The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  That remark is unintentionally revealing. The truth was that Augustus’s successors, even Nero and Caligula, presided over an unprecedented expansion of both the empire and its wealth. The Pax Romana protected one generation of its critics after another from the dark forces threatening the ancient world. Some of its rulers may have been mentally unstable and incompetent. In a brutal age, purges and bloodshed at the top were not unknown, and severitas was the rule more than the exception in dealing with outsiders. “You Romans bring a desolation,” Tacitus quotes one Briton complaining to his conquerors, “and call it peace.”7

  All the same, what is remarkable is how this great empire managed to carry on and prosper, regardless of who was in charge. Far from being cowed by tyranny, the Roman Senate actually exercised far more power and influence than it liked to pretend. Diplomacy under Nero helped to establish peace along Rome’s frontiers; the emperors Tiberius and Claudius rendered important reforms to Roman provincial government.8 Meanwhile, the old Roman elite, having decimated itself in the civil wars of the republic, was steadily replaced by new men from the provinces, including Greece. They brought new energy and enthusiasm to the empire, just as Roman rule brought a new level of settled life to outlying areas around the world, from Britain to the desert reaches of Algeria and Mesopotamia.

  The result was a strange duality in Roman culture under the empire. On one side, for three centuries legions marched, roads were built, and new provinces were conquered and plundered. Triumphs were celebrated, emperors were deified, and great temples were consecrated in their memory. Great monuments like the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus rose on the Roman skyline, as the empire’s citizens enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity and splendor. Yet Rome’s finest minds and spirits found it all empty and meaningless, even a sign of approaching doom.

  A later age would develop a term for this disaffection: alienation.

  But we can find its origin in Plato’s cave, when we realize all we do and see is a meaningless illusion, and we seem permanently shut out from the light and truth. Alienatio mentis became almost the occupational disease of Rome’s intelligentsia. In any case, Tacitus, Rome’s greatest historian, certainly suffered from it. He despised the imperial system even though he was writing under what posterity recognized as one of Rome’s best and most enlightened rulers, the emperor Trajan. Tacitus had to admit, “The interests of peace require the rule of one man,” and since Augustus, “all preferred the safety of the present to the dangers of the past.” Still, as historian M. L. Clarke puts it, Tacitus’s head was with the empire, but his heart was with the republic.9 He could not shake off the feeling that the reign of Augustus’s successors, which he savagely chronicled in his most widely read work, the Annals,† was only symptomatic of a deeper loss of Roman moral integrity and vitality. It was not just Caligula and Nero who were cruel and corrupt. The decay had infected all of Roman society.

  In Tacitus’s eyes, the only place where you could find courage, manliness, and honor anymore was not in the Roman Empire, but on the other side of its frontiers. The naked, blue-painted natives of far-off Britain (Tacitus’s father-in-law had been governor there) and the Germanic tribes that crowded close to the Roman watchtowers along the Rhine seemed to Tacitus to display the kind of free manly virtues Romans once had and had lost.

  The shame was that the Britons and Germans didn’t realize they had it so good. When they began to adopt Roman ways, like going to the baths and building villas and attending dinner parties, Tacitus sneered, “they call it civilization when in fact it is only slavery.”10

  Tacitus is the first romantic anthropologist. His sentiments will reappear in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the “noble savage,” among other places. But its roots are to be found once again in Plato and his Myth of Atlantis: the idea that at some primeval stage of humanity, long before the cycle of man’s degeneration began, men knew the truth clear and pure and obeyed the laws of God.

  Atlantis’s inhabitants were such a people, Plato writes. But “when the divine element in them became weakened,” Plato says in the Timaeus, the former super-race of Atlantis became merely human. “To the perceptive eye,” Plato wrote in the Timaeus, “the depth of their degeneration was clear enough, but to those whose judgement of true happiness is defective they seemed, in their pursuit of unbridled ambition and power, to be at the height of their fame and fortune.”11 Zeus and the gods knew the truth, Plato says; and together they plotted the doom of Atlantis—a doom so devastating it vanished forever.

  Once men knew the truth; one day they might know it again. But not before the cycle of decay and dissolution was complete, and not before existing institutions had dissolved away into nothingness.

  It was precisely that nothingness which more and more Romans were yearning for.

  By the time Tacitus died around 117 CE, the Roman Empire bore little resemblance to the one Polybius had known. It covered more than 2.5 million square miles from the Grampian Hills of Scotland to the Tigris and Euphrates and contained 65 million inhabitants. A network of 50,000 miles of stone-laid roads connected its most distant frontiers to its capital. It was also thoroughly Hellenized. Trajan’s successor, the emperor Hadrian, had been born in the Roman province of Spain but preferred speaking Greek to Latin. His boyhood nickname was “the little Greek,” and he became an honorary citizen of Athens. Emperors after Hadrian did most of their correspondence in Greek; Marcus Aurelius would even write his memoirs in Greek.

  The migration of Greek families and Hellenized Asians into the Roman Senate that began under Augustus was now a tidal wave. Indeed, Rome could not have managed without them. Imperial Rome’s finest physicians were Greeks like Galen, who explained the functions of the human body, and Asclepiades (c.124–40 BCE) the mysteries of the human mind. The Greek Strabo established its map of the world while Ptolemy explained the movements of the stars and heavens. The famous jurists Papinian and Ulpian, who codified Rome’s laws, were also born and bred Greeks.

  Alexandria, Cleopatra’s former capital, was fast becoming the intellectual center of the Roman world much as it had been the center of the Hellenistic one. The very fact that the great battles that decided the birth of the empire, from Pharsalus to Philippi to Actium, were all fought in Greece was proof that a shift of the center of gravity had been under way for more than a century—a shift that the building of a new imperial capital at Constantinople in 323 CE made official.

  The presence of Greek thought and philosophy in Roman culture was more palpable than ever. Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s treatises, plus the innumerable commentaries on their works by generations of students, were part of the fabric of daily intellectual life. The graduates of Plato’s Academy remained active all through the empire, as were their Stoic, Epicurean, and Skeptic rivals; while the traditions of Aristotle’s Lyceum lived on in a multitude of scholars’ studies and laboratories, including Alexandria’s restored Library and Museum.

  All the same, the trend was a self-defeating one. Even as the city by the Tiber crowned herself “mistress of the world,” the hole in the Roman soul yawned even wider. Under the dual impress of Plato and Polybius, all Greek philosophy managed to do was convince generations of Romans that the happiness of the human spirit depended on being indifferent to everything that their reality offered.12 Epicureans taught that men were happiest when they moved through the world like random atoms, just as the world itself was only a heap of atoms that had come together by chance, with no deeper meaning or purpose. The Skeptics (or Pyrrhonists) taught “that which is truly good is unknowable,” and since we have no means of knowing which of our judgments about the world are true and which are false, “therefore we should not rely upon them but be without judgements”—the perfect formula for a moral relativism that knows no bottom.13

  The Stoics should have done better. They had understood that men and women had to live in the world, and came equipped, as Aristotle would have pointed out, with the moral and mental tools to deal with
that fact. Man’s reason gives him the power to shape nature according to his needs, Polybius’s friend Panaetius the Stoic had told his patrons. The arts of civilized life, including building, tools, machines, and farming, were proof that humans were destined to build a future for themselves based on benevolent interdependence with others, under the protection of a divine providence.14

  This softer, socially optimistic side of Stoicism made a deep impression on Cicero’s On Moral Obligations, where it mixed easily with Aristotelian notions of man as “political animal,” in other words born with an instinct to cooperate with others to achieve a common good.‡

  All the same, it is the “hard” side of Stoicism that dominated the life and work of its most famous Roman exponent, the philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE). Seneca’s wise man is indifferent to pain and suffering; he has no fears and no hopes. He never gets angry, even when he sees his father killed and his mother raped.15 Seneca believed in humane virtues like gratitude and clemency, including toward slaves, and writes eloquently about their lasting benefit to others.

  In the end, however, Seneca loved humanity more than he cared for human beings. He preached abstinence even while he owned one of the most sumptuous homes in Rome. Once, he attended the spectacles in the arena of which the Romans took great pride, with its gladiatorial combats and slaughter of wild beasts. He came back, he said, a worse person, because he had been among his fellow men. Roman society itself, he concluded, was nothing more than a collection of wild beasts.16

  The characters in Seneca’s plays, which resemble The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in their taste for blood and horror, suffer unspeakable torments. However, the characters learn to bear their suffering with what Seneca called fortitudo and constantia, or constancy. They prefer to endure the “slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,” in the words of Shakespeare (whose tragedies were heavily shaped by Seneca’s), rather than try to fight back.

  Seneca’s solution to life’s inevitable cruelties was to withdraw. It was an increasingly attractive reaction in the later imperial age. The wise man must shun unnecessary human contact and connections, Seneca said. He must live within, and for, himself. He must cultivate the virtue of apatheia, literally an indifference to the fate of others—apathy even, in the last moment, to his own fate (faced by unjust accusations by the emperor Nero, Seneca and his wife chose suicide).17

  Remain indifferent to pain and accept your fate. Consider yourself already dead, and live out the rest of your life according to nature. These Stoic lessons also fill the pages of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, written a century after Seneca’s death and the one piece of serious philosophy to come from the pen of a Roman emperor.

  From the watchtowers of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, and the army camps along the Rhine and Danube frontiers, Marcus Aurelius could see the forces of barbarian darkness already gathering. He would spend his reign fighting to shore up the frontiers from attack, from the Germanic tribes in the north to the Parthians in the east. He would die on campaign along the Danube in 180 CE, worn out and without hope.

  The Meditations were probably written during the bloody wars of the 170s, when it really did seem as if Rome might not survive. However, they tell us nothing about the tumultuous events taking place outside the emperor’s tent. Instead, they reflect a resigned state of mind that is influenced not only by Stoicism, but by the figure of Socrates. Socrates was a particular hero for Marcus Aurelius, as the man who accepts his mortal fate; a symbol of a philosophy that is indeed a “meditation on death.”

  What are Alexander and Pompey and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius asks, compared with Socrates and Diogenes and Heraclitus—the man who said that nothing in the world is permanent? “This is the chief thing: be not perturbed, for all things are according to the nature of the Universal; and in a little time you will be nobody and nowhere.…” So leave this life satisfied, because He who releases you is also satisfied.18

  Strange words to come from a man who was ruler of the known world. Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, and even Pythagoras appear several times in the Meditations. Aristotle, never. Aristotle’s outlook was precisely the one Marcus Aurelius wanted to warn against: the idea that man is born to take charge of his existence and solve problems in a practical way, by building a better house or a more efficient machine; to make a better empire and a better life. Man’s impulse toward energeia, considered action toward a desired end, was precisely the way of life the Meditations rejected.

  “You have been a citizen of this great world,” Marcus Aurelius says to himself in his last meditation. “What difference does it make if it is for five years or one hundred?” Of course, for millions it was a very great matter. Sixty years after Marcus Aurelius’s death, from 245 to 270, every Roman frontier collapsed.19 For those who lived through it, the Stoic message of “bear and forbear” was very cold comfort. However, another thinker arose who would offer comfort, at least to those who had time and energy to devote to books and philosophy. He showed men that if they could not control the great disasters of the third century, they could rise above them. And if they could not save the empire, they could at least save their souls.

  His name was Plotinus. He is without doubt the most important and influential thinker to appear between Aristotle and Saint Augustine. Yet we know almost nothing about him. His life is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. He declined to tell his disciples any details about his life. He even refused to have his portrait painted or a bust made of his likeness.

  Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.20

  That sounds a great deal like Plato, and Plato was always the central figure in Plotinus’s cosmic vision. But Plotinus had also read his Aristotle, and by putting the two together in a thoroughly original way, he transcended the traditional limits of ancient thought. It was a major breakthrough. From the last days of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Plotinus’s “Neoplatonism” offered a new dimension for the European intellect to explore, and a new challenge: how to make the rational soul one with the Absolute.

  Plotinus appears to have been born in Lyco in Egypt, a city that was founded on the Lower Nile by priests of Osiris, probably around 205. Whether Plotinus had any family connection with the rites of Osiris, the Egyptian god symbolizing man’s hope for immortality, we will never know.21 When he came to Alexandria to study at age twenty-eight, his interests were not religious at all but philosophical. He set up with a teacher, Ammonius Saccas, who immersed him in Plato and also Aristotle.§

  Later Plotinus became part of Emperor Gordian III’s entourage on his disastrous expedition against the Persians in 238. Gordian’s army suffered a crushing defeat; the survivors scattered in all directions, while the hapless Gordian, still in his teens, was murdered by his courtiers. Among the refugees was Plotinus, who found shelter first in Antioch and then in Alexandria. The whole experience must have confirmed Plotinus’s conviction that what we call “real life” is actually a realm of meaningless pointless suffering. Still, Plotinus refused to surrender to the usual Roman impulse toward bitter alienation. Instead he decided he was going to set up a school of philosophy to examine the alternatives—this time not in Alexandria or in Athens, but in Rome itself.

  It was a momentous decision—and symbolic of a momentous break. What Plato’s Academy had done in the nearly five centuries since Plato’s death held no interest to Plotinus. He and his followers always called themselves “Platonists,” never “Academics.”22 The long tussles between the Academy and the Epicureans, Stoics, and others had led the formal heirs to Plato further and further away from Plato’s original ideas and doctrines. Now Plotinus brought them back to where they were supposed to start: the dialogu
es, including the Timaeus, which Plotinus read not just as a handbook for understanding astronomy or physics, as Cicero and others had, but as the key for understanding existence itself.

  Since Socrates, thinkers had been obsessed with the question “What is the good life?” Plotinus decided it was time to revert to the earlier question, “What is reality?” What he discovered is that once we get the right answer to that question, it also provides the key to the other one. In other words, no truly virtuous or happy life is possible until we realize that everything, including ourselves, has its rightful place in a single spiritual realm: the Absolute One, Goodness or Being in Itself.

  This may sound like Plato, but then Plotinus veers in a very different direction. Plato had seen reality as dual, with the spiritual and the material as totally separate and distinct realms. Plotinus wanted to treat them as a single totality, embracing Being in Itself and the smallest and most insignificant part of creation and everything else in between.

  Plotinus’s universe doesn’t just exist. Like Aristotle’s, it forms a living system, a continuous spiritual emanation from the Being in Itself’s own perfection, like water cascading down the steps of an enormous pyramid or ziggurat. Its life-giving force flows down the steps, level by level, and then spreads across the rest of creation. Plotinus taught that the material world is not distinct from the spiritual. The cave still reflects the distant light of truth, no matter how dimly.

  Instead, all things exist in a carefully ordered sequence, a sequence not only of time but of value, running from the purest and most spiritual—the One and its animating principle, Nous, or Being in Itself—down to the basest and most material, just as the steps of the ziggurat lead from one to the next.

  Where did Plotinus get this idea? Obviously it comes from Plato and his vision of the Good in Itself, which not only is the summit of all knowable things, but also gives the rest of the Forms (and everything else knowable by reason) their very existence.23 But it also owes a debt to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Plotinus saw at once that Aristotle had provided him with a built-in scale for ordering all reality. At the top sits pure Form, Aristotle’s invisible Prime Mover. Then comes the visible but imperishable realm of the planets and heavens. Next comes the realm of substances, informed matter, starting with man, then animate animals and inanimate plants, followed by the inorganic world of rocks, dirt, and water, as Aristotle’s life-giving, purpose-giving form gradually loses out to matter.