W. Warde Fowler

“ As may, perhaps, be said of ourselves in this present age, the Romans of the Empire were being encouraged to live too much in the enjoyment of the present, without anxiety for the future. So, too, the cultured classes gradually came to look back at the past, to the great achievements of Rome in war and literature, as all in all to them, and lost the desire to strike out new lines, to make new discoveries, to try new experiments. “Over all, to our eyes, there broods the shadow which haunts the life that is nourished only by memories, and to which the future sends no call and offers no promise.” ”

“ AUGUSTUS—THE REVIVAL OF THE ROMAN SPIRIT
The death of Julius Cæsar seemed to plunge the world once more into darkness. We have evidence enough of the general feeling of horror and despair,—a despair hard to realise in our days, when settled and orderly government saves us from all serious anxiety about our lives and property. Power fell into the hands of a far more unscrupulous man than Cæsar, the Mark Antony of Shakespeare’s play; but he had a rival in Cæsar’s nephew and adopted son, afterwards known as Augustus. ”

“ We may find parallels in history to Trajan, less easily, perhaps, to Hadrian and Antoninus; but there is no monarch like Marcus, not even in the history of the Jews. It is, indeed, astonishing that Rome, Rome of the hard practical temperament, should have produced a ruler who was a philosopher and almost a saint, and yet capable of government. It is the last striking manifestation of the old Roman spirit of duty and discipline, now kindled into a real ethical emotion by the teaching of the Stoics, far the most inspiring creed then available for a man of action. ”

“ But during this southward march he learnt, apparently for the first time, that Italy was studded with Roman and Latin colonies, each a fortress, each provisioned and ready to resist him: each, too, a miniature Rome, disseminating among the Italians the honour and pride of Roman citizenship, and the animating spirit of Italian unity under Roman leadership. One or two of these fortresses he vainly tried to take, and he must at this time have begun at last to realise that the mortal hatred of an individual is no match in the long run for the organised vitality of a practical people. ”

“ Now this younger Cæsar, nephew and adopted son of Julius, though not a great soldier or a hero in any sense, was yet one of those rare men who learn wisdom in adversity, and use it to overcome passion and violence in themselves and others. He came gradually to see that Italy and the world could not be rescued from misery and despair by war and strong government alone. He grasped the fact, which Sulla had missed, that the one thing wanting was loyalty—loyalty to himself and belief in his mission: loyalty to Rome and Italy, and belief in their mission in the world. ”

“ It would, indeed, be wrong to say that there is no beauty in Roman art; but it is quite in accordance with what has just been said, that even in the best of it there is a strong tendency to realism, to matter of fact. In their sculpture they were especially strong in portraiture, and in depicting scenes of human life they never or rarely idealise. A battle scene, or a picture on stone of life in a city, is crowded with figures, just because it really was so, and the work is without that restfulness for the eye which the perfect grouping 10 of a Greek artist so often supplies. ”

“ But a hero it must have, and he must be placed, not in the burning light of the politics of the day, but in the dim distance of the past. Such a hero was found in the mythical ancestor of the Julian family, Æneas, son of Venus and Anchises. A legend, familiar to educated Romans, told how this Trojan hero, whose personality appears in Homer, wandered over the seas after the fall of Troy, and landed at last in Italy; how he subdued the wild tribes then dwelling in Latium, brought peace and order and civilisation, and was under the hand of destiny the founder of the great career of Rome. ”

“ Italy has given the world two of the greatest poems ever written: the Æneid of Virgil, and the Divina Commedia of Dante, in which the younger poet took the imaginary figure of his predecessor as his guide and teacher in his travel through the scenes of the nether world.
But we must now leave poetry for fact and action, and try to gain some idea of that work of Augustus which laid the solid foundation of a new imperial system; a system of which we moderns not only see the relics still around us, but feel unconsciously the influence in many ways. ”

“ It would be unjust to the memory of a great man if we were to think of Trajan as a soldier only. He was a strenuous man, unsparing of himself in any part of his duty. He pursued a policy of public benefit in Italy, striving, like Augustus, to encourage agriculture and population, and carrying out a plan of his predecessor Nerva for providing a fund for the education of poor children. This last institution became an important one, and shows well how really benevolent—perhaps even to excess—how anxious for the well-being of Italy, were the Cæsars of the second century. ”

“ But it is hard for young nations, as for young men, to realise the need of rest, and all the harder in ancient Italy, where fighting had hardly ceased to be looked on as “the natural industry of a vigorous State.” The Roman Senate was not ripe enough in knowledge of human nature to understand the mischief, moral as well as material, that a long war can cause, especially if the enemy has been in your country harrying and devouring, no one knowing when his turn will come to be ruined. ”

“ Fascinating as we may find Hannibal’s wonderful career, much as we may admire his nobility of character, a sober judgment must lead to the conclusion that no great man ever did less for the good of his fellow-creatures. During the fifteen years of his stay in Italy he did irreparable damage to the fair peninsula, and he hardened the hearts of the Romans for all their future dealings with their foes. ”

“ It is plain, then, that we have to do in this volume with a people not of imagination, but of action: a people intensely alive to the necessities and difficulties of human life. The Romans were, in fact, the most practical people in history; and this enabled them to supply what was wanting to the civilisation of the Mediterranean basin in the work of the Greeks. They themselves were well aware of this quality, and proud of it. We find it expressed by the elder Cato quite at the beginning of the best age of Roman literature ”

“ This intelligence, combined with great strength of will, made him master of the Roman Empire; and though his character was by no means perfect, he seems to have used his mastership, not like a capricious Oriental despot, but with a real sense of responsibility. A man who combines the qualities of an intelligent statesman in bad times with a generous temper, good taste and good scholarship, surely deserves to be thought of as one altogether out of the common. ”

“ The prize fell to Sulla; but no sooner was his back turned on Italy than the Marian faction fell on their political enemies and sought to destroy them by wholesale murder. Compromise was utterly forgotten; all the brutality of unbridled human nature was let loose. And when Sulla returned from the East, after driving the enemy out of Roman territory, the massacres were revenged by more massacres. The loss to Italy of many thousands of her best men, and among them scores who might have done good work in the world, was a calamity never to be repaired. ”

“ Imagination in action takes the form of adventurousness, as we may see in our own history; the literary imaginativeness of Elizabethan England has its counterpart in the adventurous voyages of Elizabethan seamen. The Romans were not an adventurous people; they were not imaginative enough to be so. They penetrated, indeed, into unknown countries; Cæsar reached Britain and bridged the Rhine, but that great man, a true Roman born, had a temperament rather scientific than romantic. ”

“ In Greece many States found leisure to rest and enjoy the exercise of their higher instincts—enjoyment which led to the production of works of art and literature: leisure, too, to reflect and inquire about Nature in man and outside him, and so to develop philosophy and science for the eternal benefit of mankind. But all the strength of Rome was used in the struggle for existence, which gradually led her on to conquest and dominion. ”

“ A senator held office for life unless ejected by the Censor for immorality, while all the magistrates were elected for a year only. In the Senate there sat for life every man who had held high office and done the State good service, and as there were some three hundred of these, it was almost impossible for the yearly holders of imperium to resist their deliberate judgments. And for those judgments the Senate was responsible to no man.
Probably no assembly has ever comprised so much practical wisdom and experience as the Roman Senate of this period ”

“ With the death of Sulla ends what we may call the first act of the Roman Revolution. We are now in the middle of a revolution in more than one sense of that word. The constitution and the government of Rome are being slowly but surely changed, and at the same time the era of the free and independent city-state of the Græco-Roman world is being brought to an end. Both these changes, as we can see now, were inevitable; without them the civilised world could not have been defended against barbarian invasion, or Italy united into a contented whole possessed of Roman citizenship. ”

“ Thus, though the shrinkage of the free population was evil enough, the remedy for it was even worse. The slave, plucked up by the roots from the soil in which he had flourished in his native land, deprived of family, property, religion, must in the majority of cases become a demoralised and hopeless being. In the plays of Plautus, which date from this period, the slave is a liar and a thief, and apparently without a conscience. For the slave-owner, too, the moral results were bad enough, though not so obvious at first sight. ”

“ Her foreign policy was to be guided by Rome: she could no longer be called an independent State.
So ended this great trial of Roman endurance. No people has ever gone through a 110 harder test and survived. The sense of duty and discipline never once failed them; Romans and Italians alike were ready to face death at any moment in defence of their country. But war, always mischievous, when prolonged can sow the seeds of much evil in the future; and we must confess with regret that we are to see but little more of the heroic qualities that had carried Rome through this great struggle. ”

“ Without any aid from Christianity, which, indeed, he could not understand and occasionally persecuted, Marcus learnt not only how to make his own life pure, but how to live and work for the world of his day. ”

“ In the East Augustus contrived to do without war, trusting, and rightly trusting, to the enormous prestige he had won by overcoming Antony and Cleopatra, and annexing the ancient kingdom of Egypt. His fame spread to India, and probably even to China, with the caravans of merchants who then as now passed along fixed routes from Syria and Egypt to the Far East. We Britons know what prestige can do among Orientals; it is a word that has often been in disfavour, but it means that there are ways of avoiding war without withdrawing just claims to influence. ”

“ The Greeks were the one people who could undertake what we call the higher education, and they were now beginning to swarm in Rome. Some Greek teachers were free men, but the greater number were slaves captured in the wars; and thus the first requisite in a school-master, that he should be looked up to and willingly obeyed, was too often absent in this new education. It is men, not methods, that really tell in education. In his heart, as we know from many striking passages in Roman literature, the grown-up Roman despised the Greek, and we may be sure that the Roman boy did too. ”

“ Some mocking voices were heard, and throughout his principate of twenty-three years Tiberius had to endure continual annoyance from the old republican families, but there was no real attempt to quarrel with the principate as an institution of the Roman State.
I have dwelt on this point at some length in order to show what a singular creation this principate of Augustus was. To proclaim monarchy outright would probably have been fatal; to take the whole work on himself would be to leave the old governing families idle and discontented ”

“ Along the whole length of the lower Danube a great mass of barbarian tribes was already pressing, pressed themselves from behind by others to north and east. And here, to the north of the river, a great kingdom had been founded by a king of the Dacian people, which corresponds roughly with the modern Roumania. A glance at a map of the Empire will show that such a kingdom would be a standing menace to Italy, to Greece, and even to the peninsula of Asia Minor, and from the Roman point of view Trajan was quite justified in his determination to conquer and annex it. ”

“ That object will seem a singular one to those who are unacquainted with the Greek and 181 Roman culture of this age. What roused a poet’s passion in this man’s mind was simply the desire to free others, as he had freed himself, from the fetters of superstition, or, as he calls it, religion; to make them abandon the delusive dream of a life after death, to repudiate the old stories of torment in Hades, and all foolish legends of the gods, who in his view took no interest whatever in human life. ”

“ A man who is served by scores of fellow-creatures who are absolutely at his mercy is liable to have his sense of duty gradually paralysed. Towards them he has no obligations, only rights; and thus his sense of duty towards his free fellow-citizens is apt to be paralysed too. A habit of mind acquired in dealing with one set of men naturally extends itself and affects all human relations. And so the Roman character, naturally hard enough, came in the later days of the Republic to be harder than ever. ”

“ Italy is a mountainous country—a fact never to be forgotten in Roman history—and its mountains, the long chain of the Apennines, have their spinal ridge much nearer the east than the west coast, and descend upon the sea so sharply on that side that for long distances road or railway only just finds a passage. ”

“ So it is that the story of the succeeding century, the last before the Christian era, is one of the most thrilling interest. How did Rome survive and overcome these dangers with renewed strength, and succeed in organising an Empire on the firm foundations of law and justice, destined to hold the barbarians at bay long enough to inspire them with profound respect for the civilisation they were attacking? ”

“ Plutarch, writing in this period of his own little town of Chæronea in Greece, realises this to the full, and urges that the work of the magistrate is honourable work, and the more so as it is combined with the sense of citizenship in a great empire.
There was, however, a tendency in these provincial towns, as in the city of Rome itself, for the magistrate, who must be a man of substance, to undertake the expense of amusing the people; a tendency to make the people dependent on the rich for their comforts rather than on their own industry and exertion. ”

“ Yet it is possible that the idea of active duty to the State and its deities, as well as to the family and its presiding spirits, was all the more vividly kept up in the absence of intellectual interests. As life in the city became more usual, the boys of good families had more opportunity of learning what was meant by duty to the State; they accompanied their fathers to hear funeral orations on eminent citizens, and were even 63 admitted to meetings of the Senate. In this way they must have developed a shrewdness and practical sagacity invaluable to them in after life. ”

“ During the first century of the Empire, chiefly under the influence of the Stoic philosophy, as later on under that of Christianity, there had been growing up a feeling that a slave was, after all, a human being, and had some claim to be treated as such under the Roman law, beneficent in its dealings with all other human beings. Antoninus followed out this new idea both in legislation and in his private life, as did his successor also, who adored his memory. ”

“ The fact is that the Romans were now coming under the influence of a new idea of life, in which the individual played a more important part than ever before at Rome. The Roman of the past had grown up modelled on a type and fixed in a group, so that the individual had little chance of asserting himself; but now we find him asserting himself in every direction, and in every class of society. To think for oneself, even in matters of religion; to speak from personal motives in the senate or law-courts ”

“ No Roman senator had a doubt that his people were the strongest and most competent to control the world, which is exactly what the patriotic German believes now. And the constant assertion of this proud conviction brought many suitors and suppliants to Rome, whose presence flattered Roman pride, and whose diplomacy sometimes involved the government in new wars, giving ambitious consuls their opportunity of increasing the fame and the wealth of themselves and their families. ”

“ Ambition, says the superficial historian; the desire to make himself in due time tyrant of Rome and the Empire. But we may take it as certain that Cæsar, a man whose health was never strong, would not have exposed himself to constant peril of his life for nine successive years had he really all the time been nursing a secret ambition which death or serious illness might at any time destroy. What he really seems to have loved, like C. Gracchus, was work—steady, hard work with no one to hinder him, and with a definite practical object before him. ”

“ As the Roman oligarchy stood to the people, so Rome herself stood as an oligarchy to the populations of her Empire. The Roman citizen was the one most highly privileged person in the civilised world of that day. The great prize of his citizenship was not, as we might suppose it would be, the right to vote in the assemblies, to choose magistrates and pass or reject laws, nor the right to hold office if elected, for to that distinction very few could aspire ”

“ If we can accept the motive of the foundation—the defence of Latium against 26 her foe, we need not trouble about the many legends of it.
Rome started on her wonderful career as a military outpost of a people akin to her, and face to face with an enemy with whom she had no sort of relationship. If she could but hold her position there was obviously a great future for her. The position on the Tiber was, in fact, strategically the best in Italy. It is, as a great Roman historian said, just in the centre of the peninsula. ”

“ Midway between these two, we have the great Latin poets constantly singing of the hardihood and the practical virtues which had made Rome great, and Italy great under Rome’s leadership. “A race of hardy breed, we carry our children to the streams and harden them in the bitter, icy water; as boys they spend wakeful nights over the chase, and tire out the whirlwind, but in manhood, unwearied by toil and trained to poverty, 13 they subdue the soil with their mattocks, or shake towns in war” (Virg., Æn. ix. 607 foll.) ”

“ Depopulation, decline of agriculture, slavery and its accompanying evils, injustice to the Italian allies and the ever-growing discontent occasioned by it, misgovernment and plunder 135 in the provinces, all these sources of mischief were now accumulating force, and were before long to bring the whole Roman system to the brink of ruin. But Rome on the brink of ruin meant civilisation in imminent danger; for no other power could any longer withstand the barbarians of northern Europe, who were even now beginning to press down into sunny southern lands. ”

“ Henceforward for a long period there was no constitution that could claim an honest man’s loyalty or devotion; the idea of the State was growing dim, and the result was inefficiency in every department. The governing class was corrupt and the army undisciplined, and this at a time when there was coming upon Rome, and upon the civilised world, a period of extreme peril from foreign enemies. ”