History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne Volume I Part 16

221 Seneca, _De Vit. Beat._ c. xx.

222 Seneca, _Ep._ cxiii.

223 Seneca, _Ep._ lx.x.xi.

224 Persius, _Sat._ i. 45-47.

225 Epictetus, _Ench._ xxiii.

226 Seneca, _De Ira_, iii. 41.

227 Seneca, _Cons. ad Helv._ xiii.

228 Marc. Aur. vii. 67.

229 Marc. Aur. iv. 20.

230 Pliny, _Ep._ i. 22.

231 "Non dux, sed comes voluptas."-_De Vit. Beat._ c. viii.

232 "Voluptas non est merces nec causa virtutis sed accessio; nec quia delectat placet sed quia placet delectat."-Ibid., c. ix.

233 Peregrinus apud Aul. Gellius, xii. 11. Peregrinus was a Cynic, but his doctrine on this point was identical with that of the Stoics.

234 Marc. Aurel. ix. 42.

235 Marc. Aurel. v. 6.

236 Seneca, however, in one of his letters (_Ep._ lxxv.), subtilises a good deal on this point. He draws a distinction between affections and maladies. The first, he says, are irrational, and therefore reprehensible movements of the soul, which, if repeated and unrepressed, tend to form an irrational and evil habit, and to the last he in this letter restricts the term disease. He ill.u.s.trates this distinction by observing that colds and any other slight ailments, if unchecked and neglected, may produce an organic disease. The wise man, he says, is wholly free from moral disease, but no man can completely emanc.i.p.ate himself from affections, though he should make this his constant object.

_ 237 De Clem._ ii. 6, 7.

238 "Peccantes vero quid habet cur oderit, c.u.m error illos in hujusmodi delicta compellat?"-Sen. _De Ira_, i. 14. This is a favourite thought of Marcus Aurelius, to which he reverts again and again.

See, too, Arrian, i. 18.

239 "Ergo ne homini quidem nocebimus quia peccavit sed ne peccet, nec unquam ad praeteritum sed ad futurum pna referetur."-Ibid. ii. 31.

In the philosophy of Plato, on the other hand, punishment was chiefly expiatory and purificatory. (Lerminier, _Introd. a l'Histoire du Droit_, p. 123.)

240 Seneca, _De Constant. Sap._ v. Compare and contrast this famous sentence of Anaxagoras with that of one of the early Christian hermits. Someone told the hermit that his father was dead. "Cease your blasphemy," he answered, "my father is immortal."-Socrates, _Eccl. Hist._ iv 23.

241 Epictetus, _Ench._ 16, 18.

242 The dispute about whether anything but virtue is a good, was, in reality, a somewhat childish quarrel about words; for the Stoics, who indignantly denounced the Peripatetics for maintaining the affirmative, admitted that health, friends, &c., should be sought not as "goods" but as "preferables." See a long discussion on this matter in Cicero (_De Finib._ lib. iii. iv.). The Stoical doctrine of the equality of all vices was formally repudiated by Marcus Aurelius, who maintained (ii. 10), with Theophrastus, that faults of desire were worse than faults of anger. The other Stoics, while dogmatically a.s.serting the equality of all virtues as well as the equality of all vices, in their particular judgments graduated their praise or blame much in the same way as the rest of the world.

243 See Seneca (_Ep._ lx.x.xix.). Seneca himself, however, has devoted a work to natural history, but the general tendency of the school was certainly to concentrate all attention upon morals, and all, or nearly all the great naturalists were Epicureans. Cicero puts into the mouth of the Epicurean the sentence, "Omnium autem rerum natura cognita levamur superst.i.tione, liberamur mortis metu, non conturbamur ignoratione rerum" (_De Fin._ i.); and Virgil expressed an eminently Epicurean sentiment in his famous lines:-

"Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Quique metus omnes et inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari."

_Georg._ 490-492.

244 Plutarch, _Cato Major_.

245 Cicero, _Ad Attic._ vi. 2.

246 This contrast is noticed and largely ill.u.s.trated by M. Montee in his interesting little work _Le Stocisme a Rome_, and also by Legendre in his _Traite de l'Opinion, ou Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de l'esprit humain_ (Venise, 1735).

247 "Atque hoc quidem omnes mortales sic habent ... commoditatem prosperitatemque vitae a diis se habere, virtutem autem nemo unquam acceptam deo retulit. Nimirum recte. Propter virtutem enim jure laudamur et in virtute recte gloriamur. Quod non contingeret si id donum a deo, non a n.o.bis haberemus."-Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._ iii.

36.

_ 248 Ep._ i. 18.

249 Seneca _Ep._ lxvi.

250 Lucretius, v. It was a Greek proverb, that Apollo begat aesculapius to heal the body, and Plato to heal the soul. (Legendre, _Traite de l'Opinion_, tome i. p. 197.)

251 "Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano: Fortem posce animum, mortis terrore carentem....

Monstro, quod ipse tibi possis dare."

Juvenal, _Sat._ x. 356.

Marcus Aurelius recommends prayer, but only that we may be freed from evil desires. (ix. 11.)

252 Seneca, _Ep._ lxvi.

253 Ibid. _Ep._ liii.

_ 254 De Const. Sap._ viii.

_ 255 Ench._ xlviii.

256 Arrian, i. 12.

257 Arrian, ii. 8. The same doctrine is strongly stated in Seneca, _Ep._ xcii.

258 Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._ ii. 66.

_ 259 Ep._ lx.x.xiii. Somewhat similar sentiments are attributed to Thales and Bion (Diog. Laert.).

_ 260 Ep._ xli. There are some beautiful sentiments of this kind in Plutarch's treatise, _De Sera Numinis Vindicta_. It was a saying of Pythagoras, that "we become better as we approach the G.o.ds."

261 Marc. Aur. iii. 5.

262 Marcus Aurelius.

263 Seneca, _Praef. Nat. Quaest._ iii.

264 Marc. Aur. x. 25.