Silanus the Christian. Edwin Abbott Abbott

through that night, even till near dawn, I was harassed with wild and wearying dreams. I travelled, wandering through wilderness after wilderness in quest of Socrates and nowhere finding him. Wherever I went I seemed to hear a strange monotonous cry that followed close behind me. Presently I heard a flapping of wings, and I knew that the sound was the crowing of the cock that was to be offered for Socrates to Æsculapius. Then it became a mocking, inarticulate, human voice striving to utter articulate speech. At last I heard distinctly, “If Zeus could have, he would have. If he could have, he would have. But he could not.”

CHAPTER IV

       SCAURUS ON EPICTETUS AND PAUL

       Table of Contents

      The cock was still crowing when I started out of my dream. It was not yet dawn but sleep was impossible. When Arrian called to accompany me to lecture, he found me in a fever and sent in a physician, by whose advice I stayed indoors for two or three days. During this enforced inaction, I resolved to write to my old friend Scaurus. Marcus Æmilius Scaurus—for that was his name in full—had been a friend of my father’s, years before I was born; and his advice had been largely the cause of my coming to Nicopolis. Scaurus had seen service; but for many years past he had devoted himself wholly to literature, not as a rhetorician, nor as a lover of the poets, but as “a practical historian,” so he called it. By this he meant to distinguish himself from what he called “ornamental historians.” “History,” he used to say, “contains truth in a well; and I like trying to draw it out.”

      For a man of nearly seventy, Scaurus was remarkably vigorous in mind and thought, with large stores of observation and learning, of a sort not common among Romans of good birth. His favourite motto was, “Quick to perceive, slow to believe.” I used to think he erred on the side of believing too little, and his friends used to call him Miso-mythus or “Myth-hater.” But over and over again, when I had ventured to discuss with him a matter of documentary evidence, I had found that his incredulity was justified; so that I had come to admit that there was some force in his protest, that he ought to be called, not “Myth-hater,” but “Truth-lover.”

      In the year after my fathers death, when I was wasting my time in Rome, and in danger of doing worse, Scaurus took me to task as befitted my father’s dearest friend—a cousin also of my mother, who had died while I was still an infant. He had long desired me to enter the army, and I should have done so but for illness. Now that my health was almost restored, he returned to his previous advice, but suggested that, for the present, I might spend a month or two with advantage in attending the lectures of Epictetus, of whom he knew something while he was in Rome, and about whom he had heard a good deal since. When I demurred, and told him that I had heard a good many philosophers and did not care for them, he replied, “Epictetus you will not find a common philosopher.” He pressed me and I yielded.

      Since my coming to Nicopolis, I had written once to tell him of my arrival, and to thank him for advising me to come to so admirable a teacher. But I had been too much absorbed in the teaching to enter into detail. Now, having leisure, and knowing his great interest in such subjects, I wrote to him even more fully than I have done for my readers above, sending him all my lecture notes; and I asked him what he judged to be the secret of Epictetus, which made him so different from other philosophers. Nor did I omit to tell him of my talk with Arrian about the Christians and their sacramentum.

Many days elapsed, and I had been attending lectures again for a long time, before his letter in reply reached Nicopolis; but I will set it down here, as also a second letter from him on the same subject. In the first, Scaurus expressed his satisfaction at my meeting with Arrian (whom he knew and described as an extremely sensible and promising young man, likely to get on). He added a hope that I would take precisely Arrian’s view of the advantage to be derived from philosophy. But a large part of his letter—much more than I could have wished—was occupied with our “wonderful discovery” (as he called it) that Plato and Xenophon disagreed in their versions of the Apologia of Socrates. On this he rallied us as mere babes in criticism, but, said he, not much more babyish than many professed critics, who cannot be made to understand that—outside poetry, and traditions learned by rote, and a few “aculeate sayings” (so he called them) of philosophers and great men—no two historians ever agree independently—he laid stress on “independently”—for twenty consecutive words, in recording a speech or dialogue. “I will not lay you a wager,” said he, “for it would be cheating you. But I will make you an offer. If you and Arrian, between you, can find twenty identical consecutive words of Socrates in the whole of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Dialogues, I will give you five hundred sesterces apiece[1]. Your failure (for fail you will) ought to strike you as all the more remarkable because both Plato and Xenophon tell us that Socrates used to describe himself as ‘always saying the same things about the same subjects.’ That one similar saying they have preserved. For the rest, these two great biographers, writing page upon page of Socratic talk, cannot agree exactly about ‘the same things’ for a score of consecutive words!”

      He added more, not of great interest to me, about the credulity of those who persuaded themselves that Xenophon’s version must be spurious just because it differed from Plato’s, whereas, said he, this very difference went to shew that it was genuine, and that Xenophon was tacitly correcting Plato. But concerning the secret of Epictetus he said very little—and that, merely in reference to the sacramentum of the Christians which I mentioned in my first letter. On this he remarked that Pliny, with whom he had been well acquainted, had never mentioned the matter to him. “But that,” he said, “is not surprising. His measures to suppress the Christian superstition did not prove so successful as he had hoped. Moreover he disliked the whole business—having to deal with mendacious informers on one side, and fanatical fools or hysterical women on the other. And I, who knew a good deal more about the Christians than Pliny did, disliked the subject still more. My conviction is, however, that your excellent Epictetus—rationalist though he is now, and even less prone to belief than Socrates—has not been always unscathed by that same Christian infection (for that is the right name for it).

      “Partly, he sympathizes with the Christian hatred or contempt for ‘the powers of this world’ (to use their phrase) and partly with their allegiance to one God, whom he and they regard as casting down kings and setting up philosophers. But there is this gulf between them. The Christians think of their champion, Christus, as having devoted himself to death for their sake, and then as having been miraculously raised from the dead, and as, even now, present among them whenever they choose to meet together and ‘sing hymns to him as to a God.’ Epictetus absolutely disbelieves this. Hence, he is at a great disadvantage—I mean, of course, as a preacher, not as a philosopher. The Christians have their God, standing in the midst of their daily assemblies, before whom they can ‘corybantize’—to repeat your expression—to their hearts’ content. Your teacher has nothing—nay, worse than nothing, for he has a blank and feels it to be a blank.

      “What does he do then? He fills the blank with a Hercules or a Diogenes or a Socrates, and he corybantizes before that. But it is a make-believe, though an honest one. I have said more than I intended. You know how I ramble on paper. And the habit is growing on me. Let no casual word of mine make you doubt that Epictetus is thoroughly honest. But honest men may be deceived. Be ‘quick in perceiving, slow in believing.’ Keep to Arrian’s view of a useful and practical life in the world, the world as it is, not as it might be in Plato’s Republic—which, by the way, would be a very dull place. Farewell.”

      This letter did not satisfy me at all. “Honest men,” I repeated, “may be deceived.” True, and Scaurus, though honest as the day, is no exception. To think that Epictetus, our Epictetus—for so Arrian and I used to call him—had been even for a time under the spell of such a superstition as this! I had always assumed—and my conversation with Arrian about what seemed exceptional experiences in Bithynia had done little to shake my assumption—that the Christians were a vile