Now this was plainly impossible in the early centuries of the present
era, and it is therefore foolish to ask why Pagan moralists did not do
what we expect Christian moralists to have done. I have already
mentioned, and have fully described elsewhere, how humanitarian
sentiments were generally diffused throughout the old Graeco-Roman world.
There is not a phrase of the New Testament which has not a parallel
among the Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The great
fusion of peoples in the Roman Empire begot a feeling of brotherhood,
and, by a natural reaction on years of vice and violence, there was a
considerable growth of lofty and tender, and often impracticable,
sentiments. Moralists urged men to avoid anger, to bear blows with
dignity, to greet all men as brothers, even to love their enemies. Plato
and Epictetus and Plutarch and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius urged these
maxims as forcibly as Christ did. The Stoic religion or philosophy,
which guided Emperors and lawyers, and had a very wide influence in the
Roman world, was intensely and quite modernly humanitarian. Its
principal exponents condemned slavery and promoted a remarkable spread
of philanthropy.
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