CHAPTER III. A Philosopher on the Throne

A PHILOSOPHER ON THE THRONE

Plato had said that the world would never enjoy happiness until a philosopher should become king or until a king should become a philosopher. With the accession of Marcus the rule of the philosopher-king was an accomplished fact; according, to Gibbon, “the happiness of the subject was the one object of government,” and all the good effects anticipated by Plato were brought about. “If a man were called on,” says he, “to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus” (thus including the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius). But later historians have reversed this verdict on the Golden Age. They have shown that the reign of Marcus Aurelius was one of singular disasters to the State. And indeed Marcus himself had no such faith in the magical power of philosophy on the throne; he did not believe in the possibility of realising the Ideal State. “Do not,” he says, “expect Plato’s Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter. For who can change men’s principles? and without a change of principles what else is there than the slavery of men who groan while they pretend to obey? Simple and modest is the work of philosophy. Draw me not aside to insolence and pride.”

But if Marcus despaired of establishing the reign of Philosophy as the Queen of Men, he, at any rate, secured the rule of the Philosophers. Already under Antoninus they had been in high honour; but under Marcus they filled all the great offices of State. Sophists and rhetoricians were elevated to the senate, and became consuls and proconsuls merely because they preached renunciation and had been Marcus’ tutors. He placed their images amongst his household gods and their statues in the forum and the senate-house. They were rulers in the provinces, judges in the law-courts, leaders in the senate. And on the whole they acquitted themselves well; though amongst their number there were not a few impostors, long beards, asceticism and rough cloaks became the fashion and profitable. “His beard is worth ten thousand sesterces to him,” was the remark passed on one of them; “come, we shall have to pay goats a salary next!” Marcus distinguished between “true philosophers” and “pretended philosophers,” and learnt from Antoninus to esteem the former and to show indulgence to the latter, yet “without permitting himself to be their dupe.”

When it got to court, Stoicism put away its primitive roughness. “Plain living and high thinking” became the accepted creed among the brilliant society of which Faustina was the centre and the exemplar; just as now in England ritualism and “the Rome-ward movement” become from time to time the tone amongst elegant blue-stockings of both sexes. But of course in Rome, as in London, it would have been bad taste to take seriously what was, with them, at least, merely an interesting sentiment. Society now turns out to hear the newest preacher on the newest theology, or the fashionable and good-looking preacher on any or no theology. So, too, then; Faustina and the Roman ladies came in all the glory of flowered silk and rare jewels to the Temple of Peace, there to hear Rusticus or Fronto, or the Emperor Aurelius himself, lecturing on the vanity of vanities, the shortness of life, the blessedness of renunciation. Great families had each its philosopher--a kind of family chaplain; and the great ladies came in their sedan chairs to consult their philosophical director on the latest freaks of their fancy.

This interest in philosophy was partly the cause, partly the effect, of a general movement towards more humane views. The hard pagan world was beginning to soften; and this humanity was the greatest glory of the Golden Age. The Stoics preached the brotherhood of man, and sympathy with men, as men. Hence charity too became part of the Time-Spirit and showed itself in milder legislation and in beneficent institutions. The great ones of the world at last took notice of the weak and the outcast; the stern rule of might and the pitiless destruction of the “unfit” at last yielded to altruistic sentiments. The slave, the orphan, and woman were no longer to be the prey of society.

In his legislation in favour of the oppressed Marcus Aurelius did but carry on the work begun by Antoninus and his excellent council of jurists. Their first care was to make easier the lot of the slave. Seneca had said: “All men, if you only go back to their beginnings, have the gods for their fathers”; and Epictetus: “The slave like you is the son of Zeus”; and it was in this spirit of reverence for his fellow-man as his brother and his equal that Marcus sought to confer on him, in addition to a theoretical fraternity and equality, the third of the trinity--freedom. The master was no longer allowed absolute power of life and death over his slaves; the slave was recognised as having rights; and enfranchisement was encouraged. As the condition of the slave, so too that of women and orphans was improved. The inhuman position of woman under old Roman law, by which she was practically excluded from recognition as a member of the family, was altered by laws conferring on her rights of property; while orphans were provided for by numerous charitable institutions.

The first of these institutions endowed by public funds had been founded by the Emperors Nerva and Trajan. They were multiplied and developed by Antoninus and still further by Marcus. On the death of the elder Faustina, Antoninus had founded an institution for orphan girls--called the puellae Faustinianæ (the little maidens of Faustina); and on the death of the younger Faustina, Marcus, faithful in this as in all else to the example of Antoninus, founded a similar orphanage. These charitable works and many others he was enabled to carry out by the large fortune, amounting to twenty-two million pounds, which Antoninus had bequeathed to him.

Yet all his financial policy was not so wise. His good nature and easy-going attitude towards money matters may have been good Stoicism, but it was bad statesmanship. On his accession he gave each of the soldiers of the Praetorian guard a largess of £160 and to the other soldiers a proportional sum. He frequently distributed free corn to the mob, and, towards the end of his reign, remitted large debts due to the Treasury; and ordered that in all cases of prosecution on behalf of the treasury, the benefit of the doubt was to be given in favour of the defendant. This was all very well while Antoninus’ legacy lasted; but the season of leanness soon came, and war and the plague left the public finances in so desperate a condition that he had to sell his own personal property and debase the coinage.

The result of this generosity had been to make him the idol of the unthinking mob, though we have every reason to believe that this popularity was not sought for. Of the wise man he says: “As to what any man shall say or think about him or do against him, he never even thinks of it, being himself contented with these two things: with acting justly in what he now does, and being satisfied with what is now assigned to him; and he lays aside all distracting and busy pursuits, and desires nothing else than the straight course through the law, and, by accomplishing the straight course, to follow God.” He showed his indifference to the praise of the groundlings in a practical way in his legislation as regards the games. He put restrictions on the gladiatorial contests, and limited the rates of allowance to the stage performers.

In the eyes of the Roman people the magnificence of the games and public shows was the one test of munificence. Hence it was something to have checked those degrading spectacles, but here, as afterwards in his persecution of the martyrs, he yielded complaisance to conventional views. He lacked the strength of will to enforce his own ideals; and perhaps it was as well that he recognised his deficiency and did not attempt what was, for one of his calibre, the impossible. On great occasions, to please his colleague Lucius or his wife Faustina, or in deference to the popular wishes, he used to attend these shows in state. But when he was present there was to be no shedding of human blood, at any rate by a fellow-man, though he seems to have allowed the fights with the beasts. Dion Cassius records this fact: “The Emperor Marcus was so far from taking delight in spectacles of bloodshed, that even the gladiators in Rome could not obtain his inspection of their contests, unless, like the wrestlers, they contended without imminent risk; for he never allowed the use of sharpened weapons, but universally they fought before him with weapons blunted.”

He himself, even when presiding, took little interest in the contests. He spent his time in reading or writing or transacting official business, giving audiences or signing State papers, much to the disgust of the populace. They hated such superior refinement and would have preferred a sportsman to a philosopher as their ruler. They looked on the Emperor as a milksop, not altogether without reason, though the right reason was not their reason. He showed his contempt for their opinions on one occasion in a most emphatic manner. A lion, trained by a slave to devour human beings, acquitted himself so well in one of these spectacles in the Emperor’s presence that the whole amphitheatre rang with applause, and on every side a shout was raised that a slave who had served the people’s pleasures so well, deserved freedom. The Emperor, angered at the brutality which he could not prevent, had averted his eyes, and now replied, “The man has done nothing worthy of liberty.” Another anecdote shows his care for even the most outcast of his subjects--those whom the ordinary Roman valued and heeded less than the beasts of burden. He was present one day at an exhibition of rope-dancing, when suddenly one of the performers--a boy--missed his footing, fell into the arena and was hurt. Thereupon the Emperor ordered that nets and mattresses should always be spread beneath the rope-walkers.

Despite these attempts--feeble they seem and few--at amelioration and at instilling a higher view of human nature, the amphitheatre still remained “the great slaughter-house.” When we look at Marcus’ statue high in the Pantheon of the Positivists, we must remember another figure, cold and abstracted indeed, but thus all the more convicted of feebleness, under the awning and the perfume sprays and flowers of the Roman amphitheatre looking on with impassive tolerance at the spectacle of human and animal suffering, the daily bread of the most brutal of all populaces. True, he could soothe his soul by a Stoic aphorism on the nothingness of pain, or some other such mockery of human misery--the necessary refuge of those who had no certainty of a larger hope. For mockery truly must any solution of the problem of evil be, and vain comfort, which was not written on Calvary. That Marcus could look on such suffering unmoved; that he could order it for his fellow-man when the turn of the Christians came; this removes him from what Christians look for in their leaders to the land of Promise. It mattered little that he did not take the delight and interest which Faustina, seated by strange irony among the Vestal Virgins, robed in all the magnificence which the Via Nova could produce, took in her favourite gladiators; or which Commodus, the centre of the fastest group of young Roman nobles, manifested at every thrust, eager for the day when he himself could enter the arena as Emperor and fight with the beasts. The mere fact that he could countenance such brutality condemns him to the level of conventional mediocrity.

As Pater says: “Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of blindness, of deadness and stupidity.... Yes! what was needed was the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be with the forces that could beget a heart like that.... Surely evil was a real thing, and the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where not to have been, by instinctive election, on the right side was to have failed in life.”

The humanity of the age, though unable to effect any appreciable reform of the amphitheatre, did much for the relief of the sick. The great plague brought back from the East by Lucius Verus and his troops was ravaging the Empire. It has been compared to the great plague of Athens, which will live for ever in Thucydides’ vivid phrases, and to the Black Death of the 14th century. Niebuhr says that it was a disaster from which the old world never recovered. Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and Gaul were darkened by its passing; and in Rome itself, so Dio, a Roman senator, tells us, two thousand men were buried every day. A Golden Age! An age of peace and happiness indeed! Rather an age whose glory is that it was an age of hospitals, of funeral clubs and orphanages; of relief of suffering rather than freedom therefrom.

The temples of Æsculapius, the god of healing, had long been used as a kind of hospital for the sick, but never before to such an extent as in the Antonine age. The priests of this god were initiated into a secret medical lore. His temples could vie with the great medieval monasteries in the scenic beauty and salubrity of their surroundings. The excellence of the climate, the traditional lore, the healthy diet and more healthy abstinence, the careful nursing and the freshness and brightness of the surroundings, were really efficacious remedies. Thus, those who laboured under any illness came far and near to the most famous shrines, such as that of Epidaurus, whose ruins still remain as a silent witness of its whilom greatness. Their hope was that they would be favoured with a dream or vision from the kindly god as to the remedy for their disease. The career of Aristeides, wandering for thirteen years with fanatical enthusiasm from shrine to shrine till finally he was cured, shows to what extremes superstition carried some of those devotees. On one occasion while suffering from a fever, he thought he had a vision of the god bidding him bathe in the ice-cold water, and then run a mile, and he carried out this and many other such assuredly unearthly remedies despite the dissuasions of the priests. These priests, the neocoroi, used to interpret the dream, and the prescriptions were carried out by medical men and attendants. The belief in the efficacy of these dream-sent prescriptions was not confined to the vulgar. Marcus Aurelius believed that he himself had been cured thus; and his wise physician, Galen, trusted them. Readers of Marius, the Epicurean, will not easily forget Pater’s description of Marius’ stay in the Temple, nor the words of thanksgiving addressed to the heaven-sent dreams which he puts on his lips at parting; they are from the Asclepiadæ of Aristeides: “O ye children of Apollo! who in time past have stilled the waves of sorrow from many people, lighting up a lamp of safety before those who travel by sea and land, be pleased, in your great condescension, though ye be equal in glory with your elder brethren, the Dioscuri, and your lot in immortal youth be as theirs, to accept the prayer, which in sleep and vision ye have inspired. Order it aright, I pray you, according to your loving kindness to men. Preserve me from sickness, and endue my body with such a measure of health as may suffice it for the obeying of the spirit, that I may pass my days unhindered and in quietness.”

Thus charity and culture progressed under the Antonines. So, too, did industry and trade, which brought with them prosperity and its attendant luxury until the advent of plague and famine. We are told that each year the treasures of the East were brought by a fleet of one hundred and twenty vessels to the ports of the Red Sea, to be transferred thence through Alexandria to Rome. The silks of China, the spices and perfumes of India and Arabia, pearls and diamonds, which were to glitter on the togas of young nobles or round the necks of fair ladies in the Vicus Tuscus, formed the precious cargo. In return for these Rome sent annually three-quarters of a million pounds--worth several times that amount now. “The coast of Malabar and the island of Ceylon grew rich as trade emporia for the luxuries of Rome and Roman merchants penetrated the East as consuls of sensuality for the senators and the ‘friends’ of Cæsar.”

All this led to softening and decadence in the army and in the nation. With the blessings of peace there came also its vices; the advances in prosperity and humanity, such as it was, was not accompanied by any improvement in morals, but perhaps the reverse. The results of Marcus’ reign did not justify Plato’s expectation from the philosopher-king. What Marcus might have accomplished under less unfavourable circumstances we cannot surmise; he certainly had not the strength of mind or body necessary for carrying out far-reaching reforms in such an Empire. As it was, he was singularly unfortunate in his public life: war, plague and famine--a trinity which no State could resist--rendered him powerless. His reign left little outward impress on the Roman State; his greatest legacy to Rome and to the world was the development of humane legislation, the reverence for mind above matter, and the example of a disinterested and noble ruler.