The Joy of Reading

chapter three

The Silver Age of Tyranny

Virgil tells us in the Aeneid that, after the victory of the Achaeans and the destruction of Troy, Aeneas, fruit of the illicit coupling of the divine Aphrodite and the human Anchises, escaped from the burning city. After many adventures he reached Italy, where he had been fated to found a city and eventually a new Troy. This happened at the time of the Trojan War—and many interesting events followed in the next ten centuries. Things became even more interesting during the last century before our era, and during the first after it began; and this period we know more about.

After the defeat of Carthage and the final defeat of what remained of Greece (although Greeks continued to be the teachers of the Romans), civil war broke out over the question of which should rule Rome, a Senatus of wealthy and powerful men or a Popolus of lesser but more numerous persons. (The famous motto of the Republic, SPQR, stood for “Senatus Popolusque Romanus,” which, translated, means the Roman Senate and People.) There were several factions, one led by Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony, another by Pompey, a third by Brutus and Cassius and other senators. Caesar and Pompey were both generals, but Caesar captured Pompey and killed him. Brutus and Cassius then assassinated Caesar, whereupon Antony and Octavian, the young adopted son of Caesar, and a third man, Lepidus, who was not very powerful but was very rich, “elected” themselves a Triumvirate ruler of what was by now the largest, richest empire in the world. But Anthony and Octavian could not rule together, especially after Anthony went to Egypt, fell in love with its queen, divorced his wife (who was Octavian’s sister), and married Cleopatra—incidentally obtaining control of her enormous treasure. This turned out to be just what Octavian needed, and with a ruse he trapped Anthony’s and his wife’s separate navies at Actium, a harbor on the western coast of Greece. Cleopatra abandoned her lover suddenly, for a reason that has never been clear. Anthony, defeated, committed suicide; Cleopatra did the same.

Octavian, now in possession of Cleopatra’s treasure and therefore enormously wealthy, returned to Rome, paid off his debts, discarded Lepidus (but without killing him), changed his name to Caesar, pulled in all his strings, and declared himself—nothing very great, just “the first man at Rome.” He was cunning. He let people from all walks of life decide to accept him as their leader. Then as their ruler. Then as their dictator. Finally, under his new name of Caesar Augustus, as their god. The Republic was dead, and the Roman Empire had come into being.

It began better than it ended. A Silver Age, so-called, of Roman literature was inaugurated by Lucretius, included Virgil and his friends Horace, Ovid, and Catullus, and played out in less than a century. None of it, with the possible exception of Ovid’s works, was really original—not even the philosophical writings of Cicero, who admitted he was simply trying to teach the Romans what the Greeks knew and what the Romans had always been too busy fighting wars to learn.

Virgil was the greatest of imitators. His Eclogues were based on the Pastorals of Theocritus, although several of them had a considerable charm; he wrote them to show that a Roman could write Eclogues. Virgil’s Georgics were based on Hesiod’s Works and Days, although they too had an ulterior purpose. The unending civil wars had impoverished the Roman countryside as peasants were drafted before every campaign by one side or another. Virgil had been a farmer; his Georgics tried to teach Roman youth how to farm in the way he and his father had. And of course even The Aeneid was a frank imitation of Homer’s two great epics, with the first half of the Latin poem based on The Odyssey and the second half on The Iliad. Virgil was the greatest Roman poet. His imitations were elegant and beautiful, but they lacked the passion and humanity of the Greek originals. Of all the Latin poets Ovid may have been the best (apart from Virgil, of course), but he fell afoul of the Emperor and was banished

LUCRETIUS

96?–55 BCE

On the Nature of Things

The only biography of Titus Lucretius Carus is two sentences long and was written four hundred years after his death by a man who had little cause to like him. Here it is, from the Chronicles of Saint Jerome:

94 B.C. Titus Lucretius is born. He was rendered insane by a love-potion and, after writing, during intervals of lucidity, some books which Cicero emended, he died by his own hand in the forty-third year of his life.

This may be true, but there is no evidence either to confirm or deny it. Saint Jerome would not have approved of Lucretius’s Epicureanism, which may invalidate the account; on the other hand, love potions were so common in Lucretius’s day (roughly the first half of the first century BCE) that there were Roman laws against their use. Whether Cicero amended Lucretius’s great poem is also not known, although Cicero does say in a letter to his brother that the poem was being read in Rome in 54 B.C. Lucretius may have died the year before.

Scholars may favor the story of the love potion because they detect in Lucretius’s work an ardent interest in love. On the Nature of Things begins with a very beautiful invocation to Venus, goddess of love. But there were other reasons for dedicating such a poem to Venus. She was the mother of Aeneas, the founder of Rome, and thus the primal ancestor of all Romans, and Lucretius was writing in Latin (not in Greek, the more common “literary” language of his time) for Romans who, in his opinion, needed the kind of instruction his verses could impart.

More important is the role that the invocation plays in the poem itself. Lucretius sings of the delights of love and of the beauty of a world that is made by the love that is in all things; but this is merely to emphasize his true doctrine, namely that all of the visible world is merely an appearance. All of its color and charm and motion are nothing more than an illusion, for the only reality is atoms and the void—“first bodies, [from which] as first elements all things are.”

The shock of this message as conveyed in the very first pages of On the Nature of Things is not soon forgotten. Reach out and touch the cheek of your beloved—in fact you touch nothing but tiny pellets, indestructible and persisting from the beginning of the universe, some with hooks and some without, flying hither and yon at great speed within the emptiness of space. But do not weep; your fingers are made of atoms, too, as is your heart and also your mind, with which you delude yourself. Strange doctrine for a man who was supposed to have been driven insane by a love potion!

The theory of atomism had been first proposed by the Greek scientists Democritus and Leucippus early in the fifth century BCE. The reality we think we see, they contended, is an appearance only. In fact, all things are made of tiny elements, of which there are only a small number of types, but which in various combinations produce all the material things that we observe. Democritus had said there are two kinds of atoms, corporeal ones and soul ones, and that the two are mixed within us. The Greek atom could not be split; its very name indicated that it was primitive, the beginning and basis of all other things.

The atomic theory as proposed twenty-five hundred years ago and as kept alive by poets, philosophers, and alchemists until it was finally triumphantly confirmed in our own century, is really a very simple idea. It is much harder to believe that things are as they seem than to believe they are underlain by a more intelligible substratum of entities that cannot be seen and that we can therefore speculate about with relative impunity. Reality, in short, is always the hardest thing for human beings to face. It is therefore not surprising at all that Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus held to the theory long before there was any “scientific” evidence for it. What is really surprising is that it took two thousand years to prove it.

One reason for that long delay is a serious mistake made by the early atomists. They imagined a universe composed entirely of atomic particles constantly in motion in a space without limit, and they furthermore imagined that the motion of the particles was utterly unpredictable, ruled by chance alone. Their first idea was sound, but their failure to see how useful it would be to suppose that the motion of the particles was governed by natural laws proved a great error. Only when the laws of that motion were discovered within the past two hundred years were we able to confirm the theory.

It was also a mistake, I think, for the old atomists to deny the freedom of the will, which they did when they said that all was ruled by chance. It was not necessary to suppose that there were no immaterial entities in the universe. And if there were and are such they could have been and could still be free—like you and me, when “you” and “me” refer to entities that are not material (I do not know about you, but I know about me!).

Be that as it may, the theory came down to Lucretius via the offices of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who taught a kind of Stoicism in a school he established in Athens in the third century BCE. For the Epicureans all was calm and peace because nothing was really important except the soul, and nothing could hurt that. The gods were very far away. They didn’t care about men, or maybe they laughed at them. Pain was an illusion, as was pleasure, but of the two pleasure was the greater good, so why not follow it? A moderate life ended by a composed and peaceful death was the greatest pleasure of all.

That is the doctrine of Lucretius’s long philosophical poem, combined with the atomism that, in his view, somehow strengthened the moral implications of Epicurus’s teaching. As such it seems a curious subject for a long poem, and an impossible subject for a great poem. But the poem is great nevertheless.

It is very beautiful in its antique Latin, with a beauty the best translations retain. It is also imbued with passion, which Epicurus might have disapproved of but to which no reader can object. Lucretius was indeed a passionate man who saw no contradiction in his passionate attempts to convince us that we should be free of passion. Maybe there is none.

On the Nature of Things has much to say about love, but no less to say about death. It begins with love and ends with death; the last book (unfinished, as it turns out—as though Lucretius had died in the writing of it; and if he did kill himself, maybe he did so because he could not finish it) describes at awful length the horrors of the plague at Athens that had killed Pericles and so many other noble souls and left Athens vulnerable to the high tide of Spartan tyranny. From an invocation to Venus, lover of “increase,” to a paean to Mars, the provider of death and dissolution—that is the road Lucretius leads us down.

VIRGIL

70–19 BCE

The Aeneid

Little more than a century ago, most educated people knew Virgil reasonably well, had read some Virgil in school—in the original Latin—and could quote Virgil on appropriate occasions. They also knew Homer, of course, but they did not like Homer as much as they liked Virgil. Homer, in their view, was somewhat primitive and quite indefensible as far as his morals went, while Virgil was in all the important respects impeccable. Today the pendulum has swung the other way. We tend nowadays to appreciate Homer much more than we do Virgil; in fact, we sometimes find it hard to see much good in Virgil at all. He has become a poet who is paid more lip service than real affectionate attention and regard.

The modern judgment regarding the relative merits of Homer and Virgil is, I believe, correct. Homer is the greater poet, and Virgil has serious defects that are hard for us to accept. But this doesn’t mean the works of Virgil, especially The Aeneid, should no longer be read. The Aeneid is a wonderful poem, although it is not as wonderful as The Iliad or The Odyssey, both of which it often imitates closely. Nor are the reasons to read The Aeneid merely antiquarian. Virgil’s poem retains life and meaning for us in the twenty-first century. It also contains beauties that are rare if not unique in all of poetry.

Publius Vergilius Maro was born on a farm near the town of Mantua, in Italy, in 70 BCE. (Because of his birthplace he has been called “Mantovano” by later poets.) He came of good peasant stock, but his genius must have been recognized very early because he received an excellent education and soon came to the attention of important men in Rome. Virgil’s youth was a troubled and chaotic time. When he was twenty, Julius Caesar swept down across the Rubicon from Gaul into Italy and carried the civil war with Pompey close to home. Caesar was the victor, but war erupted again after his assassination in 44 BCE and continued until the final victory by Octavian (later called Caesar) over the combined naval forces of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE. Virgil was, in short, nearly forty years old before peace came to his country, peace which he and most living men and women had never known. It was an enormous relief and Virgil, like most Romans, felt indebted to the man who had brought it about—to Augustus, now the single ruler of the Roman world.

Virgil was well known as a poet long before the final triumph of Augustus, who later became his friend. Virgil’s Eclogues, a collection of ten pastoral poems composed between 42 and 37 BCE, were much admired for their limpidity and perfection of tone. One of them, the Fourth Eclogue, brought to Virgil great fame at a later time, when most Roman and pagan poets were almost forgotten. In it, Virgil prophesies in mystic verse the birth of a child who will banish sin, restore peace, and bring back the Golden Age. The poem can be dated to 41–40 BCE, a time when the civil war seemed to be drawing to a close (in fact it did not end for ten years). Virgil was probably referring to the expected child of Antony and Octavia, sister of Octavian. In any event, Christians later read it as prophesying the birth of Christ and this kept the name and works of Virgil alive when other pagan reputations withered and died.

The civil wars, besides keeping the Roman cities in a state of continuous political turmoil, also nearly depopulated the countryside as farmers everywhere were forced to leave their farms and go to war. Virgil’s Georgics, a didactic work pleading for the restoration of the traditional agricultural life of Italy, was written in the period between 36 and 27 BCE. It is filled with the deep and sensitive love of the country of Italy that marked everything Virgil, once a farmer, wrote.

Virgil began The Aeneid almost immediately, it seems, after Augustus’s victory at Actium had made peace possible at last. His theme—the founding of Rome by Aeneas, the last of the Trojans and the first of the Romans—made it possible for Virgil to operate on a double time scale. The poem could be and was read as describing an antique world, that of the heroes in the mythical past, but also the world of today (that is, of the late first century BCE), when Roman virtues had finally been proven triumphant and would now ensure peace forevermore.

Virgil was a shy, timid man, although he must have been a charming one, too, for he had many loving friends including the poet Horace, the emperor Augustus, and the art patron Maecenas, who supported him financially for most of his later years. But despite his success Virgil was not happy. He had been born under the Roman Republic and he died under the Empire, unable for personal as well as political reasons to express his growing sense that the change, for all it had to recommend it, was for the worse, and would become more and more so with the passage of time. I think it is obvious Virgil felt so; nothing else accounts for the persistent note of sadness and melancholy that imbues the Aeneid. The poem is about glory, duty, and sacrifice for the sake of a great aim, but it is also pervaded by what Virgil in one of his most unforgettable phrases called, “the tears in things.” That there are tears in things, that there is a deep sadness at the very heart of reality, was not an ordinary Roman idea.

The Aeneid begins with the fall of Troy. Aeneas, carrying his old father Anchises on his shoulders and leading his little son Ascanius by the hand, escapes from the burning city, silhouetted against the lurid light of the flames. It is one of Virgil’s unforgettable word pictures. Aeneas then takes a ship and sails across the sea to Carthage, where he meets and seduces Queen Dido. The seduction is necessary—Aeneas must have help for himself and his men—and so, he feels, is his departure from the queen. As he sails away never to return, Dido stands upon the shore, knowing in her heart (despite his protestations) that she will never see him again. She then immolates herself upon her funeral pyre. This image, of the ship sailing away into the distance and the flames leaping up high above the cliff, is also unforgettable. These huge, sad, heartrending scenes have shaped the imaginations of men and women for two thousand years.

Aeneas is drawn, or driven, by a sense of duty—not by love or desire or ambition or pride or even plain curiosity, as was Odysseus. Duty, though indispensable to the success of large enterprises, is no longer a lovable virtue; it seems to be a cold, sad obligation. This is a defect that Virgil never overcomes.

All the antagonists of Aeneas in the poem—Dido; Turnus, who fights for his homeland and his bride against the invading Trojans; Camilla, the lovely leader of the Volscians (allies of Turnus) whom Aeneas slays in battle—all of these share a humanity Aeneas himself lacks. He is a gigantic marble figure, glimpsed through the smoke of a burning city or in the murk of battle, a symbol, representative of Rome in all her greatness but not really recognizable as a man. This central fact makes The Aeneid essentially inaccessible to many modern readers. We want our heroes to be made of flesh and blood, with their vices as well as their virtues as large as life, so we can see them clearly.

Virgil’s Aeneid hangs in the balance when we say these things. On the one hand, there are grand, unforgettable images; on the other hand, the cold inhumanity of its central figure. Virgil’s magnificent verse finally tips the scales. Tennyson, in a famous tribute, proclaimed:

I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man.

The stately measure of the verse of Virgil moves inexorably, like an enormous, benevolent giant, marching one large, solemn step at a time, over mountains, plains, and seas. The Latin hexameter line is, in Virgil’s hands, wonderfully flexible; he can say anything serious in it (comedy is not much heard in The Aeneid). The verse is so fraught and burdened with symbolism that hundreds of lines can be detached from the poem and applied to other contexts. Thus when people still knew Latin as a matter of course, books of quotations were full of tags of Virgil. This Virgilian verse, however, is not easy to translate. Try to get hold of a good modern translation; for example, Robert Fitzgerald’s or Robert Fagles’s. Then, to obtain a sense of what Virgil sounds like in Latin, read a few pages of an older translation—for example, that of John Dryden, published in the 1690s. Dryden wrote in sonorous heroic couplets that are said to be the closest to Latin hexameters that English verse permits.

Do not expect to be exalted by Virgil, especially at first. The verse is an acquired taste. But give it a try. In the end, remember the image of Aeneas fleeing Troy, leaving it burning behind him, carrying his father on his shoulders, leading his little boy by the hand. Bernini sculpted it in marble, and a dozen painters have depicted it. It’s not easy to forget.

Why? Perhaps because every father would like to have a son like Aeneas and every son a father like Aeneas. As long as there is war and the desolation war brings, so long will that young man stand as a symbol of hope for those who are too old or too young to escape war’s destruction. Would that all such people on Earth had a young Aeneas to lead them to a new home.

OVID

43 BCE–17 CE

Metamorphoses

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in a small town east of Rome in 43 BCE. “Naso” in Latin means nose—why he acquired this nickname, as it were, is not known. He came of a comfortable family and received a good education at home, then moved to Rome for the training in rhetoric and other arts required for a professional life. But from an early age he knew that what he most wanted was to be a poet and, despite many troubles, he was, for the rest of his relatively long life.

He was a brilliant, witty man, and his poetry reveals those qualities. In his youth he wrote love poems and a mock didactic “treatise” on love and sex called Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). This and other poems like it won him friends as well as readers, which both amused and pleased him, although he knew he needed a greater challenge. He found this, in his middle age, in the large body of Greek mythical tales that Romans liked to read although they generally disapproved of the lack of Roman moral values in the stories. (Or maybe they disapproved of them because they knew the emperor did.)

Ovid began to compose the Metamorphoses when he was nearly forty and completed it in the year 1 BCE. The poem consists of a collection of stories, more or less based on familiar Greek myths, but really just stories about people—men and women, brothers and sisters, fathers and children, every kind of relationship both within families and without. The stories are strange, brutal, sad, funny, mocking, surprising, and wonderful. Metamorphoses is certainly a great book. And when it was finally published it established Ovid as the preeminent poet of Rome, since both Horace and Virgil now were dead.

Almost everyone loved the book. One man did not, and his opinion was the only one that counted. Ovid was vacationing on the famous Isle of Capri, in the Bay of Naples, when word came that Caesar Augustus wished to see him. It was an unavoidable journey, not pleasant. When Ovid arrived at Rome he was invited into the Emperor’s presence, where the two men met privately. No one knows exactly what was said except that Augustus was apparently not pleased by something Ovid had done, by an ”error” of some sort that the poet had committed. After the private audience, Ovid was tried by a private imperial court, convicted, and sentenced to banishment. He was not harmed; nor was he fined or deprived of his possessions; nor were his writings officially proscribed, except that they mysteriously disappeared from all the libraries and bookshops.

His banishment was terrible indeed. He was carried in an imperial ship through the Dardanelles and across the Black Sea to Tomi, a small city in the northeastern corner of Pontus, as the Romans called it. Tomi was totally bereft of everything Ovid held dear: there was no culture, no books or plays or any kind of public entertainment, and the people did not even speak Latin. (Their language was called Getic and I think no one speaks it now.) For years he remained an outcast in the town but was finally accepted as some kind of strange anomaly, and in a way he came to accept his fate. His wife, whom he loved, remained behind in Rome and never ceased to try to soften the Emperor’s mind, but to no effect. When Augustus died in CE 14, she petitioned his successor for mercy, but again failed, partly because everyone else—even her closest friends—were afraid to join her pleas lest they be tarred with the same brush. They never saw one another again, although Ovid never ceased to write letters to her. He lived for three more years and died at Tomi in CE 17 in the middle of one of its dreadfully dark, cold winters.

He might not have been surprised to learn that all the efforts of Caesar Augustus to wipe his name and his writings from the memory of man were unsuccessful. For a while his books had to be secreted in cellars and barns and country houses, but many survived and before long came to be openly admired. With the ascension of the Christian Constantine to the imperial throne, his books were again banned but not destroyed. Within a few hundred years they were again popular, and during the English renaissance were among the most popular books of all, thanks to a translation of Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding that was quoted by everyone from Shakespeare on down.

A good translation by Rolfe Humphries captures the wit, brilliance, and pathos of the original. Another book that I recommend, if you can find it, is The Last World, by Christoph Ransmayr. This extraordinary book seems to be written about the present day, but at the same time the action takes place in Tomi, two thousand years ago, where the people of the town find themselves playing out the adventures and the fates of the characters in Ovid’s great book. I read Ransmayr’s book fifteen years ago and I have never forgotten a word of it.

TACITUS

56?–120?

Annals

Histories

We know a good deal about first-century Rome—the first century of the Roman Empire. Records have survived, historians have recorded the facts, and archeological study has added its not inconsiderable part. But what we think about that famous age is largely owing to Tacitus Cornelius Tacitus. He was a fine writer as well as a great historian—indeed, one of the most influential historians of all time.

Eleven emperors ruled Rome during the eighty-two years from the death of Augustus in 14 to the death of Domitian in 96, and four of them are among the most famous—or infamous—men who ever lived. Tiberius. Caligula. Nero. Domitian. The blood runs cold at the mere mention of their names, thanks to Tacitus.

Tiberius may have deserved a better report. During the first half of his reign, at least, he tried to be a good ruler and a worthy successor to Caesar Augustus. Like Augustus, Tiberius had to make up a great deal as he went along; the Romans weren’t used to being ruled by a king, having enjoyed a Republican constitution for centuries. There were few precedents to follow. At the same time there were great temptations; the Senate threw power at Tiberius even when he wasn’t sure he wanted it. During his last years he did, and he used it. Suffering from a disease that made him hideous to behold, he retired to his heavily guarded villa on the island of Capri, near Naples, and there ruled through subordinates, indulging himself in cruelty and vice. Or so Tacitus says. We do not really know.

Tiberius was succeeded by a madman, Caligula, whose cruelty made everyone regret the murder of Tiberius. But Caligula only lived for four years before he too was assassinated, to no one’s displeasure. His successor was Claudius, in many respects a successful ruler; his only real mistake was in taking the last of several wives, Agrippina. She was a devil, and she brought with her a devil of a son whom she persuaded Claudius to adopt as his heir before poisoning him.

The son, Nero, was only seventeen when his mother handed him the throne. He was already practiced in cruelty and in every form of vice. He particularly enjoyed torturing people to death and forcing the wives of Roman senators to prostitute themselves at the elaborate parties that he threw and that helped to exhaust the imperial treasury. His leading passion was the theater. He loved to act and to hear himself applauded. He acted often, his soldiers roaming the audience, beating onlookers who applauded for the wrong actor or didn’t applaud at all. Nero said he was surprised that he always won the prize as the best actor. His soldiers told him it was because he was so good. No one dared to puncture the deception.

Nero was acting one evening when a great fire began to sweep through Rome. The worst fire in the city’s history, it destroyed half of all its buildings, including many government structures as well as Nero’s own house. There were rumors that Nero had started the fire himself to destroy the city so he could rebuild it after his own plan and perhaps even name it Neropolis. He did build a new palace, the Domus Aurea or Golden House, on the ruins of the central city, thus further impoverishing the state. The rumors would not die concerning his own involvement in the conflagration and concerning the fact that he refused to stop his performance even though word of the fire had reached the theater (he was not, however, fiddling, despite the popular belief), and so he decided to shift the blame to a scapegoat. For this nefarious purpose he chose a burgeoning sect, the Christians, who were disliked by most people anyway. Nero arrested many thousands and killed them in cruel and humiliating ways. He disguised himself as a commoner and wandered among the crowds who were whipped into being present at the executions. His delight in the pain he inflicted led some among the spectators to begin to have sympathy for the Christians, a novel development at Rome.

Nero was assassinated in 68, when he was thirty-one. He had earlier murdered his mother, his brother, his wife, and his tutor and guide, the philosopher Seneca. Following each of their deaths, and the deaths of hundreds of other eminent and noble victims, he required of the Senate that it not only thank him for saving the state from traitors but also that it thank the gods. The Senate never failed to do so—but they were sincere when they thanked the gods for the death of Nero.

Since Nero left no heir and had killed every member of his family, his death was followed by civil war. It raged for more than a year, during which three men occupied the principate; finally a fourth, Vespasian, ended the carnage and reestablished imperial rule. He was succeeded by Titus and he by Domitian, another in the Tiberius mold; what began well ended, in the case of Domitian, with a reign of terror—during the middle 90s—that may have exceeded for cruelty and madness anything that had gone before.

Tiberius was in fact a somewhat better man than Tacitus gave him credit for being; Domitian may not have been as bad as Tacitus said he was; and Claudius and Vespasian, at least, were relatively good as emperors went. This was not, however, what really interested Tacitus. He was interested in tyranny—in the effect it has on those who suffer under it and what it does to the tyrant himself. The Annals, covering (with lapses—unfortunately, much of the work is lost) the period from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero, and the Histories, covering (again with lapses due to missing pages and whole books) the period from the civil war of 68-69 to the death of Domitian in 96, are among the most powerful indictments of absolute power ever written. There is nothing quite like them.

The world today has its share of tyrants, as it has always had. Probably the great majority of all rulers who have ever lived have been despots and only a very few of them have been benevolent. But there have been men like Tacitus, too—and there still are—who hate tyranny, bravely confront it, and eloquently describe it in its true colors. And who therefore make us truly understand what Tacitus called “the rare happiness of times”—namely, the times of those emperors immediately following the death of Domitian when Tacitus was able to publish his books—“when we may think what we please, and express what we think.”

That happiness is very deep; it is the immemorial dream of all men and women who know the difference between being ruled well and being ruled badly. Such happiness is worth any effort, any sacrifice. If you have any doubt of that whatsoever, read Tacitus. Even if you do not doubt it, read him. The story of that first century of the Roman Empire is one of the best true, instructive stories in the history of the world

PLUTARCH

46?–120

Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans

Plutarch was born in the small Theban city of Chaeronea in Boeotia and spent most of his life there, apart from a few years in Athens as a student and several visits to Rome and to other places in Greece. During the turmoil of the first imperial century—he was born in 46 and died in 120—he was obviously content to remain far from the metropolis and its temptations and perils. His reward was that he seems to have been one of the happiest of the great writers. A number of his letters survive; in one, to his wife, whom he loved, he wrote that he found “scarcely an erasure, as a book well written,” in the happiness and contentment of his long life.

He wrote a great deal, besides occupying many political offices in his little town, directing some kind of school there that was known for miles around, and serving as a priest of Apollo at Delphi (which is not far from Chaeronea). In this last capacity he may have written to the emperor Trajan to try to revive the waning faith in the oracle. This may have led to a meeting with Trajan when Plutarch was in Rome, which may in turn have led to an honorary title of ex-consul. All of this is far from certain. It is certain that the stories of his having been Trajan’s tutor and of his having been named by him governor of Greece are fabrications—although the honor and respect in which this provincial schoolmaster was held both near and far is no fabrication at all. He was one of the best-loved authors in the world for nearly two thousand years, until the French Revolution ushered in an age with a romantic passion for the expression of emotion as contrasted with the classical passion for its control and regulation by morals and law.

Such respect for the laws of god and men imbues Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, biographies of the men of both Greece and Rome who were considered great not only for their achievements but also for the nobility of their characters, particularly in adversity. The Lives were written in pairs, one Greek, one Roman, the pairs being chosen by Plutarch as far as possible on the basis of similarities in his subjects’ lives and careers. Thus two men who betrayed their country, but for noble reasons, are compared in the lives of Alcibiades and Coriolanus; two commanders who lost important campaigns because of their timidity are compared in the lives of Nicias and Crassus; two renowned rebels are compared in Agesilaus and Pompey; two great revolutionary figures in Alexander and Caesar; and two notable patriots in Dion and Marcus Brutus. The comparisons of these bioi paralelloi (“parallel lives”) are sometimes forced, but the lives themselves are always fascinating and what is more, always inspiring. To inspire the men of his day with the ideals of the virtuous men of old was certainly one of Plutarch’s main purposes in writing his book, although he admitted that as he wrote he was deriving profit and stimulation himself from “lodging these men one after the other in (my) house.”

Plutarch’s Lives were based on solid research and they are still an important resource for scholars studying the period with which they mainly deal—from about 300 BCE to about CE 50. But it is not as history that they have been primarily read, and loved, down through the ages. Plutarch himself saw a major difference between history, which he thought of as chronology, and biography, which he thought of as drama. And dramatic his lives certainly are. They are full of anecdotes and stories, of quotations that are more or less verbatim, and of wonderful background notes that tell us what it was like to live in those far-off times. But the high drama—in many cases the high tragedy—of these lives is what in the long run attracts us most. That, together with the nobility that so many of the subjects show in meeting their tragic end: The death scenes in Plutarch’s Lives are beautiful—and unparalleled.

Plutarch’s book has had an enormous influence on other writers, notably Shakespeare, who was not above quoting or at least paraphrasing whole passages from Thomas North’s brilliant translation, which had appeared in Shakespeare’s youth. Plutarch’s prose description of the first meeting of Antony and Cleopatra is only outshone—if indeed it is outshone—by the splendid Shakespearian verse that describes the same meeting, so fraught, as Plutarch and Shakespeare both knew, with the doom of men and empires. But it is ordinary readers like you and me who have loved Plutarch most. Here is the best way to read him.

Wait for a cold night, or one of driving wind and rain. Light a fire in the fireplace (if you don’t have a fireplace, imagine one). Place your chair so you are warmed by the fire and protected from the dark shadows in the rest of the room. Draw the light forward and open the book, to the lives of Romulus and Theseus, respectively the mythical founders of Rome and Athens, or to those of Aristides and Marcus Cato, each of them moralists of the old school, or to Pericles and Fabius, noble losers, or to Demosthenes and Cicero, the eloquence of the one exceeded only by that of the other. Or indeed any other lives; it doesn’t matter which. Start to read.

Soon, very soon, you will have traveled far away from your fireside. The electric bulb will have turned into a candle and the sounds of automobiles will have faded, to be replaced by the sounds of horses’ feet and the creak of harness. Only the passions and the perils, the temptations and the falls from grace, will be familiar. You will not be sorry to take this journey and you may not want to come back when the present calls.

EPICTETUS

fl. lst-2nd century

Discourses

Epictetus was born in the middle of the first century and as a boy was the slave of a follower of the emperor Nero. Epictetus’s owner was sometimes cruel to his slave and once, perhaps playfully, he twisted Epictetus’s leg. The boy smiled. The master twisted the leg harder; he wanted Epictetus to admit that it hurt. But Epictetus only said, “If you do that you will break it.” The master twisted the leg harder and it broke. “I told you so,” said Epictetus. He was lame for the rest of his life.

The story, whether true or not, is utterly typical of the man, who gained his freedom while in his twenties, was exiled from Rome by the tyrant Domitian because he laughed at tyranny, and went to the city of Nicopolis, in northern Greece, where he lived for the rest of his long life and taught his philosophy to men who came from all over the world to learn it from him.

He was poor, possessing only, as he said, earth, sky, and a cloak. He sat on the ground, not writing anything but only talking to his visitors, who considered themselves his disciples. One of them, a certain Flavius Arrian, took notes and published them as the Discourses of Epictetus; he was careful, he said, to copy the exact words and very language of Epictetus and to preserve “the directness of his speech.” Indeed, the Discourses read like a man talking.

What did he talk about? Courage, and freedom, and that condition of the will that makes a man free—these were his main subjects. “He is free who lives as he wishes to live,” Epictetus says over and over; and how should you wish to live? Why, in such a way that no one can hinder you. And how is that? Desiring those things that are yours alone and that no one can take from you. Are there such things? Yes, one: the freedom of your own will. You can be deprived of everything you possess: your wealth, your wife and children, even your life. But you cannot be made to desire what you do not desire. You alone are able to corrupt your own will.

“Only consider at what price you sell your own will,” Epictetus warns; “if for no other reason, at least for this, that you sell it not for a small sum.” But do you have to sell it at all? Like Socrates, you can refuse and put your tormentors and executioners to shame. You will still die. Yes, none shall avoid that fate. It is better to live long and then die. But in the end, what is the price of this long life? Epictetus himself apparently lived to about eighty.

It is a hard doctrine, that “to study philosophy is to learn to die,” and hard men adhered to it, the noble Romans most of all. It is difficult not to admire them; not to know about their courage is to fail to know how good men can be. In reading Epictetus, ponder the relevance of his sayings to your own life. Pay attention to his admonitions about the will. The next time you justify a mean or cowardly action by saying, “I couldn’t help myself,” ask whether Epictetus would have accepted that explanation.

At the same time, ask yourself whether the Roman philosophy of Stoicism, of which Epictetus was one of the most eloquent spokesmen, is enough, whether it lacks something important. Why, for example, did the early Christians, who were all attracted to Stoicism, all without exception turn away from it and deny its teachings? Is it enough, to gain freedom, merely to desire only those things that no one can take away from you? Or is there not also a more positive aspect to freedom, a striving after goods, both human and divine, that requires a reaching out, a daring, and another kind of courage?

MARCUS AURELIUS

120–180

Meditations

Epictetus was a slave; Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor. Their philosophies were similar. In fact the emperor was a disciple and follower of the slave, living, as he did, only half a century after him. But for which of these two men was it more difficult to be free?

The answer is the emperor. It is harder for a ruler over all mankind to be free than for his meanest subject. The meanest subject might be imprisoned, might be hung in chains at the city gate; in another sense he would certainly not be free. But, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius agreed, in the most important sense of freedom such a prisoner might still be free, that is, his will might still be his own and not at the whim of another. The question is: Is it harder for an emperor or a slave to be free in this sense? It is harder for the emperor, because he lives in a palace and is subject to every temptation, can follow every whim. Perhaps there is not any greater slavery than that.

Epictetus, after he was exiled from Rome, went to Greece and taught philosophy. Marcus Aurelius had to remain at Rome and rule it. When the troubles started that, unknown to him, were the beginning of the fall of the Empire, he had to go where the troubles were and confront them, be they human disasters or natural ones like floods and earthquakes. His life, in short, was more subject than Epictetus’s was to necessity—but only because he was a good man and a good ruler; a bad one would have “fiddled,” like his predecessor Nero, while Rome burned.

It is curious and ironic that Marcus Aurelius, the best man among all Roman emperors, was beset with troubles that he could not control, while Nero, among the worst of men and emperors, handed down to his successors a relatively thriving state. After all, such ironies may be the best confirmation of the value of the Stoic philosophy. If we cannot control the world in which we live—and certainly we cannot—then we should learn to live with that fact and content ourselves with controlling what is in our power. And the only thing that is within our power is our own will.

We do not read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to learn the Stoic doctrine, which is better stated in the Discourses of Epictetus. We read Marcus Aurelius instead for the light he throws upon his own life and upon the life that must be led by a man such as himself, who was responsible for the peace, safety, and prosperity of all mankind (as he saw it). We read him and are touched by his weakness, which he is very frank to confess. (Probably he never expected anyone to read these private thoughts, which he put down while in his tent, at night, awaiting a battle or resting up from one.) There were even days when he did not want to get out of bed:

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present—I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bedclothes and keep myself warm?—But this is more pleasant.—Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion?

We read him, too, for his good advice. Every once in a while, he tells us, when you are doing this or that unpleasant task, “pause and ask yourself, if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives thee of this.” And we remember his famous injunction, “to live every day as if it were your last.”

Most of all, we are curious about what it is like to be an emperor, to be rich beyond limit, powerful beyond limit. Very few men, or women, have handled absolute power and riches well. Marcus Aurelius did. He was acutely aware of the problems of power and he contemplated what was, for him, the greatest obstacle to his living a good life. In the first book of the Meditations he speaks of the good fortune that gave him the strength to overcome his—good fortune! It is a famous and beautiful passage of which I shall quote a small part:

To the gods I am indebted for having good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good … Further, I am thankful to the gods that I was not longer brought up with my grandfather’s concubine and that I preserved the flower of my youth, and that I did not make proof of my virility before the proper season but even deferred the time; (and) that I was subjected to a ruler and a father who was able to take away all pride from me, and to bring me to the knowledge that it is possible for a man to live in a palace without wanting either guards or embroidered dresses, or torches and statues, and such-like show; but that it is in such a man’s power to bring himself very near to the fashion of a private person, without being for this reason either meaner in thought, or more remiss in action, with respect to the things which must be done for the public interest in a manner that befits a ruler.

Imagine this man, who could possess any woman, buy any honor, own any thing, desiring above all to live as much as possible like a private person. Surely that is the proof of virtue. If not, then what does virtue mean?