History of European Morals by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Author:William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

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formed part of the yery first teaching of the Stoics, but it' the qpedal glory of the Boman teachers, and an obvious result of the condition of affiurs I have described, to have brought them into full relieU One of the most emphatic as well as one of the earliest extant assertions of the duty of' charity to the human race/ ^ occurs in the treatise of Cicero upon duties, which was avowedly based upon Stoicism. Writing at a period when the movement of amalgamation had for a genera-tion been rapidly proceeding,' and adopting almost without restriction the ethics of the Stoics, Cicero maintained the doctrine of universal brotherhood as distinctly as it was afterwards maintained by the Christian Church. 'This whole world,' he tells us, ' is to be r^arded as the common city of gods and men.'' ' Men were bom for the sake of men, that each shoidd assist the others.'^ * Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason, t^t he is a man,** * To reduce man to the duties of his own city and to disengage him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal society of the human race.'® * Nature has inclined us to love men, and this is the foundation of the law.'^ The same principles were reiterated with increasing emphasis by the later Stoics. Adopting the well-known line which Terence had translated from Menander, they maintained that man should deem nothing human foreign to his interest. Lucan expatiated with all the fervour of a Chiistian poet upon the time when ' the human race will cast aside its weapons, and when all nations will learn to love.'® * The wWe universe,' said

* * Caritas generis humani.'— De • De Offic, m. 6.

Finib, So, too, he speaks {De Leg, ' Be Legib, i. \h. \. 23) of every good man as * civis

totins mundi.* • * Tunc genus humannm positia

' He speaks of Rome as ' ciyitas sibi consulat armis,

rznationnm oonventu constituta.* Inqueiricem gens omnia amet.*

■ De Legib, i. 7. * De Qffic, —Pharsalia, tI.

» Ibid. lii. 6.

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^

Seneofty * which you sea around yon, compriamg all things, both divine and human, is ope. We are members of one great body. Nature has made us rolatives when it begat us from the same materials and for the same destinies. She planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social Ufe/ ^ * What is a Eoman knight, or freedman, or slave ) These are but names springing from ambition or from injury.'' ^I know that my country is the world, and my guardians are the gods.' ^ ' You are a citizen,' said Epictetus, ^ and a part of the world. . . . The duty of a citizen is in nothing to consider his own interest distinct frx)m that of others, as the hand or foot, if they possessed

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