STORIA DELLA FILOSOFIA ROMANA

Speranza

Philosophy, Rome and its Empire
The Stoics | Science and Construction | Lucretius | Plutach the Biographer | Cynics versus Lucian
Marcus Aurelius | Galen the Physician and Philosopher | Plotinus, Rome's famous Theologian
The Stoics
Around 200 BCE, some conservative Romans wished that their city avoid entanglements in Greece in order to avoid contacts with fancy philosophies they believed would corrupt their fellow Romans. One of them, the statesman Marcus Porcius Cato -- Cato the Elder -- disliked the softer manners of the Greeks. He was fluent in Greek but opposed to Greek literature, poetry and art, and he opposed Greek medicine, claiming that it was poisoning Romans. Cato joined other Roman conservatives in fighting against the spread of Greek sophistication. He was influential in deporting from Rome two Epicureans whom he thought had been sneering at religion, and he played a role in deporting a host of other philosophers and rhetoricians from east of the Adriatic.
Romans adopted Greek philosophies despite these conservatives. The conservative general, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who took power as a dictator in 82 BCE, was also intellectually aggressive, and after retiring he took up gardening and became an Epicurean. Another intellectually aggressive individual, Julius Caesar, a generation after Sulla, also became an Epicurean, but he was in politics to his end.
Stoicism was adopted more widely accepted. Cicero, a contemporary of Caesar, saw the Greeks as having thought of every philosophical alternative, and he sided with the Stoics against the Epicureans, for whom he had contempt. He believed it necessary to persuade Romans that there were gods who governed all things, that these gods were the benefactors of mankind and that the gods judged the character, acts, intentions and the piety of individuals. Cicero had come to believe in Stoicism's brotherhood of man, and he saw this brotherhood as compatible with Roman imperialism. Rome, he believed, had created safety, that Rome was the light of the world, and the Roman Empire was the work of the gods.
Another Stoic was Marcus Brutus, of et tu Brute fame. He was a senator with a reputation as an idealist. Fifteen years younger than Caesar, Caesar had considered him almost a son. He was at least close to him, Caesar having pardoned him for his alliance with his adversary Pompey. When he joined the conspiracy his prestige inspired twelve other senators to join in the assassination conspiracy. Brutus' philosophy about the brotherhood of man did not inhibit him from slashing into Caesar with his knife. Caesar, he thought, was doing a disservice to the state by turning himself into a king. Brutus paid for his act with his life. Surrounded by hostile forces two years after the assassination, he committed suicide. A follower of Epicurus might have seen it as another example of the benefits of living a peaceful life outside of politics.
And there was the Stoic philosopher Seneca, one century later. He too became mixed up in politics. He accepted the position of tutor to the adopted son of an emperor, a boy named Nero. Nero took power at the age of sixteen, after his mother poisoned her husband, Emperor Claudius. Nero remained under Seneca's influence for the first five years of his rule. Seneca became a power behind the throne and applied his Stoic sentiments by opposing the use of torture as evidence. And he was opposed to slow death and physical torments involved with execution by crucifixion. During this time, Nero gave slaves the right to file complaints against their masters -- a tiny reform. Nero also pardoned people who had written unflattering descriptions of him. He left the charge of treason unused. He gave assistance to cities that had suffered from disasters. And, he won the hearts of many of his subjects by lowering taxes. But no matter Seneca's wisdom, Nero was a mediocrity unsuited emotionally for the power that had been given him. Difficulties grew, including Nero getting rid of his mother by having her murdered. Seneca retired during Nero's eighth year of rule. His replacement was Tigellinus, who amused Nero with his callousness and described Stoics, including Seneca, as hypocrites for proclaiming preference for living simply. Seneca began to devote himself again to study and writing. Three years later, he was accused of conspiring to kill Nero -- most likely a falsehood. Seneca was ordered by Nero to kill himself, and he did so, severing several of his veins and bleeding to death.

Science and Construction

The Romans were borrowing philosophy from the Greeks while some were busy trying to improve the lives of people through an understanding of construction techniques. Aristotle's school, in Athens, had made advances in understanding levers, balances and wedges. And, in the mid-200s BCE, in the tradition of Anaxagoras, a Greek from Syracuse named Archimedes had worked on the relative densities of bodies and the theoretical principles of levers. He invented the ratio pi, and he invented numerous mechanical contrivances, including machines used in war, which were employed to defend against Roman soldiers. While he was alone and working peacefully on a problem, the story goes, a Roman soldier pursuing his duties put him to the sword.

The Romans borrowed from Archimedes, and they continued to improve the sewers they had inherited from the Etruscans. Sewage remained a more pressing problem than any philosophical issue they were capable of solving. People were pouring their waste into the street, getting sick or dying and unaware of the best approach to finding out why. That would come in the wake of small technological inventions more than a thousand years later.

Drinking water was being contaminated with sewage, which was unpleasant. Some Romans disliked foul smells. The Romans had enough sense to build aqueducts to bring in fresh water from the hills outside of their towns -- nothing new -- aqueducts having been built elsewhere in the world centuries before, including more than a thousand years before in the Indus Valley. Rome's first aqueducts were underground. Rome's first aqueduct to carry water above ground was the Aqua Marcian, about 56 miles long, with a bridge section about ten miles long. The Romans were also building aqueducts in all parts of their empire.

It was around this time that Rome was creating its Concrete Revolution. This was the use of a new material -- concrete -- made with lime and powdered clay, to which water is added, and fist-sized rock mixed in. It was a change from stone and mud brick and a turning point in the history of architecture that allowed new designs and structural complexity.

This was around the same time that the Romans were building public latrines and systems of sewage pipes to carry sewage out of the streets and into the river. In 33 BCE, Rome's first emperor, Augustus, had construction done that enclosed city's sewers. Augustus encouraged spending for public works and public parks. In 19 BCE, the construction of a new aqueduct was completed. Splendid new public baths were built. A ministry of transport was begun that built and maintained roads. From a city of sun-dried brick, Rome under Augustus was to become a city of marble as well as concrete, with new roads improving communications and trade.

The Roman philosopher, Pliny the Elder (CE 23 to 79), in his Naturalis Historia, remarked that of all the that Romans had accomplished, the sewers were “the most noteworthy." And around the year 100, sewer construction extended to the homes of the well-to-do.

Roman citizens came to expect high standards of hygiene. Aqueducts were used everywhere in the empire to supply not just drinking water for private houses, but for supplying other needs such as irrigation, public fountains and public baths.

But service for everybody was seen as hopeless. This was not a democratic age. People were resigned to contemporary ideas and ways of doing things. They depended on distant authority. There was no house-to-house garbage collection. People continued to dump their rubbish into the street, and the rubbish at times became so thick that stepping-stones were needed. Street levels were to rise as new buildings would be constructed on top of trash -- while philosophers pondered what was and was not right or good character.

Lucretius

Amid the variety of attitudes among the Romans was that of their distinguished poet T. Lucretius Carus. He was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, having lived from around 99 BCE to his death around 54 BCE. At this time there was a plague in Athens and his writing came to a sudden end. Lucretius denounced conventional morality and the traditional mythology that he believed supported it. He was anti-establishment. He turned in disgust from the strife he found in Rome and found solace in Epicureanism. He had the Epicurean's awe for the beauties of nature. He wrote a book titled On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), which described the ideas of Democritus and Epicurus. The Epicurean view was empirical -- basically scientific, at odds with the view of magic by the gods that was a part of establishment beliefs. Lucretius described death as including the dissipation of mind rather than our minds living on in torment in hell or wherever. He described neither the mind nor spirit surviving independent of the body.

Another contemporary, the notorious Stoic philosopher-politician Cicero (106-43 BCE) wrote that: "The poems of Lucretius ... exhibit many flashes of genius, and yet show great mastership." The poet Virgil (70-19 BCE) was referring to Lucretius when he wrote, "Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet all fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring Underworld."

Lucretius was the first writer to introduce Roman readers to Epicurean philosophy. Knowledge of Epicurean philosophy would pass into modernity from a German monastery's copy of On the Nature of Things, which was discovered by a former papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, who was searching monasteries in Germany and Switzerland for forgotten scripts. This was described by Stephen Greenblatt in his book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

Plutarch -- Esteemed Biographer

Plutarch lived between the years 46 and 120 -- years of early Christianity. He was a Greek while Greece was part of the Roman Empire. He was a historian, biographer and essayist, and he admired the works of Plato. Plutarch wrote the most ambitious biographic project of ancient times, titled Lives, a series of biographies that was well received throughout the Roman Empire, giving Plutarch great esteem during his lifetime.

Like other successful men of letters in ancient times, Plutarch had an advantage of privilege, having been born into a prominent family and receiving the education available to the sons of the well-to-do. He furthered his education by travels. He was amiable, highly social and benefited from good conversation. He has been described as practical, as having been a good son who became a good husband, father, and friend and with a taste for "the common life."

As he explained in his first paragraph on Alexander the Great, he was exploring the influence of character on the destinies of famous men. His biographies became popular against during England's Elizabethan era, and he was to be read for lessons by George Washington.

Plutarch describes Alexander as having a violent temper and a rash and impulsive nature. This part of his personality he suggested gave him the same "weakness for alcohol" possessed by some of today's boys in college. Plutarch describes Alexander as having been infatuated by Roxanne when they first met, and he complimented Alexander for not himself on her.

Perhaps with Nero in mind he wrote: "No beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage." He is also quoted as follows:

Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself.

Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.

Rest is the sweet sauce of labor.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

Plutarch believed truth in religion was the product of the Greek and Roman traditions and religions outside of these traditions were superstitions, that they were the product of people not using their intelligence in thinking about the gods. He saw as superstitious those who attributed to the gods a power that overrode their own will and responsibility, and he saw as superstitious those who believed in the traditional Greek gods opposed by Plato: gods who treated people capriciously. The superstitious person, Plutarch wrote, believed in gods because he was afraid not to.

Plutarch's belief in tradition included a tolerance for slavery and an acceptance of monarchy as the best form of government. Philosophically, he sided with the Stoics, but foreshadowing developments within Christianity he forgave human frailty more than did the Stoics. And as would many Christians, he described Epicureanism as pernicious.

Plutarch never mentioned Christianity in his works. Christians remained a little noticed sect. But in some respects, the everyday values of Christians differed little from those expressed by Plutarch. Letters appearing in the New Testament written by Peter and Paul giving advice to husband and wives resemble what can be found in the writings of Plutarch. There is also suspicion among a few that the New Testament's Luke involved some plagiarism from Plutarch. A comparison between the two is described at gottnotes.com.

Cynics versus Lucian

Cynics were numerous in the Roman empire during the first and second centuries. One of them was Peregrinus, who lived between the years 95 and 165. He was an excommunicated Christian from a wealthy family who had studied under a cynic philosopher of repute, Agathobulus, in Alexandria. The only detailed account of the life of Peregrinus by Lucian in his satire, The Death of Peregrinus. And Lucian wrote a hostile account of Cynics in general in his book The Runaways.

Lucian was a Greek who settled in Athens -- which had been absorbed into the Roman Empire. Of the available range of philosophical options, he chose to admire the works Epicurus.

Lucian fascinates people into the 21st century. In his A True Story, he parodies Homer's the Odyssey and other fantasies known to Romans. Wikipedia describes Lucian as anticipating "modern" fictional themes like voyages to the moon and Venus, extraterrestrial life and wars between planets centuries. Also, he gave advice concerning food intake and moderation. Lucian has had 80 works of prose attributed to him, about 10 of which are said to be spurious. He is described as writing with a "mordant and malicious wit."

Lucian gave advice on serious faults in writing history. He wrote, "It is the fashion to neglect the examination of facts." Those of their own side, he wrote, "they exalt to the skies [while] the other side they disparage intemperately." Writing praise, he complained, one does "to commend and gratify his living theme some way or other; [and] if misrepresentation will serve his purpose, he has no objection to that... History, on the other hand, abhors the intrusion of any least scruple of falsehood." Lucian believed in writing history as Thucydides had: using prose. Describing contemporary historians, Lucian wrote,

Another thing these gentlemen seem not to know is that poetry and history offer different wares, and have their separate rules. Poetry enjoys unrestricted freedom; it has but one law -- the poet's fancy.

In his The Death of Peregrinus, Lucian described his subject as submitting to various humiliations, including public floggings, in order to enhance his contempt for the world. Peregrinus, he wrote, arrived in Rome and began criticizing everything and everybody. Lucian continued: Soon, Rome's prefect told Peregrinus to leave the city, and Peregrinus went to Greece, where he called on Greeks to rebel against Rome. Peregrinus lived in a hut, and claimed that for the sake of honesty and justice one should avoid sin, that avoiding sin should be made easier by remembering that eventually everything is revealed.

According to Lucian, Peregrinus decided to make a show of his inner strength and defiance by announcing to a crowd outside the Olympic games in Greece that at the next games he would burn himself to death. With the approach of the games, the prospect of Peregrinus killing himself added to the excitement. In a solemn procession followed by a large crowd, the 65 year-old Peregrinus marched to his chosen execution site. Stripped to his dirty undershirt, Peregrinus cried out "Be gracious to me, gods of my father and my mother." Then he jumped into the flames.

Lucian wrote that Peregrinus' followers were deeply moved. Some claimed that they saw a vulture fly from his flames to Olympus. Some of his followers claimed that they saw Peregrinus after death, dressed in white, walking happily with a crown of ivy on his head.

Peregrinus became a new Cynic saint around which a cult developed. Some others responded to Peregrinus' death with disgust, saying he was a lunatic driven by hunger for publicity and that he deserved to die.

It was Lucian's opinion that if someone had to die he should do it quietly and with dignity. In The Runaways, Lucian described Cynics as going from house to house begging for food and pretending to be philosophers. If questioned on any philosophical point, he wrote, they might respond with verbal abuse. A character in The Runaways asks what would become of the world if all workingmen left their jobs to live off others as the Cynics do.

Marcus Aurelius, Philosopher-Emperor

Marcus Aurelius was emperor from 161 until his death in 180. As a Stoic, Aurelius believed in the brotherhood of man and he exercised power with a strong sense of duty and tried to avoid letting himself be ruled by passion. Here was a man who would not be corrupted by power. He realized that he was not the most clever of men, but he believed that he was guided by God's "divine reason." Here was a philosopher-king of whom Plato and Aristotle might have approved, and Confucius too.

Doing right for Aurelius included defending against Parthia's military intrusions into the empire: into Armenia and across the Euphrates River into Syria, where Parthian troops had not been seen for two centuries. Aurelius fought the Parthians from 162 to 166, his troops retaking Armenia and marching into Mesopotamia to Ctesiphon. In the course of this war, the Romans came in contact with an epidemic -- perhaps smallpox. Racked by illness, the Roman army was obliged to retreat. Returning soldiers spread the disease, and the epidemic became known as the Great Pestilence. It lasted fifteen years, killing as many 25 percent in some population centers, reducing the empire's manpower while Germanic peoples on the empire's borders were growing in number.

German tribes, attracted by the pleasant climate of the Mediterranean region and by the empire's higher standard of living, pushed across the empire's border, into the Danube region and into Italy. Aurelius saw it as his duty to control the empire's borders, and he dashed about with his armies from one area to another and successfully contained the invasions. This warring was not paid for by plundering or taxing a wealthy and defeated people; it was paid for by taxing Roman citizens. And Aurelius made his contribution by auctioning off the crown jewels.

During his years of campaigning against the German invasions, Aurelius wrote Meditations, attempts at wisdom that expressed his borrowed Stoicism.

... 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.

... Let it make no difference to thee whether thou art cold or warm, if thou art doing thy duty.

... the soul does violence to itself when it turns away from any man, or even moves towards him with the intention of injuring ... when it is overpowered by pleasure or by pain ... when it plays a part, and does or says anything insincerely and untruly ... when it allows any act of its own and any movement to be without an aim.

... every man's intelligence is a god, and is an efflux of the deity.

...What a soul one has who dies not from mere obstinacy, as with the Christians, but considerately and with dignity and in a way to persuade another, without tragic show.

Despite all the challenges that Aurelius faced, he continued to want to improve the world, but in his later years he saw that the power to make the world right had to be collective. In his later years he blamed people in general for failing to reform themselves, and he become pessimistic, believing that humanity would repeat the sordid follies of the past.

Aurelius failed to see own misjudgments, lost to him in his devotion to Stoicism and to Rome's gods. Aurelius believed in that which had made him emperor. He made his sixteen year-old son Commodus his heir. With Commodus, according to the historian Sir Edward Gibbon, Rome's string of "Five Good Emperors" come to an end. Aurelius, with his sense of duty, was sending Rome on its path toward ruin.

Galen the Physician and Philosopher

Aelius Galen was eight years younger than Marcus Aurelius and of a different mindset. He was interested in philosophy and as a youth was exposed to both the Stoics and Epicureans, but it was the empiricism of the Epicureans he gravitated toward. Meditations by Aurelius were not original and of little influence. Galen, on the other hand, has been described as "the most accomplished medical researcher of the Roman period." And his theories, writes Wikipedia, "dominated and influenced Western medical science for well over a millennium."

Galen's father died when he was 19, leaving him independently wealthy. He then followed advice by the father of medicine, Hippocrates, written more than five centuries before: he travelled and studied widely. And his study included the various schools of thought taught at a famous medical school in Alexandria.

Galen wrote a small work called "That the Best Physician is also a Philosopher", and he saw himself as being both, which meant grounding medical practice in theoretically sound knowledge or "philosophy" as it was called in his time. Galen was interested in the philosophical disputes among those devoted to medicine, rival positions on the value and meaning generalizations versus the specific, and diagnoses involving clues suggested versus finding a specific cause.

Galen understood anatomy based getting his hands dirty doing monkey dissections -- human disections being illegal in his time. Galen promoted Hippocratic teaching including vein cutting, unknown in Rome and sharply criticized. His understanding anatomy gave him a greater talent, which he communicated at public demonstrations, debates, and disputes with medical rivals. It made him famous, and he became physician to the emperor's family -- to the son of Emperor Aurelius: Commodus.

Galen was not reluctant to show his contempt for the learning and ethics of his contemporaries in Rome. He criticised doctors for their ostentatious dress and belief that medicine could be learned quickly.

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Plotinus, Rome's Famous Theologian

Stoicism influenced Christianity, and so too did the Platonism of Plotinus (PLOH-tinus). He belonged to the third century -- eight centuries since Rome's independence from the Etruscans. He was born in Egypt and lived between the years 204 and 270, or thereabouts. He studied philosophy at Alexandria. He considered himself a Platonist and wrote a theology that would inspire people in modern times to consider him a major philosopher during ancient times and to label him a "neo-Platonist." His views had a wide following during his century and later and passed into Christianity. Had Christianity remained another Jewish sect rather than having spread to gentiles, neo-Platonism might have become the dominant faith in the western world -- without any one church in authority worshipping a jealous god.

Like Christianity, neo-Platonism had appeal as an alternative to the Roman Empire's chaos and decadence. Whereas Plato wanted to put people into a perfect society, Plotinus called on people to withdraw from politics and from the world of the senses and to seek instead an awareness of and solidarity with God. It was withdrawal to the extent that it had no sense of belonging to a state that grown in disrepute. Plotinus' religion was personal -- without a sense of belonging to a community as did Christianity.

In the year 245, at age forty, Plotinus settled in Rome, and there he founded a school. He conducted friendly and informal discussions on commentaries that had been written on Plato and Aristotle, defending Plato against Aristotle's criticisms while making some concessions to Aristotle. Plotinus encouraged the discussions to continue until his students believed that the philosophical problems they had raised were solved.

Plotinus pondered what he saw as "the ordered universe," and he concluded that its "material mass" had existed forever and would "forever endure." He saw God as soul, as a supreme spirit, and he saw soul as primary. He believed that all nature had been created by this supreme spirit. He saw soul not as intellect, as did Aristotle, nor as thought, pointing out that thought requires a subject, which would make soul a duality rather than primary. Nor, claimed Plotinus, is soul a plurality of things -- as it is believed by those who see God as everything. Soul, believed Plotinus, is the source of plurality.

Like the Manichaeans, Gnostics, Zoroastrians and others, Plotinus found evil in materiality. This was a time of widespread disgust with the human body, and Plotinus saw the body as a prison or tomb in which one's soul was trapped. He did not believe that salvation from this prison would come from outside oneself, as a struggle between Good and Evil or God and Satan. He believed in a salvation, or grace, by finding one's own pure spirit, one's own godly soul. And this was done, he reasoned, by avoiding vain preoccupations with one's body and by avoiding exaggerated worries.

Like the Stoics, he believed that suffering had no effect on one who had found grace. He believed in an inner freedom through indifference toward external circumstances.

Plotinus disagreed with the Gnostics that an evil power had created materiality. And, contrary to the Gnostics, he defended the notion of God creating all (including evil) by claiming that evil had a rightful place in the universe. Most or all forms of evil, he wrote, "serve the universe." Vice, he wrote, "stirs us to thoughtful living, not allowing us to drowse in security."

Like Plato, Plotinus believed that to find truth one had to look beyond materiality (the world known through the senses). Like Plato, he believed that through reason and knowledge one could work his way to a union with and an awareness of God. He believed in an ecstatic union with God that could not be adequately expressed with words.

Plotinus described his own salvation in a way that was similar to ideas in India centuries before: contact with God through repose, meditation and renunciation. He believed in fleeing alone "toward the Solitary One."

Plotinus combined his search for salvation with acts of virtue. He wrote that "Without virtue, God is only a word." He believed that a part of the self, as soul, resides in the heavens, and, ascending to that level, one rests with the Divine and experiences a love of gentle Goodness. The Good, he believed, was always gentle. He claimed that the experience of being at this higher level could remain with one as one pursued his earthly living, looking after himself and others.

It was at this higher level, according to Plotinus, that one found love, which he saw as a part of any pursuit of virtue and unity with God. On love he was close to Plato, but different from Plato in that Plato believed that love is an achievement that begins with experience at the lowly, material level. Plotinus denied that love had any such lowly origins. Plotinus believed that love was an ingredient that added to the objects or person loved, making that object something that it was not before, love being superior to the object it is placed upon. Beyond this, Plotinus saw the question what is love as similar to questions why is there Soul and why does the Creator create: unanswerable.

Plotinus saw himself as not having answers to everything. He confessed to not having an answer as to why God created the cosmos. Some questions, he believed, could not be answered.