LITMIR.BIZ

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      If we reflect that the rise of the humanitarian spirit in Christian Europe, or rather in the better section of it, is of very recent origin, it might appear unreasonable to look for any distinct exhibition of so exalted a feeling in the younger age of the world. Yet, to the shame of more advanced civilisations, we find manifestations of it in the writings of a few of the more refined minds of Greece and Italy; and Plutarch and Seneca—the former particularly—occupy a distinguished place amongst the first preachers of that sacred truth.[23]

      Publius Ovidius Naso, the Latin versifier of the Pythagorean philosophy, was born B.C. 43. He belonged to the equestrian order, a position in the social scale which corresponds with the “higher middle class” of modern days. Like so many other names eminent in literature, he was in the first instance educated for the law, for which, also like many other literary celebrities, he soon showed his genius to be unfitted and uncongenial. He studied at the great University of that age—Athens—where he acquired a knowledge of the Greek language, and probably of its rich literature. The most memorable event in his life—which, in accordance with the fashion of his contemporaries of the same rank, was for the most part devoted to “gallantry” and the accustomed amatory licence—is his mysterious banishment from Rome to the inhospitable and savage shores of the Euxine, where he passed the last seven years of his existence, dying there in the sixtieth year of his age. The cause of his sudden exile from the Court of Augustus, where he had been in high favour, is one of those secrets of history which have exercised the ingenuity of his successive biographers. According to the terms of the imperial edict, the freedom of the poet’s Ars Amatoria was the offence. That this was a mere pretext is plain, as well from the long interval of time which had passed since the publication of the poem as from the character of the fashionable society of the capital. Ovid himself attributes his misfortune to the fact of his having become the involuntary witness of some secret of the palace, the nature of which is not divulged.

      His most important poems are (1) The Metamorphoses, in fifteen books, so called from its being a collection of the numerous transformations of the popular theology. It is, perhaps, the most charming of Latin poems that have come down to us. Particular passages have a special beauty. (2) The Fasti, in twelve books, of which only six are extant, is the Roman Calendar in verse. Its interest, apart from the poetic genius of the author, is great, as being the grand repertory of the Latin feasts and their popular origin. Besides these two principal poems he was the author of the famous Loves, in three books; the Letters of the Heroines, The Remedies of Love, and The Tristia, or Sad Thoughts. He also wrote a tragedy—Medea—which, unfortunately has not come down to us. All his poems are characterised by elegance and a remarkable smoothness and regularity of versification, and in much of his productions there is an unusual beauty and picturesqueness of poetic ideas.

      The following passage from the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses has been justly said by Dryden, his translator, to be the finest part of the whole poem. It is almost impossible to believe but that, in spite of his misspent life, he must have felt, in his better moments at least, something of the truth and beauty of the Pythagorean principles which he so exquisitely versifies. In the touching words which he puts into the mouth of the jealous Medea—the murderess of her children—he might have exclaimed in his own case—

      “Video meliora proboque

      Deteriora sequor.”[24]

      “He [Pythagoras], too, was the first to forbid animals to be served up at the table, and he was first to open his lips, indeed full of wisdom yet all unheeded, in the following words: ‘Forbear, O mortals! to pollute your bodies with such abominable food. There are the farinacea (fruges), there are the fruits which bear down the branches with their weight, and there are the grapes swelling on the vines; there are the sweet herbs; there are those that may be softened by the flame and become tender. Nor is the milky juice denied you; nor honey, redolent of the flower of thyme. The lavish Earth heaps up her riches and her gentle foods, and offers you dainties without blood and without slaughter. The lower animals satisfy their ravenous hunger with flesh. And yet not all of them; for the horse, the sheep, the cows and oxen subsist on grass; while those whose disposition is cruel and fierce, the tigers of Armenia and the raging lions, and the wolves and bears, revel in their bloody diet.

      “ ‘Alas! what a monstrous crime it is (scelus) that entrails should be entombed in entrails; that one ravening body should grow fat on others which it crams into it; that one living creature should live by the death of another living creature! Amid so great an abundance which the Earth—that best of mothers—produces does, indeed, nothing delight you but to gnaw with savage teeth the sad produce of the wounds you inflict and to imitate the habits of the Cyclops? Can you not appease the hunger of a voracious and ill-regulated stomach unless you first destroy another being? Yet that age of old, to which we have given the name of golden, was blest in the produce of the trees and in the herbs which the earth brings forth, and the human mouth was not polluted with blood.

      “ ‘Then the birds moved their wings secure in the air, and the hare, without fear, wandered in the open fields. Then the fish did not fall a victim to the hook and its own credulity. Every place was void of treachery; there was no dread of injury—all things were full of peace. In later ages some one—a mischievous innovator (non utilis auctor), whoever he was—set at naught and scorned this pure and simple food, and engulfed in his greedy paunch victuals made from a carcase. It was he that opened the road to wickedness. I can believe that the steel, since stained with blood, was first dipped in the gore of savage wild beasts; and that was lawful enough. We hold that the bodies of animals that seek our destruction are put to death without any breach of the sacred laws of morality. But although they might be put to death they were not to be eaten as well. From this time the abomination advanced rapidly. The swine is believed to have been the first victim destined to slaughter, because it grubbed up the seeds with its broad snout, and so cut short the hopes of the year. For gnawing and injuring the vine the goat was led to slaughter at the altars of the avenging Bacchus. Its own fault was the ruin of each of these victims.

      “ ‘But how have you deserved to die, ye sheep, you harmless breed that have come into existence for the service of men—who carry nectar in your full udders—who give your wool as soft coverings for us—who assist us more by your life than by your death? Why have the oxen deserved this—beings without guile and without deceit—innocent, mild, born for the endurance of labour? Ungrateful, indeed, is man, and unworthy of the bounteous gifts of the harvest who, after unyoking him from the plough, can slaughter the tiller of his fields—who can strike with the axe that neck worn bare with labour, through which he had so often turned up the hard ground, and which had afforded so many a harvest.

      “ ‘And it is not enough that such wickedness is committed by men. They have involved the gods themselves in this abomination, and they believe that a Deity in the heavens can rejoice in the slaughter of the laborious and useful ox. The spotless victim, excelling in the beauty of its form (for its very beauty is the cause of its destruction), decked out with garlands and with gold is placed before their altars, and, ignorant of the purport of the proceedings, it hears the prayers of the priest. It sees the fruits which it cultivated placed on its head between its horns, and, struck down, with its life-blood it dyes the sacrificial knife which it had perhaps already seen in the clear water. Immediately they inspect the nerves and fibres torn from the yet living being, and scrutinise the will of the gods in them.

      “ ‘From whence such a hunger in man after unnatural and unlawful food? Do you dare, O mortal race, to continue to feed on flesh? Do it not, I beseech you, and give heed to my admonitions. And when you present to your palates the limbs of slaughtered oxen, know and feel that you are feeding on the tillers of the ground.’ ”—Metam. xv., 73–142.

V.

       SENECA. DIED 65 A.D.

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      LUCIUS ANNÆUS SENECA, the greatest name in the stoic school of philosophy, and the first of Latin moralists, was born at Corduba (Cordova) almost contemporaneously with the beginning

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