TESTIMONIUM ANIMÆ
OR
GREEK AND ROMAN BEFORE JESUS CHRIST
A SERIES OF ESSAYS AND SKETCHES DEALING
WITH THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENTS
IN
CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION
BY
E. G. SIHLER, PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
IN THE NEW YORK
UNIVERSITY, SOMETIME FELLOW
IN GREEK IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS
UNIVERSITY
Since by strength
They measure all, of other excellence not emulous.
MILTON.
NEW YORK
G. E. STECHERT & CO.
LONDON, LEIPZIG, AND PARIS
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1908,
BY E. G. SIHLER.
_______
All Rights Reserved.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
page: [iii][View Page [iii]]
TO
ALL LOVERS OF HISTORICAL TRUTH
ESPECIALLY TO CLASSICISTS AND
CLERGYMEN
WITH THE EARNEST HOPE THAT THE LARGE EXTENT
OF THEIR COMMON DOMAIN
MAY BE
MORE CLEARLY SEEN
THIS BOOK
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED
PREFACE
— that I might leave
Some monument behind me which pure
hearts
Should reverence.
WORDSWORTH.
THE autumnal frosts of life are apt to bare many a bough which in our own springtime had delighted our souls with the beauty and the promise of vernal blossoms. And so too in the case of classical scholarship, so long and so strongly attached to the culture and educational traditions of modern times, the writer cannot but feel that it has come to be in evil case. Well nigh there has passed from the minds of men the conviction that the Greeks (an abstraction glibly made) were exemplars and exponents of fair and perfect humanity: that, being without the shackles of a religion or creed brought to them from abroad, they had achieved the ideals of our human kind.
Of late indeed and particularly in the zoölogical philosophy of modern times, they have not figured so highly, but have been reduced to furnish convenient social data for Herbert Spencer, as do the Ashantee negroes of Africa or the Papuas. Of all the didactic and doctrinal fictions moulded into a dogma, not one is so apt to take the very heart out of history as, e.g., Spencer's thesis that individual man is but a cell in the social organism — whereas he is really a small universe in himself and passes through this world of sense and seeming absolutely alone, guided and determined by himself alone. The noisy diversion of gregarious joys, the prattle of quasi-common concerns may for a while deceive the soul of man as to his essential solitude and as to his personal responsibility, but not for always.
page: vi[View Page vi]This book is written in the full conviction that man is endowed with an immortal soul and with a transcendent responsibility of conscience and conduct, a responsibility rising infinitely above social convenience or convention, — and that man's personality is the highest thing in nature known to us, and that all efforts to bestialize man by any form of physical or zoölogical hypothesis must prove futile in the end.
I have spent some thirty-six years in reading and rereading with earnest and loving concern most of the writers which have survived of classical antiquity, so-called; I have also, as very many scholars have, examined and attempted to determine many of the minor problems possible in this aftermath of our own time, have followed with maturer powers, much of the life and learning of famous classicists from Petrarch, from Erasmus to Bentley, Ritschl and Mommsen — but at the end of it all there has come over my soul a profound melancholy. So much of the infinite industry I see about me seems to be spent in the fond belief (hallowed by long academic tradition) that Classic Literature was something absolute, something precious and transcendent in itself, that the addition of a monograph no matter on how infinitesimal a detail of classic tradition (though destined to be read by two or three specialists alone, perhaps) was an adequate object of life and labor. All technical scholarship as all work of man has a moral side as well; let us hear Pascal: "and finally others devote their lives to recording all these things, not to become wiser thereby, but merely to display the fact that they know them."
But, as a matter of fact, there is also a fashionable depreciation and decrying of classical scholarship in the zoölogical philosophy and in the meek and vicarious utterance of the same in many mouths, as of a mere department of anthropology.
To return: Wilamowitz of Germany and many others, eminent and brilliant in these studies, have in some measure abandoned for the Greeks (glib and erroneous abstraction) the claim of perfect humanity. This too is page: vii[View Page vii] to be laid away then in the herbaria of human fancy and academic nomenclature. What then, we say, remains?
Much indeed for all those souls who desire to recover the feeling of freshness and youth and to bathe their spirit in the simple directness and original power ever dormant in those letters: but greater I believe is their historical import. They show, nay they are, in great measure, the course and range of man's powers and aspirations: and they abundantly reveal this to us in our concern for the higher and highest things.
I propose to set forth, then, for younger or older scholars and for all those readers who with the author hold to the absolute and divine worth of revealed religion, to set forth, I say, what was the course and character of the religion and worship, of the morality and conduct, of the Greeks and Romans among whom the church of Christ came up: to present, very largely in the exact words of their most eminent writers, in versions made for this work, their views or aspirations concerning the soul, life and death, God and the world — in short, whatever we may designate as the spiritual elements in classic civilization. And I hope to accomplish this with greater exactness perhaps and with greater fairness too than has hitherto been the case.
The two first chapters are written by way of prelude: Culture and the Human Soul, — Humanism and the Humanists. Why are these themes presented first? Because in both of them Classicism attempted or attempts to reduce Christianity to a position of inferiority or even of hostility; further, because Classicism, quite justly, has demeaned and still does demean itself as one of the purest forms of human culture; and because it is of lasting importance to see whether, when Classicism had attained an absolute and dominant position in European culture, the fruits of that tree may not fairly be inspected for evidence of its practical and palpable relation to spiritual things.
page: [viii][View Page [viii]] page: ix[View Page ix]CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
- CULTURE AND THE HUMAN SOUL 1
- HUMANISM AND THE HUMANISTS 24
- GODS AND MEN IN HOMER AND HESIOD 53
- THE SEVEN WISE MEN. ÆSOP 79
- VOICES FROM THE LYRICAL POETS 96
- HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP AMONG THE GREEKS 118
- THE CRAVING FOR IMMORTALITY. PYTHAGORAS. THE MYSTERIES OF ELEUSIS. GREEK PIETY 131
- THE ANGER AND ENVY OF THE GODS. ÆSCHYLUS. HERODOTUS. WITH SOME PERTINENT NOTES ON THE GREEK CHARACTER 148
- SOPHOCLES OF KOLONOS 173
- THE SOPHISTS AND THE NEW LEARNING. EURIPIDES 189
- THE TRIAD OF GREEK THINKERS 210
- HELLENIC DECLINE. ATTIC MORALITY. THE SOCIETY DRAMA OF MENANDER. EPICURUS AND ZENO 251
- ACTUAL WORSHIP IN GREEK COMMUNITIES. THE VOICE OF TOMBS 289
- ROMAN SPIRIT AND ROMAN CHARACTER 312
- RITUAL AND WORSHIP AMONG ROMAN INSTITUTIONS 340
CHAPTER PAGE
- XVI. CICERO OF ARPINUM. CATO OF UTICA 362
- XVII. TWO ROMAN EPICUREANS 382
- XVIII. L. ANNÆUS SENECA, THE VERSATILE, AND THE ROME OF SENECA 402
_______
- EPILOGUE AND APPIAN WAY 431
- APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II: CHRONOLOGY OF HUMANISTS 435
- INDEX OF PHRASE, NAMES, AND MATTER 439
