CHAPTER VII
"GODS OR ATOMS?"
In the first two centuries of our era a great change came over the ancient world. A despised and traditional religion, under the stimulus of new cults coming from the East, revived and re-asserted its power over the minds of men. Philosophy, grown practical in its old age, forsook its youthful enthusiasm for the quest of truth, and turned aside to the regulation of conduct, by means of maxims now instead of inspiration, and finally, as we have seen, to apology for the ancient faith of the fathers. Its business now was to reconcile its own monotheistic dogma with popular polytheistic practice. It was perhaps this very reconciliation that threw open the door for the glowing monotheism of the disciples of Jesus; but, whatever the cause, Christianity quickly spread over the whole Roman Empire. We are apt to wonder to-day at the great political and national developments that have altered the whole aspect of Europe since the French Revolution, and to reflect rather idly on their rapidity. Yet the past has its own stories of rapid change, and not the least striking of them is the disappearance of that world of thought which we call Classical. By 180 A.D. nearly every distinctive mark of classical antiquity is gone – the old political ideas, the old philosophies, the old literatures, and much else with them. Old forms and names remain – there are still consuls and archons, poets and philosophers, but the atmosphere is another, and the names have a new meaning, if they have any at all. But the mere survival of the names hid for many the fact that they were living in a new era.
Marcus Aurelius
In the reign of Marcus Aurelius, however, the signs of change became more evident, and men grew conscious that some transformation of the world was in progress. A great plague, the scanty records of which only allow us to speak in vague terms of an immense reduction in population[583] – barbarism active upon the frontier of an Empire not so well able as it had fancied to defend itself – superstitions, Egyptian and Jewish, diverting men from the ordinary ways of civic duty – such were some of the symptoms that men marked. Under the weight of absurdity, quietism and individualism, the state seemed to be sinking, and all that freedom of mind which was the distinctive boast of Hellenism was rapidly being lost.
It happens that, while the historical literature of the period has largely perished, a number of authors survive, who from their various points of view deal with what is our most immediate subject – the conflict of religions. Faith, doubt, irritation and fatalism are all represented. The most conspicuous men of letters of the age are undoubtedly the Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself and his two brilliant contemporaries, Lucian of Samosata, and Apuleius of Madaura.[584] Celsus, a man of mind as powerful as any of the three, survives in fragments, but fragments ample enough to permit of re-construction. Among the Christians too there was increased literary activity, but Tertullian and Clement will suffice for our purpose.
Though not in his day regarded as a man of letters, it is yet in virtue of his writing that Marcus Aurelius survives. His journal, with the title that tells its nature – "To Himself," is to-day perhaps the most popular book of antiquity with those whose first concern is not literature. It is translated again and again, and it is studied. The peculiar mind of the solitary Emperor has made him, as Mr F. W. H. Myers put it, "the saint and exemplar of Agnosticism." Meditative, tender and candid, yet hesitant and so far ineffectual, he is sensitive to so much that is positive and to so much that is negative, that the diary, in which his character is most intimately revealed, gives him a place of his own in the hearts of men perplext in the extreme. He is a man who neither believes, nor disbelieves, – "either gods or atoms"[585] seems to be the necessary antithesis, and there is so much to be said both for and against each of the alternatives that decision is impossible. He is attracted by the conception of Providence, but he hesitates to commit himself. There are arguments – at least of the kind that rest on probability – in favour of immortality, but they are insufficient to determine the matter. In his public capacity he became famous for the number and magnificence of his sacrifices to the gods of the state; he owns in his journal his debt to the gods for warnings given in dreams, but he suspects at times that they may not exist. Meanwhile he persecutes the Christians for their disloyalty to the state. Their stubborn convictions were so markedly in contrast with his own wavering mind that he could not understand them – perhaps their motive was bravado, he thought; they were too theatrical altogether; their pose recalled the tragedies composed by the pupils of the rhetoricians – large language with nothing behind it.[586]
In the absence of any possibility of intellectual certainty, Marcus fell back upon conduct. Here his want of originality and of spiritual force was less felt, for conduct has tolerably well-established rules of neighbourliness, purity, good temper, public duty and the like. His Stoic guides, too, might in this region help him to follow with more confidence the voice of his own pure and delicate conscience – the conscience of a saint and a quietist rather than that of a man of action. Yet even in the realm of conduct he is on the whole ineffectual. Pure, truthful, kind, and brave he is, but he does not believe enough to be great. He is called to be a statesman and an administrator; he does not expect much outcome from all his energies, and he preaches to himself the necessity of patience with his prospective failure to achieve anything beyond the infinitesimal. "Ever the same are the cycles of the universe, up and down, for ever and for ever. Either the intelligence of the Whole puts itself in motion for each separate effect – in which case accept the result it gives; or else it did so once for all, and everything is sequence, one thing in another … [The text is doubtful for a line] … In a word, either God, and all goes well; or all at random – live not thou at random.
"A moment, and earth will cover us all; then it too in its turn will change; and what it changes to, will change again and again for ever; and again change after change to infinity. The waves of change and transformation – if a man think of them and of their speed, he will despise everything mortal.
"The universal cause is like a winter torrent; it carries all before it. How cheap then these poor statesmen, these who carry philosophy into practical affairs, as they fancy – poor diminutive creatures. Drivellers. Man, what then? Do what now Nature demands. Start, if it be given thee, and look not round to see if any will know. Hope not for Plato's Republic;[587] but be content if the smallest thing advance; to compass that one issue count no little feat.
"Who shall change one of their dogmata [the regular word of Epictetus]? And without a change of dogmata, what is there but the slavery of men groaning and pretending to obey? Go now, and talk of Alexander, and Philip and Demetrius of Phalerum; whether they saw the will of Nature and schooled themselves, is their affair; if they played the tragic actor, no one has condemned me to copy them. Simplicity and modesty are the work of philosophy; do not lead me astray into vanity.
"Look down from above on the countless swarms of men, their countless initiations, and their varied voyage in storm and calm, their changing combinations, as they come into being, meet, and pass out of being. Think too of the life lived by others of old, of the life that shall be lived by others after thee, of the life now lived among the barbarian nations; and, of how many have never heard thy name, and how many will at once forget it, and how many may praise thee now perhaps but will very soon blame thee; and how neither memory is of any account, nor glory, nor anything else at all…
"The rottenness of the material substance of every individual thing – water, dust, bones, stench… And this breathing element is another of the same, changing from this to that…
"Either the gods have no power, or they have power. If they have not, why pray? If they have, why not pray for deliverance from the fear, or the desire, or the pain, which the thing causes, rather than for the withholding or the giving of the particular thing? For certainly, if they can co-operate with men, it is for these purposes they can co-operate. But perhaps thou wilt say, The gods have put all these in my own power. Then is it not better to use what is in thine own power and be free, than to be set on what is not in thy power – a slave and contemptible? And who told thee that the gods do not help us even to what is in our own power?"[588]
This handful of short passages all from the same place, with a few omitted, may be taken as representing very fairly the mind of Marcus Aurelius. The world was his to rule, and he felt it a duty to remember how slight a thing it was. This was not the temper of Alexander or of Cæsar, – of men who make mankind, and who, by their belief in men and in the power of their own ideas to lift men to higher planes of life, actually do secure that advance is made, – and that advance not the smallest. Yet he speaks of Alexander as a "tragic actor."[589] For a statesman, the attitude of Marcus is little short of betrayal. He worked, he ruled, he endowed, he fought – he was pure, he was conscientious, he was unselfish – but he did not believe, and he was ineffectual. The Germans it might have been beyond any man's power to repel at that day, but even at home Marcus was ineffectual. His wife and his son were by-words. He had almost a morbid horror of defilement from men and women of coarse minds, – a craving too for peace and sympathy; he shrank into himself, condoned, ignored. Among his benefactors he does not mention Hadrian, who really gave him the Empire – and it is easy to see why. In everything the two are a contrast. Hadrian's personal vices and his greatness as a ruler, as a man handling men and moving among ideas[590] – these were impossible for Marcus.
Nor was the personal religion of this pure and candid spirit a possible one for mankind. "A genuine eternal Gospel," wrote Renan of this diary of Marcus, "the book of the Thoughts will never grow old, for it affirms no dogma. The Gospel has grown old in certain parts; Science no longer allows us to admit the naïve conception of the supernatural which is its base… Yet Science might destroy God and the soul, and the book of the Thoughts would remain young in its life and truth." Renan is right; when Science, or anything else, "destroys God and the soul," there is no Gospel but that of Marcus; and yet for men it is impossible; and it is not young – it is senile. Duty without enthusiasm, hope or belief – belief in man, of course, for "God and the soul" are by hypothesis "destroyed" – duty, that is, without object, reason or result, it is a magnificent fancy, and yet one recurs to the criticism that Marcus passed upon the Christians. Is there not a hint of the school about this? Is it not possible that the simpler instincts of men, – instincts with a history as ludicrous as Anthropologists sometimes sketch for us, – may after all come nearer the truth of things than semi-Stoic reflexion? At all events the instincts have ruled the world so far with the co-operation of Reason, and are as yet little inclined to yield their rights to their colleague. They have never done so without disaster.
The world did not accept Marcus as a teacher. Men readily recognized his high character, but for a thousand years and more nobody dreamed of taking him as a guide – nobody, that is, outside the schools. For the world it was faith or unbelief, and the two contemporaries already mentioned represent the two poles to which the thoughts of men gravitated, who were not yet ready for a cleavage with the past.
Lucian
"I am a Syrian from the Euphrates,"[591] wrote Lucian of himself; and elsewhere he has a playful protest against a historian of his day, magnificently ignorant of Eastern geography, who "has taken up my native Samosata, and shifted it, citadel, walls and all, into Mesopotamia," and by this new feat of colonization has apparently turned him into a Parthian or Mesopotamian.[592] Samosata lay actually in Commagene, and there Lucian spent his boyhood talking Syriac, his native language.[593] He was born about 125 A.D. His family were poor, and as soon as he left school, the question of a trade was at once raised, for even a boy's earnings would be welcome. At school he had had a trick of scraping the wax from his tablets and making little figures of animals and men, so his father handed him over to his mother's brother, who was one of a family of statuaries. But a blunder and a breakage resulted in his uncle thrashing him, and he ran home to his mother. It was his first and last day in the sculptor's shop, and he went to bed with tears upon his face. In later life he told the story of a dream which he had that night – a long and somewhat literary dream modelled on Prodicus' fable of the Choice of Herakles. He dreamed that two women appeared to him, one dusty and workmanlike, the other neat, charming and noble. They were Sculpture and Culture, and he chose the latter. He tells the dream, he says, that the young may be helped by his example to pursue the best and devote themselves to Culture, regardless of immediate poverty.[594] He was launched somehow on the career of his choice and became a rhetorician. It may be noted however that an instinctive interest in art remained with him, and he is reckoned one of the best art-critics of antiquity.
Rhetoric, he says, "made a Greek of him," went with him from city to city in Greece and Ionia, "sailed the Ionian sea with him and attended him even as far as Gaul, scattering plenty in his path."[595] For, as he explains elsewhere, he was among the teachers who could command high fees, and he made a good income in Gaul.[596] But, about the age of forty, he resolved "to let the gentlemen of the jury rest in peace – tyrants enough having been arraigned and princes enough eulogized."[597] From now onward he wrote dialogues – he had at last found his proper work.
Lucian's Dialogues
Dialogue in former days had been the vehicle of speculation – "had trodden those aerial plains on high above the clouds, where the great Zeus in heaven is borne along on winged car." But it was to do so no more, and in an amusing piece Lucian represents Dialogue personified as bringing a suit against him for outrage. Had Lucian debased Dialogue, by reducing him to the common level of humanity and making him associate with such persons as Aristophanes and Menippus, one a light-hearted mocker at things sacred, the other a barking, snarling dog of a Cynic, – thus turning Dialogue into a literary Centaur, neither fit to walk nor able to soar? Or was Dialogue really a musty, fusty, superannuated creature, and greatly improved now for having a bath and being taught to smile and to go genially in the company of Comedy? Between the attack and the defence, the case is fairly stated.[598] Lucian created a new mode in writing – or perhaps he revived it, for it is not very clear how much he owes to his favourite Menippus, the Gadarene Cynic and satirist of four centuries before.
Menippus however has perished and Lucian remains and is read; for, whatever else is to be said of him, he is readable. He has not lost all the traces of the years during which he consorted with Rhetoric; at times he amplifies and exaggerates, and will strain for more point and piquancy than a taste more sure would approve. Yet he has the instinct to avoid travesty, and his style is in general natural and simple, despite occasional literary reminiscences. His characters talk, – as men may talk of their affairs, when they are not conscious of being overheard, – with a naïve frankness not always very wise, with a freedom and common sense, and sometimes with a folly, that together reveal the speaker. They rarely declaim, and they certainly never reach any high level of thought or feeling. The talk is slight and easy – it flickers about from one idea to another, and gives a strong impression of being real. If it is gods who are talking, they become surprisingly human – and even bourgeois, they are so very much at home among themselves. Lucian's skill is amazing. He will take some episode from Homer and change no single detail, and yet, as we listen to the off-hand talk of the gods as they recount the occurrence, we are startled at the effect – the irony is everywhere and nowhere; the surprises are irresistible. Zeus, for instance, turns out to have more literary interests than we suppose; he will quote Homer and make a Demosthenic oration to the gods, though alas! his memory fails him in the middle of a sentence;[599] he laments that his altars are as cold as Plato's Laws or the syllogisms of Chrysippus. He is the frankest gentleman of heaven, and so infinitely obliging!
In short, for sheer cleverness Lucian has no rival but Aristophanes in extant Greek literature. His originality, his wit, his humour (not at all equal, it may be said, to his wit), his gifts of invention and fancy, his light touch, and his genius for lively narrative, mark him out distinctively in an age when literature was all rhetoric, length and reminiscence. But as we read him, we become sensible of defects as extraordinary as his gifts. For all his Attic style, he belongs to his age. He may renounce Rhetoric, but no man can easily escape from his past. The education had intensified the cardinal faults of his character, impatience, superficiality, a great lack of sympathy for the more tender attachments and the more profound interests of men – essential unbelief in human grandeur. An expatriated adventurer, living for twenty years on his eloquence, with the merest smattering of philosophy and no interest whatever in nature and natural science or mathematics, with little feeling and no poetry, – it was hardly to be expected that he should understand the depths of the human soul, lynx-eyed as he is for the surface of things. He had a very frank admiration for his own character, and he drew himself over and over again under various names. Lykinos, for example, is hardly a disguise at all. "Free-Speech, son of True-man, son of Examiner," he calls himself in one of his mock trials, "hater of shams, hater of impostors, hater of liars, hater of the pompous, hater of every such variety of hateful men – and there are plenty of them"; conversely, he loves the opposites, when he meets them, which, he owns, is not very often.[600]
Lucian and philosophy
With such a profession, it is not surprising that a man of more wit than sympathy, found abundance of material in the follies of his age. Men were taking themselves desperately seriously, – preaching interminable Philosophy, saving their souls, and communing with gods and dæmons in the most exasperating ways. Shams, impostures, and liars – so Lucian summed them up, and he did not conceal his opinion. Granted that the age had aspects quite beyond his comprehension, he gives a very vivid picture of it from the outside. This is what men were doing and saying around him – but why? Why, but from vanity and folly? Gods, philosophers, and all who take human life seriously, are deluged with one stream of badinage, always clever but not always in good taste. He has no purpose, religious or philosophic. If he attacks the gods, it is not as a Sceptic – the Sceptics are ridiculed as much as any one else in the Sale of Lives– men who know nothing, doubt of their own experience, and avow the end of their knowledge to be ignorance.[601] If he is what we nowadays loosely call sceptical, it is not on philosophic grounds. We should hardly expect him in his satirical pamphlets really to grapple with the question of Philosophy, but he seems not to understand in the least why there should be Philosophy at all. He is master of no single system, though he has the catch-words of them all at his finger-ends.
His most serious dialogue on Philosophy is the Hermotimus. "Lykinos" meets Hermotimus on his way to a lecture – a man of sixty who for many years has attended the Stoics. Into their argument we need not go, but one or two points may be noted. Hermotimus is a disciple, simple and persevering, who owns that he has not reached the goal of Happiness and hardly expects to reach it, but he presses bravely on, full of faith in his teachers. Under the adroit questions of Lykinos, he is forced to admit that he had chosen the Stoics rather than any other school by sheer intuition – or because of general notions acquired more or less unconsciously – like a man buying wine, he knew a good thing when he tasted it, and looked no further. Yes, says Lykinos, take the first step and the rest is easy – Philosophy depends on a first assumption – take the Briareus of the poets with three heads and six hands, and then work him out, – six eyes, six ears, three voices talking at once, thirty fingers – you cannot quarrel with the details as they come; once grant the beginning, and the rest comes flooding in, irresistible, hardly now susceptible of doubt. So in Philosophy, your passion, like the longing of a lover, blinded you to the first assumptions, and the structure followed.[602] "Do not think that I speak against the Stoics, through any special dislike of the school; my arguments hold against all the schools."[603] The end is that Hermotimus abandons all Philosophy for ever – not a very dramatic or probable end, as Plato and Justin Martyr could have told Lucian.
The other point to notice is the picture of Virtue under the image of a Celestial City, and here one cannot help wondering whether the irony has any element of personal reminiscence. Virtue Lykinos pictures as a City, whose citizens are happy, wise and good, little short of gods, as the Stoics say. All there is peace, unity, liberty, equality. The citizens are all aliens and foreigners, not a native among them – barbarians, slaves, misformed, dwarfs, poor; for wealth and birth and beauty are not reckoned there. "In good truth, we should devote all our efforts to this, and let all else go. We should take no heed of our native-land, nor of the clinging and weeping of children or parents, if one has any, but call on them to take the same journey, and then, if they will not or cannot go with us, shake them off, and march straight for the city of all bliss, leaving one's coat in their hands, if they won't let go, – for there is no fear of your being shut out there, even if you come without a coat." Fifteen years ago an old man had urged Lykinos to go there with him. "If the city had been near at hand and plain for all to see, long ago, you may be sure, with never a doubt I would have gone there, and had my franchise long since. But as you tell us, it lieth far away" – and there are so many professed guides and so many roads, that there is no telling whether one is travelling to Babylon or to Corinth.[604] "So for the future you had better reconcile yourself to living like an ordinary man, without fantastic and vain hopes."[605]
Lucian never ceases to banter the philosophers. When he visits the Islands of the Blest, he remarks that, while Diogenes and the Epicureans are there, Plato prefers his own Republic and Laws, the Stoics are away climbing their steep hill of Virtue, and the Academics, though wishful to come, are still suspending their judgment, uncertain whether there really is such an island at all and not sure that Rhadamanthus himself is qualified to give judgment.[606] Diogenes in the shades, Pan in his grotto, Zeus in heaven, and the common man in the streets, are unanimous that they have had too much Philosophy altogether. The philosophers have indeed embarked on an impossible quest, for they will never find Truth. Once Lucian represents Truth in person, and his portrait is characteristic. She is pointed out to him – a female figure, dim and indistinct of complexion; "I do not see which one you mean," he says, and the answer is, "Don't you see the unadorned one there, the naked one, ever eluding the sight and slipping away?"[607]
Lucian's Lover of Lies
But still more absurd than Philosophy was the growth of belief in the supernatural. Lucian's Lover of Lies is a most illuminating book. Here are gathered specimens of the various types of contemporary superstition – one would suspect the author of the wildest parody, if it were not that point by point we may find parallels in the other writers of the day. Tychiades (who is very like Lucian himself) tells how he has been visiting Eucrates and has dropped into a nest of absurdities. Eucrates is sixty and wears the solemn beard of a student of philosophy. He has a ring made of iron from gibbets and is prepared to believe everything incredible. His house is full of professed philosophers, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Platonic, advising him how to cure the pain in his legs, by wrapping round them a lion's skin with the tooth of a field mouse folded within it.[608] Tychiades asks if they really believe that a charm hung on outside can cure the mischief within, and they laugh at his ignorance. The Platonist tells a number of stories to prove the reasonableness of the treatment, – how a vine-dresser of his father's had died of snake-bite and been recovered by a Chaldæan, and how the same Chaldæan charmed (like the Pied Piper) all the snakes off their farm. The Stoic narrates how he once saw a Hyperborean flying and walking on water – "with those brogues on his feet that his countrymen habitually wear" – a man whose more ordinary feats were raising spirits, calling the dead from their graves, and fetching down the moon. Ion, the Platonist, confirms all this with an account of another miracle-worker – "everybody knows the Syrian of Palestine" who drives dæmons out of men; "he would stand by the patient lying on the ground and ask whence they have come into the body; and, though the sick person does not speak, the dæmon answers in Greek, or in some barbarian tongue, or whatever his own dialect may be, and explains how he entered into the man and whence he came. Then the Syrian would solemnly adjure him, or threaten him if he were obstinate, and so drive him out. I can only say I saw one, of a black smoky hue, in the act of coming out."[609] The Syrian's treatment was expensive, it appears. Celsus, as we shall see later on, has some evidence on this matter. The nationality of the magicians quoted in the book may be remarked – they are Libyan, Syrian, Arab, Chaldæan, Egyptian, and "Hyperborean."
Other tales of magical statues, a wife's apparition, an uneasy ghost,[610] a charm for bringing an absent lover, and the familiar one of the man who learns the spell of three syllables to make a pestle fetch water, but unhappily not that which will make it stop, and who finds on cutting it in two that there are now two inanimate water-carriers and a double deluge – these we may pass over. We may note that this water-fetching spell came originally from a sacred scribe of Memphis, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, who lived underground in the temple for three and twenty years and was taught his magic there by Isis herself.[611] Interviews with dæmons are so common that instances are not given.[612]
More significant are the stories of the other world, for here we come again, from a different point of approach, into a region familiar to the reader of Plutarch. Eucrates himself, out in the woods, heard a noise of barking dogs; an earthquake followed and a voice of thunder, and then came a woman more than six hundred feet high, bearing sword and torch, and followed by dogs "taller than Indian elephants, black in colour." Her feet were snakes – here we may observe that Pausanias the traveller pauses to dismiss "the silly story that giants have serpents instead of feet," for a coffin more than eleven ells long was found near Antioch and "the whole body was that of a man."[613] So the snake-feet are not a mere fancy of Lucian's. The woman then tapped the earth with one of these feet of hers, and disappeared into the chasm she made. Eucrates, peeping over the edge, "saw everything in Hades, the river of fire and the lake, Cerberus and the dead" – what is more, he recognized some of the dead. "Did you see Socrates and Plato?" asks Ion. Socrates he thought he saw, "but Plato I did not recognize; I suppose one is bound to stick to the exact truth in talking to one's friends." Pyrrhias the slave confirms the story as an eye-witness.[614] Another follows with a story of his trance in illness, and how he saw the world below, Fates, Furies, and all, and was brought before Pluto, who dismissed him with some irritation, as not amenable yet to his Court, and called for the smith Demylos; he came back to life and announced that Demylos would shortly die, and Demylos did die. "Where is the wonder?" says another – the physician, "I know a man raised from the dead twenty days after his burial, for I attended him both before his death and after his resurrection."[615]
In all this, it is clear that there is a strong element of mockery. Mockery was Lucian's object, but he probably kept in all these stories a great deal nearer to what his neighbours would believe than we may imagine. Ælian, for example, has a story of a pious cock, which made a point of walking gratefully in the processions that took place in honour of Æsculapius; and he does not tell it in the spirit of the author of the Jackdaw of Rheims.
Lucian and the gods
As one of the main preoccupations of his age was with the gods, Lucian of course could not leave them alone. His usual method is to accept them as being exactly what tradition made them, and then to set them in new and impossible situations. The philosopher Menippus takes "the right wing of an eagle and the left of a vulture," and, after some careful practice, flies up to heaven to interview Zeus. He has been so terribly distracted by the arguments of the schools, that he wants to see for himself – "I dared not disbelieve men of such thundering voices and such imposing beards." Zeus most amiably allows him to stand by and watch him at work, hearing prayers as they come up through tubes, and granting or rejecting them, then settling some auguries, and finally arranging the weather – "rain in Scythia, snow in Greece, a storm in the Adriatic, and about a thousand bushels of hail in Cappadocia."[616] Zeus asks; rather nervously what men are saying about him nowadays – mankind is so fond of novelty. "There was a time," he says, "when I was everything to them —