Speculum historiale

“ The Speculum affords the most conclusive proof of the spuriousness of another work attributed to Richard and long accepted by the learned world as his. This was the De Situ Britanniae, an elaborate forgery relating to the antiquities of Roman Britain, which first appeared at Copenhagen in the year 1747. ”

“ There was also a Speculum Regum, or Mirror of Kings, and a century later an English ecclesiastic wrote a Speculum Regis, but the writer knows of no other work called the Speculum Regale.
It is an interesting question whether the King’s Mirror was inspired by any earlier work written along similar lines. Originality was a rare virtue in the middle ages, and the good churchmen who wrote books in those days cannot have regarded plagiarism as a mortal sin. The great writers were freely copied by the lesser men, thoughts, titles, statements, and even the wording being often taken outright. ”

“ But all this literature, powerful, soul-stirring though it was, only touched, comparatively speaking, a very few of the men and women who made up the mighty world of Rome. The great mass of the peoples of the Empire neither read the books nor heard the words of the teachers of the New Religion.
Something more was needed to touch the masses of the people—something thousands might see and hear of; something they might see for themselves. That something was supplied by the noble army of martyrs. ”

“ Nor is the behaviour of the two Antonine Emperors, who ruled over the Roman Empire for a period of some forty-two years, towards their Christian subjects in any way at variance with their known principles. Such men, with their lofty ideals, with their firm unyielding persuasion that Rome owed her grandeur and power, her past prosperity and her present position as a World-Empire, to the protection of the Immortals whom their fathers worshipped, could not well have acted differently. ”

“ The new member moved in that narrow circle of ideas which through its very narrowness was strong enough to baffle Pyrrhus, Hannibal, and Philip, and to half complete the organisation of the world. The men that rose above it—Scipio, the Gracchi, Caesar—found endless difficulties in their path, and originality of conception, which is conspicuous by its absence in the organisation of the Roman Empire, led its possessors to exile, death, or monarchy. ”

“ It was the settled policy of Rome steadily to repress and to stamp out all organizations, all self-governing communities, or clubs, as highly dangerous to the spirit of imperial policy; and as the result of the trials and inquiries which followed the fire of Rome, it found in the Christian community a living embodiment of this tendency which hitherto Rome had succeeded in crushing—found that in their midst, in the capital and in the provinces, an extra-imperial unity was fast growing up—an Empire within the Empire. ”

“ The first Antonine was conscious that the soft, luxurious city life of which Rome was the great example, and which was too faithfully copied in the wealthy provincial centres, was enfeebling the Empire,—the builders and makers of Rome he well knew were the hardy race of men who feared the old gods and who were ready to fight and die for their country, and these men were the peasant-farmers produced by the old rural life of Italy. ”

“ Marcus before all things, it must ever be remembered, was a Roman. To the Emperor, the tradition of Rome was a dogma. “Every moment,” he wrote, “think ever as a Roman and a man; do whatever thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity” (II. 5) .
That he abhorred the Christian sect who poured scorn upon the traditions he loved, and contempt upon the gods whom he adored, was perfectly natural ”

“ It was a sect professing, as it seemed to the Emperor, a new religion—a religion which claimed for the One it worshipped a solitary supremacy—a religion which regarded the awful gods of Rome as shadows, as mere phantoms of the imagination. Well might sovereigns like the Antonines shudder at a teaching which would appear to a true patriot Roman, whose heart was all aflame with national pride, to involve the most daring impiety, the most shocking blasphemy; which would threaten a tremendous risk for the future of her people, if this fatal teaching should spread. ”

“ The probable inference is that the first volume of which Possevinus, Fabricius, and the authors of the Histoire litteraire were unable to find a copy, was likewise the first volume of the Speculum.
10. These last writers state, with Oudin, that the book contained little original matter, being mainly compiled by means of extracts from the fathers. Nevertheless they regard it as the source from which (a) the Philosophia, (b) the Secunda Philosophia, and (c) the Tertia Philosophia, were successively abridged ; a statement which has been repeated Cousin and others. ”

“ In the early days of Christianity it must be borne in mind that the widely extended world of Rome was not as in mediæval and modern times, made up of different nations and peoples, but that the Roman world was all one, that men were fellow-subjects of one great Empire, and that the passing to and fro from land to land was far more common than in after times; and that Christians, whether belonging to Asia or to Greece, to Italy or to Gaul, made up one great Brotherhood. ”

“ For his second edition of the Fasciculus temporum, published 14th February 1480, he had a few new blocks made, some of which were copied from Speculum cuts. At last, on the 19th April 1481, he published an Epistles and Gospels in Dutch, and into that he introduced two cut-up portions of the real old Speculum blocks. This was the last book Veldener is known to have printed at Utrecht. For two years we hear nothing more of him, and then he reappears at Kuilenburg, whither he removed his presses. There, on the 27th September 1483, he printed a quarto edition of the Speculum in Dutch. ”

“ There were also four editions of the Speculum and eight editions of the Doctrinale. In each case the evidence of other printers shows that even one of the small editions usually published at that time lasted for a considerable period. The appearance of the books themselves bears out this conclusion. Good as the later ones are, they are inferior to Mainz workmanship of their period and the earlier ones are far inferior to Mainz workmanship of any period. ”

“ And yet, now that the moral interest of the Roman history is quite at an end, a new one begins: the history of Rome becomes neither more nor less than the general history of those ages, and the events in the latter which find no place in the former, are so insignificant that they cannot be made into an independent history. ”

“ The Antonines were intensely persuaded that all that was great and glorious in the Roman Empire came from the simple and even austere life led by their fathers under the protection of the mighty Immortals—of Jupiter of the Capitol, of Mars the Avenger, of Vesta with her sacred fire, of the great Twin Brethren—of the gods whose temples with their golden roofs were the stately ornaments of the Forum on which the Emperors looked down from their proud home on the Palatine Hill. ”

“ When the proconsul Saturninus invited Speratus to swear by the genius of the emperor, the proconsul promising the Christians mercy if they would do this and return to the worship of the gods, Speratus answered, 'I know of no genius of the ruler of this earth, but I serve my God who is in heaven, whom no man hath seen nor can see. ”

“ The iron legs point to a fourth power, and that is understood of the Roman empire, which is more powerful [1] than all the kingdoms which were before it. But the fact that the feet were partly of iron and partly clay, indicates that the Roman empire is to be divided, so as never to be united. This, too, has been fulfilled, for the Roman state is ruled not by one emperor but by several, and these are always quarreling among themselves, either in actual warfare or by factions. ”

“ They would preserve the mighty Empire from the decay which they perceived was fast gaining ground; they would set, by their own example, the vogue of the purer, simpler religious life on which the foundation stories of the Empire had been so securely laid; hence the bitter persecution of the Christian sect which was so striking and painful a feature in the Antonine administration of the Empire,—a persecution evidently active and bitter in the reign of Pius, but which greatly increased in intensity and virulence under the rule of his successor Marcus. ”

“ Give yourself to the city, to the senate. Rome flourishes, the whole republic flourishes. Thanks to the Roman army, to an army truly Roman; at length we have recovered our just authority, the end of all our desires. We hear appeals, we appoint proconsuls, we create emperors; perhaps too we may restrain them—to the wise a word is sufficient.” These lofty expectations were, however, soon disappointed; nor, indeed, was it possible that the armies and the provinces should long obey the luxurious and unwarlike nobles of Rome. ”

“ When, during Roman conquests, the tendency for the successful general to become despot, repeatedly displayed, finally took effect—when the title imperator, military in its primary meaning, became the title for the civil ruler, showing us on a higher platform that genesis of political headship out of military headship visible from the beginning—when, as usually happens, an increasingly-divine character was acquired by the civil ruler, as shown in the assumption of the severed name Augustus, as well as in the growth of an actual worship of him ”

“ REASONS OF THE PERSECUTING POLICY OF THE ANTONINES Among the subjects of the Empire only one group stood persistently aloof from the crowds of worshippers who again thronged these time-honoured shrines; this group refused to share in the ancient Roman cult which the Antonines had once more made the vogue in Rome and in her provinces, a cult to which these great pagan Emperors ever referred the glories of the past, and on which they grounded their hopes of a yet more splendid future for Rome. ”

“ Thus Rome was enlarged by a third element, which is not, however, on an equal footing with the other two, but is in subjection to them, just as Ireland was to Great Britain before the year 1782. Yet although they were obliged to acknowledge this supremacy, they were already looked upon as being a part of the whole, as a third tribus with an independent administration, though with inferior rights. What here shows us our way is the statement of Festus, who on the subject of Roman antiquities is very trustworthy, inasmuch as he makes extracts from Verrius Flaccus. ”

“ Having done this, he said to the King, "Dost thou appoint me to do the pleasure of the people of Rome, me and my implements and my attendants with me?" And the King answered, "So that it be without damage to the people of Rome." Then the herald appointed one Spurius to be minister that he should take the oath, and touched his hair with the sacred herbs. And when Spurius had taken the oath, and the conditions of the treaty had been read aloud, he spake, saying, "Hear thou, Jupiter, and thou also, minister of the people of Alba, and ye men of Alba ”

“ In ancient Rome the law forbade that a bachelor should inherit any legacy whatever, and in Sparta, under the rule of Lycurgus, they were not permitted to have a part in the government, nor might they occupy any civil or military post. ”

“ Procopius and the Secret History New light has been cast, from more than one side, on the reign of Justinian where there are so many uncertain and interesting places. The first step that methodical history had to take was a thoroughgoing criticism of Procopius, and this was more than half done by Dahn in his elaborate monograph. The double problem of the "Secret History" has stimulated the curiosity of the historian and the critic. ”

“ Rome allowed this new spirit to grow up among the remnant of the people she had crushed, and made no effort to interfere with the Jamnia Rabbinic school. The statesmen of the Empire were quite content that the restless people, so long a danger to the State, should turn its attention to other matters unconnected with aspirations after independence. ”

“ The cycle of a nation's history can indeed never be broken as long as the character of the nation remains the same. And the average Roman of the middle of the second century before our era [1] was in all essential particulars the Roman of the times of Appius and of Licinius, or even of the epoch when the ten commissioners had published the Tables which were to stamp its perpetual character on Roman law. He was in his business relations either oppressor or oppressed, either hammer or anvil. ”

“ In fact, the value of a historian’s work lies precisely in his ability to show that the forces which shaped mediæval history were already at work during the period of ancient times and that the causes which had molded the Roman empire continued to operate in some degree for many centuries after the fall of Rome. ”

“ FESTUS, SEXTUS POMPEIUS, Roman grammarian, probably flourished in the 2nd century A.D. He made an epitome of the celebrated work De verborum significatu, a valuable treatise alphabetically arranged, written by M. Verrius Flaccus, a freedman and celebrated grammarian who flourished in the reign of Augustus. Festus gives the etymology as well as the meaning of every word; and his work throws considerable light on the language, mythology and antiquities of ancient Rome. ”