Section I. Roman History and Mythology
1. The ballads or songs thought to underlie one part of Roman history will surely have mentioned many divine persons. But they will surely not have placed at the center a divine counsellor, a God of wisdom. That is not the leading trait of the Roman Jove, nor of any of the lesser demigods. They are lawgivers, rulers, preservers of boundaries, champions of right, avengers of wrong. It could never have occurred to a Latin mind to revere them chiefly, or perhaps at all, for their wit and subtlety.
2. The heroes of early Roman history and tradition differ in the same way from the Greek hero. There is no Odysseus among them. His countrymen might easily have given his qualities to Romulus, Numa, or Publicola, saying: “Intelligence is what organises infant communities and prescribes rites and laws; if you suppose an order was created, you presume device or counsel in the one who established it.” A Greek needed this, because he could not separate the two thoughts. A Roman separated them without effort. Even if he felt that wisdom was needed to preserve order, order came first in his mind and wisdom second. He might admit that the legislator was a wise man; he would never have allowed that the wise man, as such, was a legislator.
3. We may reject much of the stories in Livy (he himself scarcely asks us to believe them), yet no one can doubt that he had a deep perception of what the history meant. A simple reader who takes his facts for granted gets the impression of a wonderful order growing up over many centuries, by mysterious influences, through conflicts of opposing forces, under divine direction. The critical investigator arrives at the same conclusion. Each event, truly or falsely recorded, whether kept by the vanity of patrician families or expressing popular sympathy or indignation, still explains the development of some new principle in the commonwealth. It shows how what was latent became manifest, and how institutions came forth when needed out of seeds sown in the soil ages before. We may now understand better which elements, Latin or Etruscan, went into the body politic. But that it was a body politic, and that influences higher than mortal gave it coherence and kept it from dissolving, remains the common result of old credulity and modern investigation.
4. These considerations help us see why the old Roman life seems so much less a preparation for philosophy than the old Oriental or old Greek life. The seeds of all later Brahminism were in the original Hindoo faith. The step from the Homeric chief or king to the sage tyrant of Samos or Corinth is natural, and so is the step from him 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. If we remember how many of our inquiries so far have been searches for an order in nature or in human society, we may find an answer to this question. The bare problem, “Where is wisdom found?”, was not likely to occur to the Roman of any age, and he would never really understand those who had gone searching here and there for its solution. The mere wisdom-trader or hawker might at certain periods of the commonwealth enjoy some reputation, since the prizes he offered the Athenian, rhetorical skill and political power, were just as precious to the Roman. But the course of Roman history, the forms of the constitution, and the kind of arguments by which a Roman candidate won over his electors meant that skill in disputation, in general maxims, and in word-subtleties was not generally useful to him. Sophists and Rhetoricians might both exist, but they would have distinct functions. The Sophist’s trade, we may be sure, would not be carried on by native hands, which would be clumsy both at making the wares and at selling them. When Rome wanted Sophists, they would be brought in among the conqueror’s spoils, to march in his triumph like any other slaves and supply him with a new luxury. But the love of order was deeply seated in the Roman heart, connected with all his hardest fights and identified with his glory. If the society around him failed to satisfy it, it might produce questionings as deep and earnest as any that had ever occupied a Greek in earlier times.
2. Such inquiries, in any form recognisable as philosophy, would of course appear late. They would be preceded by a long internal growth of the national powers, by a sudden and wonderful display of them in victories over the surrounding world, by a bewildering sense of their vastness, and by an accompanying and contradictory sense of weakness and decay. Clever Greeks coming to Rome at such a time, with a whole apparatus of notions and phrases strange to the Latin ear, would make very different impressions on different minds. A new fashion is most welcome to men who seek excitement and have exhausted their old resources. Men tired of the monotony and stateliness of Roman traditions would eagerly seize on the promise of something that would lift them above the past and let them despise it. The old conservative was himself widening the gap between present and past by his corrupt practices and by indulging the worst habits of ambition and aggrandisement to which his countrymen were inclined. He would be startled and shocked by the invasion of fantastic follies and would resist them in the coarsest and rudest ways. He would not realise that there were men far more patriotic than himself who listened to the Greek teachers in the hope of recovering a state of things they fancied had once been theirs and had departed. They listened with astonishment and admiration, even with blind and devout acquiescence, and yet they brought to the Greeks far more than they received: feelings, recollections, and hopes that could turn the driest chips of doctrine into practical realities.
3. It may be said that the young Roman had to take what he could get. If Carneades or Cratippus was the teacher of the day, he had to learn from him and not from Plato or Aristotle, since the living voice is always mightier than the book and can transform it. This is partly true. Yet it is evident from what we have said that the Roman had a natural affinity for the later schools and could not appreciate the earlier. Epicureans, Stoics, and Academics concerned themselves with how men were to live, and had distinct, definite propositions about the condition and conduct of the human or physical universe they inhabited. The Roman was discontented with the political schemes and intrigues around him, unable to recover his ancestors’ maxims, and aware of the tricks of the augurs and diviners of his land and of the state-craft worked into all his country’s religion. He cared little for questions about Being or Unity, but eagerly craved anything that gave him hope of greater coherency and consistency in his own relations.
Section III. The Roman Epicurean
1. The poem of Lucretius is the first and most astonishing outburst of the spirit that the wisdom of the Censor and the older Romans could not hold in check. Much heightens the wonder. The philosophical poems of the nation that supplied philosophy’s language and produced the most splendid poetry have perished. Only fragments remain of the verses in which Xenophanes and Parmenides gave their opinions, and Empedocles of Agrigentum is hardly more than the shadow of a name. Nor have we reason to think these men, gifted and original as they were, are to be regretted as works of art. How strange, then, that the greatest effort of Roman genius should treat a subject utterly alien to the Latin mind, written by a young man struggling with a language barren and uncouth for his purposes — a language one would have thought could become poetical only in speaking of great men’s deeds and of peoples subdued to law! Some may find it more astonishing still that the theory he set out to defend was, of all that Greece had produced since Thales, the hardest and most mechanical, one would have said the flattest and most prosaic. Genius is called forth by difficulties, but we can generally recognize a fitness in the choice of subject, without which a work can hardly become a great national possession. No thoughtful reader can believe Lucretius took up the doctrine because he thought it suited to poetry, or because he wanted fame for overcoming its unsuitableness. He writes with entire conviction, his whole mind impregnated with his doctrine. That was a necessary condition of so great a poem: he felt what he said. An earnestness absent from every Greek mind for at least two centuries had taken hold of his. He may have chosen a miserable idol, but he gave it complete and devoted worship.
2. He owed this earnestness to his Roman education. He perhaps had no strong impulse toward active life, nor much of the legal and rhetorical ability it required. The rage and contention of parties, and the atrocities and meannesses of the days of Marius, Cinna, and Sylla, which he must have heard of daily, will have distracted him. We can see how much better Roman society of that age, despite its abominable crimes, was than the dreary condition of Greece, even when its sleep was disturbed by the dreamy patriotic efforts that the coming of Flaminius and the Romans stirred up. We can see that great social principles were struggling in those party conflicts, which could not have left such a mark on history if there had not been much good mixed with the apparent evil. But to Lucretius the misery and confusion will have seemed almost without relief. Little knowing how much he owed to his country’s polity, and to the truths beneath its false worship, for the disgust these sights roused in him, he will have been led to question the worth of the faith and reverence that seemed to uphold a system of falsehood and cruelty. He will probably have found most thoughtful youths about him asking the same questions, with much the same result, except that they could rest quietly in contempt of popular opinion, while he needed a positive substitute. Arriving at Athens in this state, what was more natural than that an Epicurean lecturer’s words should grip his soul as they never gripped the lecturer himself? He would welcome them as deliverance from an intolerable burden, as the discovery of a region he had dreamed of but never believed in, and as satisfying the love of order that his Roman discipline had given him and that Rome’s circumstances constantly affronted.
3. A poem on the Nature of Things, written in such circumstances by a man with the vision and faculty divine, might well embody some of the deepest and truest feelings. The strongest patriotism and the greatest command of his native tongue might appear in a man who seemed to adopt all the habits and notions of a Greek. Under the guise of Epicurism he might express a religious longing for deliverance from the tyranny of powers he could not love. The Democritean concourse of atoms might give him his first notion of any scheme or order in the universe. Such a poem might well become national, for it would express the very state of mind of its age as reflected in its most gifted person. It would show the union of Greek speculation and Roman life in that age, and how Roman life asserted its dominion over the beggarly materials it had to work with.
4. We have no excuse for dwelling long on this noble poem, both because it is so well known and because its chief light on the history of philosophy is the illustration it gives of Roman feeling at this crisis. On that point I suggest two reflections. The first concerns a marked difference between the poet and his master. Epicurus, as we have seen, valued himself mainly on the moral or human part of his system, and took the physical part from Democritus only as a resource. Lucretius, on the contrary, fixed at once on the atomic theory as the central part of his philosophy. Nothing shows more strikingly the difference between them. The Greek’s problem was how to find an excuse for a voluptuous and indolent temper, sensual or not, and how to arrange the world to fit it. The Roman’s delight was to recognize some principle and connection in things. Given these impulses, Lucretius was in spirit further from Epicurus than either Zeno or Chrysippus. The second peculiarity illustrates a remark already made. Lucretius craves order in the physical world, but he feels no necessary connection between it and the Nous of which Anaxagoras spoke. 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 ever been removed by the mere acknowledgment of a skilful Designer or Demiurgus?
Section IV. The Roman Stoic
1. Some men of more adventurous genius fled “from the dregs of Romulus” to the study of the laws of the material universe. But many more found their relief in contemplating the severe figures of the elder Romans. They either found such men in their country’s records or built them out of the materials those records supplied: stately characters who were indifferent to wealth, loved their country above all things, and were ready to sacrifice themselves, or whatever was dearest to them, for its sake. A whole heaven would seem to lie between such simple men and the stiff, solemn, self-conscious Stoic. Yet the two characters resembled each other outwardly enough to deceive those who felt they lacked some knowledge their fathers had not had. These people were half ashamed of their old ignorance and half afraid that a new philosophy would weaken their admiration and their patriotism. It was soothing and satisfying to be taught how they might, by rule and principle, be what their ancestors had been by some unattainable instinct, and how this Greek infusion might make them only better and more consistent Romans.
2. We have plenty of evidence that such feelings existed, but they did not, like the thoughts of the great Epicurean, find their chief expression in words. The true utterances of Roman Stoicism are the lives of Cato and Brutus. Cato was the more formal and severe, like someone who felt he was trying to keep up a character; Brutus was the more genial and free, like someone who had really caught the spirit of the olden time. Both were Roman aristocrats at heart, whatever the language of the schools they spoke. Their lives gave the doctrine a splendour it could never have gained from its first teachers, or from Seneca and the rhetoricians who afterwards talked of it in Latin.
Section V. The Proper Roman Philosophy
1. So far we have seen the Romans only turning the dead formulas of the Greek schools into living words and acts. But Rome was also to have a formal philosophy of its own. It would make no new discoveries and follow no course of thought not already marked out, but it would give dignity to one department of thought that even the greatest Greeks had treated as secondary. I have spoken of Cicero as an Academic, and much in his character, his political career, and his rhetorical habits might have led us to predict that this was the sect he would be drawn to. He seems to have had an equitable, balancing, compromising nature. The circumstances of his age confirmed it: no one could keep steadily to a party when parties kept shifting their ground, and he was conscientiously unwilling to stay out of political life or to set an unattainable, immovable standard for those engaged in it. His profession as an advocate riveted and perfected these tendencies. He is certainly not the person to point to as the highest form of the Roman character, but he had the Roman temperament to a remarkable degree. He seems formed to show us what his nation’s intellect was at its natural best, not lifted above itself by some extraordinary impulse of genius or devotion. That is why his letters, speeches, and dialogues give so perfect an image of his age, and why some have thought a history of Rome could be written from them if every other monument were lost.
2. But merely practical wisdom cannot put itself into words until it is mixed with an apparently incongruous element. Had Cicero not studied Greek philosophy and been something of a pedant, as far as an accomplished scholar and statesman can be one, he would not have let us understand himself and his countrymen as he has. His philosophy mattered to him and to us. Still, it is amusing to hear him speak as if philosophy had greatly moulded his habits of mind, when plainly those habits were wrought into him by old forms and institutions, by his country’s circumstances, and by the tone of the men around him. These determined which philosophy he took under his patronage. He found the Academics treating philosophical questions as fairly as prosecutor and defendant were treated in the Roman courts. They reached no settlement, as he could reach none in the disputes of factions. They leaned toward established notions against the dogmatic denials of the Epicurean, and toward moderate behaviour suited to circumstances against the Stoic’s fixed rule. So he was irresistibly prepossessed in their favour.
3. What made those views attractive to the Greek was their fitness for talk, which could go on forever without any reference to life. What endeared them to the Roman was their apparent suitability for practice, their seeming to show the very point where philosophy and practice intersect. That was the point Cicero aimed at, and in his own speculations, however derived from the Academics they may seem, he keeps bringing it before us. The Greek Academician was utterly deficient in the feeling of Duty, the feeling that there is a work a man is sent into the world to do. All the sects lacked it: each framed a scheme of life or aimed at an ideal of excellence, and none acknowledged a vocation. It would be unjust to say Plato and Aristotle had no sense of duty; they must have had it, or they would not have been what they were. But it was not the prominent characteristic in either of them, or in any Greek. In Cicero, on the other hand, this feeling gives all the meaning and interest to his works. You can see he is impatient of any subject that has no direct bearing on human life; when he writes on such subjects he uses only his left hand, they never really affect him, and he has no opinions on them and does not care to have any. So he retails the opinions of all the philosophers as far as he knows them, or lets a capable representative of each sect state its views, and seems to dislike nothing but the dogmatism each shows. Yet in the end you find he has a set of firm convictions that all these controversies and his own nominal scepticism left undisturbed. He sees only a difference of words between the Peripatetics and the Academics, and clearly means this to hold of the original masters of the two schools as well. The whole subject of Being and Ideas, which Greek philosophy in its best days dealt with, is an unknown world to him. Plato he regards chiefly as the most eloquent of men; from Aristotle he got good help for the study of rhetoric. He seems to have cared nothing for physics; he prized logic chiefly as a mental exercise; and in all disputes about the nature of the gods, so far as they touch these subjects, he seems neutral, and by modern rules we might fancy him atheistic. But he is not so at all. He believes in a Divine power and a Divine government much more strongly than many who have infinitely greater opportunities of knowledge. He reached this belief without help from the Greeks, and kept it, not strengthened but not materially weakened by what he learned from them. Without a Divine Being there can be no sanctity, no duties, no laws; this was the conclusion of both his heart and his reason, and he felt it to be deeper and securer than any argument could make it. He vindicated this ground to himself and brought out the idea of Moral Obligation with a distinctness it had not had before. It would not be easy to point to passages where he discusses the subject amply and satisfactorily; the student will often complain of loose language, and will sometimes be puzzled how so much indifference to absolute truth can coexist with so strong a sense of moral duty. Yet this seems to be the total effect of his books, the result left by both their merits and their omissions: though he has established nothing, he leaves us convinced that something is established, that it is not independent of us, and that it concerns us and we are bound to act in conformity with it. His philosophical works have therefore been unjustly exalted and unjustly disparaged. If we use him as an interpreter of the older Greeks and try to understand Plato through him, we give him a station never intended for him, and he will lead us astray. If we regard him merely as the translator into eloquent Latin of what he heard from his teachers in Athens, we degrade him just as unfairly. His philosophy has substantive value; language like his can never be a mere clothing for other men’s conceptions, though it may not suit the very deepest ideas. And in the works where he adopted Plato’s titles and might seem to follow him most closely, the Laws and the Republic, he in fact drew most on his own native resources, and proved true his own saying that he had learned more from the Twelve Tables than from all the philosophers.
4. The sentence upon Cicero, sealed and sanctioned by the young Octavius, was the sign that the republic had really passed away and a new age was beginning. What that age would be like, how it would affect Rome and the universe, what questions it would settle and what questions it would raise, we may have to consider later. Possibly the answer is not to be gained wholly or chiefly from Roman history. The youth whom Virgil hoped would come to the aid of a ruined age did not fulfil that task; the return of the Saturnian reign was not brought about by the son of Pollio. When Dante spoke of Virgil, his noble predecessor, as a teacher and guide in the search for wisdom, it was mainly because Virgil had led his hero into the invisible world, and had suggested to his Florentine disciple that from there he must obtain his knowledge of the destinies of Italy and of mankind.