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The Ethics of Diet. Howard Williams
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isbn 4057664648310
Автор произведения Howard Williams
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Elsewhere he indignantly demands:—
“What is more vile or disgraceful than a learning which catches at popular applause (clamores)?”—(Ep. lii.)
Anticipating the ultimate triumph of Truth, he well says:—
“No virtue is really lost—that it has to remain hidden for a time is no loss to itself. A day will come which will publish the truth at present neglected and oppressed by the malignity (malignitas) of its age. He who thinks the world to be of his own age only, is born for the few. Many thousands of years, many millions of people, will supervene. Look forward to that time. Though the envy of your own day shall have condemned you to obscurity, there will come those who will judge you without fear or favour. If there is any reward for virtue from fame, that is imperishable. The talk of posterity, indeed, will be nothing to us. Yet it will revere us, even though we are insensible to its praise; and it will frequently consult us. … What now deceives has not the elements of duration. Falsehood is thinly disguised; it is transparent, if only you look close enough.”—(Ep. lxix.)
In his Questions on Nature, in which he often shows himself to have been much in advance of his contemporaries, and, indeed, of the whole mediæval ages, in scientific acumen, he takes occasion to reprobate the common practice of glorifying the lives and deeds of worthless princes and others, and exclaims in the modern spirit:—
“How much better to try to extinguish the evils of our own age than to glorify the bad deeds of others to posterity! How much better to celebrate the works of Nature [deorum] than the piracies of a Philip or Alexander and of the rest who, become illustrious by the calamities of nations, have been no less the pests of mankind than an inundation which devastates a whole country, or a conflagration in which a large proportion of living creatures is consumed.”—(Quæst. Nat. iii.)
It will be sufficiently apparent, from what we have presented to our readers, that Seneca, though nominally of the Stoic school, belonged in reality to no special sect or party. Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri. Bound to the words of no one master, he sought for truth everywhere. The authority whom he most frequently quotes with approval is Epicurus, the arch-enemy of Stoicism. Wiser and more candid than the great mass of sectaries, he scorns the tactics of partisanship. He justly recognises the fact that the “luxurious egoists have not derived their impulse or sanction from Epicurus; but, abandoned to their vices, they disguise their selfishness in the name of his philosophy.” He professes his own conviction to be “against the common prejudice of the popular writers of my own school, that the teaching of Epicurus was just and holy, and, on a close examination, essentially grave and sober. … I affirm this, that he is ill-understood, defamed, and depreciated.” (De Vitâ Beatâ, xii, xiii.)
It will also be sufficiently clear that the ethics of Seneca consist of no mere trials of skill in logomachy; in finely-drawn distinctions between words and names, as do so large a proportion both of modern and ancient dialectics. If so daring a heresy may possibly be forgiven us, we would venture to suggest that the authorities of our schools and universities might, with no inconsiderable advantage, substitute judicious excerpts from the Morals of Seneca for the Ethics of Aristotle; or, as Latin literature is now in question, even for the De Officiis of Cicero. This, however, is perhaps to indulge Utopian speculation too greatly. The mediæval spirit of scholasticism is not yet sufficiently out of favour at the ancient schools of Aquinas and Scotus.
VI.
PLUTARCH. 40–120 A.D. (?)
THE years of the birth and death of the first of biographers and the most amiable of moralists are unknown. We learn from himself that he was studying philosophy at Athens under Ammonius, the Peripatetic, at the time when Nero was making his ridiculous progress through Greece. This was in 66 A.D., and the date of his birth may therefore be approximately placed somewhere about the year 40. He was thus a younger contemporary of Seneca. Chæronea, in Bœotia, claims the honour of giving him birth.
He lived several years at Rome and in other parts of Italy, where, according to the fashion of the age and the custom of the philosophic rhetoricians (of whom, probably, he was one of the very few whose prælections were of any real value), he gave public lectures, attended by the most eminent literary as well as social personages of the time, among whom were Tacitus, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, and perhaps Juvenal. These lectures may have formed the basis, if not the entire matter, of the miscellaneous essays which he afterwards published. When in Italy he neglected altogether the Latin language and literature, and the reason he gives proves the estimation in which he was held: “I had so many public commissions, and so many people came to me to receive instruction in philosophy … it was, therefore, not till a late period in life that I began to read the Latin writers.” In fact, the very general indifference, or at least silence, of the Greek masters in regard to Latin literature is not a little remarkable.
It is asserted, on doubtful authority (Suidas), that he was preceptor of Trajan, in the beginning of whose reign he held the high post of Procurator of Greece; and he also filled the honourable office of Archon, or Chief Magistrate of his native city, as well as of priest of the Delphic Apollo. He passed the later and larger portion of his life in quiet retirement at Chæronea. The reason he assigns for clinging to that dull and decaying provincial town, although residence there was not a little inconvenient for him, is creditable to his citizen-feeling, since he believed that by quitting it he, as a person of influence, might contribute to its ruin. In all the relations of social life Plutarch appears to have been exemplary, and he was evidently held in high esteem by his fellow-citizens. As husband and father he was particularly admirable. The death of a young daughter, one of a numerous progeny, was the occasion of one of his most affecting productions—the Consolation—addressed to his wife Timoxena. He himself died at an advanced age, in the reign of Hadrian.
Plutarch’s writings are sufficiently numerous. The Parallel Lives, forty-six in number, in which he brings together a Greek and a Roman celebrity by way of comparison, is perhaps the book of Greek and Latin literature which has been the most widely read in all languages. “The reason of its popularity,” justly observes a writer in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary, “is that Plutarch has rightly conceived the business of a biographer—his biography is true portraiture. Other biography is often a dull, tedious enumeration of facts in the order of time, with perhaps a summing up of character at the end. The reflections of Plutarch are neither impertinent nor trifling; his sound good sense is always there; his honest purpose is transparent; his love of humanity warms the whole. His work is and will remain, in spite of all the fault that can be found with it by plodding collectors of facts and small critics, the book of those who can nobly think and dare and do.”
His miscellaneous writings—indiscriminately classed under the title Moralia, or Morals, but including historical, antiquarian, literary, political, and religious disquisitions—are about eighty in number. As might be expected of so miscellaneous a collection, these essays are of various merit, and some of them are, doubtless, the product of other minds than Plutarch’s. Next to the Essay on Flesh Eating[38] may be distinguished as amongst the most important or interesting, That the Lower Animals Reason,[39] On the Sagacity of the Lower Animals—highly meritorious treatises, far beyond the ethical or intellectual standard of the mass of “educated” people even of our day—Rules for the Preservation of Health, A Discourse on the Training of Children, Marriage Precepts, or Advice to the Newly Married, On Justice, On the Soul, Symposiacs—in