Plutarch exemplifies two movements of his time: the return to religion and the passing renaissance of Greek literature and philosophy. The former was universal, the latter was confined to Athens and the Greek East. Six cities of the Peloponnesus prospered, but contributed little to Greek thought. Western commerce and a busy textile industry kept Patrae alive through Roman and medieval history even to our day. Olympia throve on the leavings of tourists coming to see Pheidias’ Zeus or the Olympic games. It is one of the pleasantest aspects of Greek history that these quadrennial contests continued from 776 B.C. to A.D. 394, when Theodosius ended them. As in the days of Prodicus and Herodotus, philosophers and historians came to harangue the crowd assembling for the festival. Dio Chrysostom describes authors reading “their stupid compositions” to transient listeners, poets reciting their verses, rhetoricians thumping the air, and “sophists in great number, like gorgeous peacocks,” coming to blow their wind over the multitude;12 he proved no more silent than the rest. Epictetus pictures the spectators cramped and sweltering in the unshaded stands, burned by the sun or drenched by the rain, but forgetting everything in the tumult and the shouting that marked the final moments of each bout or race.13 The old Nemean, Isthmian, Pythian, and Panathenaic games continued; new ones were added like the Panhellenia of Hadrian; and many of them included competitions in poetry, oratory, or music. “Can you not hear classical music at the great festivals?” asks a character in Lucian.14 Gladiatorial combats were introduced to Greece by the Roman colony at Corinth; thence they spread to other cities until even the Theater of Dionysus was befouled with butchery. Many Greeks—Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Plutarch—protested against the desecration; Demonax, the Cynic philosopher, begged the Athenians not to allow the innovation until they had thrown down the altar of Pity at Athens;15 but the Roman games continued in Greece till predominantly Christian times.
Sparta and Argos were still moderately alive, and Epidaurus grew rich on the visits of sick bodies and souls to the shrine of Asclepius. Corinth, controlling the trade across the isthmus, became, within half a century of its re-establishment by Caesar, the wealthiest city in Greece. Its heterogeneous population of Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians, most of them uprooted from their native lands and morals, was notorious for commercialism, epicureanism, and immorality. The old Temple of Aphrodite Pandemos carried on an undiminished trade as the shrine and center of Corinthian prostitutes. Apuleius describes a gorgeous ballet that he saw in Corinth, representing the judgment of Paris. “Venus appeared all naked, save that her fine and comely middle was lightly covered with a thin silken smock; and this the wanton wind blew hither and thither.”16 Corinth had not mended her ways since Aspasia.
Passing through Megara into Attica, the rural scene was one of great poverty. Deforestation, erosion, and mineral depletion had been added to war, emigration, taxation, and race suicide to make a desert of the Roman peace. Two cities alone in Attica were prosperous: Eleusis, whose sacramental Mysteries drew lucrative crowds to her every year; and Athens, the educational and intellectual center of the classic world. Its ancient institutions—council, assembly, and archons—still functioned, and Rome had restored the Areopagus to its primeval authority as the seat of judgment and the citadel of property rights. Rulers like Antiochus IV, Herod the Great, Augustus, and Hadrian rivaled millionaires like Herodes Atticus in benefactions to the city. Herodes rebuilt the stadium in marble, almost exhausting Pentelicus, and raised an odeon, or music hall, at the foot of the Acropolis. Hadrian provided funds to complete the Olympieum, and Zeus, who now had one foot in the grave, received a home worthy of his Casanova prime.
Meanwhile the unrivaled fame of Athens in letters, philosophy, and education brought a stream of rich youths and needy scholars to her schools. The University of Athens consisted of ten professorships endowed by the city or the emperor, and a host of private lecturers and tutors. Instruction was given in literature, philology, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and law—usually in gymnasia or theaters, sometimes in temples or homes. Except in oratory or law the curriculum had no thought of equipping the student to earn a living; it sought rather to sharpen his mind, deepen his understanding, and provide him with a moral code. It produced many brilliant intellects, but also it generated thousands of cobweb-spinners who would turn both philosophy and religion into a maze of controversial theories.
As Athens depended for a considerable part of its income on the students, it put up patiently with their hilarious ways. “Freshmen” were hazed with practical jokes that sometimes injured citizens; the students of rival professors became ardent partisans and attacked one another in occasional riots like the “cane rushes” of our youth. Some students felt that they could learn more from the courtesans and gamblers of the town than from all teachers of philosophy; and we gather from Alciphron that the ladies in question looked upon the professors as dull and incompetent competitors.17 But there was often a pleasant bond of friendship between learners and teachers; many of these invited students to dinner, guided their reading, visited them in illness, and kept their parents misinformed about their progress. Most of the lecturers lived on fees paid by each disciple; a small number of professors drew a salary from the state; and the heads of the four schools of philosophy received 10,000 drachmas ($6000) a year from the imperial Treasury.
Under these stimuli the period of the “Second Sophistic” developed—a revival of the orator-philosopher passing from city to city as honorariums might beckon, delivering addresses, teaching pupils, pleading cases in the courts, living in rich homes as spiritual counselors, and sometimes acting as honored emissaries of their city-states. The movement flourished throughout the Empire, but especially in the Greek world, in the first three centuries of our era; philosophers were then, says Dio, as numerous as cobblers.18 The new sophists, like the old, had no common doctrine, phrased their teaching eloquently, drew large audiences, and attained in many cases high social status, imperial favor, or great wealth. They differed from the earlier Sophists in seldom questioning religion or morality; they were more interested in form and style, in oratorical technique and skill, than in the great questions that had shaken the beliefs and morals of the world; indeed, the new sophists were warm defenders of the ancient faith. Philostratus has preserved for us the lives of the leading sophists of this age; let one example suffice. Adrian of Tyre studied rhetoric at Athens and rose to the state chair of rhetoric there; he opened his inaugural address with the proud words, “Once again letters have come from Phoenicia.” He rode to his lectures in a carriage with silver harness, in rich attire, and gleaming with gems. When Marcus Aurelius visited Athens he tested Adrian by asking him to improvise an oration on a difficult theme; Adrian carried the matter off so well that Marcus loaded him with honors, silver and gold, houses and slaves. Promoted to the chair of rhetoric at Rome, Adrian’s lectures, though in Greek, proved so alluring that senators adjourned their sessions, and the populace deserted the pantomimes, to go and hear him.19 Such a career almost announces the death of philosophy; it had been swallowed up in an ocean of rhetoric, and had ceased to think when it learned to speak.
At the other extreme were the Cynics. We have described them elsewhere—their tattered cloak, their unkempt hair and beard, their wallet and staff, their reduction of life to simplicities, sometimes obscenities. They lived like mendicant friars, had a hierarchical organization with novices and superiors,20 avoided marriage and work, scorned the conventions and artificialities of civilization, denounced all governments as thieves and superfluities, laughed at all oracles, “mysteries,” and gods. Everyone satirized them, Lucian most savagely; yet even Lucian admired Demonax, a cultured Cynic who had abandoned his wealth to live in philosophical poverty. He gave his century of life (A.D. 50-150) to helping others, reconciling hostile individuals and cities; and Athens, which ridiculed everything, respected him. Indicted before an Athenian court for refusing to offer sacrifice to the gods, he won acquittal by saying simply that the gods had no need of offerings, and that religion consisted in kindness to all. When the Athenian assembly was engaged in a quarrel of factions, his mere appearance sufficed to quiet the dispute; whereupon he left without having uttered a word. It was his custom, in old age, to enter any house uninvited and eat and sleep there; and every home in Athens sought the honor.21 Lucian speaks with less sympathy of Peregrinus, who tried Christianity, abandoned it for the Cynic regimen, denounced Rome, called all Greece to revolt, and astonished an assemblage at Olympia by making and lighting his own funeral pyre, leaping into it, and allowing himself to be consumed in the flames (A.D. 165).22 In such scorn of wealth and life the Cynics were paving a way for the monks of the Christian Church.
When Vespasian, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius established chairs of philosophy at Athens they ignored the Cynics and the Skeptics, and recognized only four schools of thought: the Platonic Academy, the Aristotelian Lyceum, the Stoics, and the Epicureans. The Academy had diluted Plato’s proud faith in reason into the universal doubt of Carneades; but after the latter’s death the school reacted toward orthodoxy, and Antiochus of Ascalon, who taught Cicero at the Academy (79 B.C.), returned to Plato’s conceptions of reason, immortality, and God. The Lyceum was now devoting itself to natural science in the tradition of Theophrastus, or to pious commentaries on Aristotle’s works. The school of Epicurus was declining in this religious age; few men dared profess its doctrines without diplomatic reservations. In most of Greek Asia the words Epicurean, atheist, and Christian were synonyms expressive of horror and desecration.23
The dominant philosophy had long since been Stoicism. The rigorous perfectionism of its early forms had been softened by Panaetius and Poseidonius, both citizens of Rhodes. Returning to Athens after Scipio’s death (129 B.C.), Panaetius, now head of the Stoa, defined God as a material spirit or breath (pneuma) permeating all things, appearing in plants as the power of growth, in animals as soul (psyche), in man as reason (logos). His successors developed this vague pantheism into a more definitely religious philosophy. The Stoic theory of moral discipline moved closer to Cynic asceticism; and in the second century A.D. Cynicism, as one observer put it, differed from Stoicism only by a torn cloak. In Epictetus, as in Marcus Aurelius, we see both movements advancing toward Christianity.