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them? Contempt for rulers? That was no new thing in philosophers. Many of them had despised kings, or affected to despise them, without any intention of rebelling against them. What though Epictetus suggested, in a hyperbolical or metaphorical way, a religious sacramentum for philosophers? This was quite different from that of the Christians as mentioned by Arrian. I could not help feeling that, for once, my old friend had “perceived” little and “believed” much.

      Perhaps my reply shewed traces of this feeling. At all events, Scaurus wrote back, asking whether I had observed in him “a habit of basing conclusions on slight grounds.” Then he continued “I told you that I knew a good deal about the Christians. I also know a great deal more about Epictetus than you suppose. When I was a young man, I attended the lectures of that most admirable of philosophers, Musonius Rufus. About the time when I left, Epictetus, then a slave, was brought to the classes by his master, Epaphroditus; and Rufus, whom I shall always regard with respect and affection, spoke to me about his new pupil in the highest terms. Afterwards he often told me how he tried to arm the poor boy with philosophy against what he would have to endure from such a master. Many a time have I thought that the young philosopher must have needed all his Stoic armour, going home from the lecture-room of Rufus to the palace of Nero’s freedman.

      “But I also remember seeing him long before that, when he came one morning as a mere child not twelve years old, along with Epaphroditus, to Nero’s Palace. I was then about fourteen or fifteen. After we had left the Palace—my father and I—we came upon him again on that same evening, staring at some Christians, smeared with pitch and burning away like so many flaring torches, to light the Imperial Gardens—one of Nero’s insane or bestial freaks! I have never been able to forget the sight, and I have often thought that he could never forget it. Somewhere about that time, one of the Christian ringleaders, Paulus by name, was put to death. As happens in such cases, his people began to collect every scrap of his writings that could be found. A little volume of them came into my hands some twenty years ago. But long before that date, all through the period when Epictetus was in Rufus’s classes, the Christian slaves in Rome had in their hands the letters of this Paulus or Paul. One of them, the longest, written to the Christians in Rome (a few years before Paul was brought to the City as a prisoner) goes back as far as sixty years ago. Some are still earlier. I saw the volume more than once in Cæsar’s Palace in the days of Vespasian. This Paul was one of the most practical of men, and his letters are steeped in practical experience. Epictetus, besides being a great devourer of literature in general, devoured in particular everything that bore on practical life. The odds are great that he would have come across the book somewhere among his slave or freedman friends.

      “But I do not trust to such mere antecedent probabilities. You must know that, ever since Epictetus set up as a philosopher, I have followed his career with interest. Recluse though I am, I have many friends and correspondents. These, from time to time, have furnished me with notes of his lectures. Well, when I came to read Paul’s letters, I was prepared to find in them certain general similarities to Stoic doctrine; for Paul was a man of Tarsus and might have picked up these things at the University there. But I found a great deal more. I found particularities, just of the sort that you find in your lectures. Paul’s actual experiences had been exactly those of a vagrant Æsculapius or Hercules. Your friend idealizes the wanderings of Hercules; Paul enacted them. Paul journeyed from city to city, from continent to continent, everywhere turning the world upside down—Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Ephesus, Colossæ, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Jerusalem again—last of all, Rome. Everywhere the slaves, the poor, the women, went after him. Everywhere he came into collision with the rulers of the earth. If he did not proclaim a war between them and his God, he at all events implied war.

      “Now this is just what Epictetus would have liked to do. Only he could not often get people to take him in the same serious way, because he had not the same serious business in hand. I verily believe he was not altogether displeased when the Prefect of the City banished him with other philosophers of note under Domitian. I know certain philosophers who actually made money by being thus banished. It was an advertisement for their lectures. Don’t imagine that your philosopher made, or wished to make, money. No. But he made influence—which he valued above money.

      “However, the Emperors and Prefects after Domitian were not such fools. They knew the difference between a real revolution and a revolution on paper. A mere theoretical exaltation of the mind above the body, a mere scholastic laudation of kingship over the minds of men as superior to kingship over their bodies—these things kings tolerate; for they mean nothing but words. But a revolution in the name of a person—a person, too, supposed by fanatics to be living and present in all their secret meetings, ‘wherever two or three are gathered together,’ for that is their phrase—this may mean a great deal. A person, regarded in this way, may take hold of men’s spirits. Missionaries pretending—or, still worse, believing—that they are speaking in the name of such a person, may lead crowds of silly folk into all sorts of sedition. They may refuse, for example, to adore the Emperor’s image and to offer sacrifice to the Gods of the State; or they might even attempt to subvert the foundations of society by withholding taxes, or by encouraging or inculcating some wholesale manumission of slaves. This sort of thing means war, and Paul, fifty years ago, was actually waging this war. Epictetus longs to be waging it now. As he cannot, he takes pleasure in urging his pupils to it, painting an imaginary battle array in which he sees imaginary soldiers waging, or destined to wage, imaginary conflicts with imaginary enemies.

      “Hence that picturesque contrast (in the lecture you transcribed for me) between the unmarried and the married Cynic—which, besides the similarity of thought, contains some curious similarities to the actual words of Paul. It ran thus, ‘The condition of the times being such as it is, opposing forces, as it were, being drawn up in line of battle’—that was his expression. Well, what followed from this non-existent, hypothetical, imminent conflict? The Philosopher, it seems, must be a soldier, ‘undistracted, wholly devoted to the ministry of God, able to go about and visit men, not bound fast to private personal duties, not entangled in conditions of life that he cannot honourably transgress.’ And then he describes at great length a married Cynic dragged down from his royal throne by the claims and encumbrances of a nursery. Now this same ‘undistractedness’ (using the very word) of unmarried life Paul himself has mentioned in a letter to the Corinthians, where he says that ‘owing to the pressing necessity’ of the times, it was good for a man to be unmarried, and that he wished them to be ‘free from anxiety.’ He concludes ‘But I speak this for your own profit, not that I may cast a noose round you but that you may with all seemliness attend on the Lord undistractedly.’ Again, he writes to one of his assistants or subalterns, ‘Endure hardship with me as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one engaged in a campaign is entangled’—your friend’s word again—‘in the affairs of civil life.’

      “I lay little stress on the similarity of word, but a great deal on the similarity of thought. There is no such conflict as Epictetus describes. There is no such ‘line of battle’—not at least for us, Romans, or for you, Cynics. But there is for the Christians—arrayed as they are against the authorities of the Empire. And that reminds me of your Epictetian antithesis between ‘the Beast’ and ‘the Man.’ It is a little like a Christian tradition about ‘the Beast.’ By ‘the Beast’ they mean Nero. They have never forgotten his treatment of them after the fire. For a long time after his death they had a notion—I believe some of them have it still—that the Beast may rise from the dead and persecute them again. They also expect—I cannot do more than allude to their fantastic dreams—a sort of ‘Son of Man’ to appear on the clouds taking vengeance on the armies of the Beast. So, you see, they, too, recognise an opposition between the Man and the Beast. Only, with the Christians it is of a date much earlier than Epictetus. It goes back to a Jewish tradition, which represents a sort of opposition between the empires of Beasts and the empire of the Son of Man, in a prophet named Daniel, some centuries ago.

      “Epictetus, of course, does not believe in all this. But still he persuades himself that there is such a ‘line of battle’ in the air, and that he and his followers can take part in this aerial conflict by ‘going about the world’ as spiritually armed warriors, making themselves substantially miserable—or what the

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