Guglielmo Ferrero

“ It is generally believed that legends are found only at the dawn of history, in the poetic period; that is a great mistake; the legend--the legend that deceives, that deforms, that misdirects--is everywhere, in all ages, in the present as in the past--in the present even more than in the past, because it is the consequence of certain universal forms of thought and of sentiment. To-day, just as ten or twenty centuries ago, interests and passions dominate events, alter them and distort them, creating about them veritable romances, more or less probable. ”

“ It seems to me that the chief reason for the eternal fascination of the history of Rome is this, that it includes, as in a miniature drawn with simple lines, well defined, all the essential phenomena of social life; so that every age is able there to find its own image, its gravest problems, its intensest passions, its most pressing interests, its keenest struggles; therefore Roman history is forever modern, because every new age has only to choose that part which most resembles it, to find its own self. ”

“ Twenty years ago they began to excavate in France the ruins of the great Gallo-Roman villas: these are constructed on the plan of the Italian villa, decorated in the same way, but are much larger, more sumptuous, more sightly; one feels in them the pride of a new people which has adopted the Latin civilisation, but has infused into that, derived from the wealth of their land, a spirit of grandeur and of luxury that poorer and older Latins did not know, exactly as to-day the Americans infuse a spirit of greater magnitude and boldness into so many things that they take from timid, old Europe. ”

“ To satisfy their wants, to pay their debts, the classes now set upon each other, each to rob in turn the goods of the other, in the cruelest civil war that history records; now, tired of doing themselves evil, they unite and precipitate themselves on the world outside of Italy, to sack the wealth that its owners do not know how to defend. In the great revolutions of Marius and Sulla, the democratic party is the instrument with which a part of the debt-burdened middle classes seek to rehabilitate themselves by robbing the plutocracy and the aristocracy yet opulent ”

“ All that changed, and without any one's foresight or intent, when the Roman policy, urged by the internal forces that stirred the Republic, had destroyed that old order of things.
The ancients understood that peoples, like individual men, can regulate their destiny only in part; that about us, above us, are forces complex and obscure, which we can hardly comprehend, which invest us, seize us, impel us whither we had not thought to go, now to shipwreck on the rocks of misadventure, now to the discovery of islands of happiness, or to find, like Columbus, an America on the way to India. ”

“ I do not hesitate to say that every half-century there opens among civilised peoples a contest to find the new conception of Roman history, which, suited to the changed needs, may revivify classical studies; a competition followed by no despicable prize, the intellectual influence that a people may exercise on other peoples by means of these studies. To win in this contest we must never forget, as too many of us have done in the past thirty years, that a man can rule and refashion the world from the depths of a library, but only on condition that he does not immure himself there ”

“ The theory of corruption so dear to the ancients, which I have already explained, gives us the key to the mystery. Those who have been disposed to see in that theory merely a plaything of poets, orators, philosophers, will now realise that it had power enough to kill the person and destroy the family of the first citizen of the Empire. That kind of continuous fear of luxury, of amusements, of prodigality, on account of which the ancients called corruption so many things that we define as progress, was not a sentiment always equally alive in the mind of the multitude. ”

“ Agrippina, picked up by a boat, had succeeded in reaching one of her villas near by; she sent the freedman to tell the Emperor about the accident and to assure him of her safety. Agrippina alive! It was like a thunderbolt to Nero, and he lost his head: he saw his mother hurrying on to Rome, denouncing the abominable attempt to Senate and people, rousing against him the Prætorian guard and the legions. Thoroughly frightened, he summoned Seneca and Burrhus and laid before them the terrible situation. It is easy to imagine the shock of the old preceptors. ”

“ Indeed, modern civilisation has made it a duty for each one to spend, to enjoy, to waste as much as he can, without any disturbing thought as to the ultimate consequences of what he does. The world is so rich, population grows so rapidly, civilisation is armed with so much knowledge in its struggle against the barbarian and against nature, that to-day we are able to laugh at the timid prudence of our forefathers, who had, as it were, a fear of wealth, of pleasure, of love ”

“ The History and Legend of Antony and Cleopatra
In the history of Rome figures of women are rare, because only men dominated there, imposing everywhere the brute force, the roughness, and the egoism that lie at the base of their nature: they honoured the mater familias because she bore children and kept the slaves from stealing the flour from the bin and drinking the wine from the amphore on the sly. They despised the woman who made of her beauty and vivacity an adornment of social life, a prize sought after and disputed by the men. ”

“ Tiberius from his retreat in Rodi kept every one in Rome afraid, beginning with Augustus. Too rich, too eager now for pleasures and comforts, Rome was almost disgusted with the virtues and the defects that had in fact created it, and which survived in Tiberius—aristocratic pride, the spirit of rigour in authority, military valour, simplicity. Peace had come, extending everywhere, with wealth, the desire for enjoyment, happiness, pleasure, freedom, loosening everywhere the firmest bonds of social discipline, persuading Rome to lay down the heavy armour it had worn for so many centuries. ”

“ It would be possible to declare that it makes and pours into all the world its precious wine by that same virtue, intimate, national, and historic, by which it created the encyclopædia and made the Revolution, let Napoleon loose on Europe and founded the Empire, wrote so many famous books and built on the banks of the Seine the marvellous universal city, where all the forces of modern civilisation are gathered together and hold each other in equilibrium: aristocracy and democracy, the cosmopolite spirit and the spirit of nationality, money and science, war and fashion, art and religion. ”

“ Paris is the modern Rome, the metropolis of the Latin world. France continues, as far as can be done in modern times, the ancient sway of Rome, irradiating round so much of the globe, by commerce, literature, art, science, industry, dominance of political ideas, the influence of the Latin world, making tributaries to Latin culture of barbarous peoples, and nations too young for leadership or grown too old; and France has inherited the pre-eminence in wines, although it lies at the farthest confines of the vine-bearing zone, beyond which the tree of Bacchus refuses to live. ”

“ It is difficult to find in history a longer and more troubled career than that known by Augustus for nearly sixty years, from the far-away days when, young, handsome, full of ambition and daring, he had come to Rome, throwing himself head first into the frightful turmoil let loose by the murder of Cæsar, to that tranquil death, the death of a great wise man, in the midst of the pax Romana, now spread from end to end of the Empire! ”

“ In this respect, the first and second centuries of the Christian era resemble our own time. In the whole Empire, alike in Rome, in Gaul, in Asia, there were old aristocratic families, rich and illustrious, but they were not the class of greatest power. Under them stood a middle class of merchants, land-owners, orators, jurists, professors, and other intellectual men, and this was so numerous, comfortable, and so potent as to cause all the great social forces, from government to industry, to abandon the old aristocracy and court it like a new mistress. ”

“ Ah, they do not scintillate before the eyes of the world as symbols of gay intoxication like the others, for through those bottles passes no ray of the glory and prestige of France! An historian fond of paradoxes might affirm, and with great likelihood, what does not appear at first glance: that the great brands of French Champagne would not be sold so dear if the French Revolution had been suppressed by the European coalition, and if France, overcome in the terrible trial, had been enchained by the absolute monarchies of Europe like a dangerous beast. ”

“ The picture of the Empire, so brilliant from the economic stand-point, is much less so from the intellectual: here we touch its great weakness. Destroying so many governments, especially in the Orient, Rome had at the same time decapitated the intellectual elites of the ancient world; for the courts of the monarchies were the great firesides of mental activity. Rome had therefore, together with states and governments, destroyed scientific and literary institutions, centres of art, traditions of refinement, of taste, of aesthetic elegance. ”

“ His caprices, ever stranger, little by little roused even that part of the public which was not fanatically attached to tradition. At that time Nero developed his foolish vanity of actor, his caprice for the theatre, which soon was to become an all-absorbing mania. The chief of the Empire, the heir of Julius Cæsar, dreamed of nothing else than descending from the height of human grandeur to the scene of a theatre, to experience before the public the sensations of those players whom the Roman nobility had always regarded as instruments of infamous pleasure! ”

“ Pompey, envious of the glory of Lucullus, follows his example, conquers Syria, sends new treasures to Italy, carries from the East the jewels of Mithridates, and displaying them in the temple of Jove, rouses a passion for gems in the Roman women; he also builds the first great stone theatre to rise in Rome. All the political men in Rome try to make money out of foreign countries: those who cannot, like the great, conquer an empire, confine themselves to blackmailing the countries and petty states that tremble before the shadow of Rome ”

“ Furthermore, into the history of Rome, the historic aristocracy of Europe may look as into the mirror of their own destiny, as everywhere they try to retain wealth and power, playing in the stock-exchange, marrying the daughters of millionaire brewers, giving themselves to commerce; a nobility that resorts, in the effort to preserve its prestige over the middle classes, to the expedients of the most reckless demagogy. ”

“ Among the most important facts, however little noticed, in the history of the nineteenth century, I should number this: that the Republic, the human state considered as the common property of all—the great political creation of ancient Rome—is reborn here in America, after having died out in Europe. The Latin seed, lying buried for so many centuries beneath the ruins of the ancient world, like the grains of wheat buried in Egyptian tombs, transported from the other side of the ocean, has sprung up in the land that Columbus discovered. ”

“ It will be said that judgments as to beauty are personal; that Antony, who saw her alive, could decide better than we who see her portraits half effaced by the centuries; that the attractive power of a woman emanates not only from corporal beauty, but also—and yet more—from her spirit. The taste of Cleopatra, her vivacity, her cleverness, her exquisite art in conversation, is vaunted by all. ”

“ To understand all that they meant to say to contemporaries, one must imagine Roman society as it was then, hardly out of a century of conquests and revolutions, in disorder, unbalanced, and still crude, notwithstanding the luxuries and refinements superficially imitated from the Orient; a society eager to enjoy, yet still ill educated to exercise upon itself that discipline of good taste, without which civilisation and its pleasures aggravate more than restrain the innate brutality of men. ”

“ To-day men regard that constant transformation either as beneficent, or at least as such a matter of course that almost no one heeds it; just as no one notices the alternations of day and night, or the change of seasons. On the contrary, we have little by little become so confident of the goodness of this force that drives the coming generation on into the unknown future, that society, European, American, among other liberties has won in the nineteenth century, full and entire, a liberty that the ancients did not know—freedom in vice. ”

“ We are returning, in a vaster world, to the condition of the Roman Empire at its beginning; to an immense economic unity, which, notwithstanding the aberrations of protectionism, is grander and firmer than all its predecessors; to a political unity not so great, yet considerable, because even if peace be not eternal, it is at least the normal condition of the European states; to an indifference for every effort put forth to establish moral and ideal uniformity among the nations, great and small, that share in this political and economic unity. ”

“ We have but to notice what happens about us in the modern world--when industry gains and wealth increases and cities grow, men drink more eagerly and riotously inebriating beverages--to understand what happened in Italy and in Rome, as gradually wars, tribute, blackmailing politics, pitiless usury, carried into the peninsula the spoils of the Mediterranean world, riches of the most numerous and varied forms. The old-time aversion to wine diminished; men and women, city-dwellers and countrymen, learned to drink it. ”

“ During the first period of peace, arrived after so great disturbance, that poetry so perfect in form, which analysed and described all the most exquisite delights of sense and soul, infused a new spirit of refinement into habits, and co-operated with laborious education in teaching even the stern conquerors of the world to enjoy all the pleasures of civilisation, alike literature and love, the luxury of the city and the restfulness of the villa, fraternal friendship and good cookery. ”

“ In the pessimism with which the ancients regarded progress as corruption, there was a basis of truth, just as there is a principle of error in the too serene optimism with which we consider corruption as progress. This force that pushes the new generations on to the future, at once creates and destroys; its destructive energy is specially felt in ages like Cæsar's in ancient Rome and ours in the modern world, in which facility in the accumulation of wealth over-excites desires and ambitions in all classes. ”