Theodor Mommsen

“ The Latin religion, reduced as it was to the level of ordinary perception, was completely intelligible to every one, and accessible in common to all; and therefore the Roman community preserved the equality of its citizens, while Hellas, where religion rose to the level of the highest thought, had from the earliest times to endure all the blessing and curse of an aristocracy of intellect. The Latin religion like every other had its origin in the effort to fathom the abyss of thought ”

“ Rome was in fact a commercial city, which was indebted for the commencement of its importance to international intercourse, and which with a noble liberality granted the privilege of settlement to every offspring of an unequal marriage, to every manumitted slave, to every stranger who, surrendering his rights at home, emigrated to Rome, and in fact to a great extent even to the foreigner, who retained his rights as a burgess in a friendly community. ”

“ No Italian Homer, however, has preserved for us a picture of these earliest frays and plundering excursions, in which the character of nations is moulded and expressed, like the mind of the man in the sports and enterprises of the boy; nor does historical tradition enable us to form a judgment, with even approximate accuracy, as to the outward development of power and comparative resources in the several cantons of Latium. It is only in the case of Rome, at the utmost, that we can trace in some degree the extension of its power and of its territory. ”

“ But above all no development of national poetry took place in Latium. It is the deepest and noblest effect of the fine arts and above all of poetry, that they do away with the barriers of civil communities, and create out of tribes one nation and out of the nations one world. As in the present day by means of our cosmopolitan literature the distinctions of civilized nations are done away, so Greek poetic art transformed the narrow and egotistical sense of tribe-relationship into the consciousness of an Hellenic nation, and that again into the consciousness of a broad humanity. ”

“ While the Italian peninsula still lay enveloped in the dim twilight of morning, the regions of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean had already emerged into the full light of a varied and richly developed civilization. It falls to the lot of most nations in the early stages of their development to be taught and trained by some rival sister-nation; and such was destined to be in an eminent degree the lot of the peoples of Italy. ”

“ It is time therefore to desist from that childish view of history which believes that it can commend the Greeks only at the expense of the Romans, or the Romans only at the expense of the Greeks; and as we allow the oak to hold its own beside the rose, so should we abstain from praising or censuring the two noblest organizations which antiquity has produced, and comprehend the truth that their distinctive excellences have a necessary connection with their respective defects. ”

“ The Roman law knew no distinctions of quality in inheritance, and no locking up of estates; it allowed on the one hand, to every man capable of making a disposition, the entirely unlimited disposal of his property during his lifetime; and, on the other hand, so far as we know, to every one who was at all entitled to have dealings with Roman burgesses, even to the foreigner and the client, the unlimited right of acquiring moveable, and (from the time when immoveables could be held as private property at all) also immoveable, estate in Rome. ”

“ It appears, from many indications, that the houses of the old and powerful families were constructed somewhat in the style of fortresses and were rendered capable of defence—a precaution, it may be presumed, not unnecessary. It was the magnificent scheme of fortification ascribed to King Servius Tullius, that first surrounded, not merely those two cities of the Palatine and Quirinal, but also the heights of the Aventine and the Capitoline which were not comprehended within their enclosure, with a single great ring- wall, and thereby created the new Rome—the Rome of history. ”

“ The art of measuring brings the world into subjection to man; the art of writing prevents his knowledge from perishing with himself; together they make man, what nature has not made him, all-powerful and eternal. It is the privilege and duty of history to trace the course of national progress along these paths also.
Italian measures. Measurement necessarily presupposes the development of the several ideas of units of time, of space, and of weight, and of a whole as consisting of equal parts, or in other words of number and of a numeral system. ”

“ Poetry is impassioned language, and its modulation is melody. While in this sense no people is without poetry and music some nations have received a pre-eminent endowment of poetic gifts. The Italian nation, however, was not and is not one of these. The Italian is deficient in the passion of the heart, and in the longing to idealize what is human and to give life to the things of the inanimate world, which form the very essence of poetic art. ”

“ It was not the province of the civil authorities, still less of the individual burgess or of the wholly powerless priest, to carry into effect the divine curse; the life of the person accursed was forfeited not to man but to the gods. But the pious popular faith, on which that curse was based, would in earlier times have power even over natures frivolous and wicked; and the civilizing agency of religion must have exercised an influence deeper and purer precisely because it was not contaminated by any appeal to the secular arm. ”

“ So far, therefore, as cycles of culture admit of demarcation at all, we may regard that cycle as an unity which has its culminating points denoted by the names Thebes, Carthage, Athens, and Rome. The four nations represented by these names, after each of them had attained in a path of its own a peculiar and noble civilization, mingled with one another in the most varied relations of reciprocal intercourse, and skilfully elaborated and richly developed all the elements of human nature. ”

“ Temples and sanctuaries arose on all the summits, above all the federal sanctuary of Diana on the Aventine (P. 111) , and on the summit of the stronghold the far-seen temple of father Diovis, who had given to his people all this glory, and who now, when the Romans were triumphing over the surrounding nations, triumphed along with them over the subject gods of the vanquished.
The names of the men at whose bidding these great structures of the city arose are almost as completely lost in oblivion as those of the leaders in the earliest battles and victories of Rome. ”

“ In Rome the household was not absolutely annihilated, and the community aggrandized at its expense, as was the case in the police organization of Lycurgus. It was one of the most undeniable as well as one of the most remarkable principles of the primitive constitution of Borne, that the state might imprison or hang the burgess, but might not take away from him his son or his field, or even lay taxation on him. No community was so all-powerful within its own sphere as the Roman ”

“ Italian soil gave birth in ancient times to burlesque tragedy, and in modern times to burlesques of the poetry of chivalry. In rhetoric and theatrical art especially no other nation equalled or equals the Italians. But in the more perfect kinds of art they have hardly advanced beyond cleverness of execution, and no epoch of their literature has produced a true epos or a genuine drama. ”

“ No people on earth was great enough by its own efforts to create either the marvel of Hellenic, or the marvel in a later period of Christian culture; history has produced these most brilliant results only where the ideas of Aramaic religion have sunk into an Indo-Germanic soil. But if for this reason Hellas is the prototype of purely human, Latium is not less for all time the prototype of national development ”

“ While in the case of the Greek every important notion speedily expanded into a group of forms, and gathered around it a circle of legends and ideas, in the case of the Roman the fundamental thought remained stationary in its original naked rigidity. The religion of Rome had nothing of its own peculiar growth even remotely parallel to the religion of Apollo investing earthly morality with its halo of glory, to the divine intoxication of Dionysus, or to the Chthonian and mystical worships with their profound and hidden meanings. ”

“ If, in fine, we are to form a judgment respecting the endowments of the different Italian nations, we already at this stage perceive—what becomes indeed far more obvious in the later stages of the history of art—that while the Etruscans perhaps practised art at an earlier period and produced more massive and rich workmanship, their works are interior to those of the Latins and Sabellians in appositeness and utility no less than in spirit and beauty. This certainly is apparent, in the case of our present epoch, only in architecture. ”

“ The very highest literary works that have been successfully produced in Italy, divine poems like Dante's Commedia, and historical treatises such as those of Sallust and Macchiavelli, of Tacitus and Colletta, are pervaded by a passion more rhetorical than spontaneous. Even in music, both in ancient and modern times, real creative talent has been far less conspicuous than the facility, which speedily assumes the character of virtuosoship, and enthrones in the room of genuine and genial art a hollow and heart-withering idol. ”

“ The poetical form, and the genial symbolism, which so pleasingly prevail in the Germanic legal ordinances, were foreign to the Roman; in his law all was clear and precise, no symbol was employed, no institution was superfluous. It was not cruel; everything necessary was performed without tedious ceremony, even the punishment of death; that a free man could not be tortured was a primitive maxim of Roman law, to obtain which other peoples have had to struggle for thousands of years. ”

“ Even the legend betrays its sense of the strangeness of the fact: the story of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Alba under the leadership of the sons of an Alban prince, Romulus and Remus, is nothing but a naïve attempt of primitive quasi-history to explain the singular circumstance that the place should have arisen on a site so unfavourable, and to connect at the same time the origin of Rome with the general metropolis of Latium. ”

“ The death of the individual was not an evil, for it was a matter of necessity; but the extinction of a household or of a clan was an evil, even for the community itself, which in the earliest times, therefore, opened up to the childless the means of avoiding such a fatality by their adopting, in presence of the people, the children of others as their own.
The Roman family from the first contained within it the conditions of a higher culture in the moral adjustment of the mutual relations of its members. Man alone could be head of a family. ”

“ It seems as if the small and ever diminishing number and the meaningless character of the Italian, and particularly of the Roman, individual names, compared with the luxuriant and poetical fulness of those of the Greeks, were intended to illustrate the truth that it was characteristic of the one nation to reduce all features of distinctive personality to an uniform level, of the other freely to promote their development. ”

“ The legal check, again, upon the king's power lay in the principle that he was entitled only to execute the law, not to alter it: in reality, every deviation from the law had to receive the previous sanction of the assembly of the people; if it was not so sanctioned, it was a null and tyrannical act, carrying no legal effects. It thus appears that the power of the king in Rome was, both morally and legally, altogether different from the sovereignty of the present day. There is no counterpart in modern life either to the Roman household or to the Roman state. ”

“ Thus there not only existed in Latium the same fundamental elements in which Hellenic culture and art originated, but Hellenic culture and art themselves exercised a powerful influence over Latium in very early times. Not only did the Latins possess the elements of gymnastic training, seeing that the Roman boy learned like every farmer's son to manage horses and waggon and to handle the huntingspear, and that in Rome every burgess was at the same time a soldier ”

“ That which is gained by war may be wrested from the grasp by war again, but it is not so with the conquests made by the plough; while the Romans lost many battles, they scarcely ever on making peace ceded Roman soil, and for this result they were indebted to the tenacity with which the farmers clung to their fields and homesteads. The strength of man and of the state lies in their dominion over the soil; the greatness of Rome was built on the most extensive and immediate mastery of her citizens over her soil, and on the compact unity of the body which thus acquired so firm a hold. ”

“ With all these facts before us, we cannot allow that there ever was a time when the Greeks in all Hellenic districts subsisted by purely pastoral husbandry. If it was the possession of cattle, and not that of land, that in Greece, as in Italy, formed the basis and the standard of all private property, the reason of this was, not that agriculture was of later introduction, but that it was at first conducted on the system of joint possession. Of course a purely agricultural economy cannot have existed anywhere before the separation of the stocks ”

“ On the other hand, the comparison of languages, when conducted with accuracy and caution, may give us an approximate idea of the degree of culture which the people had reached when these separations took place, and so furnish us with the beginnings of history, which is nothing but the development of civilization. For language, especially in the period of its formation, is the true image and organ of the degree of civilization attained ”

“ The field of the inward in art (so far as we may in the case of art distinguish the inward and outward at all) is not that which has fallen to the Italian as his special province; the power of beauty, to have its full effect upon him, must be placed, not ideally before his mind, but sensuously before his eyes. Accordingly he is thoroughly at home in architecture, painting, and sculpture; in these he was during the epoch of ancient culture the best disciple of the Hellenes, and in modern times he has become the instructor of all nations.
Dance, music, and song in Latium. ”

“ THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION OF ROME.
The Roman house. Father and mother, sons and daughters, home and homestead, servants and chattels—such are the natural elements constituting the household in all cases, where polygamy has not obliterated the distinctive position of the mother. But the nations that have been most susceptible of culture have diverged widely from each other in their conception and treatment of the natural distinctions which the household thus presents. By some they have been apprehended and wrought out more profoundly, by others more superficially ”

“ But the greatness of Rome was involved in, and was based upon, the fact that the Roman people ordained for itself and endured a system of law, in which the eternal principles of liberty and of subordination, of property and of rightful redress, reigned and still at the present day reign unadulterated and unmodified. ”