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were only so many registers of his sins of omission. There was, in truth, no encouragement to pursue a different course. Seneca's attempt

to seat philosophy on the throne by influencing the mind of Nero, had issued only in his own moral degradation as the lying apologist of matricide, and the receiver of a bounty which in one of its aspects was plunder, in another corruption; and though his retirement, and still more his death, may have sufficed to rescue his memory from obloquy, they could only prove that he had learned too late what the more consistent members of the fraternity knew from the beginning. From such a government the only notice that a Stoic could expect or desire was the sentence which hurried him to execution or drove him into banishment. Even under the rule of Vespasian the antagonism was still unabated. At the moment of his accession, Euphrates the Tyrian, who was in his train, protested against the ambition which sought to aggrandize itself when it might have restored the republic. Helvidius Priscus, following, and perhaps deforming, the footsteps of his father-in-law Thrasea, ignored the political existence of the emperor in his edicts as praetor, and asserted his own equality repeatedly by a freedom of speech amounting to personal insult, till at last he succeeded in exhausting the forbearance of Vespasian, who put him to death and banished the philosophers from Italy. A similar expulsion took place under Domitian, who did not require much persuasion to induce him to adopt a policy recommended by the instinct of self-preservation no less than by Nero's example. Meantime, the spirit of Stoicism was gradually undergoing a change. The theoretic parts of the system, its physics and its dialectics, had found comparatively little favour with the Roman mind, and had passed into the shade in consequence: but it was still a foreign product, a matter of learning, the subject of a voluminous literature, and as such a discipline to which only the few could submit. It was still the old conception of the wise man as an ideal rather than a reality, a being necessarily perfect, and therefore necessarily superhuman. Now, however, the ancient exclusiveness was to be relaxed, and the invitation to humanity made more general. Strange and shocking would it be,' said Musonius Rufus, the one philosopher exempted from Vespasian's sentence, if the tillers of the ground were incapacitated from philosophy, which is really a business of few words, not of many theories, and far better learnt in a practical country life than in the schools of the city.' In short, it was to be no longer a philosophy but a religion. Epictetus, the poor crippled slave, as his epitaph proclaims him, whom the gods loved, turned Theism from a speculative dogma into an operative principle, bidding his disciples follow the divine service, imitate the divine life, implore the divine aid, and rest on the

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divine providence. Dependence on the Deity was taught as a correlative to independence of external circumstances, and the ancient pride of the Porch exchanged for a humility so genuine that men have endeavoured to trace it home to a Christian congregation. A Stoic thus schooled was not likely to become a political propagandist, even if the memory of the republic had been fresh, and the imperial power had continued to be synonymous with tyranny-much less after the assassination of Domitian had inaugurated an epoch of which Tacitus could speak as the fulfilment of the brightest dreams of the truest lovers of freedom. Fifty years rolled away, and government became continually better, and the pursuit of wisdom more and more honourable, till at last the ideal of Zeno himself was realized, and a Stoic ascended the throne of the Caesars, and the philosophy of political despair seemed to have become the creed of political hope. The character of Marcus Aurelius is one that is ever good to dwell on, and our sympathies cling round the man that could be rigorously severe to himself while tenderly indulgent to his people, whose love broke out in their fond addresses to him as their father and their brother: yet the peace of his reign was blasted by natural calamities, torn by civil discord, and tainted by the corruption of his own house, and at his death the fair promise of the commonwealth and of philosophy expired together. Commodus ruled the Roman world, and Stoicism, the noblest of the later systems, fell the first before the struggles of the enfeebled yet resisting rivals, and the victorious advances of a new and living faith.

It is not often that a poet has been so completely identified with a system of philosophy as Persius. Greece had produced poets who were philosophers, and philosophers who were writers of poetry; yet our first thought of Aeschylus is not as of a Pythagorean, or of Euripides as of a follower of the Sophists; nor should we classify Xenophanes or Empedocles primarily as poets of whose writings only fragments remain. In Lucretius and Persius, on the other hand, we see men who hold a prominent place among the poets of their country, yet whose poetry is devoted to the enforcement of their peculiar philosophical views. The fact is a significant one, and symptomatic of that condition of Roman culture which I have noticed on a former occasion. It points to an age and nation where philosophy is a permanent, not a progressive study— an imported commodity, not an indigenous growth,-where the impulse that gives rise to poetry is not so much a desire to give musical voice to the native thought and feeling of the poet and his fellow-men, as a recognition of the want of a national literature and a wish to contribute towards its supply. At first sight there may seem something extravagant in pretending that Persius can be called the poet of Stoicism in the sense

in which Lucretius is the poet of Epicureanism, as if there were equal scope for the exposition of a philosophy in a few scholastic exercises and in an elaborate didactic poem. On the other hand, it should be recollected that under the iron grasp of the Roman mind, Stoicism, as was just now remarked, was being reduced more and more to a simply practical system, bearing but a faint impress of those abstruse cosmological speculations which had so great a charm for the intellect of Greece even in its most sober moments, and exhibiting in place of them an applicability to civil life the want of which had been noted as a defect in the conceptions of Zeno and Chrysippus1. The library and the lectureroom still were more familiar to it than the forum or the senate; but the transition had begun: and though Persius may have looked to his seven hundred volumes for his principles of action, as he did to Horace for information about the ways of the world, the only theory which he strove to inculcate was the knowledge which the founders of his sect, in common with Socrates, believed to be the sole groundwork of correct practice. Using the very words of Virgil, he calls upon a benighted race to acquaint itself with the causes of things: but the invitation is not to that study of the stars in their courses, of eclipses, and earthquakes and inundations, of the laws governing the length of days and nights, which enabled Lucretius to triumph over the fear of death, but to an inquiry into the purpose of man's being, the art of skilful driving in the chariotrace of life, the limits to a desire of wealth and to its expenditure on unselfish objects, and the ordained position of each individual in the social system. Such an apprehension of his subject would naturally lead him not to the treatise, but to the sermon-not to the didactic poem, but to the satire or moral epistle. But though the form of the composition is desultory, the spirit is in the main definite and consistent. Even in the first satire, in which he seems to drop the philosopher and assume the critic, we recognize the same belief in the connection between intellectual knowledge and practice, and consequently between a corrupt taste and a relaxed morality, which shines out so clearly afterwards when he tells the enfranchised slave that he cannot move a finger without committing a blunder, and that it is as portentous for a man to take part in life without study as it would be for a ploughman to attempt to bring a ship into port. It is true that he follows Horace closely, not only in his illustrations and descriptions of manners, but in his lessons of morality—a strange deference to the man who ridiculed Crispinus and Damasippus, and did not even spare the great Stertinius; but the evil and folly of avarice, the wisdom of contentment and self-control, and the

1 Cic. Leg. 3. 6.

duty of sincerity towards man and God, were doctrines at least as congenial to a Stoic as to an Epicurean, and the ambition with which the pupil is continually seeking to improve upon his master's felicity of expression shows itself more successfully in endeavours to give greater stringency to his rule of life and conduct. In one respect, certainly, we may wonder that he has failed to represent the views of that section of the Stoics with which he is reported to have lived on terms of familiar intercourse. There is no trace of that political feeling which might have been expected to appear in the writings of a youth who was brought into frequent contact with the revolutionary enthusiasm of Lucan, and may probably have been present at one of the banquets with which Thrasea and Helvidius used to celebrate the birthdays of the first and the last of the great republican worthies. The supposed allusions to the poetical character of Nero in the first satire shrink almost to nothing in the light of a searching criticism, while the tradition that in the original draught the emperor was directly satirized as Midas receives no countenance, to say the least, from the poem itself, the very point of which, so far as we can apprehend it, depends on the truth of the reading given in the MSS. The fourth satire does undoubtedly touch on statesmanship: but the tone throughout is that of a student, who in his eagerness to imitate Plato has apparently forgotten that he is himself living not under a popular but under an imperial government, and the moral intended to be conveyed is simply that the adviser of the public ought to possess some better qualification than those which were found in Alcibiades-a topic about as appropriate to the actual state of Rome as the schoolboy's exhortation to Sulla to lay down his power. Thus his language, where he does speak, enables us to interpret his silence as the silence not of acquiescence or even of timidity, though such times as his might well justify caution, but rather of unworldly innocence, satisfied with its own aspirations after moral perfection, and dreaming of Athenian licence under the very shade of despotism. On the other hand, it is perfectly intelligible that he should have seen little to admire in Seneca, many as are the coincidences which their common philosophy has produced in their respective writings. There could, indeed, have been but little sympathy between his simple earnestness and that rhetorical facility— that Spanish taste for inappropriate and meretricious ornament—that tolerant and compromising temper, able to live in a court while unable to live in exile, which, however compatible with real wisdom and virtue, must have seemed to a Stoic of a severer type only so many qualifications for effectually betraying the good cause. So, again, he does not seem to exhibit any anticipation of the distinctly human and religious development which, as we have seen, was the final phase

of Stoicism. His piety is simply the rational piety which would approve itself to any Roman moralist-the piety recommended by Horace, and afterwards by Juvenal-pronouncing purity of intent to be more acceptable in the sight of Heaven than costly sacrifice, and bidding men ask of the gods such things only as divine beings would wish to grant. In like manner his humanity, though genial in its practical aspect, is still narrowed on the speculative side by the old sectarian exclusiveness which barred the path of life to every one not entering through the gate of philosophy. In short, he is a disciple of the earlier Stoicism of the empire—a Roman in his predilection for the ethical part of his creed yet conforming in other respects to the primitive traditions of Greeceneither a patriot nor a courtier, but a recluse student, an ardent teacher of the truths which he had himself learnt, without the development which might have been generated by more mature thought, or the abatement which might have been forced upon him by a longer experience.

We have already observed that the character of Persius' opinions determined his choice of a poetical vehicle for expressing them. With his views it would have been as unnatural for him to have composed a didactic treatise, like Lucretius, or a republican epic, like Lucan, as to have rested satisfied with multiplying the productions of his own boyhood, tragedies and pilgrimages in verse. And now, what was the nature and what the historical antecedents of that form of composition which he adopted as most congenial to him?

The exploded derivation of satire from the Greek satyric drama is one of those not infrequent instances where a false etymology has preserved a significant truth. There seems every reason to believe that the first beginnings of satire among the Romans are parallel to the rudimental type from which dramatic entertainments were developed in Greece. When I am reading on these two subjects,' says Dryden, in his admirable essay on Satire, 'methinks I hear the same story told twice over with very little alteration.' The primitive Dionysiac festivals of the Greek rustic populations seem to have answered with sufficient exactness to the harvest-home rejoicings of agricultural Italy described by Horace, when the country wits encountered each other in Fescennine verses. Nor did the resemblance cease at this its earliest stage. Improvised repartee was succeeded by pantomimic representation and dancing to music, and in process of time the two elements, combined yet discriminated from each other, assumed the form of a regular play, with its alternate dialogues and cantica. Previous to this later development there had been an intermediate kind of entertainment called the satura or medley, either from the miscellaneous character of its matter, which appears to have made no pretence to a plot or story,

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