Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Dill Samuel

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СКАЧАТЬ such as they had never wielded save in the Pythagorean aristocracies of southern Italy. Philosophy now began to inspire legislation and statesmanship.13 Its professors were raised to the consulship and great prefectures. Above all, it was incarnate, as it were, in the ruler who, whatever we may think of his practical success, brought to the duties of government a loftiness of spiritual detachment which has never been equalled by any ruler of men. Whether there was any corresponding elevation of conduct or moral tone in the mass of men may well be doubted by any one who has studied the melancholy thoughts of the saintly emperor. Lucian and M. Aurelius seem to be as hopeless about the moral condition of humanity as Seneca and Petronius were in the darkest days of Nero’s tyranny.14 Such opinions, indeed, have little scientific value. They are often the result of temperament and ideals, not of trustworthy observation. But it would be rash to assume that heightened religious feeling and the efforts of philosophy had within a hundred years worked any wide-spread transformation of character. It was, however, a great step in advance that the idea of the principate, expounded by Seneca, and the younger Pliny, as a clement, watchful, infinitely [pg 7]laborious earthly providence had been realised since the accession of Trajan. It was easier to be virtuous in the reign of M. Aurelius than in the reign of Nero, and it was especially easier for a man of the highest social grade. The example of the prince for good or evil must always powerfully influence the class who are by birth or office nearest to the throne. And bad example will be infinitely more corrupting when it is reinforced by terror. A fierce, capricious tyranny generates a class of vices which are perhaps more degrading to human dignity, and socially more dangerous, than the vices of the flesh. And the reign of such men as Caligula, Nero, and Domitian not only stimulated the grossness of self-indulgence, but superadded the treachery and servility of cowardice. In order to appreciate fully what the world had gained by the mild and temperate rule of the princes of the second century, it is necessary to revive for a moment the terrors of the Claudian Caesars.

      The power of Seneca as a moral teacher has, with some reservations, been recognised by all the ages since his time. But equal recognition has hardly been given to the lurid light which he throws, in random flashes, on the moral conditions of his class under the tyranny of Caligula and Nero. This may be due, perhaps, to a distrust of his artificial declamation, and that falsetto note which he too often strikes even in his most serious moments. Yet he must be an unsympathetic reader who does not perceive that, behind the moral teaching of Seneca, there lies an awful experience, a lifelong torture, which turns all the fair-seeming blessings of life, state and luxury and lofty rank, into dust and ashes. There is a haunting shadow over Seneca which never draws away, which sometimes deepens into a horror of darkness. In whatever else Seneca may have been insincere, his veiled references to the terrors of the imperial despotism come from the heart.

      Seneca’s life almost coincides with the Julio-Claudian tyranny. He had witnessed in his early manhood the gloomy, suspicious rule of Tiberius, when no day passed without an execution,15 when every accusation was deadly, when it might be fatal for a poet to assail Agamemnon in tragic verse, or for a [pg 8]historian to praise Brutus and Cassius,16 when the victims of delation in crowds anticipated the mockery of justice by self-inflicted death, or drank the poison even in the face of the judges. Seneca incurred the jealous hatred of Caligula by a too brilliant piece of rhetoric in the Senate,17 and he has taken his revenge by damning the monster to eternal infamy.18 Not even in Suetonius is there any tale more ghastly than that told by Seneca of the Roman knight whose son had paid with his life for a foppish elegance which irritated the tyrant.19 On the evening of the cruel day, the father received an imperial command to dine. With a face betraying no sign of emotion, he was compelled to drink to the Emperor, while spies were eagerly watching every expression of his face. He bore the ordeal without flinching. “Do you ask why? He had another son.” Exiled to Corsica in the reign of Claudius,20 Seneca bore the sentence with less dignity than he afterwards met death. He witnessed the reign of the freedmen, the infamies of Messalina, the intrigues of Agrippina, and the treacherous murder of Britannicus; he knew all the secrets of that ghastly court. Installed as the tutor of the young Nero, he doubtless, if we may judge by the treatise on Clemency, strove to inspire him with a high ideal of monarchy as an earthly providence. He probably at the same time discovered in the son of Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina the fatal heritage of a vicious blood and the omens of a ghastly reign. The young tiger was held on leash for the famous quinquennium by Burrus and Seneca. It seemed only the device of a divine tragic artist, by a brief space of calm and innocence, to deepen the horror of the catastrophe. And, for Seneca, life darkened terribly towards its close. With high purposes for the commonweal, he had probably lent himself to doubtful means of humouring his wayward pupil, perhaps even to crime.21 His enormous wealth, whether won from imperial favour, or gained by usury and extortion,22 his power, his literary brilliance, aroused [pg 9]a host of enemies, who blackened his character and excited the fears or the jealousy of Nero. He had to bear the unenviable distinction of a possible pretender to the principate.23 He withdrew into almost monastic seclusion, and even offered to resign his wealth.24 He strove to escape the evil eyes of calumny and imperial distrust by the most abject renunciation. But he could not descend from the precipice on which he hung; his elevation was a crucifixion.25 Withdrawn to a remote corner of his palace, which was crowded with the most costly products of the East, and surrounded by gardens which moved the envy of Nero,26 the fallen statesman sought calm in penning his counsels to Lucilius, and bracing himself to meet the stealthy stroke which might be dealt at any moment.27 In reading many passages of Seneca, you feel that you are sitting in some palace on the Esquiline, reading the Phaedo or listening to the consolations of a Stoic director, while the centurion from the palace may at any moment appear with the last fateful order.

      Seneca, like Tacitus, has a remarkable power of moral diagnosis. He had acquired a profound, sad knowledge of the pathology of the soul. It was a power which was almost of necessity acquired in that time of terror and suspicion, when men lived in daily peril from seeming friends. There never was a period when men more needed the art of reading the secrets of character. Nor was there ever a time when there were greater facilities for the study. Life was sociable almost to excess. The Roman noble, unless he made himself deliberately a recluse, spent much of his time in those social meeting-places of which we hear so often,28 where gossip and criticism dealt mercilessly with character, where keen wits were pitted against one another, sometimes in a deadly game, and where it might be a matter of life or death to pierce the armour of dissimulation.29 Seneca had long shone in such circles. In his later years, if he became a recluse, he was also a spiritual director. And his Letters leave little doubt that many a restless or weary spirit laid bare its secret misery to him, for advice or [pg 10]consolation. Knowing well the wildest excesses of fantastic luxury, all the secrets of the philosophic confessional, the miseries of a position oscillating between almost princely state and monastic renunciation, the minister of Nero, with a self-imposed cure of souls, had unrivalled opportunities of ascertaining the moral condition of his class.

      Seneca is too often a rhetorician, in search of striking effects and vivid phrase. And, like all rhetoricians, he is often inconsistent. At times he appears to regard his own age as having reached the very climax of insane self-indulgence. And yet, in a calmer mood, he declares his belief that the contemporaries of Nero were not worse than the contemporaries of Clodius or Lucullus, that one age differs from another rather in the greater prominence of different vices.30 His pessimism extends to all ages which have been allured by the charm of ingenious luxury from the simplicity of nature. In the fatal progress of society, the artificial multiplication of human wants has corrupted the idyllic innocence of the far-off Eden, where the cope of heaven or the cave was the only shelter, and the skin-clad savage made his meal on berries and slaked his thirst from the stream.31 It is the revolutionary dream of Rousseau, revolting from the oppression and artificial luxury of the Ancien Régime. Seneca’s state of nature is the antithesis of the selfish and materialised society in which he lived. Our early ancestors were not indeed virtuous in the strict sense.32 For virtue is the result of struggle and philosophic guidance. But their instincts were good, because they were not tempted. They enjoyed in common the natural bounties of mother earth.33 Their fierceness of energy spent itself on the beasts of the chase. They lived peaceably in willing obedience to the gentle paternal rule of their wisest and best, with no lust of gold or power, no jealousy and hatred, to break a contented and unenvious СКАЧАТЬ