastity.(1482) But it is balanced by the clubs of the “late sleepers” and “late drinkers” of Pompeii.(1483)

The colleges in which the artisans and traders of the Antonine age grouped themselves are almost innumerable, even in the records which time has spared. They represent almost every conceivable branch of industry or special skill or social service, from the men who laid the fine sand in the arena, to the rich wine merchants of Lyons or Ostia.(1484) The mere catalogue of these associations in an index will give an enlarged conception of the immense range and minute specialisation of Roman industry. It may be doubted whether a similar enumeration of our English crafts would be longer or more varied. The great trades, which minister to the first necessities of human life, occupy of course the largest space, the bakers, the cloth-makers, the smiths, carpenters, and wood-merchants, trades often grouped together, the shoemakers and fullers and carders of wool. The mechanics, who made the arms and engines for the legions, naturally hold a prominent place. Nor less prominent are the boatmen of Ostia, and of the Rhone and the Saône.(1485) The sailors of these great rivers had several powerful corporations at Lyons, and, on many an inscription,(1486) claim the wealthiest citizens, men who have gained the whole series of municipal honours, as their chiefs and patrons. Arles, which was then a great sea-port, had its five corporations of sailor-folk, and Ostia an equal number, charged with the momentous task of taking up the cargoes of the African corn-ships for the bakeries of Rome.(1487) Transport by land is represented by colleges of muleteers and ass drivers in the Alps and Apennines.(1488) All the many trades and services which ministered to the wants or pleasures of the capital were similarly banded together, the actors and horn-blowers, the porters and paviors, down to the humble dealers in pastils and salt fish.(1489) We have seen that even the gladiators, in their barrack-prisons, were allowed to form their clubs. Although traces of these combinations are found in remote and obscure places all over the Roman world, it is at great commercial centres, at Ostia, Puteoli, Lyons, and Rome itself, that they have left the most numerous remains. They had probably for one of their objects the protection of their members against encroachments or fiscal oppression. Strabo once came across a deputation of fishermen on their way to plead with the Emperor for a reduction of their dues.(1490) Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that these trades unions were always organised for trade objects, or that the separate colleges were composed of people engaged in the same occupation. They had many honorary members from among the richer classes, and, even in the lower ranks, in defiance of the law,(1491) a dealer in salt might be enrolled among the boatmen of the Rhone, and member of a college of builders.(1492) In truth, the great object of association among these humble people appears to have been not so much the protection of their trade, as the cheerfulness of intercourse, the promotion of fellowship and good-will, the relief of the dulness of humdrum lives.

Probably no age, not even our own, ever felt a greater craving for some form of social life, wider than the family, and narrower than the State. It was a movement at which, as we have seen, even the greatest and strongest of the emperors had to connive. It penetrated society down to its lowest layers. Even the slaves and freedmen of great houses organised themselves in colleges. There were colleges in the imperial household.(1493) T. Aelius Primitivus, chief of the imperial kitchen, being a man of great posthumous ambition, left the care of his own and his wife’s monument to the college of the palatine cooks.(1494) In the inscriptions of Moesia there is the album of a Bacchic club of household slaves containing 80 names, with apparently different grades among them, designated by such titles as archimysta, bouleuta, frater and filius.(1495) A similar club of the servile class, devoted to the worship of Isis, existed at Tarraco.(1496) The officers of another bear the pompous titles of tribune, quaestor, and triumvir, and the slab records the thanks of one Hilara, that her ashes have been allowed to mingle in the same urn with those of Mida the chamberlain.(1497) A provincial treasurer at Ephesus, who was a verna Augusti, commits the custody of his wife’s monument to five colleges of slaves and freedmen in the emperor’s household. One of the colleges bears the name of Faustina. Another college is devoted to the cult of the Lares and images of Antoninus Pius.(1498) Private masters seem to have encouraged the formation of such associations among their dependents, and sometimes to have endowed them with a perpetual foundation.(1499) It was probably politic, as well as kind, to provide for slaves social pleasures within the circle of the household, and thus to forestall the attractions of the numerous clubs outside, which freely offered their hospitality.(1500) We may be sure that the college “which was in the house of Sergia Paulina” was not encouraged by the mistress without good reason.

Thus it appears that in every part of the Roman world, in the decaying little country town, and in the great trading centres, the same great movement of association, is going on apace. It swept into its current almost every social grade, and every trade, handicraft or profession, the pastil-makers, the green-grocers and unguent sellers of Rome, the muleteers of the Alps, the fullers of Pompeii, the doctors at Beneventum, the boatmen of the Seine, the wine merchants of Lyons. Men formed themselves into these groups for the most trivial or whimsical reasons, or for no reason at all, except that they lived in the same quarter, and often met.(1501) From the view which the inscriptions give us of the interior of some of these clubs, it is clear that their main purpose was social pleasure. And this is especially true of the clubs of the humblest class. M. Boissier has well remarked that the poor workman, the poor freedman, with the brand of recent slavery upon him, who was often engaged in some mean or disgusting occupation, amidst a society which from tradition regarded any industry soiled by servile touch with distant scorn, must have felt themselves solitary exiles in the desert of a great town, the most awful desert in the world. The remote splendour of the court and aristocratic life must have deepened the gloom of isolation and helplessness. Shut out for ever from that brilliant world of fashion and pleasure and power, whose social life seemed so charming and gay and friendly, the despised and lonely toiler sought a refuge in little gatherings of people as lonely as himself. At some chance meeting, some one, more energetic than the rest, would throw out the suggestion to form a club, on the model of some of the old trade societies which had always been authorised by the State from the days of Numa, or of those newer associations which were now tacitly permitted under the guise of religion. A small entrance fee would meet, for the time, their modest expenses. In that age of generous or ambitious profusion, it was not hard to find some influential patron, a kindly gracious noble, or an aspiring or generous parvenu, to give the infant society his countenance, along with a substantial donation for the building of a club-house, and for simple convivial pleasures on his birthday, and other festivals which could easily be multiplied. Then the brethren met in solemn form to frame their constitution and commemorate their benefactor, on one of those many monuments which illuminate a social life on which the literature of the age is generally silent.

The continuity and repetition of proved political organisation is a notable characteristic of the great races which have left, or are destined to leave, their mark on history. The British settlers on the prairies of Oregon or Manitoba immediately order themselves into communities, which are modelled on a social system as old as the Heptarchy. The Latin race had perhaps an even more stubborn conservatism than the English. Under the most various circumstances, the Roman instinctively clung to forms and institutions of tested strength and elasticity, and consecrated by the immemorial usage of his race. The most distant and most humble municipality was fashioned after the pattern of the great “city which had become a world.”(1502) It had its senate, the ordo splendidissimus et amplissimus, and the popular assembly which elected the magistrates. The municipal magistrates, if they do not always bear the ancient names, reproduce in shadowy form the dictators, the praetors, the aediles, quaestors, and censors of the old republic.(1503) The same continuity of form is seen in the colleges. As the municipal town was modelled on the constitution of the State, so we may say that the college was modelled on the municipal town. The college, indeed, became a city for the brotherhood, at once a city and a home. They apply to it such terms as respublica collegii.(1504) The meetings often took place in a temple, whether of a patron deity or of an emperor, as those of the Roman Senate were held in the temple of Concord or of Bellona. There they elected their administrative officers, generally for a period of one year; in some cases, by way of special distinction, for life. The heads of these little societies bear various names, magistri, curatores, quinquennales, praefecti, or praesides.(1505) They have also quaestors,(1506) who managed their financial affairs, which, although perhaps on no great scale, still involved the investment of trust moneys to yield the prescribed amounts which had to be distributed either as burial payments, or in food and money on the high festivals. The number of the members was generally limited, either by the government in the interests of public order, or by the will of a benefactor, to prevent the progressive diminution in the value of the divisible shares of the income.(1507) A periodical revision of the roll of members was therefore conducted every five years, as it was in the municipality, by the chief officers, exercising for the time censorial powers in miniature. Fortunately the albums of three or four colleges have been preserved. The lists throw a vivid light on their constitution and social tone. We have drawn attention in a former chapter to the strict gradation of social rank in the city polity. The same characteristic is repeated in the collegiate organisation. In these humble plebeian coteries, composed of “men without a grandfather,” of men, perhaps, whose father was a slave, or of men who were slaves themselves, there emerges, to our astonishment, a punctilious observance of shadowy social distinctions, which is an inheritance from the exclusive aristocratic pride of the old republic. This characteristic has excited in some French critics and historians a certain admiration,(1508) in which it is not altogether easy to join. Gradation of rank to ensure devotion and order in public service is a precious and admirable thing. But artificial and unreal distinctions, invented and conferred to flatter wealth, to stimulate or reward the largesses of the rich patron, to gratify the vulgar self-complacency of the parvenu, are only a degrading form of mendicancy. Some indulgence is no doubt due to men who were still under the yoke of slavery, or only just released from it; the iron had entered into their souls. But both the college and the municipality of the Antonine age cannot be relieved of the charge of purchased or expectant deference to mere wealth. Hence we cannot altogether share the pleasure of M. Boissier in these pale and vulgar reproductions of the hierarchy of a real aristocracy. But the image of the hierarchy is there, and it is very instructive. In a college of smiths in Tarraconensis, there were fifteen patrons at the head of the roll, followed by twelve decurions, including two doctors and a soothsayer, one man isolated by the honours of the bisellium, two honorary members, twenty-eight plain plebeians. There were also several “mothers” and “daughters” of the society.(1509) The album of another club at Ostia shows a list of nine patrons, two holders of quinquennial rank, and one hundred and twenty-three plebeians.(1510) The plebs of many colleges included slaves, and in more than one inscription the men of ingenuous and those of servile birth are carefully distinguished, the slaves being sometimes placed at the bottom of the roll.(1511) Yet it was surely a great advance when slaves and freemen could meet together for the time, on a certain footing of equality, for business or convivial intercourse. The rigid lines of old pagan society are indeed still marked on the face of these clubs. And yet many an inscription leaves the impression that these little societies of the old pagan world are nurseries, in an imperfect way, of the gentle charities and brotherliness which, in shy retirement, the young Church was cultivating in her disciples to be the ideal of the world.

These colleges became homes for the homeless, a little fatherland, or patria, for those without a country. Sometimes they may have met in low taverns, which were on that account jealously watched by some of the emperors.(1512) But they generally attained to the possession of a club-room or schola, a name which had been previously given to the lounging-room of the public baths. Sometimes the schola was erected at their own cost, the site being perhaps granted by some rich patron, or by the town council, on a vacant spot close to the basilica or the theatre.(1513) But frequently a hall was built for them by some generous friend. A like generosity often provided for them a little chapel of their patron deity, with a shaded court, or a balcony open to the air and sun, where the brethren took their common meals.(1514) Or a rich patron, anxious to secure some care and religious observance of his last resting-place, would bequeath to a college a pleasant garden adjoining the tomb, with a house in which to hold their meetings.(1515) And, as a further security against neglect and oblivion, a sum of 10,000 or 15,000 sesterces would be invested to provide a dinner for the college on their benefactor’s birthday.(1516) As years went on, the scene of many a pleasant gathering became a centre round which clustered a great deal of sentiment, and even pride. We may imagine that, allowing for differences of time and faith, the little school or shrine would, in the course of years, attract something of the feeling which consecrates an ancient village church in England, or a little Bethel which was built in the year of the visit of John Wesley. It became a point of honour to make gifts to the schola, to add to its comfort or beauty. One benefactor would redeem a right of ancient lights, or build a boundary wall.(1517) Another would make a present of bronze candelabra on a marble stand, with the device of a Cupid holding baskets in his hands.(1518) Or a college would receive from its curator a gift of some silver statues of the gods, on the dedication of the schola, with a brass tablet, no doubt recording the event.(1519) The gift of a place where the brethren of the club might be buried beside their wives or concubines, was probably, to these poor people, not the least valued benefaction.(1520) Many a humble donation was probably made, which was too slight for a memorial. But it happens that we have one record of gifts evidently offered by poor, insignificant people. It is contained in a very interesting inscription found upon a rock near the theatre at Philippi in Macedonia.(1521) It records that P. Hostilius Philadelphus, in recognition of the aedileship of the college, which had been conferred upon him, bore the expense of polishing the rock, and inscribing upon it the names of the members of a college of Silvanus, sixty-nine in number, together with a list of those who had presented gifts to their temple. The college was a religious one, with a priest who is named in the first place. It is also a funerary society, and seems to be composed of freedmen and of slaves, either belonging to the colony or private masters. They had just erected a temple of their patron god, to which some had given subscriptions in money, while others made various offerings for its adornment. One brother presents an image of the god in a little shrine, another statuettes of Hercules and Mercury. There is another donation of some stone-work in front of the temple, and Hostilius, at his own expense, cut away the rock to smooth the approach to the shrine. Most of the gifts are of trifling value, a poor little picture worth 15 denarii, a marble image of Bacchus costing not much more. But they were the offerings of an enthusiastic brotherhood, and the good Hostilius has given them an immortality of which they never dreamed.

The contributions of the members would generally have been but a sorry provision for the social and religious life of a college. Reproducing, as it did, the constitution and the tone of the city in so many traits, the college in nothing follows its model so closely as in its reliance on the generosity of patronage. At the head of the album of the society there is a list, sometimes disproportionately long, of its patroni. Countless inscriptions leave us in no doubt as to the reason why the patron was elected. His raison d’être in the club is the same as in the city; it is to provide luxuries or amusements for the society, which the society could not generally obtain for itself. The relation of patron and client is, of all the features of ancient life, the one which, being so remote from the spirit of our democratic society, is perhaps most difficult for us to understand. The mutual obligations, enforced by a powerful traditional sentiment, were of the most binding, and sometimes burdensome character. And in that form of relation, between former master and freedman, which became so common in the first age of the Empire, the old master was bound to continue his support and protection to the emancipated slave.(1522) Although there was much that was sordid and repulsive in the position of the client in Juvenal’s and Martial’s days, we must still recognise the fact that the fortune of the rich patron had to pay a heavy price for social deference. Not less heavy was the demand made on the patrons of municipalities and colleges.

There must have been wide distinctions of dignity and importance among the industrial colleges of the Empire. The centonarii, the fabri, and dendrophori of the more important centres, such as Aquileia, Lyons and Milan, the boatmen of Arles or Ostia, would probably have looked down with scorn on the flute-players of the Via Sacra, the hunters of Corfinium, or the muleteers of the Porta Gallica.(1523) And there was a corresponding variety in the rank of the patrons. Some are high officials of the Empire, procurators of provinces, curators of great public works, or distinguished officers of the legions. Or they are men evidently of high position and commanding influence in their province, priests of the altar of Augustus, augurs of the colony, magistrates or decurions of two or three cities.(1524) Sometimes the patron is a great merchant, with warehouses of oil or wine at Lyons or Tarragona or Ostia.(1525) Yet in spite of his wealth, the patron’s social position in those days might be rather uncertain, and we may without difficulty, from modern analogies, believe that a new man might find his vanity soothed, or his position made less obscure, by being known as the titular head of an ancient corporation of the clothworkers, or dendrophori, or of the boatmen on the Saône. Probably in obscure country towns, remote from the seat of Empire, these bourgeois dignities were even more valued.(1526) The humbler colleges would have to be content with one of the new freedmen, such as the vulgar friends of Trimalchio, who, after a youth of shameful servitude, had leapt into fortune by some happy chance or stroke of shrewdness, and who sought a compensation for the contempt of the great world in the deference and adulation of those who waited for their largesses.

The election of a patron was an event of great moment, especially to a poor college. And it was conducted with a formal preciseness, and an assumption of dignity, which, at this distance of time, are sometimes rather ludicrous. In a little town of Cisalpine Gaul in the year 190, the college of smiths and clothworkers met in solemn session in their temple. Their quaestors, who may have had the financial condition of the college in view, made a formal proposal that the college should set an example of the judicious reward of merit, by electing one Tutilius Julianus, a man distinguished by his modesty and liberality, as the patron of their society. The meeting commended the sage proposal of the quaestors, and formally resolved that the honourable Julianus should be requested to accept the distinction, with an apology for so tardy a recognition of his merits, and that a brass plate, containing a copy of this decree, should be placed above his door.(1527)

It is significant that the patrons were, in very many cases, Seviri and Augustales, a body which in the provinces, as we have seen, was generally composed of new men of the freedman class. Although they were steadily rising in importance and in strength of organisation, the provincial Augustales always ranked after the decurions of a town. They often displayed boundless liberality to their city and to their own order.(1528) But the leading Augustales seem to have been quite as generous to the other corporations who placed themselves under their patronage. And they were not unfrequently patrons of several colleges.(1529) It is no long task to find men who were the titular protectors of two or three, of eight, or even of as many as twelve or fifteen colleges. One inscription to Cn. Sentius of Ostia would seem to include among his dependents almost every industrial college in that busy port.(1530) Sentius must have been a very wealthy and a very generous man to accept the patronage of so many societies, which in those days expected or demanded that their honours should be paid for in solid cash. The crowning distinction of a statue, or a durable inscription, was often solemnly decreed with all seemly forms of deference or unstinted flattery in a full meeting of the society. But in a great majority of cases we are amused or disgusted to read that, after all his other liberalities, the benefactor or his heir is permitted to pay for the record of popular gratitude.(1531) This fact may explain the extraordinary abundance of these honours, if it somewhat lowers their value in the eyes of posterity.

But, besides the benefactions which sprang either from ambition or real generosity, a vast number were inspired by the Roman passion for long remembrance, and for the continuity of funerary ritual. The very position of so many tombs by the side of the great roads beyond the city gates, was a silent appeal to the passing traveller not to forget the departed. The appeal is also often expressly made on the stone by those who had no other means of prolonging their own memory or that of some one they loved. It is impossible to read without some emotion the prayer of an old Spanish soldier, that his brethren of the college may never suffer grief like his, if they will only keep the lamp burning for ever over the tomb of his child.(1532) The more opulent took more elaborate measures to provide for the guardianship of their “last home.”(1533) They often attached to the tomb a field or gardens of considerable extent, to be cultivated for profit, or to bear the roses for the annual offering. The whole area, the dimensions of which, in many inscriptions, are defined with mathematical precision, would be surrounded by a wall. Within the enclosure there would be a little shrine containing statues of the dead, an arbour and a well, and a hall in which the kindred of coming generations might hold their annual banquet, till the tie was dissolved by the cruel oblivion of time.(1534) There will be a cottage (taberna) in which a freedman or dependent of the house may be lodged, to watch over the repose of the dead.(1535) But all these precautions, as the testator feels, were likely to be defeated in the end by the vicissitudes of human fortunes.(1536) He had, indeed, before his eyes the fate of many a forsaken and forgotten tomb of old worthies of the Republic. Families die out; faithful freedmen and their children cannot keep their watch for ever. The garden will grow wild, a time may come when no kindly hand will pour the libation or scatter the roses on the natal day. Families will die out, but a college may go on for ever by the perpetual renewal of its members. Inspired with this idea, a worthy of Nîmes created a funerary college to dine regularly in his honour.(1537) It was to consist of thirty persons, and the number was to be maintained by co-optation into the places of deceased members. Members of the college who were obliged to be absent might send one of their friends to join in the repast. Thus the dead man, who had taken such care to prolong his memory, would at no distant date be festively celebrated by people who barely knew his name. Many another left a bequest to a college to be spent in a feast on the testator’s memorial day.(1538) A freedman of Mevania leaves a tiny legacy of HS.1000 to the guild of clothworkers, of whom he is patron, with the condition that not less than twelve of their number shall feast once a year in memory of him.(1539) A more liberal provision for convivial enjoyment was left to a college of Silvanus in honour of Domitian. It consisted of the rents of four estates, with their appurtenances, which were to be spent on the birthdays of the emperor and his wife, “for all time to come,” with the sacrifices proper to such a holy season.(1540) Due provision is often made for the seemly and impressive performance of a rite which was at once a religious duty and a convivial pleasure. There is a curious letter of the time of Antoninus Pius containing a deed of gift to the college of the fabri at Narbo, in return for their constant favours to the donor. One Sextus Fadius presents them with the sum of 16,000 sesterces, the interest of which is to be divided every year at the end of April for ever, at a banquet on his birthday; the guests on this festive occasion are to be habited in their handsomest attire.(1541)

But the fullest and minutest arrangements for these modest meals are to be found in the document relating to the foundation of the poor college of Diana and Antinous, to which reference has already been made. The master of the feast was taken in regular order from the roll of the society. Each brother had to accept this office in his turn, or pay a fine of five shillings of our money. The regular festivals of the club were six in the year, on the natal days of Diana and Antinous, and those of the founder and some of his relatives. There is some obscurity in the regulations for these common feasts, and at first sight they are a ludicrous contrast to the pontiff’s famous banquet in the days of Julius Caesar, described by Macrobius.(1542) M. Boissier naturally refuses to imagine that even the poor brethren of the club of Diana and Antinous would be contented with bread, four sardines, a bottle of good wine, with hot water and the proper table service. The slave steward of Horace probably found much better fare in his popina.(1543) Dr. Mommsen has resolved the mystery. It is evident, from several inscriptions, that sportulae were sharply distinguished from distributions of bread and wine.(1544) The sportula was a gift of richer food or dainties, which in public distributions might be carried home; it was sometimes an equivalent in money. If those who received the sportula preferred to enjoy it at a common table, an appointed member of the college would have the food prepared, or convert the money into dishes for the feast. The bread and wine he might add from his own pocket, if they were not provided by the foundation. How much for these meals came from the club funds, and how much out of the pocket of the magister coenae, is not always clearly stated. But we may be sure, from the tone of the times, that additions to a modest menu were often made by the generosity of patrons and officers of the club.

It would be futile and uninteresting to pursue into all its minute details throughout the inscriptions, the system of sportulae founded by so many patrons and benefactors. Any one who wishes can temperately regale himself for hours at these shadowy club-feasts of the second century. Perhaps the clearest example of such distributions is the donation of Marcellina and Aelius Zeno to the little college of Aesculapius, to which reference has been made for another purpose.(1545) On seven different anniversaries and festivals, sums of money, with bread and wine, were distributed to the brethren of the college in due proportions, according to their official dignity and social rank. Thus, in the division on the 4th of November, the fête-day of the society, the shares in money, according to the various grades, from the father of the college downwards, are six, four, and two. The division of the wine, according to social rank, follows the proportion of nine, six, and three. A slightly different scale is followed on the birthday of the Emperor Antoninus Pius in September, and on the day for New Year’s gifts in January. But in these benefactions the difference of grade is always observed, the patron and the chief magistrates and magnates of the society always receiving a larger share than the obscure brethren at the bottom of the list. In the college of Aesculapius, Marcellina herself, and Aelius Zeno, the two great benefactors of the society, along with the highest of its dignitaries, are allotted three times as much as the plebeian brother. The excellent Marcellina, who, in the fourth century might perhaps have followed S. Jerome and Paula to Bethlehem, was the widow of a good and tender husband, who had been curator of the imperial picture galleries.(1546) Had she been drawn into the ranks of that hidden society, who were beginning to lay their dead in the winding vaults beneath the Appian Way, she would certainly have dealt out her bounty on a different scale and on different principles. Her bequest to the college of Aesculapius reveals how deep in the soul of a charitable pagan woman, who was probably sprung from servile stock, lay that aristocratic instinct of the Roman world which survived the advent of the Divine Peasant and the preaching of the fishermen of Galilee, for far more than four hundred years.

The most curious and interesting among the regulations for these club entertainments are those relating to order and decorum. The club of Diana and Antinous was not very select, being probably composed of poor freedmen and slaves.(1547) The manners of this class, if we may judge by the picture given by Petronius, were, to say the least, wanting in reserve and self-restraint. The great object of such reunions was, as the founder tells us, that the brethren might dine together cheerfully and quietly.(1548) Hence he most wisely orders that all serious proposals and complaints shall be reserved for business meetings. If any member quits his place or makes a disturbance, he is to pay a fine of four sesterces. Twelve sesterces is the penalty for insulting a fellow-guest. The man who, under the influence of good wine, so far forgot himself as to insult the chief officer of the society, was to be punished by a forfeit of twenty sesterces, which would probably be a powerful discouragement of bad manners to most of the brotherhood of Antinous.

Many another gift or bequest, of the same character as Marcellina’s, meets the eye of the student of the inscriptions The motives are singularly uniform—to repay the honours conferred by a college, to celebrate the dedication of a statue, to save from forgetfulness a name which to us is only a bit of the wreckage of time. Everything is conventional about these bequests. The money is nearly always left for the same purpose, an anniversary repast in honour of the humble dead, of the emperor, or of the patron gods. Sometimes the burial fee is refunded to the college, with the prayer that on the natal day the poor pittance derived from the gift be spent on pious rites, with roses strewn upon the grave.(1549) Another will beg only that the lamp in the humble vault may be kept for ever burning. These pieties and longings, which have their roots in a rude pagan past before the dawn of history, were destined to prolong their existence far into Christian times. The lamp will be kept burning over many a tomb of saint or martyr in the fourth or fifth century. And the simple feasts which the clothworkers of Brescia, or the boatmen of Ostia or Lyons, observed to do honour to some departed patron, will be celebrated, often in riotous fashion, over the Christian dead in the days of S. Augustine and S. Paulinus of Nola.(1550)

Dr. Mommsen believes that the collegiate life which blossomed forth so luxuriantly in the early Empire, was modelled on the sacred union of the Roman family.(1551) And the instinct of the Roman nature for continuity in institutions prepossesses us in favour of the theory. In the college endowed by Marcellina and Zeno, there are a father and a mother, and elsewhere we read of daughters of a college. The members sometimes call themselves brethren and sisters.(1552) One of the feasts of the brotherhood is on the day sacred to “dear kinship,” when relations gathered round a common table, to forget in kindly intercourse any disturbance of affection.(1553) They also met in the early days of January, when presents were exchanged. Above all, like the primal society, they gathered on the birthdays of the revered dead to whom they owed duty and remembrance. And in many cases the members of the society reposed beside one another in death.(1554) The college was a home of fraternal equality in one sense. As M. Boissier has pointed out, the members had equal rights in the full assembly of the club. A quorum was needed to pass decrees and to elect the officers. And, in the full conclave, the slave member had an equal voice with the freeman, and might, perchance, himself even be elected to a place of dignity.(1555) He might thus, in a very humble realm, wield authority for the time over those who were accustomed to despise him. It is true that he needed his master’s leave to join a college, and his master had the legal power to deny to him the last boon of burial by the hands of his collegiate brethren.(1556) Yet it was undoubtedly a great stride in advance when a slave could sit at table or in council on equal terms with free-born men, and might receive pious Roman burial, instead of being tossed like a piece of carrion into a nameless grave. The society of one of these humble colleges must have often for the moment relieved the weariness and misery of the servile life, and awakened, or kept alive, some sense of self-respect and dignity. The slave may have now and then felt himself even on the edge of political influence, as when his college placarded its sympathies in an election contest on the walls of Pompeii. Yet we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by words and appearances. In spite of legislative reform, in spite of a growing humane sentiment, whether in the Porch or the Christian Church, the lot of the slave and of the poor plebeian will be in many respects as hopeless and degraded in the reign of Honorius as it was in the reign of Trajan.(1557) Even in the reign of Trajan, it is true, perhaps even in the reign of Nero, there were great houses like the younger Pliny’s, where the slaves were treated as humble friends, where their weddings were honoured by the presence of the master, where, in spite of legal disabilities, they were allowed to dispose of their savings by will.(1558) And the inscriptions record the gratitude and affection to their masters and mistresses of many who were in actual slavery, or who had but just emerged from it. But these instances cannot make us forget the cruel contempt and barbarity of which the slave was still the victim, and which was to be his lot for many generations yet to run. And therefore the improvement in the condition of the slave or of his poor plebeian brother by the theoretical equality in the colleges, may be easily exaggerated. In the humblest of these clubs, the distribution of good fare and money is not according to the needs of the members, but regulated by their social and official rank. We cannot feel confident that in social intercourse the same distinction may not have been coldly observed. In modern times we often see a readiness to accord an equality of material enjoyment, along with a stiff guardianship of social distinctions which are often microscopic to the detached observer. And it would not be surprising to discover that the “master” or the “mother” of the college of Antinous protected their dignity by an icy reserve at its festive meetings.

The question has been raised whether the ordinary colleges were in any sense charitable institutions for mutual help. And certainly the inscriptions are singularly wanting in records of bequests made directly for the relief of poverty, for widows and orphans or the sick. The donations or bequests of rich patrons seem to have had chiefly two objects in view, the commemoration of the dead and the provision for social and convivial enjoyment. It is true that, just as in municipal feasts, there is often a distribution of money among the members of colleges. But this appears to be deprived of an eleemosynary character by the fact that by far the largest shares are assigned to those who were presumably the least in need of them. Yet it is to be recollected that we probably have left to us the memorial of only a small proportion of these gifts, and that, if we had a full list of all the benefactions bequeathed to some of the colleges, the total amount received by each member in the year might be very considerable, if judged by the standard of ordinary plebeian incomes. To the ambitious slave any addition, however small, to his growing peculium, which might enable him to buy his freedom, would certainly be grateful.

There is one class of colleges, however, which were undoubtedly formed to meet various exigencies in the course of life, as well as to make a provision for decent burial. These are the military clubs, on the objects and constitution of which a flood of light has been thrown by the study of the inscriptions in the great legionary camps of North Africa.(1559) A passage of Vegetius shows us the provident arrangement made by government for the future of the ordinary legionary.(1560) It is well known that, on the accession of each new emperor, or on the occurrence of some interesting event in the history of the prince’s family, or of some great military success, and often without any particular justification, a donative was distributed throughout the army. It sometimes reached a considerable amount, ranging from the 25 denarii granted by Vespasian, to the 5000 of M. Aurelius.(1561) One half of this largess was by orders set aside, and retained under the custody of the standard-bearers, to provide a pension on the soldier’s retirement from the service. Another fund, entirely different, was formed by the soldiers’ own contributions, to furnish a decent burial for those who died on service. But the law against the formation of colleges fell with peculiar severity on the soldier.(1562) Not even for a religious purpose was he permitted to join such a society. This prohibition, however, seems to have been relaxed in the case of the officers, and some of the more highly skilled corps.(1563) And we have among the inscriptions of Lambaesis a few instructive records of these military colleges.(1564)

Lambaesis, as we have seen, was one of those camps which developed into a regular municipality, after the recognition of soldiers’ marriages by Septimius Severus. Henceforth the camp became only a place of drill and exercise, and ceased to be the soldier’s home. And on the ground where the soldiers’ huts used to stand, there are left the remains of a number of buildings of the basilica shape, erected probably in the third century, which were the club-houses of the officers of the Tertia Augusta. The interior was adorned with statues of imperial personages, and on the wall was inscribed the law of the college, commencing with an expression of gratitude for the very liberal pay which enabled the college to make provision for the future of its members.(1565) The provision was made in various ways. An ambitious young officer was allowed a liberal viaticum for a journey across the sea to seek promotion. If promotion came, he received another grant to equip him. One half the amount granted in these cases was mercifully paid to him in the unpleasant contingency of his losing his grade. If he died on active service, his heir received a payment on the larger scale. And, when a man, in due course, retired from the army, he received the same sum under the name of anularium, which has puzzled the antiquary.(1566)

It has been maintained that these military clubs were really and primarily funerary societies.(1567) And provision for burial was certainly one of their objects. Yet, on a reading of the law of the society of the Cornicines, it may be doubted whether the subject of burial is more prominent than the other contingencies of the officer’s life, and in some of the inscriptions, burial is not even alluded to. The grant on retirement or promotion, and the grant to his heir on the death of a member, are the same. But probably the majority of officers had the good fortune to carry the money with them into peaceful retirement, if not into higher rank in another corps. In this case they would probably join another college, whether of soldiers or veterans, and secure once more the all-important object of a decent and pious interment. The military clubs seem rather intended to furnish an insurance against the principal risks and occasions of expenditure in a soldier’s career. A calculation shows that, after providing for all these liabilities, the military college must have had a considerable surplus.(1568) How it was spent, it is not hazardous to conjecture. If the poor freedmen and slaves at Ostia or Lanuvium could afford their modest meals, with a fair allowance of good wine, drunk to the memory of a generous benefactor, we may be sure that the college of the Cornicines at Lambesi would relieve the tedium of the camp by many a pleasant mess dinner, and that they would have been astonished and amused on such occasions to hear themselves described merely as a burial society.

The foundation law of the college of Diana and Antinous betrays some anxiety lest the continuity of the society should be broken. And in many a bequest, the greatest care is taken to prevent malversation or the diversion of the funds from their original purpose.(1569) We feel a certain pathetic curiosity, in reading these records of a futile effort to prolong the memory of obscure lives, to know how long the brotherhoods continued their meetings, or when the stated offerings of wine and flowers ceased to be made. In one case the curiosity is satisfied and we have before our eyes the formal record of the extinction of a college. It is contained in a pair of wooden tablets found in some quarry pits near Alburnus, a remote village of Dacia. The document was drawn up, as the names of the consuls show, in the year 167, the year following the fierce irruption of the Quadi and Marcomanni into Dacia, Pannonia, and Noricum, in which Alburnus was given to the flames.(1570) Artemidorus the slave of Apollonius, and Master of the college of Jupiter Cernenius, along with the two quaestors, places it on record, with the attestation of seven witnesses, that the college has ceased to exist. Out of a membership of fifty-four, only seventeen remain. The colleague of Artemidorus in the mastership has never set foot in Alburnus since his election. The accounts have been wound up, and no balance is left in the chest. For a long time no member has attended on the days fixed for meetings, and, as a matter of course, no subscriptions have been paid. All this is expressed in the rudest, most ungrammatical Latin, and Artemidorus quaintly concludes by saying, that, if a member has just died, he must not imagine that he has any longer a college or any claim to funeral payments! The humble brothers of the society, whom Artemidorus reproaches for their faithless negligence, may probably have fled to some refuge when their masters’ lands were devastated by the Marcomanni, or been swept on in the fierce torrent of invaders which finally broke upon the walls of Aquileia.

Book III

NEC PHILOSOPHIA SINE VIRTUTE EST NEC SINE PHILOSOPHIA VIRTUS

I. THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR

Philosophy in the time of Seneca was a very different thing from the great cosmic systems of Ionia and Magna Graecia, or even from the system of the older Stoicism. Speculative interest had long before his time given way to the study of moral problems with a definite practical aim. If the stimulus of the searching method of Socrates gave an impetus for a century to abstract speculation, it had an even more decided and long-lived influence in diverting thought to moral questions from the old ambitious paths. His disciples Antisthenes and Aristippus prepared the way for the Stoic and Epicurean schools which dominated the Roman world in the last century of the Republic and the first of the Empire. And even Plato and Aristotle indirectly helped forward the movement. It is not merely that, for both these great spirits, the cultivation of character and the reform of society have a profound interest. But even in their metaphysics, they were paving the way for the more introspective and practical turn which was taken by post-Aristotelian philosophy, by giving to what were mere conceptions of the mind a more real existence than to the things of sense.(1571) The “ideas” or “forms” which they contrast with the world of concrete things, are really creations of the individual mind of which the reality must be sought in the depths of consciousness, however they may be divinised and elevated to some transcendental region beyond the limits of sense and time. With Aristotle, as with Plato, in the last resort, the higher reason is the true essence of man, coming into the body from a diviner world, and capable of lifting itself to the ideal from the cramping limitations of sensuous life. The philosopher in the Phaedo who turns his gaze persistently from the confusing phantasmagoria of the senses to that realm of real existence, eternal and immutable, of which he has once had a vision, is really the distant progenitor of the sage of Stoicism, who cuts himself off from the external objects of desire, to find within a higher law, and the peace which springs from a life in harmony with the Reason of the world.

The ancient schools, if they maintained a formal individuality even to the days of Justinian,(1572) had worked themselves out. A host of scholarchs, from all the cities of the Greek East, failed to break fresh ground, and were content to guard the most precious or the least vulnerable parts of an ancient tradition. Moreover, the scrutiny of the long course of speculation, issuing in such various conclusions, with no criterion to decide between their claims, gave birth to a scepticism which sheltered itself even under the great name of the Academy. And as the faith in the truth of systems dwindled, the marks of demarcation between them faded; men were less inclined to dogmatise, and began to select and combine elements from long discordant schools. In this movement the eclectic and the sceptic had very much the same object in view—the support and culture of the individual moral life.(1573) The sceptic sought his ideal in restrained suspense of judgment and in moral calm. The eclectic, without regard to speculative consistency, and with only a secondary interest in speculation, sought for doctrines from any quarter which provided a basis for the moral life, and, in the conflict of systems on the deeper questions, would fall back, like Cicero, on intuition and the consent of consciousness.(1574) Creative power in philosophy was no more. Speculative curiosity, as pictured in the Phaedo or the Theaetetus, had lost its keenness. The imperious craving was for some guide of life, some medicine for the deeply-felt maladies of the soul.

The extinction of the free civic life of Greece, the conquests of Macedon, the foundation of the world-wide empire of Rome, had wrought a momentous moral change. In the old city-state, religion, morals, and political duty were linked in a gracious unity and harmony. The citizen drew moral support and inspiration from ancestral laws and institutions clothed with almost divine authority. Even Plato does not break away from the old trammels, but requires the elders of his Utopia as a duty, after they have seen the vision of God, to descend again to the ordinary tasks of government. But when the corporate life which supplied such vivid interests and moral support was wrecked, the individual was thrown back upon himself. Morals were finally separated from politics. Henceforth the great problem of philosophy was how to make character self-sufficing and independent; how to find the beatitude of man in the autonomous will, fenced against all assaults of chance and change.(1575) At the same time, the foundation of great monarchies, Macedonian or Roman, embracing many tribes and races and submerging old civic or national barriers, brought into clearer light the idea of a universal commonwealth, and placed morals on the broad foundation of a common human nature and universal brotherhood. The mundane city of old days, which absorbed, perhaps too completely, the moral life and conscience of her sons, has vanished for ever. And in its place and over its ruins has risen an all-embracing power which seems to have all the sweep of an impersonal force of nature, though it is sometimes impelled by one wild, lawless will. If, in return for the loss of civic freedom, ambitious and patriotic energy, or pride of civic life, it has given to its subjects a marvellous peace and order and culture, have not the mass of men become grosser and more materialised? If there is greater material well-being and better administration, have not the moral tone and ideal, in the lack of stimulus, been lowered? Has not vice become more shameless, and the greed for all things pleasant grown harder and more cruel? Are not the mass of men hopelessly and wearily wandering in a tangled maze without a clue?(1576)

With such questionings ringing in his inner ear, the man with some lingering instinct of goodness might well crave, beyond anything else, for an inner law of life which should bring order into the chaos of his conduct and desires.(1577) And philosophy, having in magnificent effort failed to scale the virgin heights, fell back on conduct, which seemed then, even more than to a lost teacher of our youth, “three-fourths of life.” The great science which, in the glory and fresh vigour of the Hellenic prime, aspired to embrace all existence and all knowledge, to penetrate the secret of the universe and God, by general consent narrowed its efforts to relieve the struggles of this transient life set “between two eternities.” The human spirit, weary of the fruitless quest of an ever-vanishing ideal of knowledge, took up the humbler task of solving the ever-recurring problem of human happiness and conduct. Henceforth, in spite of traditional dialectic discordance, all the schools, Stoic or Epicurean, Sceptic or Eclectic, are seeking for the secret of inner peace, and are singularly unanimous in their report of the discovery.(1578) The inner life of the spirit becomes all in all. Speculation and political activity are equally unimportant to the true life of the soul. Calm equipoise of the inner nature, undisturbed by the changes of fortunes or the solicitations of desire, is the ideal of all, under whatever difference of phrase. What has he to do with any single state who realises his citizenship in the great commonwealth of man? If the secret of peace cannot be won by launching in adventurous thought into the Infinite, perchance it may be found in discipline of the rebellious will. Philosophy, then, must become the guide of life, the healer of spiritual maladies.(1579) It must teach the whole duty of man, to the gods, to the state, to parents and elders, to women and to slaves. It must attempt the harder task of bringing some principle of order into the turmoil of emotion and passion: it must teach us, amid the keen claims of competing objects of desire, to distinguish the true from the false, the permanent from the fleeting.

The moral reformer cannot indeed dispense with theory and a ground of general principles,(1580) but he will not forget that his main business is to impart the ars vivendi; he will be more occupied with rules which may be immediately applied in practice, than with the theory of morals. A profound acquaintance with the pathology of the soul, minute study of the weaknesses of character, long experience of the devices for counteracting them, will be worth far more than an encyclopædic knowledge of centuries of speculation.(1581) He will not undervalue the moral discourse, with the practical object of turning souls from their evil ways; but he has only contempt for the rhetoric of the class-room which desecrates solemn themes by the vanities of phrase-making.(1582) The best and most fruitful work of practical philosophy is done by private counsel, adapted to the special needs of the spiritual patient. He must be encouraged to make a full confession of the diseases of his soul.(1583) He must be trained in daily self-examination, to observe any signs of moral growth or of backsliding. He must be checked when over confident, and cheered in discouragement. He must have his enthusiasm kindled by appropriate examples of those who have trodden the same path and reached the heights.(1584)

This serious aim of philosophy commended itself to the intensely practical and strenuous spirit of the Romans. And although there were plenty of showy lecturers or preachers in the first century who could draw fashionable audiences, the private philosophic director was a far more real power. The triumph of Aemilius Paulus brought numbers of Greek exiles to Italy, many of whom found a home as teachers in Roman families.(1585) Panaetius, who revolutionised Stoicism, and made it a working system, profoundly influenced the circle of Scipio Aemilianus, in whose house he lived. Great generals and leaders of the last age of the Republic, a Lucullus or a Pompey, often carried philosophers in their train. From Augustus to Elagabalus we hear of their presence at the imperial court. The wife of Augustus sought consolation on the death of Drusus from Areus, her husband’s philosophic director.(1586) Many of these men indeed did not take their profession very seriously, and in too many cases they were mere flatterers and parasites whom the rich patron hired from ostentation and treated with contumely.(1587) Both Nero and Hadrian used to amuse themselves with the quarrels and vanity of their philosophers.(1588) But in the terror of the Claudian Caesars, the Stoic director is often seen performing his proper part. Julius Canus, when ordered to execution by Caligula, had his philosopher by his side, with whom he discussed till the last fatal moment the future of the soul.(1589) The officer who brought the sentence of death to Thrasea found him absorbed in conversation with the Cynic Demetrius on the mystery which the lancet was in a few moments to resolve.(1590)

Of this great movement to cultivate a moral life in paganism L. Annaeus Seneca was not the least illustrious representative. Musonius, his younger contemporary, and Epictetus, the pupil of Musonius, were engaged in the same cure of souls, and taught practically the same philosophic gospel. They equally paid but slight attention to the logic and physics of the older schools.(1591) Virtue, to all of them, is the one great end of philosophic effort. They were all deeply impressed by the spiritual wants of the time,(1592) and they all felt that men needed not subtleties of disquisition or rhetorical display, but direct, personal teaching which appealed to the conscience. To all of them the philosopher is a physician of souls. Musonius and Epictetus were probably loftier and more blameless characters than Seneca. Epictetus especially, from the range and simple attractiveness of his teaching, might seem to many a better representative of the philosophic director than Seneca. Seneca, as the wealthy minister of Nero, excites a repugnance in some minds, which prevents them doing justice to his unquestionable power and fascination. His apparent inconsistency has condemned him in the eyes of an age which professes to believe in the teaching of the Mount, and idolises grandiose wealth and power. His rhetoric offends a taste that can tolerate and applaud verbose banalities, with little trace of redeeming art. He cannot always win the hearing accorded to the repentant sinner, whose dark experience may make his message more real and pungent. The historian, however, must put aside these rather pharisaic prejudices, and give Seneca the position as a moral teacher which his writings have won in ages not less earnest than ours. Nor need we fear to recognise a power which led the early Fathers to trace the spiritual vision of Seneca to an intercourse with S. Paul,(1593) supported by a feigned correspondence which imposed on S. Augustine and S. Jerome.(1594) The man who approaches Seneca thinking only of scandals gleaned from Tacitus and Dion Cassius,(1595) and frozen by a criticism which cannot feel the power of genius, spiritual imagination, and a profound moral experience, behind a rhetoric sometimes forced and extravagant, had better leave him alone. The Christianity of the twentieth century might well hail with delight the advent of such a preacher, and would certainly forget all the accusations of prurient gossip in the accession of an immense and fascinating spiritual force. The man with any historical imagination must be struck with amazement that such spiritual detachment, such lofty moral ideals, so pure an enthusiasm for the salvation of souls, should emerge from a palace reeking with all the crimes of the haunted races of Greek legend. That the courtier of the reigns of Caligula and Claudius, the tutor and minister of Nero, should not have escaped some stains may be probable: that such a man should have composed the Letters and the De Ira of Seneca is almost a miracle. Yet the glow of earnestness and conviction, the intimate knowledge of the last secrets of guilty souls, may well have been the reward of such an ordeal.

Seneca’s career, given a latent fund of moral enthusiasm, was really a splendid preparation for his mission, as an analyst of a corrupt society and a guide to moral reform. He lived through the gloomiest years of the imperial tyranny; he had been in the thick of its intrigues, and privy to its darkest secrets; he had enjoyed its favour, and knew the perils of its jealousy and suspicion. He came as an infant from Cordova to Rome in the last years of Augustus.(1596) In spite of weak health, he was an ardent student of all the science and philosophy of the time, and he fell under the influence of Sotion, a member of the Sextian School, which combined a rigorous Stoicism with Pythagorean rules of life.(1597) As a young advocate and prosperous official, he passed unharmed through the terror and ghastly rumours of the closing years of Tiberius.(1598) His eloquence in the Senate excited the jealousy of Caligula, and he narrowly escaped the penalty.(1599) In the reign of Claudius he must have been one of the inner circle of the court, for his banishment, at the instance of Messalina, for eight years to Corsica was the penalty of a supposed intrigue with Julia, the niece of the emperor.(1600) Seneca knew how to bend to the storm, and, by the influence of Agrippina, he was recalled to be the tutor of the young Nero, and on his accession four years afterwards, became his first minister by the side of Burrus.(1601) The famous quinquennium, an oasis in the desert of despotism, was probably the happiest period of Seneca’s life. In spite of some misgivings, the dream of an earthly Providence, as merciful as it was strong, seemed to be realised.(1602) But it was, after all, a giddy and anxious elevation, and the influence of Seneca was only maintained by politic concessions, and was constantly threatened by the daemonic ambition of Agrippina.(1603) And Seneca had enemies like P. Suillius, jealous of his power and his millions, and eagerly pointing to the hypocrisy of the Stoic preacher, whom gossip branded as an adulterer and a usurer.(1604) The death of Burrus gave the last shock to his power.(1605) His enemies poured in to the assault. The emperor had long wished to shake off the incubus of a superior spirit; and the riches, the pointed eloquence, and more pointed sarcasms, the gardens and villas and lordly state of the great minister, suggested a possible aspirant to the principate. Seneca acted on his principles and offered to give up everything.(1606) But his torture was to be prolonged, and his doom deferred for about two years. His release came in the fierce vengeance for the Pisonian conspiracy.(1607)

Seneca was an ideal director for the upper class of such an age. He had risen to the highest office in a world-wide monarchy, and he had spent years in hourly fear of death. He had enjoyed the society of the most brilliant circles, and exchanged epigrams and repartees with the best; he had also seen them steeped in debauchery and treachery, and terror-stricken in base compliance. He had witnessed their fantastic efforts of luxury and self-indulgence, and heard the tale of wearied sensualism and disordered ambition and ineffectual lives.(1608) His disciples were drawn, if not from the noblest class, at any rate from the class which had felt the disillusionment of wealth and fashion and power. And the vicissitudes in his own fate and character made him a powerful and sympathetic adviser. He had long to endure the torturing contrast of splendid rank and wealth, with the brooding terror of a doom which might sweep down at any moment. He was also tortured by other contrasts, some drawn by the fierceness of envious hatred, others perhaps acknowledged by conscience. Steeped in the doctrines of Chrysippus and Pythagoras, he had subdued the ebullient passions of youth by a more than monastic asceticism.(1609) He had passionately adopted an ethical creed which aimed at a radical reform of human nature, at the triumph of cultivated and moralised reason and social sympathy over the brutal materialism and selfishness of the age. He had pondered on its doctrines of the higher life, of the nothingness of the things of sense, on death, and the indwelling God assisting the struggling soul, on the final happy release from all the sordid misery and terror, until every earthly pleasure and ambition faded away in the presence of a glorious moral ideal.(1610) And yet this pagan monk, this idealist, who would have been at home with S. Jerome or Thomas à Kempis, had accumulated a vast fortune, and lived in a palace which excited the envy of a Nero. He was suspected of having been the lover of two princesses of the imperial house.(1611) He was charged with having connived at, or encouraged the excesses of Nero, and even of having been an accomplice in the murder of Agrippina, or its apologist.(1612) Some of these rumours are probably false, the work of prurient imaginations in the most abandoned age in history. Yet there are traces in Seneca’s writings that he had not passed unscathed through the terrible ordeal to which character was exposed in that age. There are pictures of voluptuous ease and jaded satiety which may be the work of a keen sympathetic observation, but which may also be the expression of repentant memory.(1613) In any case, he had sounded the very depths of the moral abysses of his time. He had no illusions about the actual condition of human nature. The mass of men, all but a few naturally saintly souls, were abandoned to lust or greed or selfish ambition. Human life was an obscene and cruel struggle of wild beasts for the doles flung by fortune into the arena.(1614) The peace and happiness of the early Eden have departed for ever, leaving men to the restlessness of exhausted appetite, or to the half-repentant sense of impotent lives, spent in pursuing the phantoms of imaginary pleasure, with broken glimpses now and then of a world for ever lost.(1615) With such a scene about him in his declining years, whatever his own practice may have been, Seneca came to feel an evangelistic passion, almost approaching S. Paul’s, to open to these sick perishing souls the vision of a higher life through the practical discipline of philosophy.

The tendency to regard the true function of philosophy as purely ethical, reforming, guiding and sustaining character and conduct, finds its most emphatic expression in Seneca. He is far more a preacher, a spiritual director, than a thinker, and he would have proudly owned it. His highest, nay, one may almost say his only aim, is, in our modern phrase, to which his own sometimes approaches, to save souls. Philosophy in its highest and best sense is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, nor the disinterested play of intellect, regardless of intellectual consequences, as in a Platonic dialogue.(1616) It is pre-eminently the science or the art of right living, that is of a life conformed to right reason.(1617) Its great end is the production of the sapiens, the man who sees, in the light of Eternal Reason, the true proportions of things, whose affections have been trained to obey the higher law, whose will has hardened into an unswerving conformity to it, in all the difficulties of conduct.(1618) And the true philosopher is no longer the cold, detached student of intellectual problems, far removed from the struggles and the miseries of human life. He has become the generis humani paedagogus,(1619) the schoolmaster to bring men to the Ideal Man. In comparison with that mission, all the sublimity or subtlety of the great masters of dialectic becomes mere contemptible trifling, as if a man should lose himself in some game, or in the rapture of sweet music, with a great conflagration raging before his eyes. In the universal moral shipwreck, how can one toy with these old world trifles, while the perishing are stretching out their hands for help?(1620) Not that Seneca despises the inheritance of ancient wisdom, so far as it has any gospel for humanity.(1621) He will accept good moral teaching from any quarter, from Plato or Epicurus, as readily as from Chrysippus or Panaetius.(1622) He is ready to give almost divine honours to the great teachers of the human race. But he also feels that no moral teaching can be final. After a thousand ages, there will still be room for making some addition to the message of the past. There will always be a need for fresh adjustments and applications of the remedies which past wisdom has handed down.(1623)

It is almost needless to say that Seneca has almost a contempt for the so-called liberal studies of his day.(1624) There is only one truly liberal study, that which aims at liberating the will from the bondage of desire. Granted that it is necessary as a mental discipline to submit to the grammarian in youth; yet experience shows that this training does nothing to form the virtuous character.(1625) Who can respect a man who wastes his mature years, like Didymus, in inquiries as to the relative ages of Hecuba or Helen, or the name of the mother of Aeneas, or the character of Anacreon or Sappho?(1626) The man of serious purpose will rather try to forget these trifles than continue the study of them. And Seneca treats in the same fashion the hair-splitting and verbal subtleties of some of the older Stoics. He acquiesces indeed, in their threefold division of Philosophy into Logic, Physics, and Ethics; but for the first department he seems to have but scant respect, though once or twice he amuses his pupil Lucilius by a disquisition on Genus and Species, or the Platonic and Aristotelian “Causes,” in the style of the Stoic scholasticism.(1627) Seneca was writing for posterity; he has his intellectual vanity; and he probably wished to show that, while he set but little store by such studies, this was not due to an imperfect knowledge of them. It is because life is too short, and its great problems are too urgent, to permit a serious man to spend his precious years in fruitless intellectual play. He calls on Lucilius to leave such barren subtleties, which bring the greatest of all themes down to the level of intellectual jugglery.(1628)

For the department of Physics Seneca has much more respect, and he evidently devoted much attention to it. We have traces of some lost works of his on scientific subjects, and there is still extant a treatise in seven books on Natural Questions, which became a handbook of science in the Middle Ages.(1629) It deals with such subjects as we meet with in the poem of Lucretius, thunder and lightning, winds and earthquakes, and rising and failing springs. But it has perhaps less of the scientific spirit than Lucretius, according to our modern standards. We have abundant reference to old physical authorities, to Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Diogenes of Apollonia, to Caecina and Attalus. But the conception of any scientific method beyond more or less ingenious hypothesis, or of any scientific verification of hypothesis, is utterly absent. This is of course a general characteristic of most of the scientific effort of antiquity. The truth is that, although Seneca probably had some interest in natural phenomena, he had a far more profound interest in human nature and human destiny. The older Stoics, with some variations, subordinated Physics to Ethics, as of inferior and only subsidiary importance.(1630) Seneca carries this subordination almost to extremes, although he also is sometimes inconsistent.(1631) He thinks it significant that while the World-Spirit has hidden gold, the great tempter and corruptor, far beneath our feet, it has displayed, in mysterious yet pompous splendour, in the azure canopy above us, the heavenly orbs which are popularly believed to control our destiny in the material sense, and which may really govern it, by raising our minds to the contemplation of an infinite mystery and a marvellous order.(1632) To Seneca, as to Kant, there seems a mystic tie between the starry heavens above and the moral law within. In the prologue to the Natural Questions, indeed, carried away for the moment by the grandeur of his theme, Seneca seems to exalt the contemplation of the infinite distances and mysterious depths and majestic order of the stellar world far above the moral struggles of our mundane life. The earth shrinks to a mere point in infinitude, an ant-hill where the human insects mark out their Lilliputian territories and make their wars and voyages for their lifetime of an hour.(1633) This, however, is rather a piece of rhetoric than a careful statement of Seneca’s real view. In the Letters, again and again, we are told that virtue is the one important thing, that the conquest of passion raises man to be equal to God,(1634) and that in the release of the rational or divine part of us from bondage to the flesh, man recovers a lost liberty, a primeval dignity. But in this struggle the spirit may refresh and elevate itself by looking up to the divine world from which it draws its origin, and to which it may, perchance, return. To Seneca’s mind the so-called physics really involve theology and metaphysics. In the contemplation of the vastness of the material universe, the mind may be aroused to the urgency and interest of the great questions touching God, His relation to fate, to the world, and man.(1635) The scientific interest in Seneca is evidently not the strongest. There are still indeed the echoes of the old philosophies which sought man’s true greatness and final beatitude in the clear vision of abstract truth. But Seneca is travelling rapidly on the way which leads to another vision of the celestial city, in which emotion, the passionate yearning for holiness as well as truth, blends with and tends to overpower the ideal of a passionless eternity of intellectual intuition. In Seneca’s rapturous outburst on the gate of deliverance opened by death, making allowance for difference of associations and beliefs, there is surely a strange note of kindred sympathy, across the gulf of thirteen centuries, with Thomas à Kempis.(1636)

The Natural Questions were, as he tells us, the work of his old age.(1637) He has a lofty conception of his task, of the importance of the subject to the right culture of the spirit, and he summons up all his remaining energy to do it justice. But the work falls far short, in interest and executive skill, of a treatise like the De Beneficiis, and the principle of edification—omnibus sermonibus aliquid salutare miscendum(1638)—is too obtrusive, and sometimes leads to incongruous and almost ludicrous effects. A reference to the mullet launches him on a discourse on luxury.(1639) A discourse on mirrors would hardly seem to lend itself to moralising. Yet the invention furnishes to Seneca impressive lessons on self-knowledge, and a chance of glorifying the simple age when the unkempt daughter of a Scipio, who received her scanty dowry in uncoined metal, had never had her vanity aroused by the reflected image of her charms.(1640) The subject of lightning naturally gives occasion to a homily against the fear of death.(1641) A prologue, on the conflict to be waged with passion and luxury and chance and change, winds up abruptly with the invitation—quaeramus ergo de aquis ... qua ratione fiant.(1642) The investigation closes with an imaginative description of the great cataclysm which is destined to overwhelm in ruin the present order. The earthquakes in Campania in 66 A.D. naturally furnish many moral lessons.(1643) The closing passage of the Natural Questions is perhaps the best, and the most worthy of Seneca. In all these inquiries, he says, into the secrets of nature, we should proceed with reverent caution and self-distrust, as men veil their faces and bend in humbleness before a sacrifice.(1644) How many an orb, moving in the depths of space, has never yet risen upon the eyes of man.(1645) The Great Author Himself is only dimly visible to the inner eye, and there are vast regions of His universe which are still beyond our ken, which dazzle us by their effulgence, or elude our gross senses by their subtle secrecy. We are halting on the threshold of the great mysteries. There are many things destined to be revealed to far-distant ages, when our memory shall have passed away,(1646) of which our time does not deserve the revelation. Our energies are spent in discovering fresh ingenuities of luxury and monstrous vice. No one gives a thought to philosophy; the schools of ancient wisdom are deserted and left without a head.(1647) It is in this spirit that Seneca undertook his mission as a saviour of souls.

Seneca, in the epilogue to the Natural Questions, remarks sarcastically that, as all human progress is slow, so, even with all our efforts of self-indulgence, we have not yet reached the finished perfection of depravity; we are still making discoveries in vice. In another passage he maintains that his own age is no worse than others.(1648) But this is only because at all times the mass of men are bad. Such pessimism in the first and second centuries was a prevalent tone. We meet it alike in Persius, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal, and in Seneca, Tacitus, Pliny, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.(1649) The rage for wealth and luxury, the frenzy of vice which perverted natural healthy instincts and violated the last retreats of modesty, the combination of ostentation and meanness in social life, the cowardice and the cruelty which are twin offspring of pampered self-indulgence, the vanity of culture and the vanishing of ideals, the vague restless ennui, hovering between satiety and passion, between faint glimpses of goodness and ignominious failure, between fits of ambition and self-abandoned languor, all these and more had come under the eye of Seneca as an observer or a director of souls.(1650) It is a lost world that he has before him, trying fruitless anodynes for its misery, holding out its hands for help from any quarter.(1651) The consuming earnestness of Seneca, about which, in spite of his rhetoric, there can be no mistake, and his endless iteration are the measure of his feeling as to the gravity of the case. Seneca is the earliest and most powerful apostle of a great moral revival. His studied phrase, his epigrammatic point seem often out of place; his occasionally tinsel rhetoric sometimes offends a modern taste. We often miss the austere and simple seriousness of Epictetus, the cultivated serenity and the calm clear-sighted resignation of Marcus Aurelius. Still let us admit that here is a man, with all his moral faults which he freely confesses, with all his rhetoric which was a part of his very nature, who felt he had a mission, and meant to fulfil it with all the resources of his mind. He is one of the few heathen moralists who warm moral teaching with the emotion of modern religion, and touch it with the sadness and the yearning which spring from a consciousness of man’s infinite capacities and his actual degradation; one in whose eyes can be seen the amor ulterioris ripae, in whose teaching there are searching precepts which go to the roots of conduct, and are true for all ages of our race. He adheres formally to the lines of the old Stoic system in his moments of calm logical consistency. But when the enthusiasm of humanity, the passion to win souls to goodness and moral truth is upon him, all the old philosophical differences fade, the new wine bursts the old bottles; the Platonic dualism, the eternal conflict of flesh and spirit,(1652) the Platonic vision of God, nay, a higher vision of the Creator, the pitiful and loving Guardian, the Giver of all good, the Power which draws us to Himself, who receives us at death, and in whom is our eternal beatitude, these ideas, so alien to the older Stoicism, transfigure its hardness, and its cold, repellent moral idealism becomes a religion.(1653) Seneca’s system is really a religion; it is morality inspired by belief in a spiritual world and “touched by emotion.” In a remarkable letter, he discusses the question whether, for the conduct of life, precept is sufficient without dogma, whether a man can govern his life by empirical rules, without a foundation of general principles. Can a religion dispense with dogma?(1654) Seneca, as a casuist and spiritual director, was not likely to undervalue the importance of definite precept, adapted to the circumstances of the case. The philosopher, who was a regular official in great families, probably dealt chiefly in precept, on a basis of authority concealed and rarely scrutinised. But Seneca is not an ordinary professional director. He has a serious purpose; he feels that he is dealing with the most momentous of all problems—how to form or reform a life, with a view to its true end, how the final good of man is to be realised only in virtuous action. But action will not be right and virtuous unless the will be also right, and rightness of will depends on ordered habit of the soul,(1655) and that again springs from right general principles or dogmas. In other words, a true theory of conduct is necessary to virtue in the highest sense. Mere imperative precept and rule cannot give steadiness and continuity to conduct. The motive, the clear perception of the guiding principle, can alone dignify an act with a peculiar moral distinction. In order to possess that character, the external act must be rooted in a faith in the rational law of conduct. Particular precepts may produce an external obedience to that law, but they cannot give the uniformity and certainty of the inner light and the regulated will.

Seneca is not a sectarian dogmatist, although he lays so much stress on the necessity of dogma to virtuous conduct. He boldly declares that he does not follow absolutely any of the Stoic doctors. He defends Epicurus against the vulgar misunderstanding of his theory of pleasure, and the more vulgar practical deductions from it. He often quotes his maxims with admiration to Lucilius.(1656) In his views of the nature of God and His relation to the external world and to the human soul, Seneca often seems to follow the old Stoic tradition. There are other passages where he seems to waver between different conceptions of God, the Creator of the universe, the incorporeal Reason, the divine breath diffused through all things, great and small, Fate, or the immutable chain of interlinked causation.(1657) It is also clear that, from the tone of his mind, and the fact that the centre of philosophical interest for him is the moral life of man, he tends towards a more ethical conception of the Deity, as the Being who loves and cares for man. All this may be admitted and will be further noticed on a later page. Yet Seneca, in strict theory, probably never became a dissenter from the physical or ontological creed of his school. He adhered, in the last resort, to the Stoic pantheism, which represented God and the universe, force and formless matter, as ultimately issuing from the one substratum of the ethereal fire of Heraclitus, and in the great cataclysm, returning again to their source.(1658) He also held theoretically the Stoic materialism, and the Stoic principle, that only corporeal natures can act on one another.(1659) The force which moulds indeterminate matter into concrete form is spirit, breath, in the literal sense, interfused in rude matter, and by its tension, outward and again inward upon itself, producing form and quality and energy. Mere matter could never mould itself, or develop from within a power of movement and action. But this material force which shapes the universe from within is also rational, and the universe is a rational being, guided by the indwelling reason to predestined ends, and obedient to a universal law. The God of the Stoics is thus a very elastic or comprehensive conception. He may be viewed as the ubiquitous, impalpable force, which may, in the lack of more accurate expression, be called air, ether, fire. He is the soul, the breath, the Anima Mundi. He is also the universal law, the rational principle, underlying all the apparently casual and fitful phenomena of physical nature and human life. God may also surely be regarded as the eternal Fate, the power in the ruthless, yet merciful sequence of inevitable causation.(1660) And, in milder and more optimistic moods, we may view Him as a watchful Providence, caring for men more than they seem to care for themselves, saving them from the consequences of their own errors and misdeeds. In Seneca, He develops into a moral and spiritual Being, the source of all spiritual intuition and virtuous emotion, the secret power within us making for righteousness, as He is the secret force in all nature making for order.(1661)

It seems a little crude and superficial to contrast the materialist and idealist conceptions of God in the later Stoic creed. What human conception of Him is free from similar contradictions? How can any conception of Him, expressed in human language, avoid them? And in Seneca’s conception of soul, even as material, there is something so thin, so subtle, and elusive, that the bounds of matter and spirit seem to melt away and disappear.(1662) However loyal he may be in form to Stoic materialism, Seneca in the end regards God as no mere material force, however refined and etherealised, but a spiritual power; not perhaps limited by the bounds of personality, but instinct with moral tendencies, nay, a moral impetus, which no mere physical force could ever develop.(1663) The growing dualism in Seneca’s metaphysics is the result of the growing dualism of his psychology. In accord with the old Stoic doctors, he sometimes formulates the material nature of the soul, and its essential unity. It is, like the Anima Mundi, warm breath or subtle fire, penetrating all parts of the body, discharging currents from the central heart to the several organs. It is primarily rational, and all the lower powers of passion are derived from the controlling and unifying reason. It is a spark of the universal Spirit, holding the same place in the human organism as the Divine Spirit does in the universe.(1664) But experience and reflection drove Seneca more and more into an acceptance of the Platonic opposition of reason and passion, an unceasing struggle of the flesh and spirit, in which the old Stoic theory of the oneness of the rational soul tended to disappear.(1665) This is only one, but it is the most important, modification of ancient theory forced on Seneca by a closer application of theory to the facts of human life, and a completer analysis of them. The individual consciousness, and the spectacle of human life, alike witness to the inevitable tendency of human nature to corruption. Even after the great cataclysm, when a new earth shall arise from the waters of the deluge, and a new man, in perfect innocence, shall enter on this fair inheritance, the clouds will soon gather again, and darken the fair deceitful dawn.(1666) The weary struggle of flesh and spirit will begin once more, in which the flesh is so often the victor. For to Seneca, as to the Orphic mystics and to Plato, the body is a prison, and life one long punishment.(1667) Such is the misery of this mortal life, such the danger of hopeless corruption, that no one would accept the gift of existence if he could foresee the evil in store for him.(1668) And death, the object of dread to the blind masses, is really the one compensation for the calamity of birth, either as a happy return to antenatal tranquillity, or as the gateway to a glorious freedom and vision of the Divine.(1669) Seneca, indeed, does not always express himself in this strain. He is often the consistent, orthodox Stoic, who glories in the rounded perfection of the sapiens, triumphing, even in this life, over all the seductions of sense and the fallacies of perverted reason, and, in virtue of the divine strength within him, making himself, even here below, equal with God in moral purity and freedom.(1670) In such moods, he will adhere to the Stoic psychology: reason will be all in all; virtue will be uniform, complete, attained by one supreme victorious effort. But the vision is constantly crossed and darkened by doubts which are raised by the terrible facts of life. The moral problem becomes more difficult and complicated; the vision of perfection recedes to an infinite distance, and the glorious deliverance is reserved for an immortal life of which the older Stoics did not often dream.

Still, we can find in Seneca all the Stoic gospel, and moral idealism. “Nil bonum nisi verum” is the fundamental principle. The failures, aberrations, and sins of men arise from a false conception of what is good, produced by the warping effect of external things upon the higher principle. The avaricious, the ambitious, the sensual, live in a vain show. They are pursuing unreal objects of desire, which cheat and befool the reason, and turn to ashes when they are won. The “kingdom of Heaven is within.” It is the freedom, the peace, the tranquil sense of power over all that is fortuitous and external and fleeting, which alone can realise the highest good of man.(1671) It is attained only by virtue, that is, by living in obedience to the law of reason, which has its voice and representative in each human soul. The summons to yield ourselves to the law of nature and reason simply calls us to obey our highest part (τὸ ἡγεμονικόν), which is a steadfast witness to the eternal truth of things, and, if unbribed and unperverted, will discern infallibly the right line of conduct amid all the clamorous or seductive temptations of the flesh or of the world. Nothing is a real good which has not the stamp and hall-mark of reason, which is not within the soul itself, that is within our own power. Everything worth having or wishing for is within. External things, wealth, power, high place, the pleasures of sense, are transitory, deceptive, unstable, the gifts of Fortune, and equally at her mercy. In the mad struggle for these ephemeral pleasures, the wise man retires unobserved from the scene of cruel and sordid rapacity, having secretly within him the greatest prize of all, which Fortune cannot give or take away.(1672) If these things were really good, then God would be less happy than the slave of lust and ambition, than the sensualist who is fascinated by a mistress or a minion, the trader who may be ruined by a storm, the wealthy minister who may at any moment be ordered to death by a Nero.(1673) The only real liberty and human dignity are to be found in renunciation. If we jealously guard and reverence the divine reason within us, and obey its monitions, which are in truth the voice of God, the Universal Reason, then we have an impregnable fortress which cannot be stormed by any adverse fortune. The peace and freedom so won may be called, although Seneca does not so call it, the “peace of God.” For it is in fact the restored harmony between the human spirit and the Reason of the world, and the cessation of the weary conflict between the “law in the members” and “the law of the mind,” which ends so often in that other peace of a “mare mortuum,” a stillness of moral death.(1674)

The gospel of Seneca, with all its searching power, seems wanting in some of the essentials of an effective religion which can work on character. Where, it may be asked, is the force to come from which shall nerve the repentant one to essay the steep ascent to the calm of indefectible virtue? And what is the reward which can more than compensate for the great renunciation? With regard to the first question, the Stoic answer is clear. The reforming force is the divine reason, indwelling in every human soul,(1675) which, if it is able, or is permitted, to emancipate itself from bondage to the things of sense, will inevitably gravitate to the divine world, from which it sprang. The question of necessity and freedom of the will has not much interest for Seneca, as a practical moralist. He believes theoretically in the old Stoic dogmas on the subject. From one point of view, God may be regarded as the eternal Fate, the inevitable law of causation. And as the Universal Reason, He cannot act otherwise than He does, without violating His very nature. But His action is self-determined and therefore free and spontaneous.(1676) This freedom man only attains by breaking away from the cruel servitude to passion and external circumstance. As a practical moral teacher, Seneca is bound to say that we can take the higher road if we will. The first step towards freedom is to grasp firmly the fundamental law of the moral life—that the only good lies in conformity to reason, to the higher part of our being. If we yield to its bidding, we can at once cut ourselves off from the deceitful life of the senses, and the vision of the true beatitude in virtue at once opens on the inner eye. When that vision has been seen, we must then seek to form a habit of the soul which shall steadily conform to the universal law, and finally give birth to a settled purpose, issuing inevitably in virtuous act.(1677) It is this fixed and stable resolution which is the Stoic ideal, although experience showed that it was rarely attained. The great renunciation is thus the entrance on a state of true freedom, which is realised only by submitting ourselves to the law of reason, that is of God. By obedience to rational law man is raised to a level far transcending the transient and shadowy dignities of the world. His rational and divine part is reunited to the Divine Spirit which “makes for righteousness”; he places himself in the sweep and freedom of a movement which finds its image and counterpart in the majestic and ordered movements of the heavenly spheres. If we ask, how can poor humanity, so abject, so brutalised, so deadened by the downward pressure of the flesh and the world, ever release itself and rise to those empyrean heights, the answer is, through the original strength of the rational, which is the divine element in the human soul. It may be, and actually is, in the mass of men, drugged and silenced by the seductions of sense and the deceptions of the world. But if, in some moment of detachment and elation, when its captors and jailors relax their guard, it can escape their clutches, it will at once seek the region of its birth, and its true home. It is in the kindred of the human reason with the Divine, the Reason of the world, that we must seek the reconciliation of two apparently opposite points of view. At one time the Stoic doctor tells us that we must trust to our own strength in the moral struggle. And again Seneca, in almost Christian phrase, comforts his disciple with the vision of God holding out a succouring hand to struggling virtue, just as he warns the backslider of an eye “that seeth in secret.” Woe to him who despises that Witness.(1678)

With such a conception of the relation of the human reason to the Divine, Seneca was bound to believe that human nature, as it is, had fallen away from original and spontaneous innocence. In the equal enjoyment of the unforced gifts of nature, in the absence of the avarice and luxury which the development of the arts, the exploitation of the earth’s hidden wealth, and the competitive struggle, born of a social life growing more and more complicated, have generated, the primeval man was unsolicited by the passions which have made life a hell.(1679) Yet this blissful state was one of innocence rather than of virtue; it was the result of ignorance of evil rather than determined choice of good.(1680) And the man who, in the midst of a corrupt society, fights his way to virtue, will take far higher moral rank than our simple ancestors, who wandered in the unravaged garden of the Golden Age. For the man born in a time when the nobler instincts have been deadened by the lust of gold and power and sensual excess, the virtuous will can only be won by a hard struggle.

Confronted with the facts of life, and fired with a passion to win men to a higher law, the later Stoicism had in some points to soften the rigid lines of earlier theory. The severe idealism of the great doctors was a mere dream of an impossible detachment, the inexorable demand of a pitiless logic. Virtue, being conformity to the immutable law of reason, was conceived as a rounded, flawless whole, to which nothing could be added, and to which nothing must be wanting. It presupposes, or is identical with, a settled intellectual clearness, an unclouded knowledge of the truly good, which must inevitably issue in perfect act. It is a single, uniform mental state from which all the separate virtues spring as from a single root.(1681) The moral value of an act depends entirely on will, intention, that is, on the intellectual perception. And as there are no gradations in the mental state, so there are no gradations in moral conduct which issues from it. There are no distinctions between things morally good, between “divine” things; and so, just as in the older Calvinistic system, there is no class intermediate between the wise and the foolish, the saved and the lost. And conversion, “transfiguration,” the change from folly to wisdom, is regarded as instantaneous and complete.(1682) Even those who are struggling upward, but have not yet reached the top, are still to be reckoned among the foolish, just as the man a few inches below the waves will be drowned as certainly as if he were sunk fathoms deep. And, as there is no mean state in morals, so the extremes are necessarily finished and perfect types of virtue and reprobacy. The ideal sapiens, who combines in himself all the moral and intellectual attributes that go to make up the ideal of serene, flawless virtue, has been the mark for ridicule from the days of Horace.(1683) Such an ideal, soaring into the pure cold regions of virgin snow, left the great mass of men grovelling in filth and darkness. And it was in this light that the severe Stoic regarded the condition of the multitude. They are all equally bad, and they will always be bad, from age to age. Every generation mourns over its degeneracy, but it is no worse than its ancestors, and its posterity will be no better. The only variation is in the various fashion of the vices.(1684) In any crowded scene, says Seneca, in the forum or the circus, you have a mere gathering of savage beasts, a spectacle of vice incarnate.(1685) In the garb of peace, they are engaged in a truceless war, hating the fortunate, trampling on the fallen. Viewing this scene of shameless lust and cupidity where every tie of duty or friendship is violated, if the wise man were to measure his indignation by the atrocity of the offenders, his anger must end in madness. But we are all bad men living among the bad, and we should be gentle to one another.

The idealism and the pessimism of the earlier Stoics were alike fatal to any effort of moral reform. The cold, flawless perfection of the man of triumphant reason was an impossible model which could only discourage and repel aspirants to the higher life. The ghastly moral wreck of ordinary human nature, in which not a single germ of virtuous impulse seemed to have survived the ruin, left apparently no hope of rescue or escape. If morals were to be anything but an abstract theory, if they were to have any bearing on the actual character and destiny of man, their demand must be modified. And so in many essential points it was, even before Seneca.(1686) The ideal contempt for all external things had to give way to an Aristotelian recognition of the value of some of them for a virtuous life. And Seneca is sometimes a follower of Aristotle, as in the admission, so convenient to the millionaire, that wealth may be used by the wise man for higher moral ends.(1687) He will not be the slave of money; he will be its master. He will admit it to his home, but not to his heart, as a thing which may take to itself wings at any moment, but which may meanwhile be used to cheer and warm him in his struggles, and may be dispensed in beneficent help to dependents. In the same way, beside the ideal of perfect conformity to the law of reason, there appeared a class of conditional duties. To conform absolutely to the law of reason, to realise the highest good through virtue, remains the highest Stoic ideal. But if, beside the highest good, it is permitted to attach a certain value to some among the external objects of desire, manifestly a whole class of varying duties arises in the field of choice and avoidance.(1688) And again the ideal of imperturbable calm, which approached the apathy of the Cynics, was softened by the admission of rational dispositions of feeling.(1689) These concessions to imperious facts of human life, of course, modified the awful moral antithesis of wise and foolish, good and reprobate. Where is the perfectly wise man, with his single moral purpose, his unruffled serenity, his full assurance of his own impregnable strength, actually to be found?(1690) He is not to be discovered among the most devoted adherents of the true philosophic creed. Even a Socrates falls short of the sublime standard. If we seek for the wise man in the fabulous past, we shall find only heroic force, or a blissful, untempted ignorance, which are alike wanting in the first essential of virtue.(1691) As the perfect ideal of moral wisdom, imperturbable, assured, and indefectible, receded to remote ideal distances, so the condemnation of all moral states below an impossible perfection to indiscriminate reprobacy(1692) had to be revoked. Seneca maintains that men are all bad, but he is forced to admit that they are not all equally bad, nay, that there are men who, although not quite emancipated from the snares of the world and the flesh, have reached various stages on the upward way. He even distinguishes three classes of proficientes, of persons on the path of moral progress.(1693) There is the man who has conquered many serious vices, but is still captive to others. Again, there is the man who has got rid of the worst faults and passions, but who is not secure against a relapse. There is a third class who have almost reached the goal. They have achieved the great moral victory; they have embraced the one true object of desire; they are safe from any chance of falling away; but they want the final gift of full assurance reserved for the truly wise.(1694) They have not attained to the crowning glory of conscious strength. Seneca is still in bondage to the hard Stoic tradition, in spite of his aberrations from it. The great Catholic virtue of humility is to him still, theoretically at least, a disqualification for the highest spiritual rank.

And yet Seneca is far from wanting in humility. In giving counsels of perfection, he candidly confesses that he is himself far from the ideal.(1695) Indeed, his Letters reveal a character which, with lofty ideals, and energetic aspiration, is very far removed from the serene joy and peace of the true Stoic sage. He has not got the invulnerable panoply from which all the shafts of fortune glance aside. He shows again and again how deep a shadow the terror of his capricious master could cast over his life, how he can be disturbed even by the smaller troubles of existence, by the slights of great society, by the miseries of a sea voyage, or the noises of a bath.(1696) In the counsels addressed to Lucilius, Seneca is probably quite as often preaching to himself. The ennui, the unsteadiness of moral purpose, the clinging to wealth and power, the haunting fears or timid anticipations of coming evil, for which he is constantly suggesting spiritual remedies, are diagnosed with such searching skill and vividness that we can hardly doubt that the physician has first practised his art upon himself.(1697) Nor has he entire faith in his own insight or in the potency of the remedies which ancient wisdom has accumulated. The great difficulty is, that the moral patient, in proportion to the inveteracy of his disease, is unconscious of it.(1698) Society, with its manifold temptations of wealth and luxury and irresponsible ease, can so overwhelm the congenital tendency to virtue,(1699) that the inner monitor may be silenced, and a man may come to love his depravity.(1700) If men are not getting better, they are inevitably getting worse. There is such a state, in the end, as hopeless, irreclaimable reprobacy. Yet even for the hoary sinner Seneca will not altogether despair, so long as there lingers in him some divine discontent, however faint, some lingering regret for a lost purity. He will not lose hope of converting even a mocker like Marcellinus, who amuses himself with jeers at the vices and inconsistencies of professing philosophers, and does not spare himself. Seneca may, perchance, give him a pause in his downward course.(1701)

Seneca’s gospel, as he preaches it, is for a limited class. With all his professed belief in the equality and brotherhood of men, Seneca addresses himself, through the aristocratic Epicurean Lucilius, to the slaves of wealth and the vices which it breeds. The men whom he wishes to save are masters of great households, living in stately palaces, and striving to escape from the weariness of satiety by visits to Baiae or Praeneste.(1702) They are men who have awful secrets, and whose apparent tranquillity is constantly disturbed by vague terrors,(1703) whose intellects are wasted on the vanities of a conventional culture or the logomachies of a barren dialectic.(1704) They are people whose lives are a record of weak purpose and conflicting aims, and who are surprised by old age while they are still barely on the threshold of real moral life.(1705) With no religious or philosophic faith, death is to such men the great terror, as closing for ever that life of the flesh which has been at once so pleasant and so tormenting.(1706) In dealing with such people, Seneca recognises the need both of the great principles of right living and of particular precepts, adapted to varieties of character and circumstance. The true and solid foundation of conduct must always be the clear perception of moral truth, giving birth to rightly-directed purpose and supplying the right motive. For example, without a true conception of God as a spirit, worship will be gross and anthropomorphic.(1707) The doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the universal commonwealth is the only solid ground of the social charities and of humanity to slaves. Yet dogma is not enough; discipline must be added. The moral director has to deal with very imperfect moral states, some of quite rudimentary growth, and his disciples may have to be treated as boys learning to write, whose fingers the master must guide mechanically across the tablet.(1708) The latent goodness of humanity must be disencumbered of the load which, through untold ages, corrupt society has heaped upon it. The delusions of the world and the senses must be exposed, the judgment, confused and dazzled by their glamour, must be cleared and steadied, the weak must be encouraged, the slothful and backsliding must be aroused to continuous effort in habitual converse with some good man who has trodden the same paths before.(1709) Thus the great “Ars Vitae,” founded on a few simple principles of reason, developed into a most complicated system of casuistry and spiritual direction. How far it was successful we cannot pretend to say. But the thoughtful reader of Seneca’s Letters cannot help coming to the conclusion that, even in the reign of Nero, there must have been many of the proficientes, of candidates for the full Stoic faith. If Seneca reveals the depths of depravity in his age, we are equally bound to believe that he represents, and is trying to stimulate, a great moral movement, a deep seated discontent with the hard, gross materialism, thinly veiled under dilettantism and spurious artistic sensibility, of which Nero was the type. Everything that we have of Seneca’s, except the Tragedies, deals with the problems or troubles of this moral life, and the demand for advice or consolation appears to have been urgent. Lucilius, the young Epicurean procurator, who has been immortalised by the Letters, is only one of a large class of spiritual inquirers. He not only lays his own moral difficulties before the master, but he brings other spiritual patients for advice.(1710) There were evidently many trying to withdraw from the tyranny or temptations of high life, with a more or less stable resolution to devote themselves to reflection and amendment. It is a curious pagan counterpart to the Christian ascetic movement of the fourth and fifth centuries.(1711) And, just as in the days of S. Jerome and S. Paulinus, the deserter from the ranks of fashion and pleasure in Nero’s time had to encounter a storm of ridicule and misrepresentation. Philosophic retreat was derided as mere languid self-indulgence, an unmanly shrinking from social duty, nay, even a mere mask for the secret vices which were, too often with truth, charged against the soi-disant philosopher.(1712) Sometimes the wish to lead a higher life was openly assailed by a cynical Epicureanism. Virtue and philosophy were mere idle babble. The only happiness is to make the most of the senses while the senses still keep their fresh lust for pleasure. The days are fleeting away never to return in which we can drink with keen zest the joys of the flesh. What folly to spare a patrimony for a thankless heir!(1713) Seneca had to deal with many souls wavering between the two ideals. One of his treatises is addressed to a kinsman, Annaeus Serenus, who had made a full confession of a vague unrest, an impotence of will, the conflict of moral torpor with high resolve.(1714) In his better moments, Annaeus inclines to simplicity of life and self-restraint. Yet a visit to a great house dazzles him and disturbs his balance, with the sight of its troops of elegant slaves, its costly furniture and luxurious feasting. He is at one time drawn to philosophic quietude; at another he becomes the strenuous ambitious Roman of the old days, eager for the conflicts of the forum. He is always wavering between a conviction of the vanity of literary trifling and the passion for literary fame.(1715) Cannot Seneca, to whom he owes his ideal, furnish some remedy for this constant tendency to relapse and indecision?

It is in the sympathetic handling of such cases, not in broad philosophic theory, that the peculiar strength of Seneca lies. His counsels were adapted to the particular difficulties presented to him. But many of them have a universal validity. He encourages the wish to retire into meditative quietude, but only as a means to moral cure.(1716) Retreat should not be an ostentatious defiance of the opinion of the world.(1717) Nor is it to be a mere cloak for timid or lazy shrinking from the burdens of life. You should withdraw from the strife and temptations of the mundane city, only to devote yourself to the business of the spiritual city, to cultivate self-knowledge and self-government, to inspire the soul with the contemplation of the Eternal and the Divine. Solitude may be a danger, unless a man lives in the presence of “One who seeth in secret,”(1718) from whom no evil thought is hidden, to whom no prayer for evil things must be addressed.(1719) And, lest the thought of God’s presence may not come home with sufficient urgency, Seneca recommends his disciples to call up the image of some good man or ancient sage, and live as if under his eye.(1720) The first step in moral progress is self-knowledge and confession of one’s faults.(1721) Ignorance of our spiritual disease, the doom of the indurated conscience, is the great danger, and may be the mark of a hopeless moral state. Hence the necessity for constant daily self-examination. In the quiet of each night we should review our conduct and feeling during the day, marking carefully where we have fallen short of the higher law, and strengthening ourselves with any signs of self-conquest. Seneca tells us that this was his own constant practice.(1722) For progress is only slow and difficult. It requires watchful and unremitting effort to reach that assured and settled purpose which issues spontaneously in purity of thought and deed, and which raises man to the level of the Divine freedom. There must be no pauses of self-complacency until the work is done. There is no mediocrity in morals. There must be no halting and unsteadiness of purpose, no looking back to the deceitful things of the world. Inconstancy of the wavering will only shortens the span of this short life. How many there are who, even when treading the last stage to death, are only beginning to live, in the true sense, and who miss the beatitude of the man who, having mastered the great secret, can have no addition to his happiness from lengthened years. In the long tract of time any life is but a moment, and of that the least part by most men is really lived.(1723) And this unsettled aim is liable to constant temptation from without. We are continually within sight and earshot of the isles of the Sirens, and only the resolution of a Ulysses will carry us past in safety.(1724) In fact no isle of the Sirens can have been more dangerous than the life of a great household in the Neronian age, when the dainties and the vices of every land assailed the senses with multiplied seductions, and men craved in vain for a heightened and keener sensibility. Perpetual change of scene to the shores of Baiae, to Apulia, to some glen in the Apennines, or to the northern lakes, or even further, to the Rhone, the Nile, the Atlas, was sought by the jaded man of pleasure or the man struggling in vain to reform. But Seneca warns his disciple that wherever he may go he will take his vices and his weakness with him.(1725) Let him try to work out his salvation within his great palace on the Esquiline. Surrounded by splendour and luxury, let him, for a time, isolate himself from them; let him lie on a hard bed, and live on scanty fare, and fancy himself reduced to that poverty which he dreads so much and so foolishly.(1726) The change will be good for body and soul; and the temporary ascetic may return to his old life, at least released from one of his bugbears, and refreshed with a new sense of freedom.

Such were some of the precepts by which Seneca strove to fortify the struggling virtue of his disciples. But he never concealed from them that it is only by struggle that the remote ideal can be attained. “Vivere militare est.” And almost in the words of S. Paul, he uses the example of the gladiator or the athlete, to arouse the energy of the aspirant after moral perfection.(1727) “They do it for a corruptible crown.”(1728) The reward of the Stoic disciple is vain and poor to the gross materialist. But, from the serene heights, where ideal Reason watches the struggle, the only victor is the man who has adopted the watchwords—self-knowledge, renunciation, resignation. Only by following that steep path can any one ever reach the goal of assured peace within, and be delivered from the turmoil of chance and change. The misery of the sensual, the worldly, and the ambitious lies in the fact that they have staked their happiness on things which are beyond their own power, which are the casual gifts of fortune, and may be as capriciously withdrawn. This state is one of slavery to external things, and the pleasure, after all, which can be drawn from them is fleeting. Hence it is that the sensualist is equally miserable when his pleasures are denied, and when they are exhausted.(1729) He places his happiness in one brief moment, with the danger or the certainty either of privation or satiety. The wise man of the Stoics, on the other hand, has built his house upon the rock. He shuns, according to the Pythagorean maxim, the ways of the multitude, and trusting to the illumination of divine Reason, he takes the narrow path.(1730) His guiding light is the principle that the “kingdom of heaven is within,” that man’s supreme good depends only on himself, that is, on the unfettered choice of reason. To such a man “all things are his,” for all worth having is within him. His mind creates its own world, or rather it rediscovers a lost world which was once his. He can, if he will, annihilate the seductions of the flesh and the world, which cease to disturb when they are contemned. He may equally extinguish the griefs and external pains of life, for each man is miserable just as he thinks himself.(1731) Human nature, even unfortified by philosophic teaching, has been found capable of bearing the extremity of torture with a smile. The man who has mastered the great secret that mind may, by its latent forces, create its own environment, should be able to show the endurance of a Scaevola or a Regulus.(1732) All he needs to do is to unmask the objects of his dread.(1733) For just as men are deluded by the show of material pleasure, so are they unmanned by visionary fears. Even the last event of life should have no terror for the wise man, on any rational theory of the future of the soul. The old mythical hell, the stone of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, Cerberus, and the ghostly ferryman, may be dismissed to the limbo of fable.(1734) For the man who has followed the inner light, death must either be a return to that antenatal calm of nothingness which has left no memory, or the entrance to a blissful vision of the Divine.(1735) Even in this luxurious and effeminate time, men and women of all ranks and ages have shown themselves ready to escape from calamity or danger by a voluntary death.(1736) And what after all is death? It is not the terminus of life, a single catastrophe of a moment. In the very hour of birth we enter on the first stage in the journey to the grave. We are dying daily, and our last day only completes the process of a life-long death.(1737) And as to the shortness of our days, no life is short if it has been full.(1738) The mass of men are only living in an ambiguous sense; they linger or vegetate in life, they do not really live. Nay, many are long since dead when the hour of so-called death arrives. And the men who mourn over the shortness of their days are the greatest prodigals of the one thing that can never be replaced.(1739) In the longest life, on a rational estimate, how small a fraction is ever really lived! The whole past, which might be a sure and precious possession, is flung away by the eager, worldly man.(1740) The fleeting present is lost in unrest or reckless procrastination, or in projecting ourselves into a future that may never come. Thus old age surprises us while we are mere children in moral growth.(1741)

At certain moments, the Stoic ideal might seem to be in danger of merging itself in the self-centred isolation of the Cynic, asserting the defiant independence of individual virtue, the nothingness of all external goods, the omnipotence of the solitary will. And undoubtedly, in the last resort, Seneca has pictured the wise man thus driven to bay, and calmly defying the rage of the tyrant, the caprices of fortune, the loss of health and wealth, nay the last extremity of torture and ignominious death. His own perilous position, and the prospect of society in the reign of Nero, might well lead a man of meditative turn so to prepare himself for a fate which was always imminent. But the Stoic doctor could never acquiesce in a mere negative ideal, the self-centred independence of the individual soul. He was too cultivated, he had drunk too deep of the science and philosophy of the past, he had too wide an outlook over the facts of human life and society, to relegate himself to a moral isolation which was apt to become a state of brutal disregard of the claims of social duty, and even of personal self-respect.(1742) Such a position was absolutely impossible to a man like Seneca. Whatever his practice may have been, it is clear that in temperament he was almost too soft and emotional. He was a man with an intense craving for sympathy, and lavish of it to others; he was the last man in the world who could enjoy a solitary paradise of self-satisfied perfection. It is true the Roman world to the eyes of Seneca lay in the shadow of death, crushed under a treacherous despotism, and enervated by gross indulgence. Yet, although he sees men in this lurid light, he does not scorn or hate them. It was not for nothing that Seneca had been for five years the first minister of the Roman Empire. To have stood so near the master of the world, and felt the pulse of humanity from Britain to the Euphrates, to have listened to their complaints and tried to minister to their needs, was a rare education in social sympathy. It had a profound effect on M. Aurelius, and it had left its mark on Seneca.(1743)

Two competing tendencies may be traced in Stoicism, and in Seneca’s exposition of it. On the one hand, man must seek the harmony of his nature by submitting his passions and emotions to his own higher nature, and shaking himself free from all bondage to the flesh or the world. On the other hand, man is regarded as the subject of the universal Reason, a member of the universal commonwealth, whose maker and ruler is God.(1744) The one view might make a man aim merely at isolated perfection; it might produce the philosophic monk. The other and broader conception of humanity would make man seek his perfection, not only in personal virtue, but in active sympathy with the movement of the world. The one impulse would end in a kind of spiritual selfishness. The other would seek for the full development of spiritual strength in the mutual aid and sympathy of struggling humanity, in friendship,(1745) in the sense of a universal brotherhood and the fatherhood of God. There are two cities, says Seneca, in which a man may be enrolled—the great society of gods and men, wide as the courses of the sun; the other, the Athens or the Carthage to which we are assigned by the accident of birth.(1746) A man may give himself to the service of both societies, or he may serve the one and neglect the other. The wise man alone realises to the full his citizenship in the spiritual commonwealth, in pondering on the problems of human conduct, the nature of the soul, of the universe and God, and conforming his moral being to the eternal law of Nature. The sage, a Zeno or a Chrysippus, may rightly devote himself exclusively to contemplation and moral self-culture.(1747) He may not, by wealth and station, have access to the arena of active life. And, although a seeming recluse, he may really be a far greater benefactor of his kind than if he led the Senate, or commanded armies. There may be cases in which a man may be right in turning his back on public life, in order to concentrate all his energies on self-improvement. And Seneca does not hesitate to counsel Lucilius to withdraw himself from the thraldom of office.(1748) Yet Zeno’s precept was that the wise man will serve the State unless there be some grave impediment in his way.(1749) For, on Stoic principles, we are all members one of another, and bound to charity and mutual help. And all speculation and contemplation are vain and frivolous unless they issue in right action. Yet the practical difficulty for the sapiens was great, if not insuperable. What earthly commonwealth could he serve with consistency; is it an Athens, which condemned a Socrates to death, and drove an Aristotle into exile?(1750) How please the vulgar sensual crowd without displeasing God and conscience? It might seem that the true disciple of Stoicism could not take a part in public life save under some ideal polity, such as Plato or Chrysippus dreamed of.(1751) Here, as elsewhere, the problem was solved with varying degrees of consistency. The problem is stated by Seneca—“Se contentus est sapiens ad beate vivendum, non ad vivendum.”(1752) It is the ever-recurring conflict between lofty idealism and the facts of human life, which is softened, if not solved, from age to age by casuistry. The wise and good man should have the springs of his happiness in himself. Yet a wise friend may call forth his powers, and furnish an object of self-sacrifice.(1753) The wise man will not entangle himself in the cares of family life.(1754) Yet wife and child are needed to give completeness to the life of the citizen. Since man exists for the general order, how can he avoid lending his services to the State, unless there be some insuperable bar? The controversy between the dream of solitary perfection and altruism was variously solved, and the particular solution could always be defended in the light of the great law of life. Epictetus, cut off from the great world by servile birth and poverty, could make light of marriage, of the begetting of future citizens, and the duties of political life.(1755) On the other hand, M. Aurelius, by nature as detached as Epictetus, might refuse to follow the transcendental counsels of Chrysippus and Seneca. He might strive painfully to reconcile devotion to an irksome political charge with a dream of that unseen commonwealth “in which the cities of men are as it were houses.”(1756)

Yet in spite of these difficulties about public duty, no one outside the pale of Christianity has perhaps ever insisted so powerfully on the obligation to live for others, on the duty of love and forgiveness, as Seneca has done. We are all, bond or free, ruler or subject, members one of another, citizens of a universal commonwealth.(1757) We have all within us a portion of the Divine spirit. No man can live entirely to himself.(1758) If we are not doing good to others we are doing harm. The nature of man and the constitution of the universe make it a positive obligation to seek the welfare of our fellows.(1759) The social instinct is innate and original in us. As man is flung upon the world at birth, or in the natural state, with all his immense possibilities as yet undeveloped, no creature is so helpless.(1760) It was only by combination and mutual good offices that men were able to repel the dangers which surrounded the infancy of the race, and to conquer the forces of nature. Man is born for social union, which is cemented by concord, kindness, and love,(1761) and he who shows anger, selfishness, perfidy, or cruelty to his fellows strikes at the roots of social life. Nor should the spectacle of universal depravity cause us to hate or despise our kind.(1762) It is quite true that the mass of men are bad, and always will be bad, with only rare exceptions. If society is the source of many blessings, it is also a great corruptor, and the conquest of nature and the development of the arts have aroused insatiable passions which have darkened the eye of reason.(1763) Yet this crowd of sinners are our brothers, with the germs of virtue in their grain. They have taken the broad way almost necessarily, because it is broad. A general may punish individual soldiers, but you must pardon an army when it deserts the standards. The truly wise, not knowing whether to laugh or weep, will look kindly on the erring masses, as sick men who need a physician.(1764) And beside the few truly wise, who can cast the first stone? We are all more or less bad, we have all gone astray.(1765) And yet we constantly show the utmost severity to the faults of others, while we forget or ignore our own.(1766) Even as God is long-suffering to transgressors, and sends His rain upon the evil and good alike, so should we be merciful in judgment and lavish in beneficence.(1767) The spectacle of universal greed and selfishness and ingratitude should not harden us against our fellows, but rather make us turn our eyes to our own faults.(1768) Sometimes, indeed, the note of humility is absent, and Seneca is the serene sapiens contra mundum, or the proud Roman gentleman who will not demean himself to resent or even notice the insults or injuries of the spiteful crowd.(1769) They will pass him by as the licensed jests of the slaves on the Saturnalia. He reminds himself that it is the lower air which is turbid with storm and thunder; the ether which spreads around the stars is never vexed and darkened by the tempest.(1770) This is one of the recurring contrasts in Seneca between the moral tone of the old world and that of the great movement which was setting in. But the new prevails in the end. The conception of God as cold reason or impersonal law or fate gives way to the thought of a God who guides by His providence, who embraces all by His love, whose goodness is as boundless as His power, who is best worshipped by the imitation of His goodness.(1771) As the vision grows, the pride of the invulnerable sapiens, who might make himself the equal or more than the equal of God,(1772) shrinks and is abased. We are all more or less bad, and we should be gentle to one another.(1773) Do we complain of coldness and ingratitude? Let us think how many a kindness done to us in early days, the tenderness of a nurse, a friend’s wise counsel or help in critical times, we have carelessly let slip from memory.(1774) The faults which irritate us in another are often lurking in ourselves. Forgive if you wish for forgiveness; conquer evil with good; do good even to those who have wrought you evil.(1775) Let us copy the serene example of those Eternal Powers who constantly load with their benefits even those who doubt of their existence, and bear with unruffled kindness the errors of frail souls that stumble by the way.

And as we shall not be harsh to those of our own external rank, so shall we soften the lot of those whom fortune has condemned to slavery. Even the slave is admitted to that great city of gods and men, which has no frontiers, which embraces all races and ranks, where all ranks should be levelled by the consciousness of a common Divine descent and a universal brotherhood of men.(1776) The conquests of Macedon and Rome, overthrowing all old-world national barriers, had prepared the way for the greatest and most fruitful triumph of ancient philosophy. And the Stoic school has the glory of anticipating the diviner dream, yet far from realised, of a human brotherhood under the light from the Cross. Seneca has never risen higher, or swept farther into the future than in his treatment of slavery. He is far in advance of many a bishop or abbot or Christian baron of the middle age. Can a slave confer a benefit? he asks.(1777) Is his service, however lavish, not merely a duty to his lord, which, as it springs from constraint, is undeserving of gratitude? Seneca repudiates the base suggestion with genuine warmth. On the same principle a subject cannot confer a benefit on his monarch, a simple soldier on his general. There is a limit beyond which power cannot command obedience. There is a line between cringing compliance and generous self-sacrifice. And the slave has often passed that limit. He has often borne wounds and death to save his master’s life in battle. He has often, in the years of the terror, endured the last extremity of torture, rather than betray his secrets.(1778) The body of the slave is his master’s; his mind is his own.(1779) It cannot be bought and sold. And in his inner soul, the slave is his master’s equal. He is capable of equal virtue and equal culture; nay, in both he may be his master’s superior. He can confer a benefit if he can suffer injury in the outrages which cruelty and lust inflict upon him. When he confers a benefit, he confers it as man upon man, as an equal in the great family whose Father is God.

Seneca gives a lurid picture of the corruption of women in the general licence of his age.(1780) Yet he has a lofty ideal of what women might become. Like other Stoic preachers, it was his good fortune to be surrounded by good women from his infancy. He remembers the tenderness of his aunt, in whose arms he first entered Rome as a child, who nursed him through long sickness, and broke through her reserve to help him in his early career of ambition. Her blameless character escaped even the petulance of Alexandrian gossip.(1781) His letters to his mother, Helvia, reveal a matron of the best Roman type—strong, self-denying, proud of her motherhood, and despising the extravagance and ostentation of her class. In spite of her father’s limited idea of female culture, she had educated herself in liberal studies, and found them a refuge in affliction.(1782) Marcia was of a softer type, and gave way to excessive grief for a lost child. Yet it is to her that Seneca unfolds most fully his ideal of feminine character. He will not admit the inferior aptitude of women for virtue and culture.(1783) Women have the same inner force, the same capacity for nobleness as men. The husband of Paulina who surrounded him with affectionate sympathy, and was prepared to die along with him, the man who had witnessed the stern courage and loving devotion of the wives of the Stoic martyrs, might well have a lofty ideal of woman’s character.(1784) But to any true disciple of the Porch that ideal had a surer ground than any personal experience, however happy. The creed which Seneca held was at once a levelling and an elevating creed. It found the only nobility or claim to rank in higher capacity for virtue.(1785) It embraced in the arms of its equal charity all human souls, bond or free, male or female, however they might be graded by convention or accident, who have a divine parentage, and may, if they will, have a lofty, perhaps an eternal future.

And now, in taking leave of Seneca, let us forget the fawning exile in Corsica, the possible lover of Julia or Agrippina, the millionaire minister of Nero, who was surrounded by a luxury and state which moved the envy of the tyrant.(1786) Rather let us think of the ascetic from his early youth, who, raised by his talents to the highest place, had to reconcile an impossible ideal with the sordid or terrible realities of that rank which was at once a “pinnacle and a precipice.”(1787) He was continually torn by the contrast between the ideal of a lofty Stoic creed and the facts of human life around him, between his own spiritual cravings and the temptations or the necessities of the opportunist statesman. He was imbued with principles of life which could be fully realised only in some Platonic Utopia; he had to deal with men as they were in the reign of Nero, as they are painted by Tacitus and Petronius. If he failed in the impossible task of such a reconciliation, let us do him the justice of recognising that he kept his vision clear, and that he has expounded a gospel of the higher life, which, with all its limitations from temperament or tradition, will be true for our remotest posterity, that he had a vision of the City of God.(1788) He was not personally perhaps so pure and clear a soul as Plutarch or Aristides or Dion Chrysostom. But he had utterly cast off that heathen anthropomorphism which crossed and disturbed their highest visions of the Divine.(1789) Seneca is far more modern and advanced than even the greatest of the Neo-Platonic school, just because he saw that the old theology was hopelessly effete. He could never have joined in the last struggle of philosophic paganism with the Church. And so the Church almost claimed him as her son, while it never dreamt of an affinity with Plutarch or Plotinus.

Indeed, there needed only the change of some phrases to reconcile the teaching of Seneca with that of the great ascetic Christian doctors. Many of the headings of the Imitation might be attached to paragraphs of Seneca—“of bearing with the faults of others”; “of inordinate affections”; “of the love of solitude and silence”; “of meditation on death”; “of humble submission”; “that to despise the world and serve God is sweet”; “of the acknowledgment of our own infirmities, and the remembrance of God’s benefits”; “of the contempt of temporal honour and vain secular knowledge”; “of the day of eternity and this life’s straitness.” In truth, the great spirits of all ages who have had a genius for religion, after due allowance for difference of association and difference of phrase, are strangely akin and harmonious. And Seneca had one great superiority over other equally religious souls of his time, which enables him to approach mediaeval and modern religious thought—he had broken absolutely with paganism. He started with belief in the God of the Stoic creed; he never mentions the Stoic theology which attempted to reconcile Him with the gods of the Pantheon. In spite of all his rhetoric, he tries to see the facts of human life and the relation of the human spirit to the Divine in the light of reason, with no intervening veil of legend. God is to Seneca the great Reality, however halting human speech may describe Him, as Fate, or Law, or Eternal Reason, or watchful loving Providence. God is within us, in whatever mysterious way, inspiring good resolves, giving strength in temptation, with all-seeing eye watching the issue of the struggle. God is without us, loading us with kindness even when we offend, chastising us in mercy, the goal of all speculation, He from whom we proceed, to whom we go at death. The true worship of Him is not in formal prayer and sacrifice, but in striving to know and imitate His infinite goodness. We mortal men in our brief life on earth may be citizens of two commonwealths, one the Rome or Corinth of our birth, the other that great city of gods and men, in which all are equally united, male and female, bond and free, as children of a common Father. In this ideal citizenship, in obedience to the law of the spiritual city, the eternal law which makes for righteousness, man attains his true freedom and final beatitude in communion with kindred souls.

Yet, as in mediaeval and puritan religious theory, there is in Seneca a strange conflict between pessimism and idealism. To the doomed philosophic statesman of the reign of Nero, the days of man’s life are few and evil. Life is but a moment in the tract of infinite age, and so darkened by manifold sins and sorrows that it seems, as it did to Sophocles, a sinister gift.(1790) On the other hand, its shortness is a matter of no importance; the shortest life may be full and glad if it be dignified by effort and resignation and conformity to the great law of the universe. The wise and pious man, ever conscious of his brief time of probation, may brighten each passing day into a festival and lengthen it into a life. The shortness of a life is only an illusion, for long or short have no meaning when measured by the days of eternity. And the philosopher may unite many lives in one brief span. He may join himself to a company of sages who add their years to his, who counsel without bitterness, and praise without flattery; he may be adopted into a family whose wealth increases the more it is divided; in him all the ages may be combined in a single life.(1791) To such a spirit death loses all its terrors. The eternal mystery indeed can be pierced only by imaginative hope. Death, we may be sure, however, can only be a change. It may be a passage into calm unconsciousness, as before our birth, which will release us from all the griefs and tumults of the life here below. It may, on the other hand, prove to be the morning of an eternal day, the entrance to a radiant and untroubled world of infinite possibilities. In any case, the spirit which has trained itself in obedience to eternal law, will not tremble at a fate which is surely reserved for the universe, by fire or flood or other cataclysmal change. The future in store for the soul is either to dwell for ever among things divine, or to sink back again into the general soul, and God shall be all in all.