The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  The special horror of the age was the body of informers, Juvenal’s spies, “whose gentle whisper cuts men’s throats,” who, if successful in an accusation, were rewarded with part of the estate of the condemned. So fostered, they spread. “None could trust each other,” Tacitus sums up, “not relatives, not friends. The very walls were suspect.” The success of this infamy was made easy. People were found guilty on the most frivolous charges, a man killed because he had dreamed he saw the emperor wearing a withered wreath—taken for a bad omen; a woman exiled because “she harbored resentment” on account of a husband’s fate; another put to death for weeping over a son’s execution. “Natural affection was made a felony and a mother’s tear was treason.” Many times the accusation was of “secret practices in the magic arts,” and with these words classical antiquity and the spirit of enlightenment seem to end; the reader feels suddenly transported to the Middle Ages. “The magic art” would have sounded to Cicero precisely as it does to us.

  Within the palace during those years of terror an incredible state of things prevailed. All the emperors died violent deaths, but only after each had murdered those nearest to him. Often their crimes were fantastic, as when Nero put his mother aboard a ship designed so that suddenly in the night it went to pieces, or when the Empress Messalina during the emperor’s absence married publicly and with great pomp another man. “It will appear a fabulous tale,” Tacitus comments on this last exploit, “but to amuse with fiction is not the design of this work.”

  Now and again, however, he does amuse, although, of course, without intention. The duel for the possession of Nero between his mother, that truly terrific woman, Agrippina, and the subtle, but even more to be dreaded Poppaea, who became his wife, is a lively narrative. The latter was so fascinating, even Tacitus’ austerity softens in describing her: “Virtue excepted, she possessed all the qualities that adorn the female character—the graces of an elegant form, conversation decorated with every winning art, a refined wit. Her favors were bestowed where she saw her interest—a politician in her pleasures.” Her methods in detaching Nero from his mother exemplified these traits: “She would make gentle fun of the emperor—call him a pupil under tuition, deprived of personal liberty.” Then she would grow serious: “If Agrippina had determined that no one should be her daughter-in-law but a woman the emperor held in detestation, she would herself retire to some remote corner of the earth where she could not see his disgrace.” And the words would end in tears. Agrippina with all her violence of character could not hold out against this combination of charm and policy; her death followed.

  But before she was removed she had given the state much disquiet. Not because she served poisoned mushrooms to her imperial husband. That, after all, could be accounted a deed within woman’s conceded field of action, the home. All that the senate did then was to set upon the throne the son for whom she had committed the murder. But when it came to her taking part in public life, the foundations of Rome rocked. Shortly after Nero’s accession, as he was about to give audience to some foreign ambassadors, Agrippina entered and advanced to the tribunal, with the evident intention of taking her seat there and her share in the proceedings. “All who beheld the scene were struck with horror and amazement,” says Tacitus. “Seneca alone in the universal confusion had the presence of mind to bid the emperor step forward to greet his mother [as though granting her also an audience]. So, under an appearance of filial respect, the honor of the state was saved.”

  Juvenal’s sixth satire is not the only indication that the men of Rome were beginning to have to defend actively that masculine supremacy which had been, on the whole, so satisfactorily understood in the good days of old.

  Side by side with the crimes of violence, and quite as conspicuous, were the crimes of vice. Rome had reached a condition when these did not have to be concealed. Poison still must be administered with some degree of privacy, but scenes of brutal lust were enacted publicly, not only at banquets and great entertainments, but at the spectacles of the games. Tacitus never descends to the arena, but another author of the time makes good this deficiency, Martial, the writer of epigrams. He describes in many a verse what the ampitheatre became under Domitian, when mythological tales of monstrous vice were enacted before the whole city, always, Martial is forever repeating, to the great glory of the one and only lord of all the earth.

  To turn from these writers to the Stoics of the same day is like being lifted from a reeking slum or a battlefield heaped with dead to a mountain top or an untrodden shore of the open sea. While Nero was reigning, Seneca from that court red with blood and black with shame, was writing, “We do not need to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol, God is near you, with you, within you. A holy spirit dwells within us.” A few years after Juvenal died, a Caesar of Rome in his soldier’s tent on the wild bank of the Danube was solving for himself life’s enigma in terms of unselfish duty unflinchingly pursued—“each task from hour to hour performed as though it were to be the last, free from passion, insincerity, self-love, discontent . . . offering to God who is within thee a manly being, a citizen, a soldier at his post, ready to depart from life as soon as the trumpet sounds.” And, at the opposite end of the social scale, a man born to a terrible fate, a slave to one of Nero’s creatures, had declared not long before that no evil could happen to him because nothing could happen save by the will of God. Then “Let us sing hymns to God and bless him and tell of his benefits.”

  This is the voice not of philosophy, but of religion. Stoicism from its earliest beginnings was religious. In the fourth century B.C., Zeno, its founder, was preaching in Athens the belief in one supreme God of boundless power and goodness, who was not to be worshipped in temples, unworthy of Deity, but who dwelt in every man, uniting all into one great commonwealth, where there was no distinction between rich or poor, man or woman, bond or free. Three hundred and fifty years later, St. Paul on the Areopagus told the Athenians: “God dwelleth not in temples made with hands. . . . He hath made of one blood all nations of men . . . that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he be not far from everyone of us: For in him we live and move and have our being.” These words are a concise declaration of the Stoic creed, the fundamental tenets of the school.

  It must not however be concluded that Stoicism was a religion only and not a philosophy. Zeno had been constrained by the necessity which has pressed upon most of the world’s great religious leaders, to attach a rational account of the universe to the intuitive convictions of faith, but his explanation had both of the weaknesses always present when knowledge is sought, not for its own sake, but to prop up something else: it was not very good reason and it was asserted to be infallibly true. As a result, it did not greatly commend itself to the Athenians, intellectualists by nature and trained in the school of Socrates to believe in the dispassionate search for truth and in pursuing it with the Socratic spirit, always remembering that “This may be true, Cratylus. On the other hand, it may very well not be.” To fourth-century Athens, belief and rational proof were inextricably connected and the rationality of the proof forever open to re-examination.

  A dogmatic theology cannot take root in such soil. Stoicism crossed the Adriatic to find the conditions necessary for its growth.

  The Romans were not philosophically minded. Theories of knowledge and of final causes were unimportant and could be accepted without much probing into the basis of truth they rested on. But when the question had to do with the guiding principles needed for life, they knew better than the Greeks what was important. They were men of practical vision: they perceived the struggle between good and evil as the Greeks never did. Pleasure and morality were not seen as opposed to each other in Greece. Socrates visiting a famous courtesan to discover if she was as beautiful as people said, carrying on an agreeable conversation with her, giving her advice how best to attach her lovers to her, leaving her with a charming compliment to her beauty, is representative
of all Greece. But to the Romans the opposition between duty and pleasure was absolute. Men’s natural inclinations were evil; their manifest obligation was sternly to control them. Socrates’ idea, so characteristically Greek, that no one can know virtue without embracing and practicing it—we needs must love the highest when we see it—was totally inadequate to life’s hard demands, as Romans saw them.

  To men so disposed came Stoicism with its final emphasis upon the will. The Stoic’s eyes were fixed on life, not on intellectual truth. Right and wrong had to do not with the reason, but with the will. All virtue was vain that did not result in virtuous doing. It was a doctrine fitted to the deepest demands of the Roman nature. They wanted not philosophy, which is for understanding, but religion, which is for action. “We are the most religious of all nations,” wrote Cicero, and when religion is seen as a force to make men better, not to explain the universe, his words are true. It was in Rome that the conquest of Christianity was most complete, and it was from Rome that the Christianizing of the world proceeded. The fact is easily comprehensible when the Roman genius for religion is perceived—religion as it is understood by the west, the power of the good to conquer the evil.

  The Christian Church never proclaimed in stronger terms the all-sufficiency of this power than the Stoics did. Whoever recognized the divine light within him and strove to keep it bright, was removed from the possibility of evil. Pain, sorrow, death, could not enter that inner shrine. It was the impregnable citadel where peace reigned, no matter what was without. Epictetus, a slave who knew the horrors of Nero’s court, felt himself free in his slavery and independent of all men could do to him. “Suppose the tyrant says he will throw me into prison—my spirit cannot be imprisoned. ‘But I can put you to death.’ ‘No—You can only cut off my head.’” The only thing that matters is a will bent upon the good, and this is wholly within a man’s own mastery. That alone is our concern. Our lot in life, slave or emperor, God assigns. All we have to do is to play well the part he gives us, as the actor does, whatever the rôle he is cast for. Outside success and failure are of no consequence. “Virtue consists in aiming at the mark, not hitting it.” The man who tries hardest is thereby the most successful. The wise man of the Stoics’ ideal is like the good athlete who strives to the utmost, but to play the game, not to win it.

  The power there is in an ideal to bring about its own reality was exemplified many a time in those last days of Rome. In the city where Tacitus and Juvenal saw public exhibitions of unnamable vice, the Stoics lived lives of austere purity. To them all sexual relations outside of marriage were “disgraceful by reason of their lawlessness and foulness.” They held—it is an instance of their astonishing modernity—the equality of man and woman, and conceded no more license to the one than to the other. “Do you allow to the master of the house an intrigue with his slave-woman?” they asked. “Then, of course, you allow the mistress to consort with her man-slave? No? Yet you hold a man superior to a woman? Less able, then, to restrain his desires? Your position, you see, is untenable. If men claim superiority to women, they must show themselves superior in self-control.”

  In an age of cruelty, widespread as it never was to be again, the Stoics declared the cruel man to be possessed by “a dreadful disease of the mind” which reached “the extreme of insanity when pleasure was felt in watching a human being die.” Alone in the Roman world their voice was heard denouncing the centuries-old gladiatorial games.

  They were alone, too, in teaching that a slave was to be treated as a human being. This insistence was the logical result of their belief in “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Master and slave, by virtue of this sharing in common, became each a brother to the other. Perhaps it was here that their attitude stood out in sharpest contrast to that of their age. Rome saw in those days four hundred slaves at once led forth to die, men and women, young and old, because their master had been killed by one of them. The murderer was known, and even the brutal crowd in the streets was softened to pity at the sight of so many innocent people about to suffer death. But the senate refused mercy; an illustrious member stated that “those we have in our service are the scum of humanity collected from all quarters of the globe,” and that the only way to keep them subject was to keep them in terror.

  Precisely at this time Seneca was writing: “‘They are slaves,’ people declare. Nay, they are men. Slaves? No, comrades.” Epictetus followed, declaring that a slave is “your brother, who is sprung from God . . . of the same heavenly descent as you.” The principle which became fundamental in Roman law, that all men are by nature equal, was derived, the historians agree, from the Stoics, and if Stoicism had no other claim to admiration, that alone would set it high among the great beneficent activities of the world.

  How widespread the Stoics were is not known, but it is generally agreed that their numbers were large. If so, the fact speaks volumes for the strength of the Roman character, for Stoicism was a religion for the strong. It did not teach the practice of virtue as a means to eternal bliss, still less as a means to escape eternal misery. Tales, Seneca says, which represent the other world as terrible, are fiction. “There is no black darkness awaiting the dead, no lake of fire, . . . no renewal of the reign of tyrants.” The Stoics fixed their attention on this earthly life. Goodness, here and now, was enough. The good man was the happy man whatever befell him, in death as in life. It was Seneca who said, “Virtue is its own reward.” The Stoic asked for no other.

  But always, consoling and strengthening, there was the consciousness of a divine presence and a divine purpose. “When you have shut your door and darkened your room,” says Epictetus, “say not that you are alone. God is in your room.” And Seneca writes: “God does not leave a good man in prosperity. He tries him, he strengthens him, he prepares him for himself.” Therefore, knowing there is a purpose behind all, “I do not obey God—I agree with him. I follow him heart and soul, not because I must.” “Is it God’s will,” asks Epictetus, “that I shall have a fever? It is my will too.” And, as regards death, “To have God for our maker, father, guardian, should not that free us from all sadness and from all fear?” “Serenely take your leave,” Marcus Aurelius writes, “serene as he who gives you your discharge.”

  So in latter-day Rome religion at its noblest confronted the utmost of depravity. The two streams seem not to have intermingled. The debased were not raised to a higher level by the presence among them of the great and good, and in the midst of vilest evil the Stoics never lowered their standard. Rome was a divided city, separated by a final division which cut deeper still than the old opposition between millionaire and pauper, autocrat and slave. Absolute good and absolute evil were arrayed against each other, with no conception of a principle of mediation between them. Vice was content, virtue too. The Stoic’s creed armed the good man invulnerably against evil; it did not enlist him for active warfare upon the evil. The final view of ancient Rome given by her last great writers is of a state that has come to an inevitable standstill; progress is not possible.

  XIII

  The End of Antiquity

  Throughout the great days of the early Republic as they have come down to us in Polybius, in Livy, in Plutarch, in many an allusion in other writers, Rome was a nation perpetually at war. By the time Plautus was born she was absolute mistress of Italy, but the achievement took some five hundred years of fighting. Terence had been dead only a short time when the last Punic War made the Mediterranean a Roman sea. The east called next to the ever-moving, ever-growing power, and Cicero, fighting in Cilicia, was one of its instruments in extending Roman dominion far into Asia. Julius Caesar conquered the west and made Northern Africa a province of the empire. Horace’s Rome was mistress from the Sahara to the Rhine and the Danube, from the Euphrates to the Atlantic.

  “Keep the empire within its bounds” was the maxim Augustus bequeathed to his successors. The eight-hundred-years war of conquest was ended. The pioneer work of advancing agains
t constantly opposing physical forces cannot in the nature of things go on forever. That task Rome had now completed. She had accomplished marvels; she had made the framework for a new world. A mightier task by far remained: to keep pace intellectually and spiritually with the enormous material advance, so as to be able to plan and build the new construction which the new framework demanded. A vision and an understanding not needed before were now imperatively called for.

  Caesar, it is possible, had both requisites and could have rebuilt the state, but Rome did not see that the old world had passed away, and he died in consequence. Augustus, taught by what Caesar had begun, understood the immediate needs of the present and established a system which worked efficiently for some centuries. But these two were Rome’s only great constructive statesmen in her latter years. No other men were able to go forward with the march of events and meet new conditions with new provisions. On the contrary, all turned unanimously for help to the days of old. Go back to the virtues of our forefathers, the patriots cried, from Cicero on to the last martyrs for liberty in Tacitus’ pages. The longing voiced by the whole of Latin literature is for a return to the times when Rome was simple and pious and able to bear hardship. All that men were able to do when confronted with difficulties such as never had been known before, was to look to the past, which always seems so good, so comprehensible, and try to apply to the baffling present the solutions of a life that was outgrown.