Theodor Mommsen

“ But the headlong fall of the Roman power was owing not to the fault of Quintus Fabius or Gaius Varro, but to the distrust between the government and the governed—to the variance between the senate and the burgesses. If the deliverance and revival of the state were still possible, the work had to begin at home with the re-establishment of unity and of confidence. To have perceived this and, what is of more importance, to have done it, and done it with an abstinence from all recriminations however just, constitutes the glorious and imperishable honour of the Roman senate. ”

“ Lastly, the claim of Rome to extend her protecting arm over all the Hellenes was by no means an empty phrase: the citizens of Neapolis, Rhegium, Massilia, and Emporiae could testify that that protection was meant in earnest, and there is no question at all that at this time the Romans stood in a closer relation to the Greeks than any other nation—one little more remote than that of the Hellenized Macedonians. It is strange that any should dispute the right of the Romans to feel their human, as well as their Hellenic, sympathies revolted at the outrageous treatment of the Cians and Thasians. ”

“ It is more certain that, while the Roman senate deemed it beneath its dignity to have the old man hunted out in his last asylum—for the tradition which inculpates the senate appears to deserve no credit—Flamininus, whose restless vanity sought after new opportunities for great achievements, undertook on his own part to deliver Rome from Hannibal as he had delivered the Greeks from their chains, and, if not to wield—which was not diplomatic—at any rate to whet and to point, the dagger against the greatest man of his time. ”

“ During all this march of the Carthaginian army the dictator had followed along the heights, and had condemned his soldiers to the melancholy task of looking on with arms in their hands, while the Numidian cavalry plundered the faithful allies far and wide, and the villages over all the plain rose in flames. At length he opened up to the exasperated Roman army the eagerly-coveted opportunity of attacking the enemy. ”

“ Hellenizing Literature
The Roman literature is the only one as to which we can still form an opinion; and, however problematical its absolute worth may appear to the aesthetic judge, for those who wish to apprehend the history of Rome it remains of unique value as the mirror of the inner mental life of Italy in that sixth century—full of the din of arms and pregnant for the future—during which its distinctively Italian phase closed, and the land began to enter into the broader career of ancient civilization. ”

“ There, no doubt, absolutism had emerged in opposition to the old constitution, which to some extent recognized different estates; but sovereign and subject by no means stood towards each other in Macedonia as they stood in Asia and Egypt, and the people still felt itself independent and free. In steadfast resistance to the public enemy under whatever name, in unshaken fidelity towards their native country and their hereditary government, and in persevering courage amidst the severest trials, no nation in ancient history bears so close a resemblance to the Roman people as the Macedonians ”

“ On principle no freedom of movement whatever was allowed to them—a slave, so runs one of Cato's maxims, must either work or sleep—and no attempt was ever made to attach the slaves to the estate or to their master by any bond of human sympathy. The letter of the law in all its naked hideousness regulated the relation, and the Romans indulged no illusions as to the consequences. "So many slaves, so many foes," said a Roman proverb. It was an economic maxim, that dissensions among the slaves ought rather to be fostered than suppressed. ”

“ That the most able and upright men throughout Greece should be opposed to Rome was to be expected; the venal aristocracy alone was favourable to the Romans, and here and there an isolated man of worth, who, unlike the great majority, was under no delusion as to the circumstances and the future of the nation. This was most painfully felt by Eumenes of Pergamus, the main upholder of that extraneous freedom among the Greeks. ”

“ While the reverential piety of the older tragedians sheds over their pieces as it were a reflected radiance of heaven; while the limitation of the narrow horizon of the older Hellenes exercises its satisfying power even over the hearer; the world of Euripides appears in the pale glimmer of speculation as much denuded of gods as it is spiritualised, and gloomy passions shoot like lightnings athwart the gray clouds. The old deeply-rooted faith in destiny has disappeared; fate governs as an outwardly despotic power, and the slaves gnash their teeth as they wear its fetters. ”

“ But when a war of annihilation is surely, though in point of time indefinitely, impending over a weaker state, the wiser, more resolute, and more devoted men—who would immediately prepare for the unavoidable struggle, accept it at a favourable moment, and thus cover their defensive policy by a strategy of offence—always find themselves hampered by the indolent and cowardly mass of the money- worshippers, of the aged and feeble, and of the thoughtless who are minded merely to gain time, to live and die in peace, and to postpone at any price the final struggle. ”

“ But even the statesman, with whom political morality was no mere phrase, might ask in reply, how Roman burgesses, who had broken their military oath and treacherously murdered the allies of Rome, could be placed on a level with foreigners who had committed an outrage on foreigners, where no one had constituted the Romans judges of the one or avengers of the other? Had the question been only whether the Syracusans or Mamertines should rule in Messana, Rome might certainly have acquiesced in the rule of either. Rome was striving for the possession of Italy, as Carthage for that of Sicily ”

“ Taking advantage of the impulse of the nation, they should have made it their aim gradually to establish a naval force important not only in numbers but in sailing power and practice, and for such a purpose they had a valuable nucleus in the privateering that was developed during the long war; but nothing of the sort was done by the government. Nevertheless the Roman fleet with its unwieldy grandeur was the noblest creation of genius in this war, and, as at its beginning, so at its close it was the fleet that turned the scale in favour of Rome. ”

“ The Romans began to feel the need of a richer intellectual life, and to be startled as it were at their own utter want of mental culture; and, if even nations of artistic gifts, such as the English and Germans, have not disdained in the pauses of their own productiveness to avail themselves of the miserable French culture for filling up the gap, it need excite no surprise that the Italian nation now flung itself with fervid zeal on the glorious treasures as well as on the dissolute filth of the intellectual development of Hellas. ”

“ Whatever could be demanded of an assembly of burgesses like the Roman, which was not the moving spring, but the firm foundation, of the whole machinery—a sure perception of the common good, a sagacious deference towards the right leader, a steadfast spirit in prosperous and evil days, and, above all, the capacity of sacrificing the individual for the general welfare and the comfort of the present for the advantage of the future—all these qualities the Roman community exhibited in so high a degree that, when we look to its conduct as a whole, all censure is lost in reverent admiration. ”

“ If it tended to transplant the radicalism of Euripides to Rome, to resolve the gods either into deceased men or into mental conceptions, to place a denationalized Latium by the side of a denationalized Hellas, and to reduce all purely and distinctly developed national peculiarities to the problematic notion of general civilization, every one is at liberty to find this tendency pleasing or disagreeable, but none can doubt its historical necessity. From this point of view the very defectiveness of the Roman poetry, which cannot be denied, may be explained and so may in some degree be justified. ”

“ In ancient times it was necessary to be either anvil or hammer; and in the final struggle between the victors victory remained with the Romans. Whether they would have the judgment to use it rightly—to attach the Latin nation by still closer bonds to Rome, gradually to Latinize Italy, to rule their dependents in the provinces as subjects and not to abuse them as slaves, to reform the constitution, to reinvigorate and to enlarge the tottering middle class—many a one might ask. ”

“ Is it to be supposed that one so generous, unprejudiced, and intelligent should not have asked himself of what benefit it could be to his country, now that the political power of the Carthaginian city was annihilated, utterly to destroy that ancient seat of commerce and of agriculture, and wickedly to overthrow one of the main pillars of the then existing civilization? ”

“ All real art has its root in individual freedom and a cheerful enjoyment of life, and the germs of such an art were not wanting in Italy; but, when Roman training substituted for freedom and joyousness the sense of belonging to the community and the consciousness of duty, art was stifled and, instead of growing, could not but pine away. The culminating point of Roman development was the period which had no literature. ”

“ While the quasi-poetry of Livius proceeded, somewhat like that of Gottsched in Germany, from purely external impulses and moved wholly in the leading-strings of the Greeks, his successor emancipated Roman poetry, and with the true divining-rod of the poet struck those springs out of which alone in Italy a native poetry could well up —national history and comedy. Epic poetry no longer merely furnished the schoolmaster with a lesson-book, but addressed itself independently to the hearing and reading public. ”

“ The belief that Rome's destruction was this time inevitable, and that the Roman soil was fated to become the property of the Gauls, was so generally diffused among the multitude in Rome itself that the government reckoned it not beneath its dignity to allay the absurd superstitious belief of the mob by an act still more absurd, and to bury alive a Gaulish man and a Gaulish woman in the Roman Forum with a view to fulfil the oracle of destiny. ”

“ Men might perhaps speak and write Greek and yet not cease to be Romans; but in this case they accustomed themselves to speak in the Roman language, while the whole inward being and life were Greek. It is not one of the most pleasing, but it is one of the most remarkable and in a historical point of view most instructive, facts in this brilliant era of Roman conservatism, that during its course Hellenism struck root in the whole field of intellect not immediately political, and that the -maitre de plaisir- of the great public and the schoolmaster in close alliance created a Roman literature. ”

“ National patriotism was bestirring itself in Greece as in Carthage: for a moment it seemed possible to kindle a Hellenic national war against Rome. But the general in such a crusade could only be Philip of Macedonia; and he lacked the enthusiasm and the faith in the nation, without which such a war could not be waged. He knew not how to solve the arduous problem of transforming himself from the oppressor into the champion of Greece. His very delay in the conclusion of the alliance with Hannibal damped the first and best zeal of the Greek patriots ”

“ The policy of Rome throughout was not projected by a single mightly intellect and bequeathed traditionally from generation to generation; it was the policy of a very able but somewhat narrow-minded deliberative assembly, which had far too little power of grand combination, and far too much of a right instinct for the preservation of its own commonwealth, to devise projects in the spirit of a Caesar or a Napoleon. The universal empire of Rome had its ultimate ground in the political development of antiquity in general. The ancient world knew nothing of a balance of power among nations ”

“ Italian agriculture saw its very existence endangered by the proof, first afforded in this war, that the Roman people could be supported by grain from Sicily and from Egypt instead of that which they reaped themselves.
Nevertheless the Roman, whom the gods had allowed to survive the close of that gigantic struggle, might look with pride to the past and with confidence to the future. Many errors had been committed, but much suffering had also been endured; the people, whose whole youth capable of arms had for ten years hardly laid aside shield or sword, might excuse many faults. ”

“ Under such circumstances, where art worked for daily wages and the artist instead of receiving due honour was subjected to disgrace, the new national theatre of the Romans could not present any development either original or even at all artistic; and, while the noble rivalry of the noblest Athenians had called into life the Attic drama, the Roman drama taken as a whole could be nothing but a spoiled copy of its predecessor, in which the only wonder is that it has been able to display so much grace and wit in the details. ”

“ The wretched Roman commander, however, knew not how or where to attack; the army marched to and fro in Thessaly, without accomplishing anything of importance. Perseus might have assumed the offensive; he saw that the Romans were badly led and dilatory; the news had passed like wildfire through Greece, that the Greek army had been brilliantly victorious in the first engagement; a second victory might lead to a general rising of the patriot party, and, by commencing a guerilla warfare, might produce incalculable results. But Perseus, while a good soldier, was not a general like his father ”

“ If, in conclusion, we glance back at the career of Rome from the union of Italy to the dismemberment of Macedonia, the universal empire of Rome, far from appearing as a gigantic plan contrived and carried out by an insatiable thirst for territorial aggrandizement, appears to have been a result which forced itself on the Roman government without, and even in opposition to, its wish. ”

“ But we cannot omit to add that, while Carthage had put forth all the efforts of which intellect and wealth were capable to provide herself with artificial means of attack and defence, she was unable in any satisfactory way to make up for the fundamental wants of a land army of her own and of a symmachy resting on a self-supporting basis. That Rome could only be seriously attacked in Italy, and Carthage only in Libya, no one could fail to see; as little could any one fail to perceive that Carthage could not in the long run escape from such an attack. ”