Section I. Roman History and Mythology
1. Divinities. In the ballads or songs, which are supposed to be the foundation of one part of Roman history, there will assuredly have been allusions to a number of divine persons. But there will assuredly not have been a divine counsellor, a God of wisdom, in the centre of them. This is not the leading characteristic of the Roman Jove. Neither is it the leading quality of any of the subordinate demigods. They are lawgivers, rulers, preservers of boundaries, champions of right, avengers of wrong. It could never have occurred to any Latin mind to reverence them chiefly, or perhaps at all, for their wit and subtlety.
2. The Roman Heroes. All the heroic characters in early Roman history or tradition are distinguished in the same manner from the Greek hero. There is not a single Odysseus among them. His countrymen, indeed, might easily have transferred his qualities to Romulus, or Numa, or Publicola; they might have said, “Intelligence is that which organises infant communities, which prescribes rites and laws; if you suppose the creation of an order, you presume device or counsel in him who establishes it.” No doubt this was necessary to a Greek; he could not separate the two thoughts from each other. A Roman separated them without the least effort. Even if he felt that wisdom was necessary to the preservation of order, the order would always be first in his mind, the wisdom second. He might confess that the legislator was a wise man; he never would have allowed that the wise man was as such a legislator.
3. The Roman Commonwealth. Though we may reject a great part of the stories in Livy (he himself scarcely asks us to believe them), no one can doubt that he had a very deep perception of the meaning of the history. A simple reader, who takes his facts for granted, receives from them the impression that a wonderful order was growing up during a great many centuries, by mysterious influences, through conflicts of opposing forces, under a divine direction. The critical investigator brings us at last to the same conclusion. Each event, truly or falsely recorded, preserved by the vanity of patrician families, or expressive of popular sympathy or indignation, still explains the development of some new principle in the commonwealth—shows how that which had been latent became manifest, how actual institutions came forth when they were needed out of seeds that had been in the soil ages before. We may understand better than in former days what elements, Latin or Etruscan, entered into the composition of the body politic; but the fact that it was a body politic, and that influences higher than mortal gave it its coherency and preserved it from dissolution, remains as the common result of old credulity and modern investigation.
4. Apparent absence of the elements of philosophy in the Roman mind. These considerations may enable us to understand why the old Roman life seems so much less a preparation for philosophy than either the old Oriental or the old Greek life. The seeds of all later Brahminism were contained in the original Hindoo faith. It is a natural transition from the Homeric chief or king to the sage tyrant of Samos or Corinth; thence to the student of physics or of man. But what germs of such a student were there in the countrymen of Fabricius and Camillus? By what steps could they be led to become professors of wisdom, or hunters for it—sophists or philosophers?
Section II. Origin of Latin Philosophy
1. Roman love of order supplies the want. If we recollect how many of the inquiries which have hitherto occupied us have been inquiries after an order in nature or in human society, we may find an answer to this question. No doubt the naked problem, “Where is wisdom found?” was not likely to present itself to the Roman of any age. Those who had been seeking hither and thither for some solution of that problem he would never really understand. The mere wisdom trader or hawker might, in certain periods of the commonwealth, be a person of some reputation; for the prizes which he held out to the Athenian—the possession of rhetorical skill and political power—were quite as precious to the Roman. But the course of the history, the forms of the constitution, the kind of arguments by which the Roman candidate appealed to the sympathies of his electors, would make the mere skill in disputation, in the use of general maxims, in word-subtleties, not generally available for his purpose. The Sophist and the Rhetorician both might exist; but they would have distinct functions. And the former trade, one may be quite sure, would not be carried on by native hands. They would be found altogether clumsy both in making the wares and disposing of them. When Sophists were wanted in Rome, they would be brought in as part of the spoils of the conqueror, to march, like any other slaves, in his triumph, and furnish him with a new luxury. But the love of order which was so deeply seated in the heart of the Roman—which was connected with all his hardest fights—which was identified with his glory—if it failed to be satisfied by the aspect of the surrounding society, might bring forth questionings as deep and earnest as those by which any Greek in the past times had ever been exercised.
2. Motives to study Greek wisdom. These inquiries, in any distinct shape which could be recognised under the name of philosophy, would of course be of late appearance. They would be preceded by a long internal growth of the national powers, by a sudden and wonderful exhibition of them in victories over the surrounding world, by a bewildering sense of their vastness, by an accompanying and contradictory consciousness of weakness and decay. Clever Greeks coming to Rome at such a time, with a whole apparatus of notions and phrases which were strange to the Latin ear, would produce the most different impressions upon different minds. A new fashion is, of course, most desirable for men in search of excitement, and who have exhausted their old resources. Men tired of the monotony and stateliness of Roman traditions would eagerly catch at the promise of something that would raise them above the past, and enable them to despise it. The old conservative, who was doing much himself to separate the present from the past by his adherence to corrupt practices, and by carrying out all the worst habits of ambition and aggrandisement to which his countrymen were inclined, would be startled and shocked by the invasion of fantastic follies, and would take the coarsest and rudest methods of resisting them. He would be quite unaware that there was a class of men far more patriotic than himself, who listened to the Greek teachers in the very hope that they might find the way of recovering a state of things which they fancied had once been theirs, and which had departed, listened to them with astonishment and admiration, even with blind and devout acquiescence, and yet really brought to them far more than they received from them—feelings, recollections, hopes, which could convert the driest chips of doctrine into practical realities.
3. The young Roman, it may be said, was obliged to take what he could get. If Carneades or Cratippus was the teacher of his day, he must learn of him, and not of Plato nor of Aristotle; since the living voice will always be mightier than the book, and has the power of transforming it. This is partly true. Why the Roman preferred the later schools. Yet it will be evident from what we have said that the Roman had a natural affinity for the later schools, and an incapacity for appreciating the earlier. Epicureans, Stoics, Academics, were occupying themselves about the manner in which men were to live; they had distinct and definite propositions about the condition and conduct of the human or physical universe in which they were dwelling. The Roman, discontented with the political schemes and intrigues in the midst of which his lot was cast—unable to recover the maxims of his ancestors—aware of the tricks which were resorted to by the augurs and diviners of his land—of the state-craft which had worked itself into all the religion of his country—cared little for questions about Being or Unity, but eagerly craved for anything which should give him a hope of greater coherency and consistency in his own relations.
Section III. The Roman Epicurean
1. The poem of Lucretius. The poem of Lucretius naturally presents itself as the first and most marvellous outburst of that spirit which all the wisdom of the Censor and of the older Romans was unable to keep in check. Everything at first sight tends to heighten the wonder which this poem produces in us. The philosophical poems of that nation which had furnished the language of philosophy, and given birth to the most splendid poetry, have perished; only a few fragments remain of the verses in which Xenophanes and Parmenides conveyed their opinions; Empedocles of Agrigentum is scarcely more than the shadow of a name. Nor have we any reason to believe that the productions of these men, though they were men of genius and originality, deserve to be regretted, at least as works of art. How strange, then, does it seem that the greatest effort of Roman genius should be a work written on a subject utterly alien from the habits of the Latin mind, by a young man struggling with a language which, for his purposes at least, was barren and uncouth; a language too which one would have thought could only have become poetical when it was used to speak of the actions of great men, and of people subdued to laws! Its peculiarity. It may seem to some even a more astonishing circumstance than any of these, that the theory which Lucretius undertook to defend and illustrate was, of all that Greece had produced from the days of Thales downwards, the hardest and most mechanical—one would have said the most flat and prosaic. Genius, no doubt, is called forth by difficulties, and if it had nothing to overcome would not deserve its name. Still there is a fitness in the choice of subjects which we are generally able to recognise, and without which it is hardly possible that a work, even if it were written, could become a great national possession. With respect to the doctrine, no thoughtful reader can believe that it was adopted from a false notion either that it was particularly suited for poetry, or that great fame would be obtained by triumphing over its unsuitableness. Lucretius writes with the most entire conviction; his whole mind is evidently impregnated with his doctrine. And this was one necessary condition of his producing so great a poem,—he felt what he said: an earnestness, which had not been in the mind of any Greek for at least two centuries, had got possession of his. He may have selected a miserable idol, but such as it was he rendered to it the most entire, devoted worship.
2. Owes its strength to Roman, not to Greek influences. This earnestness he owed to his Roman education. He had not perhaps himself any strong impulses towards active life, or much of the legal and rhetorical abilities which were the qualification for it. The rage and contention of parties, the atrocities and the meannesses which, in the days of Marius, Cinna, and Sylla, he must have heard of every day, will have been most distracting to him. We may be able to perceive how much better Roman society in that age, with all its abominable crimes, was, than the dreary condition of Greece, even when its sleep was confused by those dreamy efforts of patriotism which the appearance of Flaminius and the Romans called forth. We may see that great social principles were struggling with each other in those conflicts of rival parties which could not have left such an impression upon history, if there had not been much good mixed with the apparently unbroken evil. Influence of his age upon Lucretius. But to Lucretius the misery and confusion will have presented themselves almost without relief; and then, little knowing how much he was indebted to the forms of his country’s polity, and to the truths that lay underneath its false worship, for the disgust which such spectacles excited in him, he will have been led to question the worth of the faith and reverence by which a system of falsehood and cruelty seemed to be upheld. In such inquiries he will probably have found most of the thoughtful youths about him engaged, with no great difference in the result, except that they could abide quietly in contempt of the popular opinions, while he required some positive substitute for them. Arriving with such feelings at Athens, what could be more natural than that the words of an Epicurean lecturer should take a hold of his soul which they never had obtained over the person who uttered them; that he should have welcomed them as the deliverance from an intolerable burden, as the discovery of a region of which he had been dreaming, but which he never believed to exist; nay, as the satisfaction of that love of order which his Roman discipline had imparted to him, and which the circumstances of Rome itself were continually affronting?
3. A poem on the Nature of Things, written under such circumstances by a man possessing the vision and the faculty divine, might well embody some of the deepest, nay, truest feelings. The strongest patriotism, the greatest command of his native tongue, might be exhibited by a man apparently adopting all the habits and notions of a Greek. Under the guise of Epicurism, he might express a religious desire for a deliverance from the tyranny of powers whom he could not love; the Democritic concourse of atoms might convey to him his first notion of any scheme or order in the universe: and such a poem might well become national, for it would express the very state of mind of the age in which it was produced as reflected in the person of the most genius; it would bring out the whole nature of the union which was effected in that age between Greek speculation and Roman life; would show how the latter really asserted its dominion over the beggarly materials with which it had to work.
4. We have no excuse for dwelling at any length upon this noble poem, both because it is so well known, and because the illustration which it gives of Roman feeling at this crisis is the chief light which it throws upon the history of philosophy. In reference to that point, however, we would suggest two reflections to our reader. The first relates to a marked difference between the poet and his master. Epicurus, as we have seen, valued himself mainly upon the moral or human part of his system: the physical, which he borrowed from Democritus, was adopted only as a resource. Lucretius, on the contrary, at once fixed upon the atomic theory as the central part of his philosophy. Nothing can illustrate more strikingly the difference between them. How to find an excuse for a voluptuous and indolent temper, whether it were a sensual one or not—how to arrange the world in conformity with it—was the problem proposed to himself by the Greek; to recognise some kind of principle and connection in things was the delight of the Roman. Such being their respective impulses, we may fairly say, that Lucretius was in spirit further removed from Epicurus than either Zeno or Chrysippus. Another obvious peculiarity of Lucretius illustrates a remark which has been made already. He has evidently the greatest craving for an order in the physical world; but he does not feel the least necessary connection between it and the Nous which Anaxagoras spoke of. He can more readily regard it as the result of a concurrence of atoms. Lucretius wanted a Moral Ruler; not finding one he became an Atheist. Has the Atheism of any Latin been ever removed by the mere acknowledgment of a skilful Designer or Demiurgus?
Section IV. The Roman Stoic
1. Motives to embrace Stoicism If there were some of a more adventurous genius, who fled ex fæce Romuli to the study of the laws of the material universe, there were many more who found their great relief in contemplating the severe forms of the elder Romans; who either saw in the records of their country, or created out of the materials which they furnished, men of a stately character to whom wealth was indifferent, loving their country above all things, ready to sacrifice themselves, or whatever was dearest to them, for its sake. Between such simple men and the stiff solemn conscious Stoic a whole heaven would seem to intervene. Yet there was enough of external resemblance in the two characters to deceive those who felt that they wanted some knowledge which their fathers had not, who were unwillingly half ashamed of their old ignorance, and half afraid lest their new philosophy should weaken their admiration and their patriotism. To be taught how they might upon rule and principle be that which their ancestors had been from some unattainable instinct—to be taught how they might be only better and more consistent Romans for this Greek infusion—was most soothing and satisfactory.
2. Cato and Brutus. That such feelings existed we have abundant evidence; but they did not, like the thoughts of the great Epicurean, find their principal expression in words. The lives of Cato and Brutus—the one more formal and severe, as of a person who felt that he was trying to support a character, the other more genial and free, like one who had really caught the spirit of the olden time,—both Roman aristocrats at heart, however they might speak the language of the schools—these are the true utterances of Roman stoicism, which have thrown a splendour around the doctrine that it could never have obtained either from its first teachers, or from Seneca and the rhetoricians who afterwards talked of it in Latin.
Section V. The Proper Roman Philosophy
1. Thus far we have seen the Romans only translating into living words or living acts the dead formulas of the Greek schools. But Rome was also to have a formal philosophy of its own; if not to make any new discoveries or to follow any course of thought which had not been previously marked out, at least to give a dignity to one particular department of thought, which, in the minds of even the greatest Greeks, had obtained only a secondary importance. CICERO. We have spoken of Cicero as an Academic; and doubtless there was much in his character, in his political career, and in his rhetorical habits, which might have led us to predict that this was the sect to which he would be most naturally drawn. He appears to have had a singular equitable, balancing, compromising nature. The circumstances of his age, the utter impossibility of adhering with steadiness to any one party, when parties were so constantly shifting their ground; his conscientious unwillingness not to take some part in political life, or to set up any immutable, unattainable standard for those who were engaged in it, confirmed all his original tendencies; the profession of an advocate riveted and perfected them. Though certainly not the person to be fixed upon as exemplifying the highest form of the Roman character, he had in a remarkable degree the Roman temperament, and he seems especially formed to show us what the intellect of his nation was when at its greatest natural stretch, not raised by some extraordinary impulse of genius or devotion above itself. On this account it is that his letters, speeches, and dialogues, present so perfect an image of his own age, and that some have thought a history of Rome might have been composed from them, if all other monuments were lost.
2. Why he preferred the Academy. But it must be observed, that merely practical wisdom is not able to express and embody itself in words till it has been mixed with an apparently incongruous element. If Cicero had not studied Greek philosophy, and been, so far as an accomplished scholar and statesman can be so, a pedant, he would not have enabled us to understand himself or his countrymen as he has done. His philosophy was unquestionably important to him and to us; still it is amusing to hear him speak as if his habits of mind had been in any considerable degree moulded by its influence, when it is evident that they were wrought into him by the influence of old forms and institutions, by the circumstances of his country, and the tone of the men who surrounded him. These determined the system of philosophy which he took under his patronage. He found the Academics treating philosophical questions in the same manner and with the same fairness as prosecutor and defendant were treated in the Roman courts: arriving at no settlement, as he could arrive at none in the disputes of factions, yet inclining to established notions in opposition to the dogmatical denials of the Epicurean, and to a moderate behaviour accommodated to circumstances, in opposition to the fixed rule of the Stoic, he was therefore irresistibly prepossessed in favour of their views.
3. How he differed from his teachers. But that which gave those views favour in the mind of the Greek was their fitness for talk—a talk which might be carried on for ever without the least reference to life. That which endeared them to the Roman was their apparent suitableness for practice, their seeming to show the very point where the lines of philosophy and practice intersect each other. This was the point at which he was aiming; and in his own speculations, however they may seem to be merely derived from the Academics, he is continually bringing it before us. If there was one feeling in which the Greek Academician was utterly deficient, it was the feeling of Duty, the feeling that there is a work which a man is sent into the world to do. This feeling is wanting in all the sects: each was framing a scheme of life, or aiming at some ideal of excellence; none was acknowledging a vocation. It would be very unjust to say that the sense of duty was absent from the minds of Plato and Aristotle; they had it unquestionably, or they would not have been what they were, or have done what they did. But it is true that it was not the prominent characteristic in either of them, or in any Greek. On the other hand, this feeling is the one which gives all the meaning and interest to the works of Cicero. You can always see that he is impatient of any subject which he does not think has a direct bearing upon human life; that when he writes upon such subjects, he has only the use of his left hand; that they never do really affect him at all; that he has no opinions upon them, and does not care to have any. He will, therefore, retail the opinions of all the philosophers so far as he knows them, or will allow some able representative of the different sects to state the views of each, and will seem to have no aversion to anything but the dogmatism which each exhibits. Yet in the end you find that he has a set of firm convictions in his mind, which have remained undisturbed by all these controversies, and by his own nominal scepticism. He can see nothing but a difference of words between the Peripatetics and the Academics, and it is quite clear that he means to extend the observation to the original masters of those two schools. Not an Atheist nor a Sceptic. The whole subject of Being and Ideas, about which Greek philosophy in its best days was conversant, is an unknown world to him. Plato he looks upon chiefly as the most eloquent of men; from Aristotle he has gained good helps in the study of rhetoric. One cannot discover that he cared anything about physics; logic he prized chiefly as a mental exercise, and in all disputes about the nature of the gods, so far as they bear upon either of these subjects, he seems to be neutral, and, if one tried him by modern rules, we might fancy atheistic. But he is not so at all; he has a much stronger belief in a Divine power, and a Divine government, than many whose opportunities of knowledge are infinitely greater than his. He attained this belief without any assistance from the Greeks, and he retained it, not at all strengthened certainly, but not materially weakened, by what he learnt through them. Without a Divine Being there can be no sanctity, no duties, no laws; this was the conclusion of his heart and reason both, and he felt that it was a deeper and securer one than any which arguments could furnish him with. Idea of Duty or moral obligation. This ground, therefore, he vindicated to himself; he brought out the idea of Moral Obligation with a distinction with which it had not been presented before. Not that it would be easy to point out passages in his books in which the subject is discussed amply and satisfactorily; not that the student will not often have to complain of much looseness in his language upon it; not that he will not be sometimes puzzled to conceive how so much indifference to absolute truth can consist with a strong sense of moral duty; yet this seems to be the total effect of his books,—the result which is left upon our minds both by their merits and their omissions. Though he has established nothing, he leaves us with the conviction that something is established, and that it is not something independent of us, but something with which we are concerned, and in conformity with which we are bound to act. His philosophical works, therefore, appear to have been unjustly exalted, and as unjustly disparaged. When he is used as an interpreter of the older Greeks—when we try to understand Plato through his means—we confer on him a station which was never intended for him, and he will unquestionably lead us astray. On the contrary, when we regard him merely as the translator into eloquent Latin of what he had heard from his teachers in Athens, we degrade him just as unfairly. His philosophy has a substantive value; such language as his can never be a mere clothing for other men’s conceptions, though it may not be a fitting expression for the very deepest ideas. And it should be observed, that in those works wherein he has adopted Plato’s titles, and might seem to have followed him most closely, as in the Laws and the Republic, he has really drawn most upon his native resources, and established the truth of his own words, that he had learned more from the Twelve Tables than from all the philosophers.
4. A new age beginning. The sentence upon Cicero, sealed and sanctioned by the young Octavius, was the sign that the republic had really passed away; that a new age was beginning. What the character of that new age would be, how it would affect the condition of Rome and of the universe, what questions it would settle, to what questions it would give rise—we may have to consider hereafter. Possibly we shall find that the answer is not to be gained wholly or chiefly from Roman history. The youth who, as Virgil hoped, was carried everso succurrere sæclo, did not fulfil that task. The return of the Saturnian reign was not brought about by the son of Pollio. When Dante spoke of his noble predecessor as a teacher and guide in the search for wisdom, it was mainly because he had led his hero into the invisible world, and had suggested to his Florentine disciple the thought that thence he must obtain his knowledge respecting the destinies of Italy and of mankind.