by Will Durant
We must not forget those blessings and comforts which we share with many more, but must . . . joy in this, that we live, that we have our health, that we behold the light of the sun. . . . Will not the good man consider every day a festival? . . . For the world is the most august of temples, and most worthy of its Lord. Into this temple man is introduced at his birth, into the presence not of statues made with hands and motionless, but such as the Divine Mind has manifested to our senses . . . even the sun, moon, and stars, and the rivers ever pouring forth fresh water, and the earth producing food.... As this life is the most perfect of initiations into the most exalted of mysteries, we should ever be filled with good cheer and rejoicing.11
II. INDIAN SUMMER
Plutarch exemplifies two movements of his time: the return to religion and the passing renaissance of Greek literature and philosophy. The former was universal, the latter was confined to Athens and the Greek East. Six cities of the Peloponnesus prospered, but contributed little to Greek thought. Western commerce and a busy textile industry kept Patrae alive through Roman and medieval history even to our day. Olympia throve on the leavings of tourists coming to see Pheidias’ Zeus or the Olympic games. It is one of the pleasantest aspects of Greek history that these quadrennial contests continued from 776 B.C. to A.D. 394, when Theodosius ended them. As in the days of Prodicus and Herodotus, philosophers and historians came to harangue the crowd assembling for the festival. Dio Chrysostom describes authors reading “their stupid compositions” to transient listeners, poets reciting their verses, rhetoricians thumping the air, and “sophists in great number, like gorgeous peacocks,” coming to blow their wind over the multitude;12 he proved no more silent than the rest. Epictetus pictures the spectators cramped and sweltering in the unshaded stands, burned by the sun or drenched by the rain, but forgetting everything in the tumult and the shouting that marked the final moments of each bout or race.13 The old Nemean, Isthmian, Pythian, and Panathenaic games continued; new ones were added like the Panhellenia of Hadrian; and many of them included competitions in poetry, oratory, or music. “Can you not hear classical music at the great festivals?” asks a character in Lucian.14 Gladiatorial combats were introduced to Greece by the Roman colony at Corinth; thence they spread to other cities until even the Theater of Dionysus was befouled with butchery. Many Greeks—Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Plutarch—protested against the desecration; Demonax, the Cynic philosopher, begged the Athenians not to allow the innovation until they had thrown down the altar of Pity at Athens;15 but the Roman games continued in Greece till predominantly Christian times.
Sparta and Argos were still moderately alive, and Epidaurus grew rich on the visits of sick bodies and souls to the shrine of Asclepius. Corinth, controlling the trade across the isthmus, became, within half a century of its re-establishment by Caesar, the wealthiest city in Greece. Its heterogeneous population of Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians, most of them uprooted from their native lands and morals, was notorious for commercialism, epicureanism, and immorality. The old Temple of Aphrodite Pandemos carried on an undiminished trade as the shrine and center of Corinthian prostitutes. Apuleius describes a gorgeous ballet that he saw in Corinth, representing the judgment of Paris. “Venus appeared all naked, save that her fine and comely middle was lightly covered with a thin silken smock; and this the wanton wind blew hither and thither.”16 Corinth had not mended her ways since Aspasia.
Passing through Megara into Attica, the rural scene was one of great poverty. Deforestation, erosion, and mineral depletion had been added to war, emigration, taxation, and race suicide to make a desert of the Roman peace. Two cities alone in Attica were prosperous: Eleusis, whose sacramental Mysteries drew lucrative crowds to her every year; and Athens, the educational and intellectual center of the classic world. Its ancient institutions—council, assembly, and archons—still functioned, and Rome had restored the Areopagus to its primeval authority as the seat of judgment and the citadel of property rights. Rulers like Antiochus IV, Herod the Great, Augustus, and Hadrian rivaled millionaires like Herodes Atticus in benefactions to the city. Herodes rebuilt the stadium in marble, almost exhausting Pentelicus, and raised an odeon, or music hall, at the foot of the Acropolis. Hadrian provided funds to complete the Olympieum, and Zeus, who now had one foot in the grave, received a home worthy of his Casanova prime.
Meanwhile the unrivaled fame of Athens in letters, philosophy, and education brought a stream of rich youths and needy scholars to her schools. The University of Athens consisted of ten professorships endowed by the city or the emperor, and a host of private lecturers and tutors. Instruction was given in literature, philology, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and law—usually in gymnasia or theaters, sometimes in temples or homes. Except in oratory or law the curriculum had no thought of equipping the student to earn a living; it sought rather to sharpen his mind, deepen his understanding, and provide him with a moral code. It produced many brilliant intellects, but also it generated thousands of cobweb-spinners who would turn both philosophy and religion into a maze of controversial theories.
As Athens depended for a considerable part of its income on the students, it put up patiently with their hilarious ways. “Freshmen” were hazed with practical jokes that sometimes injured citizens; the students of rival professors became ardent partisans and attacked one another in occasional riots like the “cane rushes” of our youth. Some students felt that they could learn more from the courtesans and gamblers of the town than from all teachers of philosophy; and we gather from Alciphron that the ladies in question looked upon the professors as dull and incompetent competitors.17 But there was often a pleasant bond of friendship between learners and teachers; many of these invited students to dinner, guided their reading, visited them in illness, and kept their parents misinformed about their progress. Most of the lecturers lived on fees paid by each disciple; a small number of professors drew a salary from the state; and the heads of the four schools of philosophy received 10,000 drachmas ($6000) a year from the imperial Treasury.
Under these stimuli the period of the “Second Sophistic” developed—a revival of the orator-philosopher passing from city to city as honorariums might beckon, delivering addresses, teaching pupils, pleading cases in the courts, living in rich homes as spiritual counselors, and sometimes acting as honored emissaries of their city-states. The movement flourished throughout the Empire, but especially in the Greek world, in the first three centuries of our era; philosophers were then, says Dio, as numerous as cobblers.18 The new sophists, like the old, had no common doctrine, phrased their teaching eloquently, drew large audiences, and attained in many cases high social status, imperial favor, or great wealth. They differed from the earlier Sophists in seldom questioning religion or morality; they were more interested in form and style, in oratorical technique and skill, than in the great questions that had shaken the beliefs and morals of the world; indeed, the new sophists were warm defenders of the ancient faith. Philostratus has preserved for us the lives of the leading sophists of this age; let one example suffice. Adrian of Tyre studied rhetoric at Athens and rose to the state chair of rhetoric there; he opened his inaugural address with the proud words, “Once again letters have come from Phoenicia.” He rode to his lectures in a carriage with silver harness, in rich attire, and gleaming with gems. When Marcus Aurelius visited Athens he tested Adrian by asking him to improvise an oration on a difficult theme; Adrian carried the matter off so well that Marcus loaded him with honors, silver and gold, houses and slaves. Promoted to the chair of rhetoric at Rome, Adrian’s lectures, though in Greek, proved so alluring that senators adjourned their sessions, and the populace deserted the pantomimes, to go and hear him.19 Such a career almost announces the death of philosophy; it had been swallowed up in an ocean of rhetoric, and had ceased to think when it learned to speak.
At the other extreme were the Cynics. We have described them elsewhere—their tattered cloak, their unkempt hair and beard,
their wallet and staff, their reduction of life to simplicities, sometimes obscenities. They lived like mendicant friars, had a hierarchical organization with novices and superiors,20 avoided marriage and work, scorned the conventions and artificialities of civilization, denounced all governments as thieves and superfluities, laughed at all oracles, “mysteries,” and gods. Everyone satirized them, Lucian most savagely; yet even Lucian admired Demonax, a cultured Cynic who had abandoned his wealth to live in philosophical poverty. He gave his century of life (A.D. 50-150) to helping others, reconciling hostile individuals and cities; and Athens, which ridiculed everything, respected him. Indicted before an Athenian court for refusing to offer sacrifice to the gods, he won acquittal by saying simply that the gods had no need of offerings, and that religion consisted in kindness to all. When the Athenian assembly was engaged in a quarrel of factions, his mere appearance sufficed to quiet the dispute; whereupon he left without having uttered a word. It was his custom, in old age, to enter any house uninvited and eat and sleep there; and every home in Athens sought the honor.21 Lucian speaks with less sympathy of Peregrinus, who tried Christianity, abandoned it for the Cynic regimen, denounced Rome, called all Greece to revolt, and astonished an assemblage at Olympia by making and lighting his own funeral pyre, leaping into it, and allowing himself to be consumed in the flames (A.D. 165).22 In such scorn of wealth and life the Cynics were paving a way for the monks of the Christian Church.
When Vespasian, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius established chairs of philosophy at Athens they ignored the Cynics and the Skeptics, and recognized only four schools of thought: the Platonic Academy, the Aristotelian Lyceum, the Stoics, and the Epicureans. The Academy had diluted Plato’s proud faith in reason into the universal doubt of Carneades; but after the latter’s death the school reacted toward orthodoxy, and Antiochus of Ascalon, who taught Cicero at the Academy (79 B.C.), returned to Plato’s conceptions of reason, immortality, and God. The Lyceum was now devoting itself to natural science in the tradition of Theophrastus, or to pious commentaries on Aristotle’s works. The school of Epicurus was declining in this religious age; few men dared profess its doctrines without diplomatic reservations. In most of Greek Asia the words Epicurean, atheist, and Christian were synonyms expressive of horror and desecration.23
The dominant philosophy had long since been Stoicism. The rigorous perfectionism of its early forms had been softened by Panaetius and Poseidonius, both citizens of Rhodes. Returning to Athens after Scipio’s death (129 B.C.), Panaetius, now head of the Stoa, defined God as a material spirit or breath (pneuma) permeating all things, appearing in plants as the power of growth, in animals as soul (psyche), in man as reason (logos). His successors developed this vague pantheism into a more definitely religious philosophy. The Stoic theory of moral discipline moved closer to Cynic asceticism; and in the second century A.D. Cynicism, as one observer put it, differed from Stoicism only by a torn cloak. In Epictetus, as in Marcus Aurelius, we see both movements advancing toward Christianity.
III. EPICTETUS
Epictetus was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia about A.D. 50, a slave woman’s son, and therefore himself a slave. He had little chance of education, for he was passed from one owner and city to another, until he found himself the property of Epaphroditus, a powerful freedman in Nero’s court. He was of feeble health and lame, apparently through the brutality of one of his masters, but he lived the normal threescore years and ten. Epaphroditus allowed him to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus and later freed him. Epictetus must himself have set up as a teacher in Rome, for when Domitian banished the philosophers Epictetus was among those who fled. He settled in Nicopolis and drew to his lectures there students from many parts. One was Arrian of Nicomedia, later governor of Cappadocia; Arrian took down the words of Epictetus, probably in shorthand, and published them as Diatribai—“rubbings” or copies—now on all lists of the world’s best books as the Discourses.I It is no dull formal treatise, but a classic of simple speech and bluff humor, intimately expressing a modest and kindly, yet sharp and vigorous character. Epictetus applied his lusty sarcasms to himself and others impartially, and gaily mocked his rough-and-tumble style. He made no complaint when Demonax, hearing that the old bachelor counseled marriage, sarcastically petitioned for his daughter’s hand; he excused himself on the ground that teaching wisdom is as great a service as begetting “two or three pug-nosed children.”24 In later years he took a wife to help him care for an infant that he had rescued from exposure. In those years his fame compassed the Empire, and Hadrian counted him among his friends.
Epictetus, resembling Socrates in this as in so many other ways, cared too little about physics or metaphysics to construct a system of thought; his one subject and passion was the good life. “What do I care,” he asks, “whether all existing things are composed of atoms ... or of fire and earth? Is it not enough to learn the true nature of good and evil?”25 Philosophy does not mean reading books about wisdom, it means training oneself in the practice of wisdom. The essence of the matter is that a man should so mold his life and conduct that his happiness shall depend as little as possible upon external things. This does not require a hermit’s solitude; on the contrary, “Epicureans and blackguards” are to be condemned for detaching men from public service; the good man will take his part in civic affairs. But he will accept with equanimity all vicissitudes of fortune—poverty, bereavement, humiliation, pain, slavery, imprisonment, or death; he will know how to “endure and renounce.”
Never say about anything, “I have lost it,” but only “I have given it back.” Is your child dead? It has been given back. Is your wife dead? She has been returned. “I have had my farm taken away.” Very well; this, too, has been given back. So long as God gives it to you take care of it as something not your own. . . . “Alas, that I should be lame in one leg!” Slave! do you then, because of one paltry leg, blame the universe? Will you not make a free gift of it to the whole? ... I must go into exile: does anyone keep me from going with a smile, serene? ... “I will throw you into prison.” It is only my body you imprison. I must die; must I then die complaining? . . . These are the lessons that philosophy ought to rehearse, and write down daily, and practice. ... A platform or a prison are places, one high, the other low; but your moral purpose can be kept the same in either place.27
The slave can be spiritually free, like Diogenes; the prisoner can be free, like Socrates; the emperor can be a slave, like Nero.28 Even death is a minor incident in the good man’s life; he may advance its coming if he finds that evil too heavily outweighs good;29 in any case he will receive it calmly as part of the secret wisdom of Nature.
If heads of grain had feeling, ought they to pray that they should never be harvested? ... I would have you know that it is a curse never to die. . . . The ship goes down. What, then, am I to do? Whatever I can ... I drown without fear, neither shrinking nor crying out against God, but recognizing that what is born must also perish. For I am a part of the whole, as an hour is part of a day. I must come on as the hour, and like an hour pass away.30 . . . Regard yourself as but a single thread of all that go to make up the garment.31 . . . Seek not that the things which happen to you should happen as you wish, but wish the things that happen to be as they are, and you will find tranquillity.32
Though he often speaks of Nature as an impersonal force, Epictetus as frequently infuses his conception with personality, intelligence, and love. The atmosphere of religion pervading his age warms his philosophy to a self-surrendering piety akin to that of the Stoic emperor who would soon read him and echo his thought. He speaks with a fine eloquence of the majestic order prevailing in time and space, and the evidences of design in nature, but he proceeds to explain that “God has created some animals to be eaten, others to serve in farming, others to produce cheese.”33 The human mind itself, he thinks, is so marvelous an instrument that only a divine creator could have brought it into being; indeed, so far as we possess reason we are parts of the World Reason.
If we could trace our ancestry back to the first man we should find him begotten by God; God is therefore literally the father of us all, and all men are brothers.34
He who has once observed with understanding the administration of the world, and has learned that the greatest and most comprehensive community is the system [systema, standing together] of men and God, and that from God came the seeds whence all things, and especially rational beings, spring—why should not that man call himself a citizen of the world . . . nay, a son of God? ... If a man could only subscribe heart and soul to this doctrine ... I think he would entertain no mean or ignoble thought in himself. . . . Bear in mind, then, when you eat, who you are that eat, and whom you are nourishing; when you cohabit with women, who you are that do this. . . . You are bearing God about with you, you poor wretch, and know it not!35
In a passage that Saint Paul might have written, Epictetus exhorts his students not only to submit their wills trustingly to God’s, but to be the apostles of God among mankind:
God says, “Go and bear witness for me.”36 . . . Think what it is to be able to say, “God has sent me into the world to be his soldier and witness, to tell men that their sorrows and fears are vain, that to a good man no evil can befall, whether he live or die. God sends me at one time here, at another time there; he disciplines me by poverty and imprisonment, that I may be the better witness to him among men. With such a ministry committed to me, can I any longer care in what place I am, or who my companions are, or what they say about me? Nay, rather, does not my whole nature strain after God, his laws and commandments?”37