Greco-Roman philosophy

“ Many influences had been at work to blur the clean-cut outlines of Hellenic imagination, and to sophisticate the ancestral faith both of Greece and Rome. Men wished to believe in the ancient gods, but they were no longer the gods of Homer or of Aeschylus, the gods worshipped by the men who fought [pg 459] in the Samnite or the Punic wars. Greek philosophy for eight centuries had been teaching a doctrine of one Divine force or essence, transcending the powers and limitations of sense, or immanent in the fleeting world of chance and change. ”

“ It is notorious that this proposition—live according to nature—was the sum of the tenets of the famous Stoic philosophy. Now on the subjugation of Greece that philosophy made instantaneous progress in Roman society. It possessed natural fascinations for the powerful class who, in theory at least, adhered to the simple habits of the ancient Italian race, and disdained to surrender themselves to the innovations of foreign fashions. ”

“ No doubt our knowledge of these doctrines, being largely drawn from the Latin writers and their Greek contemporaries, is somewhat coloured and unjust. With the Romans a system of philosophy was considered mainly in its bearing upon conduct, whence the ethical elements in Stoicism and Epicureanism have been by their Roman adherents so thrust into the foreground, that we have almost lost sight of the intellectual elements, which can have had little less importance in the eyes of the Greeks. ”

“ In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato.
And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles?
Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered and possessed it by her thought. ”

“ And the philosophy which Greece gave Rome was no better than the mythology. It is not strange that human thought experienced a reaction after a century which contained both Plato and Aristotle, but it is a pity that Rome should have learned her philosophy from a period of doubt and scepticism, an age in which the lesser masters, who had known the greater ones, had gone, leaving nothing but pupils' pupils. ”

“ But I must avow my conviction that our civilization—and I specially remember that we are Englishmen—is not only in origin but in essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened by reflection upon its own past. ”

“ Such is the character of Roman philosophy, of which we must be careful not to speak ill, for it has played a great part in the world, and it is through it that the wisdom of the Greeks, rendered at once more solid and yet more clear, has come down to the nations of the West. ”

“ When Greek literature and thought became firmly established in Rome during the second century BC, it was just this dogmatic treatment of moral questions that gave philosophy a hold on a people far more interested in conduct than in speculation. The Roman attempts, often clumsy enough, to translate principle into practice were, and continued to be, various in spirit and success. Stoicism in particular blended most readily with the harder and more virile types of Roman character, and found a peculiarly sympathetic reception among eminent lawyers. ”

“ The history of Greek civilization and education was so intermingled with the Roman that it can scarcely be distinguished from it. The Greek schools of philosophy and rhetoric were continued in Rome, Roman youths made up a great body of the attendance at the universities of Athens and Alexandria, and the Roman emperors did much for the support and extension of the work in these institutions. Hence from the Greeks have developed some of the most advanced intellectual and æsthetic ideas that civilization has known. ”

“ It is now proposed briefly to relate how this line was lost, when the politeness and philosophy, the literature and the Art of Greece were chained to the triumphal cars of Roman conquerors,—and how it seems to have been found again in our own day, after slumbering so long in ruined temples, broken statues, and cinerary urns.
The scholar who studies the aesthetical anatomy of Greek Art has a melancholy pleasure, like a surgeon, in watching its slow, but inevitable atrophy under the incubus of Rome. ”

“ Whether philosophy is profitable or not, "you cannot condemn the Greeks on the basis of mere statements about their opinions, without going into it with them till point by point you discover what they mean and understand them. ”

“ Greek philosophy has sometimes been reproached as the cause of the corruption of Roman character and the decay of Roman religion. But it would be more true to say that, to the higher natures at least, philosophy supplied the place of the ancient principles of duty, which had long since decayed with the decay of patriotism and religion. ”

“ When Rome trod the path of immorality, none of her great men could save her. The ancient Greeks were an accomplished people, still all their art and philosophy could not continue in their immorality for long. ”

“ The tendencies of the later times of the Roman empire to a commenting literature, and a second-hand philosophy, have already been noticed. The loss of the dignity of political freedom, the want of the cheerfulness of advancing prosperity, and the substitution of the less philosophical structure of the Latin language for the delicate intellectual mechanism of the Greek, fixed and augmented the prevalent feebleness and barrenness of intellect. Men forgot, or feared, to consult nature, to seek for new truths, to do what the great discoverers of other times had done ”

“ Previous to the introduction of the Greek philosophy, and the Greek education and social habits, the Roman people were worthy of their noblest representative—Camillus. At that early period of their history they rewarded virtue and punished vice. But during the Empire, after the invasion of Greek manners, they were unworthy of their best representatives—Cato, Germanicus, and Agricola. To those great and good men they preferred Cæsar, Caligula, and Nero: they rewarded vice and punished virtue. ”

“ Politics absorbed the minds of the people. Glory and splendor were followed by corruption of morals and the pursuit of material pleasures. Philosophy went out of fashion, since it brought no outward and tangible good. More scientific studies were pursued—those which could be applied to purposes of utility and material gains; even, as in our day, geology, chemistry, mechanics, engineering, having reference to the practical wants of men, command talent, and lead to certain reward. In Athens, rhetoric, mathematics, and natural history supplanted rhapsodies and speculations on God and Providence. ”

“ From the earliest times, however, till that of Cicero, Greek philosophy was chiefly inculcated by Greeks. There was no Roman who devoted himself entirely to metaphysical contemplation, and who, like Epicurus, Aristotle, and Zeno, lounged perpetually in a garden, paced about in a Lyceum, or stood upright in a portico. The Greek philosophers passed their days, if not in absolute seclusion, at least in learned leisure and retirement. ”

“ From this time forth not only were Greek philosophers of eminence drawn to live themselves at Rome, and so to meet her statesmen and nobles in habits of intercourse, but the higher classes of the great capital commonly completed their education by visiting and studying at Athens, Rhodes, and other centres of Grecian thought. Thus by the fusion of Greece with the empire, while her political importance dwindled away, her influence upon the mind of her subjugators was immensely increased. But the Roman on his side obtained a sort of victory. ”

“ In preference, however, to the admission of a free agency in the affairs of the universe, he subscribes to the stoicism of Grecian philosophy, which subjects all things to a stern, unbending necessity, and makes men act by the impulse and determination of their nature. “This system offered a support in their hour of trial, not only to many illustrious Greeks, but also to some of the great philosophers, statesmen, generals, and emperors of Rome—a system which excluded chance from everything, and asserted the direction of all events by irresistible necessity to the promotion of perfect good ”

“ Philosophy held the sum of knowledge in the Empire, and from it came the concepts in which all the Fathers reasoned. But the Latin Fathers, who were juristically and rhetorically educated, might also reason through conceptions, or in a terminology, taken from the Roman Law. Nevertheless, in the rational process of formulating Christian dogma, Greek philosophy was the overwhelmingly important factor, because it furnished knowledge and the metaphysical concepts, and because the greater number of Christian theologians were Hellenic in spirit, and wrote Greek ”

“ In turning from Greece to Rome, we are prepared to find literature holding a different relation towards public opinion. The Greek temperament with its quick play of thought and fancy, had an instinctive craving to make the sympathy of thoughts continually felt in words, and to accompany action with a running comment of speech. The Roman, as we find him during Rome’s earlier career of conquest, was usually content to feel that his action was in conformity with some principle which he had expressed once for all in an institution or a statute. ”

“ If, now, we look round the world and ask; in what countries and what ages the kind of thought we have described has attained a high degree of development, we shall find such a development only in ancient Greece and in modern Europe. There were great civilizations in Egypt, China, Assyria, and so on. They produced art and religion, but no philosophy to speak of. Even {14} ancient Rome added nothing to the world's philosophical knowledge. Its so-called philosophers, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Lucretius, produced no essentially new principle. ”

“ But alike in science and in philosophy, the Romans were the pupils of the Greeks; and hence possibly may have arisen the parallelism between a certain function of the philosopher in Greece and one he exercised in Rome.
The philosopher "was generally to he found in a large mansion acting almost like a private chaplain, instructing in ethics those who wished to learn, and attending the death-beds of members of the family." ”

“ The composite Greco-Roman ideal, in which Stoicism had united the best elements of the Greek and the Roman type of character, while it did serve as a guide to the moral strivings of select souls, was wholly unfitted to give support to the moral life of the masses or to awaken in them moral enthusiasm. ”

“ In these provinces they were copyists of the Greeks: they lacked ideality. They had, also, far less delicacy of perception, flexibility, and native refinement of manners. But they had more sobriety of character and more endurance. They were a disciplined people; and in their capacity for discipline lay the secret of their supremacy in arms and of their ability to give law to the world. If they produced a much less number of great men than the Greeks, there was more widely diffused among Roman citizens a conscious dignity and strength. ”

“ In a less degree, Roman literature, which is the offspring of Greek culture, has value as an intellectual stimulus and discipline. Here also the youthful mind is brought into the presence of a great and noble people, who, if they have less genius and a duller sense of beauty than the Greeks, excel them in steadiness of purpose, in dignity of character, in reverence for law and religion, and above all in the art of governing. ”

“ This little touch [Pg 99] of art throws a gleam of inner light on the struggle towards originality and truth which characterized the Greek principles of beauty and fitness in literature and art, in direct contrast to that which was always turning back to those fossil forms which were only respectable on account of their age and their mystery, but of which the tradition and intention were already lost.
Roman patterns were merely Greek adaptations with an Etruscan flavour, which was a survival of the earliest Italian art. ”

“ Again, at the very starting-point of Greek philosophy a man of most virtuous conduct, gifted likewise with great powers of attraction, had sought to realise in a society the philosophic life. And we have seen this conception of the mode of propagating truth to lie at the bottom of Greek teaching, and to have been pursued by Plato, by Aristotle, by Zeno, by Epicurus, to have been the original and even the only form of teaching which they recognised. ”

“ It is a singular fact that the Greek and the Roman, in spite of their great intellectual acuteness, accomplished so little in the penetration of Nature's secrets. With the strong love of the beautiful that distinguished the one, and the profound sense of law that marked the other, one would have supposed that they would have felt more the charm and loveliness of the outward world, and have taken a greater interest in discovering its unchangeable ordinances. ”

“ Greek philosophy was to prove the greatest intellectual asset of humanity. No other civilization or language before the Greek had invented the abstract ideas: time, will, space, beauty, truth, and the others. And from these wonderful, though imperfect, word ideas the vigorous and subtle Greek intellect rapidly raised a structure which found its supreme expression in Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno. But from the close of the Fourth Century before Christ, the time of Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great, Greek began to lose its vitality and to decay. ”