Frank Frost Abbott

“ How the armies of Rome mastered the nations of the world is known to every reader of history, but the story of the conquest by Latin of the languages of the world is vague in the minds of most of us. If we should ask ourselves how it came about, we should probably think of the world-wide supremacy of Latin as a natural result of the world-wide supremacy of the Roman legions or of Roman law. But in making this assumption we should be shutting our eyes to the history of our own times. A conquered people does not necessarily accept, perhaps it has not commonly accepted, the tongue of its master. ”

“ We should find the Roman people, recognizing the menace to their simple, frugal way of living which lay in the inroads of Greek civilization, and turning in their helplessness to their officials, the censors, to protect them from a demoralization which, by their own efforts, they could not withstand. We should find the same officials preaching against race suicide, extravagant living, and evasion of public duties, and imposing penalties and restrictions in the most autocratic fashion on men of high and low degree alike who failed to adopt the official standards of conduct. ”

“ It is true that what men said against me after the death of Cæsar was known to me. They call it a sin of mine that I sorrow over the death of a man dear to me, and because I grieve that he whom I loved is no more, for they say that 'fatherland should be above friendship,' just as if they had proved already that his death has been of service to the state. ”

“ If we look at a map of the Roman world under Augustus, with the Atlantic to bound it on the west, the Euphrates on the east, the desert of Sahara on the south, and the Rhine and Danube on the north, and recall the fact that the linguistic conditions which Cæsar found in Gaul in 58 B.C. were typical of what confronted Latin in a great many of the western, southern, and northern provinces, the fact that Latin subdued all these different tongues, and became the every-day speech of these different peoples, will be recognized as one of the marvels of history. ”

“ It appears strange that the admirable police and fire system which Augustus introduced into Rome was not adopted throughout the Empire, but that does not seem to have been the case, and life and property must have been exposed to great risks, especially on festival days and in the unlighted streets at night. The rich man could be protected by his bodyguard of clients, and have his way lighted at night by the torches which his slaves carried, but the little shopkeeper must have avoided the dark alleys or attached himself to the retinue of some powerful man. ”

“ In a most unexpected place, in one of Cicero's fiery invectives against Antony,120 we come upon an episode illustrating his affectionate care of Curio during Curio's youth. The elder Curio lies upon a couch, prostrate with grief at the wreck which his son has brought on the house by his dissolute life and his extravagance. The younger Curio throws himself at Cicero's feet in tears. Like a foster-father, Cicero induces the young man to break off his evil habits, and persuades the father to forgive him and pay his debts. ”

“ These various theories of the origin of the romance of Petronius—that it may be related to the epic, to the serious heroic romance, to the bourgeois story of adventure developed out of the rhetorical exercise, to the Milesian tale, to the prologue of comedy, to the verse-mélange of comedy or the mime, or to the prose-poetical Menippean satire—are not, of necessity, it seems to me, mutually exclusive. ”

“ The Roman state was reproduced in miniature in these societies, with their popular assemblies, and their officials, who bore the honorable titles of quæstor, curator, prætor, ædile, and so forth.
To read these twenty-five hundred or more inscriptions from all parts of the Empire brings us close to the heart of the common people. We see their little ambitions, their jealousies, their fears, their gratitude for kindness, their own kindliness, and their loyalty to their fellows. ”

“ Out of these small beginnings developed the socialistic policy of later times. By the middle of the first century B.C., it is said that there were three hundred and twenty thousand persons receiving doles of corn from the state, and, if the people could look to the government for the necessities of life, why might they not hope to have it supply their less pressing needs? Or, to put it in another way, if one politician won their support by giving them corn, why might not another increase his popularity by providing them with amusement and with the comforts of life? ”

“ The anthropomorphic teachings of Greek literature, art, and religion found an echo in the Jupiter and Juno, the Hercules and Pan of Virgil and Horace, but made no impress on the faith of the common people, who, with that regard for tradition which characterized the Romans, followed the fathers in their way of thinking.
A disbelief in personal gods hardly accords with faith in a life after death, but most of the Romans believed in an existence of some sort in the world beyond. ”

“ This hymn the priests sang at the May festival of the goddess, when the farmers brought them the first fruits of the earth. It has no intrinsic literary merit, but it carries us back beyond the great wars with Carthage for supremacy in the western Mediterranean, beyond the contest with Pyrrhus for overlordship in Southern Italy, beyond the struggle for life with the Samnites in Central Italy, beyond even the founding of the city on the Tiber, to a people who lived by tilling the soil and tending their flocks and herds. ”

“ Christian writers and preachers made their appeal to the common people rather than to the literary world. They, therefore, expressed themselves in language which would be readily understood by the average man, as St. Jerome frankly tells us his purpose was. The result of these influences, and of others, acting on literary Latin, was to destroy its unity and its carefully developed scientific system, and to bring it nearer and nearer in its genius to popular Latin, or, to put it in another way, the literary medium comes to show many of the characteristics of the spoken language. ”

“ All these gifts were for the city of Rome, and for the people of the city, not for the Empire, nor for Italy. This is characteristic of ancient generosity or philanthropy, that its recipients are commonly the people of a single town, usually the donor's native town. It is one of many indications of the fact that the Roman thought of his city as the state, and even under the Empire he rarely extended the scope of his benefactions beyond the walls of a particular town. The small cities and villages throughout the West reproduced the capital in miniature. Each was a little world in itself. ”

“ Wherefore I beg you the more earnestly to consider deeds more than words, and to believe, if you feel that it is well for the right to prevail, that I can have no intercourse with dishonorable men. For am I now, in my declining years, to change that course of action which I maintained in my youth, when I might even have gone astray with hope of indulgence, and am I to undo my life's work? ”

“ These literary tricks find little place in our serious verse, and the finer Latin poets rarely indulge in them. They seem to be especially out of place in an epitaph, which should avoid studied effects and meretricious devices. But writers in the early stages of a literature and common people of all periods find a pleasure in them. Alliteration, onomatopœia, the pun, and the play on words are to be found in all the early Latin poets, and they are especially frequent with literary men like Plautus and Terence, Pacuvius and Accius, who wrote for the stage, and therefore for the common people. ”

“ The practice which the Roman government followed of letting out to the highest bidder the privilege of collecting the taxes in each of the provinces, naturally gave a great impetus to the development of companies organized for this purpose. Every new province added to the Empire opened a fresh field for capitalistic enterprise, in the way not only of farming the taxes, but also of loaning money, constructing public works, and leasing the mines belonging to the state, and Roman politicians must have felt these financial considerations steadily pushing them on to further conquests. ”

“ Had the Latin which the colonist, the merchant, and the soldier carried through Italy and into the provinces been allowed to develop in different localities without any external unifying influence, probably new dialects would have grown up all over the world, or, to put it in another way, probably the Romance languages would have come into existence several centuries before they actually appeared. That unifying influence was the Latin used by the officials sent out from Rome, which all classes eagerly strove to imitate. ”

“ But when flourishing schools of literature sprang up in Spain, in Africa, and in Gaul, the paramount authority of Rome and the common standard for the Latin world which she had set were lost. When some men tried to imitate Cicero and Quintilian, and others, Seneca, there ceased to be a common model of excellence. Similarly a careful distinction between the diction of prose and verse was gradually obliterated. There was a loss of interest in literature, and professional writers gave less attention to their diction and style. ”

“ One of the most fascinating and tantalizing problems of literary history concerns the origin of prose fiction among the Romans. We can trace the growth of the epic from its infancy in the third century before Christ as it develops in strength in the poems of Nævius, Ennius, and Cicero until it reaches its full stature in the Æneid, and then we can see the decline of its vigor in the Pharsalia, the Punica, the Thebais, and Achilleis, until it practically dies a natural death in the mythological and historical poems of Claudian. ”

“ So long as the Empire held together the unifying influence of official Latin, and the constant intercommunication between the provinces, preserved the essential unity of Latin throughout the world, but when the bonds were broken, the naturally divergent tendencies which had existed from the beginning, but had been held in check, made themselves felt, and the speech of the several sections of the Old World developed into the languages which we find in them to-day. ”

“ Perhaps there have never been so many beautiful towns in any other period in history as there were in the Roman Empire, during the second century of our era, and their attractive features—their colonnades, temples, fountains, and works of art—were due in large measure to the generosity of private citizens. We can make this statement with considerable confidence, because these benefactions are recorded for us on innumerable tablets of stone and bronze, scattered throughout the Empire. ”