Dancers, cooks, and play-actors received the highest consideration,
since their earnings were large. Scholars, poets, and philosophers--what
few there were--pined in attics. Epictetus lived in a miserable cottage
with only a straw pallet and a single lamp. Women had no education, and
were disgracefully profligate; even the wife of Marcus Aurelius (the
daughter of Antoninus Pius) was one of the most abandoned women of the
age, notwithstanding all the influence of their teachings and example.
Slavery was so great an institution that half of the population were
slaves. There were sixty millions of them in the Empire, and they were
generally treated with brutal cruelty. The master of Epictetus, himself
a scholar and philosopher, broke wantonly the leg of his illustrious
slave to see how well he could bear pain. There were no public
charities. The poor and miserable and sick were left to perish unheeded
and unrelieved. Even the free citizens were fed at the public expense,
not as a charity, but to prevent revolts. About two thousand people
owned the whole civilized world, and their fortunes were spent in
demoralizing it. What if their palaces were grand, and their villas
beautiful, and their dresses magnificent, and their furniture costly, if
their lives were spent in ignoble and enervating pleasures, as is
generally admitted. There was a low religious life, almost no religion
at all, and what there was was degrading by its superstition.
Everywhere were seen the rites of magical incantations, the pretended
virtue of amulets and charms, soothsayers laughing at their own
predictions,--nowhere the worship of the _one God_ who created the
heaven and the earth, nor even a genuine worship of the Pagan deities,
but a general spirit of cynicism and atheism. What does St. Paul say of
the Romans when he was a prisoner in the precincts of the imperial
palace, and at a time of no greater demoralization? We talk of the
glories of jurisprudence; but what was the practical operation of laws
when such a harmless man as Paul could be brought to trial, and perhaps