A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  I come now to the second contradiction, that the Stoic, while he preached benevolence, held, in theory, that no man can do either good or harm to another, since the virtuous will alone is good, and the virtuous will is independent of outside causes. This’contradiction is more patent than the other, and more peculiar to the Stoics (including certain Christian moralists). The explanation of their not noticing it is that, like many other people, they had two systems of ethics, a superfine one for themselves, and an inferior one for “the lesser breeds without the law.” When the Stoic philosopher is thinking of himself, he holds that happiness and all other worldly so-called goods are worthless; he even says that to desire happiness is contrary to nature, meaning that it involves lack of resignation to the will of God. But as a practical man administering the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius knows perfectly well that this sort of thing won’t do. It is his duty to see that the grain-ships from Africa duly reach Rome, that measures are taken to relieve the sufferings caused by pestilence, and that barbarian enemies are not allowed to cross the frontier. That is to say, in dealing with those of his subjects whom he does not regard as Stoic philosophers, actual or potential, he accepts ordinary mundane standards of what is good or bad. It is by applying these standards that he arrives at his duty as an administrator. What is odd is that this duty, itself, is in the higher sphere of what the Stoic, sage should do, although it is deduced from an ethic which the Stoic sage regards as fundamentally mistaken.

  The only reply that I can imagine to this difficulty is one which is perhaps logically unassailable, but is not very plausible. It would, I think, be given by Kant, whose ethical system is very similar to that of the Stoics. True, he might say, there is nothing good but the good will, but the will is good when it is directed to certain ends, that, in themselves, are indifferent. It does not matter whether Mr. A is happy or unhappy, but I, if I am virtuous, shall act in a way which I believe will make him happy, because that is what the moral law enjoins. I cannot make Mr. A virtuous, because his virtue depends only upon himself; but I can do something towards making him happy, or rich, or learned, or healthy» The Stoic ethic may therefore be stated as follows: Certain things are vulgarly considered goods, but this is a mistake; what is good is a will directed towards securing these false goods for other people. This doctrine involves no logical contradiction, but it loses all plausibility if we genuinely believe that what are commonly considered goods are worthless, for in that case the virtuous will might just as well be directed to quite other ends.

  There is, in fact, an element of sour grapes in Stoicism. We can’t be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesn’t matter being unhappy. This doctrine is heroic, and, in a bad world, useful; but it is neither quite true nor, in a fundamental sense, quite sincere.

  Although the main importance of the Stoics was ethical, there were two respects in which their teaching bore fruit in other fields. One of these is theory of knowledge; the other is the doctrine of natural law and natural rights.

  In theory of knowledge, in spite of Plato, they accepted perception; the deceptiveness of the senses, they held, was really false judgement, and could be avoided by a little care. A Stoic philosopher, Sphaerus, an immediate disciple of Zeno, was once invited to dinner by King Ptolemy, who, having heard of this doctrine, offered him a pomegranate made of wax. The philosopher proceeded to try to eat it, whereupon the king laughed at him. He replied that he had felt no certainty of its being a real pomegranate, but had thought it unlikely that anything inedible would be supplied at the royal table.* In this answer he appealed to a Stoic distinction, between those things which can be known with certainty on the basis of perception, and those which, on this basis, are only probable. On the whole, this doctrine was sane and scientific.

  Another doctrine of theirs in theory of knowledge was more influential, though more questionable. This was their belief in innate ideas and principles. Greek logic was wholly deductive, and this raised the question of first premisses. First premisses had to be, at least in part, general, and no method existed of proving them. The Stoics held that there are certain principles which are luminously obvious, and are admitted by all men; these could be made, as in Euclid’s Elements, the basis of deduction. Innate ideas, similarly, could be used as the starting-point of definitions. This point of view was accepted throughout the Middle Ages, and even by Descartes.

  The doctrine of natural right, as it appears in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, is a revival of a Stoic doctrine, though with important modifications. It was the Stoics who distinguished jus naturale from jus gentium. Natural law was derived from first principles of the kind held to underlie all general knowledge. By nature, the Stoics held, all human beings are equal. Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, favours “a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed.” This was an ideal which could not be consistently realized in the Roman Empire, but it influenced legislation, particularly in improving the status of women and slaves. Christianity took over this part of Stoic teaching along with much of the rest. And when at last, in the seventeenth century, the opportunity came to combat despotism effectually, the Stoic doctrines of natural law and natural equality, in their Christian dress, acquired a practical force which, in antiquity, not even an emperor could give to them.

  * This is not historically true.

  † Perhaps this is no longer true, as the sons of those who held this belief have been educated at Eton.

  * Quoted in Bevan, House of Seleucus, Vol. I, p. 298n;.

  † The king, not the astronomer.

  ‡ Annals, Book VI, Ch. 42.

  * See Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. VII, pp. 194-5.

  * “The Social Question in the Third Century,” by W. W. Tarn, in The Hellenistic Age by various authors. Cambridge, 1923. This essay is exceedingly interesting, and contains many facts not elsewhere readily accessible.

  † Ib.

  * Bevan, House of Seleucus, Vol. II, pp. 45-6.

  * Five Stages of Greek Religion, pp. 177-8.

  * C. F. Angus in Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. VII, p. 231. The above quotation from Menander is taken from the same chapter.

  * Benn, Vol. II, pp. 4, 5; Murray, Five Stages, pp. 113-14.

  † Murray, Five Stages, p. 117.

  ‡ Murray, Five Stages, p. 119.

  * The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge, 1923), p. 84 ff.

  * The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge, 1923), p. 86.

  * Quoted by Edwyn Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, p. 126.

  * North’s Plutarch, Lives, Marcus Cato.

  † Ib.

  * The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, by Cyril Bailey, Oxford 1928, p. 221. Mr. Bailey has made a specialty of Epicurus, and his book is invaluable to the student.

  * The Stoics were very unjust to Epicurus. Epictetus, for example, addressing him, says: “This is the life of which you pronounce yourself worthy: eating, drinking, copulation, evacuation and snoring.” Bk. II, Chap. XX, Discourses of Epictetus.

  † Gilbert Murray, Five Stages, p. 130.

  * About twenty dollars.

  * The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, by W. J. Oates, p. 47. Where possible, I have availed myself of Mr. Oates’s translations.

  * (For Epicurus) “Absence of pain is in itself pleasure, indeed in his ultimate analysis the truest pleasure.” Bailey, op. cit., p. 249.

  * On the subject of friendship and Epicurus’s amiable inconsistency, see Bailey, op. cit., pp. 517-20.

  * An analogous view is urged in our day by Eddington, in his interpretation of the principle of indeterminacy.

  * I quote the translation of Mr. R. C. Trevelyan, Bk. I, 60-79.

  * Lucretius instances the sacrifice of Iphigenia as an example of the harm wrought by religion. Bk. I, 85-100.

  * Bk. III, 1068-76. I again quote Mr.
R. C. Trevelyan’s translation.

  * Gilbert Murray, The Stoic Philosophy (1915), p. 25.

  * For the sources of what follows, see Bevan, Later Greek Religion, p. I ff.

  * See Barth, Die Stoa, 4th edition, Stuttgart, 1922.

  † Ib.

  * Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, p. 88.

  † He estimated that by sailing westward from Cadiz, India could be reached after 70,000 stades. “This remark was the ultimate foundation of Columbus’s confidence.” Tarn, Hellenistic Civilization, p. 249.

  ‡ The above account of Posidonius is mainly based on Chapter III of Edwyn Bevan’s Stoics and Sceptics.

  * Rostovtseff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. p. 179.

  * Quoted from Oates, op. cit., pp. 225-26.

  * Diogenes Laertius, Vol. VII, p. 177.

  † lb., p. 251.

  ‡ lb., p. 280.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  The Roman Empire in Relation to Culture

  THE Roman Empire affected the history of culture in various more or less separate ways.

  First: there is the direct effect of Rome on Hellenistic thought. This is not very important or profound.

  Second: the effect of Greece and the East on the western half of the empire. This was profound and lasting, since it included the Christian religion.

  Third: the importance of the long Roman peace in diffusing culture and in accustoming men to the idea of a single civilization associated with a single government.

  Fourth: the transmission of Hellenistic civilization to the Mohammedans, and thence ultimately to western Europe.

  Before considering these influences of Rome, a very brief synopsis of the political history will be useful.

  Alexander’s conquests had left the western Mediterranean untouched; it was dominated, at the beginning of the third century B.C., by two powerful City States, Carthage and Syracuse. In the first and second Punic Wars (264-241 and 218-201), Rome conquered Syracuse and reduced Carthage to insignificance. During the second century, Rome conquered the Macedonian monarchies—Egypt, it is true, lingered on as a vassal state until the death of Cleopatra (30 B.C.). Spain was conquered as an incident in the war with Hannibal; France was conquered by Caesar in the middle of the first century B.C., and England was conquered about a hundred years later. The frontiers of the Empire, in its great days, were the Rhine and Danube in Europe, the Euphrates in Asia, and the desert in North Africa.

  Roman imperialism was, perhaps, at its best in North Africa (important in Christian history as the home of Saint Cyprian and Saint Augustine), where large areas, uncultivated before and after Roman times, were rendered fertile and supported populous cities. The Roman Empire was on the whole stable and peaceful for over two hundred years, from the accession of Augustus (30 B.C.) until the disasters of the third century.

  Meanwhile the constitution of the Roman State had undergone important developments. Originally, Rome was a small City State, not very unlike those of Greece, especially such as, like Sparta, did not depend upon foreign commerce. Kings, like those of Homeric Greece, had been succeeded by an aristocratic republic. Gradually, while the aristocratic element, embodied in the Senate, remained powerful, democratic elements were added; the resulting compromise was regarded by Panaetius the Stoic (whose views are reproduced by Polybius and Cicero) as an ideal combination of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements. But conquest upset the precarious balance; it brought immense new wealth to the senatorial class, and, in a slightly lesser degree, to the “knights,” as the upper middle class were called. Italian agriculture, which had been in the hands of small farmers growing grain by their own labour and that of their families, came to be a matter of huge estates belonging to the Roman aristocracy, where vines and olives were cultivated by slave labour. The result was the virtual omnipotence of the Senate, which was used shamelessly for the enrichment of individuals, without regard for the interests of the State or the welfare of its subjects.

  A democratic movement, inaugurated by the Gracchi in the latter half of the second century B.C., led to a series of civil wars, and finally—as so often in Greece—to the establishment of a “tyranny.” It is curious to see the repetition, on such a vast scale, of developments which, in Greece, had been confined to minute areas. Augustus, the heir and adopted son of Julius Caesar, who reigned from 30 B.C. to A.D. 14, put an end to civil strife, and (with few exceptions) to external wars of conquest. For the first time since the beginnings of Greek civilization, the ancient world enjoyed peace and security.

  Two things had ruined the Greek political system: first, the claim of each city to absolute sovereignty; second, the bitter and bloody strife between rich and poor within most cities. After the conquest of Carthage and the Hellenistic kingdoms, the first of these causes no longer afflicted the world, since no effective resistance to Rome was possible. But the second cause remained. In the civil wars, one general would proclaim himself the champion of the Senate, the other of the people. Victory went to the one who offered the highest rewards to the soldiers. The soldiers wanted not only pay and plunder, but grants of land; therefore each civil war ended in the formally legal expulsion of many existing landholders, who were nominally tenants of the State, to make room for the legionaries of the victor. The expenses of the war, while in progress, were defrayed by executing rich men and confiscating their property. This system, disastrous as it was, could not easily be ended; at last, to every one’s surprise, Augustus was so completely victorious that no competitor remained to challenge his claim to power.

  To the Roman world, the discovery that the period of civil war was ended came as a surprise, which was a cause of rejoicing to all except a small senatorial party. To every one else, it was a profound relief when Rome, under Augustus, at last achieved the stability and order which Greeks and Macedonians had sought in vain, and which Rome, before Augustus, had also failed to produce. In Greece, according to Rostovtseff, republican Rome had “introduced nothing new, except pauperization, bankruptcy, and a stoppage of all independent political activity.”A

  The reign of Augustus was a period of happiness for the Roman Empire. The administration of the provinces was at last organized with some regard to the welfare of the population, and not on a purely predatory system. Augustus was not only officially deified after his death, but was spontaneously regarded as a god in various provincial cities. Poets praised him, the commercial classes found the universal peace convenient, and even the Senate, which he treated with all the outward forms of respect, lost no opportunity of heaping honours and offices on his head.

  But although the world was happy, some savour had gone out of life, since safety had been preferred to adventure. In early times, every free Greek had had the opportunity of adventure; Philip and Alexander put an end to this state of affairs, and in the Hellenistic world only Macedonian dynasts enjoyed anarchic freedom. The Greek world lost its youth, and became either cynical or religious. The hope of embodying ideals in earthly institutions faded, and with it the best men lost their zest. Heaven, for Socrates, was a place where he could go on arguing; for philosophers after Alexander, it was something more different from their existence here below.

  In Rome, a similar development came later, and in a less painful form. Rome was not conquered, as Greece was, but had, on the contrary, the stimulus of successful imperialism. Throughout the period of the civil wars, it was Romans who were responsible for the disorders. The Greeks had not secured peace and order by submitting to the Macedonians, whereas both Greeks and Romans secured both by submitting to Augustus. Augustus was a Roman, to whom most Romans submitted willingly, not only on account of his superior power; moreover he took pains to disguise the military origin of his government, and to base it upon decrees of the Senate. The adulation expressed by the Senate was, no doubt, largely insincere, but outside the senatorial class no one felt humiliated.

  The mood of the Romans was like that of a jeune homme rangé in nineteenth-century France, w
ho, after a life of amatory adventure, settles down to a marriage of reason. This mood, though contented, is not creative. The great poets of the Augustan age had been formed in more troubled times; Horace fled at Philippi, and both he and Vergil lost their farms in confiscations for the benefit of victorious soldiers. Augustus, for the sake of stability, set to work, somewhat insincerely, to restore ancient piety, and was therefore necessarily rather hostile to free inquiry. The Roman world began to become stereotyped, and the process continued under later emperors.

  The immediate successors of Augustus indulged in appalling cruelties towards Senators and towards possible competitors for the purple. To some extent, the misgovernment of this period extended to the provinces; but in the main the administrative machine created by Augustus continued to function fairly well.

  A better period began with the accession of Trajan in A.D. 98, and continued until the death of Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 180. During this time, the government of the Empire was as good as any despotic government can be. The third century, on the contrary, was one of appalling disaster. The army realized its power, made and unmade emperors in return for cash and the promise of a life without warfare, and ceased, in consequence, to be an effective fighting force. The barbarians, from north and east, invaded and plundered Roman territory. The army, preoccupied with private gain and civil discord, was incompetent in defence. The whole fiscal system broke down, since there was an immense diminution of resources and, at the same time, a vast increase of expenditure in unsuccessful war and in bribery of the army. Pestilence, in addition to war, greatly diminished the population. It seemed as if the Empire was about to fall.