In these chapters, as I have before stated, my attempt is not so much
to show what the schools accomplished in the ancient nations herein
discussed, as to show their educative influence upon the world. Each
nation has a mission given it to perform. Divine Providence gives
to each a special work that is useful to all mankind. The national
development is first an education of itself and secondly an education
of mankind. This is true, in an especial sense, of the Jews, the
Greeks and the Romans. All modern civilization grows from a three-fold
root—Roman law, Greek science and art, Hebrew spirituality. Of course
I restrict the word “civilization” in the above statement to Christian
and Mohammedan nations—Mohammedan nations have more Hebrew and Greek
and less Roman in their civilization.
We have given some consideration, already, to the Jewish and Greek
educations, and it remains for us here to study the Roman character and
achievements.
Let us place before ourselves the conclusion that thoughtful writers
on the subject have long since reached: The Roman principle is that
of compromise or mutual concession for the sake of the highest good
and the safety of the state. A more attractive rendering of this
principle would run somewhat as follows: The Roman people learned to
distinguish between individual wishes and desires, and the duty owed
to the state or political whole, and they were the first to define
with great precision the spheres of private and public rights and
duties. Then they conquered the world and disciplined all peoples into
this recognition of private and public spheres, and destroyed all
local patriotism and all local religions. This destruction of local
patriotism and religion prepared the way for the coming of Christianity.
According to the general tradition, the origin of Rome was in the
collection of a band of outlaws on one of the Seven Hills. The
historian, Livy, calls them a _colluvies_, to express their coming
together from different surrounding nations. Here was the border land
of the Sabines, Latins, and Etruscans. The robbers must stand by each
other as they have a common cause against all surrounding states. Here
in the very beginning we have the most important element of the Roman
principle. We see a union of different national stocks, different
personal habits, different dialects, different social prejudices, and
especially different religious ideas. All was difference except the
common cause against avenging justice that pursued them. This however
was a cause that involved life and death. They band together like
robbers and make the safety of the community the chief object, and do
not interfere with whatever private customs and usages the members of
the league may have.
Here we see at the beginning the principle of toleration of a private
or personal sphere for each citizen as contrasted with the sphere
of public duty. The citizen is protected in the exercise of his own
pleasure in his personal affairs where they are different to the public
world, but on the other hand he must unhesitatingly sacrifice all when
Rome’s interest demands it. His home and religion are matters that the
state does not regulate nor allow neighbors to interfere with. The
public concern of all is the safety of Rome. The citizen is in constant
training to preserve his two-fold attitude of private and public life.
He is always on the watch to control himself from stepping beyond the
prescribed boundary and trespassing on the province of others, and he
is always jealously defending his own domain from trespass. He is
cultivating a consciousness of legality, a consciousness of statutes
and regulations which are not in conformity with his own inclination,
but necessary for Rome.
Each citizen learns to subordinate his caprice and inclination to the
command of the state. This seems so much a matter of course with us
that we do not at first see anything strange in the attitude of the
Roman citizen. We forget that we have inherited this from Rome, and
that it began with Rome and had no existence in other nations. With
other people the religious principle and the state were homogeneous.
Where the one penetrated the other penetrated. The individual lived
in harmony with the state because the political life was all of one
piece with the manners, customs, and habits of private life. The
religion extended over both public and private spheres of life. Hence
there was unity of religion and political duty, without any feeling of
distinction existing between the public and private spheres of life.
But the Roman life was the beginning of a much deeper spiritual
life. After the individual learns to distinguish and unite these two
phases of his life—the public and private—he is a much deeper and
stronger man, and is capable of exercising and improving greater
personal freedom. He can realize within himself a far deeper spiritual
experience and attain to a higher and purer idea of God and the divine
life. In fact, after he has been through the Roman national education,
he is fitted for a faith in the divine-human nature of God.
When the Roman makes treaties with the surrounding nations he bows to
a common will, the will that unites his own national will with the
opposing national will of another people. A treaty is a sort of higher
public will uniting two national public wills. As opposed to the public
will expressed in the treaty, the public will of either nation is a
relatively private will. Thus the Romans who are famous for making
treaties seem to be occupied with making distinctions between higher
and lower will-powers, and realizing the difference between public and
private wills at every step and in every degree.
When the treaty is broken, the Roman conceives it necessary to conquer
the nation that breaks its faith and compel the vanquished people to
submit and pass under the yoke of Roman law. Thus the Roman becomes a
conqueror of the world. There being no higher power that can act as
umpire between Rome and the nations with whom it makes a treaty, each
nation acts as its own judge and is very apt to accuse the other one
of broken faith. An appeal to arms results in the justification of the
strongest. The vanquished must yield his convictions and submit.
Curtius defines the spirit of the Roman as that of the destruction
of national peculiarities. Rome conquers the world and educates all
nations into the same state of mind as its own people. The people in
Spain and Gaul and Britain, in Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, as well as in
Greece, all become like the people of Italy in this respect, and grow
to be very considerate of the boundary line between public and private
life.
Out of this isolation of the private life grows the great respect
for property and ownership which we find in connection with Roman
institutions. The public is not one with the private, but distinguished
from it by the Roman idea. But the law defines the limits of each and
so they do not conflict.
In private property the citizen finds a sphere wherein he can realize
his personal freedom. By means of property man satisfies his wants
of food, clothing, and shelter. He is able, by means of property, to
gratify a higher spiritual want of amusement and culture. He may avail
himself of the observation and reflection of his fellow-men and profit
by learning their experience. What our fellow-men have learned by
error and suffering, as well as by observation and reflection, go to
make up the wisdom of the race, which may be collected, preserved and
distributed by means of the institution of private property.
Property is thus something that connects the particular individual
with the social whole or the human race. In the sphere of ownership
the individual is free and self-determined; he makes and unmakes
at pleasure. With property he extends the sphere of his private
personality and enters into free alliance with other personalities.
By bargain and sale of chattels he exercises his own private freedom,
not by limiting the freedom of others, but by and through the equal
exercise of freedom on the part of those others. Thus by the invention
of the institution of property the private freedom of each individual
interpenetrates the sphere of the freedom of others without conflicting
with it, but in fact reinforcing it, so that each man is freer through
the freedom of others. Such is the wonderful significance of this Roman
invention of private right of property.
What we see among other nations in Europe and Asia, before the Roman
law came in vogue, is not the completed realization of the idea of
private property but only the crude first appearance of it. Property
under the Romans is as different from property in Persia, or even
in Sparta, as commerce is different from piracy. It is the Roman
who eliminates the element of external violence by freeing private
rights from absorption in public rights. Then the freedom of one
individual comes to reinforce that of another instead of limiting and
circumscribing it.
It is one thing to be able to see the universal law in the particular
facts and phenomena. It is quite another thing to see the universal
forms of the will, rules that all individuals may conform their actions
to, and by so doing avoid all conflict and collision of wills. These
general forms of actions and deeds, when defined in words, become civil
laws. The civil laws define the limits and boundaries within which each
and all individuals may act without mutual conflict. If these laws are
not obeyed one individual act will neutralize another and both will
reduce to zero.
The Roman is able to formulate the general will, and he compiles the
code of laws that descends to modern nations as one of the three most
precious heir-looms. These laws define the forms in which men may act
without contradicting each other, the forms by which the individual may
accumulate property and realize his personality, and at the same time
help, and not hinder, the personal freedom of all others. The Roman
invented the forms by which a city, a town, a state may be governed and
justice rendered to all, the forms in which a corporation may exist for
the accomplishment of undertakings too great or too long continued for
the single individual.
Religion in Rome had the two fold character of public and private.
The family had its household gods, its Lares and Penates. The city
had its tutelary deities, under various forms and names, but all
amounting to the same thing, to wit: the expression of the abstract
power of the state. The state was the highest divinity that the Roman
knew. The gods Jupiter, Quirinus, Janus, etc., all meant the might of
Rome. The deification of abstractions was carried out to a degree of
superstitious whimsicality that astonishes us. There was conceived a
god or goddess for every process of growth and decay and for every
instrumentality of the natural or of the spiritual, and there was a
divinity that made the bones grow in the child, and a divinity that
assisted the flow of the sewers.
The Roman conception of the divine defined it as some invisible power
that could be made useful to the individual or the state by some
sacrifice or service performed toward it. The Roman therefore made
vows to a particular deity when he found himself in an emergency. If
the deity gave him success he fulfilled his vow with the greatest
punctiliousness, offering a sacrifice, or founding a temple, or
establishing some worship, in return for the service obtained. Thus the
principle of contract entered the Roman idea of religion.
Contract is the essential legal basis for the transfer of property
in such a manner as to secure joint freedom of individuals. Contract
in religion as the relation of the individual to God seems the most
terrible of all impiety. But the Roman in effect made contracts with
his gods, showing the all-powerful hold of the idea of property and
legality over the mind of this nation.
In the family there prevailed a form of ancestor worship almost as
primitive as we found among the Chinese. All other nations, according
to De Coulanges, had ancestor-worship at one time. It would seem that
a more spiritual faith superseded it in other nations quite early. The
special circumstances of Rome and China encouraged the preservation of
family traditions. In China the entire state government is patriarchal,
and thus wholly conservative of the principle of the family. In Rome on
the other hand the state separates, as public affair, from the family,
as a private affair, and carefully defines the limits between itself
and the family so as to preserve the latter in the primitive form. Each
family worshiped with stated ceremony the male ancestors of the family,
the oldest son acting as the priest after the death of his father.
This principle of non-interference with the family customs and a
careful guarding of the sacred privacy of the family developed a
very noble type of woman. The Roman matrons were sublime examples of
heroism, dignity and purity. The mother had much more influence in the
education of the Roman youth, than in the education of youth in any
other of the ancient nations. On the ninth day the Roman child was
enrolled on the citizen’s register. But up to his fifteenth year his
education was chiefly at home under the supervision of the mother. He
studied reading, writing, and arithmetic, much the same as the boy of
other nations. But he committed to memory the laws of the Twelve Tables
as carefully as the Hebrew child learned the Ten Commandments. The
Roman child was educated to be a soldier, to fight for Rome and to be a
supporter of the laws. In his sixteenth year he studied Roman law with
some jurist. One may read in Plutarch, or in Shakspere’s _Coriolanus_,
how powerful was the influence of the mother over her son, and how
devoted was the mother to Rome. Roman education prepared the world for
Christianity, by breaking down national idiosyncrasies and leading up
to the idea of the human race—_genus humanum_.
The system practiced by the Romans after the conquest of a country
was to conscript the young men into the army and send their legions
to a distant frontier. The young men from Britain might be sent to
Spain or Egypt, and those from Illyria and the Danube, to Britain. In
the presence of a hostile people, speaking a foreign tongue, the raw
conscript found his only safe course to be a faithful adherence to the
Roman eagles. He could not revolt with any hope of success. In a few
years he had become attached to the Roman cause and cherished it as his
second nature; while his relatives and countrymen afar away had also
been obliged to obey Roman laws until their customs and usages had also
changed to Roman. Thus each conquered nation became a means in turn of
subduing every other nation and converting them into Romans.
The Persians had conquered nations and held them in subjection, but
they had not attempted to mould the character and institutions of the
conquered people, but had left them untrammeled, only requiring them
to acknowledge supremacy and pay tribute. After a people recovered
independence from Persia, little evidence remained of Persian
influence. The Roman institutions, on the other hand, became so
firmly rooted among a conquered people that they remained ever after
substantially Roman in character.
The Greeks, we saw, were a cheerful people. They made games a religious
ceremonial, celebrating the physical beauty of the gods by becoming
beautiful themselves. Beautiful bodies and graceful movements seemed
to them divine. The gods and goddesses fell in love with beautiful
mortals. The Romans on the contrary, were sober and serious, and would
not exercise for the sake of developing personal beauty, but only to
become good soldiers for Rome. It was shameful in the estimation of
the Roman to expose the naked body. Even within the family the utmost
care was taken to develop and foster the sense of shame and of decency
in the care of the person. The Roman was a haughty spectator at the
games, but would not himself condescend to appear as a contestant. He
bought slaves or forced his prisoners taken in battle to exhibit their
skill in the arena. He delighted in spectacles where death-contests
of beasts and men took place, because he felt its symbolic expression
of the struggle within his own character, and his sacrifice of self
for the state, and of his arbitrary will for the general abstract law.
The Roman was sober and thoughtful because his life was occupied in
self-restraint. He perpetually watched himself lest he should go beyond
the limits fixed between the private and the public spheres of duty.
The result of mingling all nations in the Roman armies brought about a
feeling of brotherhood among the soldiers and then among the people.
There arose conviction that peculiarities of nation and even of race
are accidents that do not affect the substance of a common humanity.
The objects of affection for the individual—his native land, his
country’s gods, his ties of kindred and friendship, were all ruthlessly
broken by the irresistible might of the Roman empire, and for these
objects of the heart were substituted only the abstract devotion to the
state and devotion to the private right of property. There resulted
a deep heart-hunger for a spiritual faith that would give to all an
object commensurate with this new idea of the _human race_. This want
was supplied by Christianity.