THE ARTS AND SCIENCES IN ROME
LETTERS
=Imitation of the Greeks.=--The Romans were not artists naturally.
They became so very late and by imitating the Greeks. From Greece they
took their models of tragedy, comedy, the epic, the ode, the didactic
poem, pastoral poetry, and history. Some writers limited themselves to
the free translation of a Greek original (as Horace in his Odes). All
borrowed from the Greeks at least their ideas and their forms. But
they carried into this work of adaptation their qualities of patience
and vigor, and many came to a true originality.
=The Age of Augustus.=--There is common agreement in regarding the
fifty years of the government of Augustus as the most brilliant period
in Latin literature. It is the time of Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus,
Propertius, and Livy. The emperor, or rather his friend Maecenas,
personally patronized some of these poets, especially Horace and
Vergil, who sang the glory of Augustus and of his time. But this
Augustan Age was preceded and followed by two centuries that perhaps
equalled it. It was in the preceding century,[157] the first before
Christ, that the most original Roman poet[158] appeared, Caesar the
most elegant prose-writer, and Cicero the greatest orator. It was in
the following age that Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus, Pliny, and Juvenal
wrote. Between Lucretius and Tacitus there were for three centuries
many great writers in Rome. One might also add another century by
recurring to the time of Plautus, the second century before Christ.
Of these great authors a few had their origin in Roman families; but
the majority of them were Italians. Many came from the provinces,
Vergil from Mantua, Livy from Padua (in Cisalpine Gaul), while Seneca
was a Spaniard.
=Orators and Rhetors.=--The true national art at Rome was eloquence.
Like the Italians of our day, the Romans loved to speak in public. In
the forum where they held the assemblies of the people was the
rostrum, the platform for addressing the people, so named from the
prows of captured ships that ornamented it like trophies of war.
Thither the orators came in the last epoch of the republic to declaim
and to gesticulate before a tumultuous crowd.
The tribunals, often composed of a hundred judges, furnished another
occasion for eloquent advocates. The Roman law permitted the accused
to have an advocate speak in his place.
There were orators in Rome from the second century. Here, as in
Athens, the older orators, such as Cato and the Gracchi, spoke simply,
too simply for the taste of Cicero. Those who followed them in the
first century learned in the schools of the Greek rhetors the long
oratorical periods and pompous style. The greatest of all was Cicero,
the only one whose works have come down to us in anything but
fragments; and yet we have his speeches as they were left by him and
not as they were delivered.[159]
With the fall of the republic the assemblies and the great political
trials ceased. Eloquence perished for the want of matter, and the
Roman writers remarked this with bitterness.[160] Then the rhetors
commenced to multiply, who taught the art of speaking well.[161] Some
of these teachers had their pupils compose as exercises pleas on
imaginary rhetorical subjects. The rhetor Seneca has left us many of
these oratorical themes; they discuss stolen children, brigands, and
romantic adventures.
Then came the mania for public lectures. Pollio, a favorite of
Augustus, had set the example. For a century it was the fashion to
read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends
assembled to applaud them. The taste for eloquence that had once
produced great orators exhibited in the later centuries only finished
declaimers.
=Importance of the Latin Literature and Language.=--Latin literature
profited by the conquests of Rome; the Romans carried it with their
language to their barbarian subjects of the West. All the peoples of
Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the Danubian lands discarded their
language and took the Latin. Having no national literature, they
adopted that of their masters. The empire was thus divided between the
two languages of the two great peoples of antiquity: the Orient
continued to speak Greek; almost the entire Occident acquired the
Latin. Latin was not only the official language of the state
functionaries and of great men, like the English of our day in India;
the people themselves spoke it with greater or less correctness--in
fact, so well that today eighteen centuries after the conquest five
languages of Europe are derived from the Latin--the Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and Roumanian.
With the Latin language the Latin literature extended itself over all
the West. In the schools of Bordeaux and Autun in the fifth century
only Latin poets and orators were studied. After the coming of the
barbarians, bishops and monks continued to write in Latin and they
carried this practice among the peoples of England and Germany who
were still speaking their native languages. Throughout almost the
whole mediaeval period, acts, laws, histories, and books of science
were written in Latin. In the convents and the schools they read,
copied, and appreciated only works written in Latin; beside books of
piety only the Latin authors were known--Vergil, Horace, Cicero, and
Pliny the Younger. The renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries consisted partly in reviving the forgotten Latin writers.
More than ever it was the fashion to know and to imitate them.
As the Romans constructed a literature in imitation of the Greeks, the
moderns have taken the Latin writers for their models. Was this good
or bad? Who would venture to say? But the fact is indisputable. Our
romance languages are daughters of the Latin, our literatures are full
of the ideas and of the literary methods of the Romans. The whole
western world is impregnated with the Latin literature.
THE ARTS
=Sculpture and Painting.=--Great numbers of Roman statues and
bas-reliefs of the time of the empire have come to light. Some are
reproductions and almost all are imitations of Greek works, but less
elegant and less delicate than the models. The most original
productions of this form of art are the bas-reliefs and the busts.
Bas-reliefs adorned the monuments (temples, columns, and triumphal
arches), tombs, and sarcophagi. They represent with scrupulous
fidelity real scenes, such as processions, sacrifices, combats, and
funeral ceremonies and so give us information about ancient life. The
bas-reliefs which surround the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius
bring us into the presence of the great scenes of their wars. One may
see the soldiers fighting against the barbarians, besieging their
fortresses, leading away the captives; the solemn sacrifices, and the
emperor haranguing the troops.
The busts are especially those of the emperors, of their wives and
their children. As they were scattered in profusion throughout the
empire, so many have been found that today all the great museums of
Europe have collections of imperial busts. They are real portraits,
probably very close resemblances, for each emperor had a well-marked
physiognomy, often of a striking ugliness that no one attempted to
disguise.
In general, Roman sculpture holds itself much more close to reality
than does the Greek; it may be said that the artist is less concerned
with representing things beautifully than exactly.
Of Roman painting we know only the frescoes painted on the walls of
the rich houses of Pompeii and of the house of Livy at Rome. We do not
know but these were the work of Greek painters; they bear a close
resemblance to the paintings on Greek vases, having the same simple
and elegant grace.
=Architecture.=--The true Roman art, because it operated to satisfy a
practical need, is architecture. In this too the Romans imitated the
Greeks, borrowing the column from them. But they had a form that the
Greeks never employed--the arch, that is to say, the art of arranging
cut stones in the arc of a circle so that they supported one another.
The arch allowed them to erect buildings much larger and more varied
than those of the Greeks. The following are the principal varieties of
Roman monuments:
1. The _Temple_ was sometimes similar to a Greek temple with a
broad vestibule, sometimes vaster and surmounted with a dome. Of
this sort is the Pantheon built in Rome under Augustus.
2. The _Basilica_ was a long low edifice, covered with a roof and
surrounded with porticos. There sat the judge with his assistants
about him; traders discussed the price of goods; the place was at
once a bourse and a tribunal. It was in the basilicas that the
assemblies of the Christians were later held, and for several
centuries the Christian churches preserved the name and form of
basilicas.
3. The _Amphitheatre_ and the _Circus_ were constructed of several
stories of arcades surrounding an arena; each range of arcades
supported many rows of seats. Such were the Colosseum at Rome and
the arenas at Arles and Nimes.
4. The _Arch of Triumph_ was a gate of honor wide enough for the
passage of a chariot, adorned with columns and surmounted with a
group of sculpture. The Arch of Titus is an example.
5. The _Sepulchral Vault_ was an arched edifice provided with many
rows of niches, in each of which were laid the ashes of a corpse.
It was called a Columbarium (pigeon-house) from its shape.
6. The _Thermae_ were composed of bathing-halls furnished with
basins. The heat was provided by a furnace placed in an
underground chamber. The Thermae in a Roman city were what the
gymnasium was in a Greek city--a rendezvous for the idle. Much
more than the gymnasium it was a labyrinth of halls of every sort:
there were a cool hall, warm apartments, a robing-room, a hall
where the body was anointed with oil, parlors, halls for exercise,
gardens, and the whole surrounded by an enormous wall. Thus the
Thermae of Caracalla covered an immense area.
7. The _Bridge_ and the _Aqueduct_ were supported by a range of
arches thrown over a river or over a valley. Examples are the
bridge of Alcantara and the Pont du Gard.
8. The _House_ of a rich Roman was a work of art. Unlike our
modern houses, the ancient house had no facade; the house was
turned entirely toward the interior; on the outside it showed only
bare walls.
The rooms were small, ill furnished, and dark; they were lighted
only through the atrium. In the centre was the great hall of honor
(the atrium) where the statues of the ancestors were erected and
where visitors were received. It was illuminated by an opening in
the roof.
Behind the atrium was the peristyle, a garden surrounded by
colonnades, in which were the dining halls, richly ornamented and
provided with couches, for among the rich Romans, as among the
Asiatic Greeks, guests reclined on couches at the banquets. The
pavement was often made of mosaic.
=Character of the Roman Architecture.=--The Romans,[162] unlike the
Greeks, did not always build in marble. Ordinarily they used the stone
that they found in the country, binding this together with an
indestructible mortar which has resisted even dampness for eighteen
hundred years. Their monuments have not the wonderful grace of the
Greek monuments, but they are large, strong, and solid--like the Roman
power. The soil of the empire is still covered with their debris. We
are astonished to find monuments almost intact as remote as the
deserts of Africa. When it was planned to furnish a water-system for
the city of Tunis, all that had to be done was to repair a Roman
aqueduct.
=Rome and Its Monuments.=--Rome at the time of the emperors was a
city of 2,000,000 inhabitants.[163] This population was herded in
houses of five and six stories, poorly built and crowded together. The
populous quarters were a labyrinth of tortuous paths, steep, and ill
paved. Juvenal who frequented them leaves us a picture of them which
has little attractiveness. At Pompeii, a city of luxury, it may be
seen how narrow were the streets of a Roman city. In the midst of
hovels monuments by the hundred would be erected. The emperor Augustus
boasted of having restored more than eighty temples. "I found a city
of bricks," said he; "I leave a city of marble." His successors all
worked to embellish Rome. It was especially about the Forum that the
monuments accumulated. The Capitol with its temple of Jupiter became
almost like the Acropolis at Athens. In the same quarter many
monumental areas were constructed--the forum of Caesar, the forum of
Augustus, the forum of Nerva, and, most brilliant of all, the forum of
Trajan. Two villas surrounded by a park were situated in the midst of
the city; the most noted was the Golden House, built for Nero.
THE LAW
=The Twelve Tables.=--The Romans, like all other ancient peoples, had
at first no written laws. They followed the customs of the
ancestors--that is to say, each generation did in everything just as
the preceding generation did.
In 450 ten specially elected magistrates, the decemvirs, made a
series of laws that they wrote on twelve tables of stone. This was the
Law of the Twelve Tables, codified in short, rude, and trenchant
sentences--a legislation severe and rude like the semi-barbarous
people for whom it was made. It punished the sorcerer who by magical
words blasted the crop of his neighbor. It pronounced against the
insolvent debtor, "If he does not pay, he shall be cited before the
court; if sickness or age deter him, a horse shall be furnished him,
but no litter; he may have thirty days' delay, but if he does not
satisfy the debt in this time, the creditor may bind him with straps
or chains of fifteen pounds weight; at the end of sixty days he may be
sold beyond the Tiber; if there are many creditors, they may cut him
in parts, and if they cut more or less, there is no wrong in the act."
According to the word of Cicero, the Law of the Twelve Tables was "the
source of all the Roman law." Four centuries after it was written down
the children had to learn it in the schools.
=The Symbolic Process.=--In the ancient Roman law it was not enough in
buying, selling, or inheriting that this was the intention of the
actor; to obtain justice in the Roman tribunal it was not sufficient
to present the case; one had to pronounce certain words and use
certain gestures. Consider, for example, the manner of purchasing. In
the presence of five citizens who represent an assembly and of a sixth
who holds a balance in his hand, the buyer places in the balance a
piece of brass which represents the price of the thing sold. If it be
an animal or a slave that is sold, the purchaser touches it with his
hand saying, "This is mine by the law of the Romans, I have bought it
with this brass duly weighed." Before the tribunal every process is a
pantomime: to reclaim an object one seizes it with the hand; to
protest against a neighbor who has erected a wall, a stone is thrown
against the wall. When two men claim proprietorship in a field, the
following takes place at the tribunal: the two adversaries grasp hands
and appear to fight; then they separate and each says, "I declare this
field is mine by the law of the Romans; I cite you before the tribunal
of the praetor to debate our right at the place in question." The judge
orders them to go to the place. "Before these witnesses here present,
this is your road to the place; go!" The litigants take a few steps as
if to go thither, and this is the symbol of the journey. A witness
says to them, "Return," and the journey is regarded as completed. Each
of the two presents a clod of earth, the symbol of the field. Thus the
trial commences;[164] then the judge alone hears the case. Like all
primitive peoples, the Romans comprehended well only what they
actually saw; the material acts served to represent to them the right
that could not be seen.
=The Formalism of Roman Law.=--The Romans scrupulously respected their
ancient forms. In justice, as in religion, they obeyed the letter of
the law, caring nothing for its sense. For them every form was sacred
and ought to be strictly applied. In cases before the courts their
maxim was: "What has already been pronounced ought to be the law." If
an advocate made a mistake in one word in reciting the formula, his
case was lost. A man entered a case against his neighbor for having
cut down his vines: the formula that he ought to use contained the
word "arbor," he replaced it with the word "vinea," and could not win
his case.
This absolute reverence for the form allowed the Romans some strange
accommodations. The law said that if a father sold his son three
times, the son should be freed from the power of the father; when,
therefore, a Roman wished to emancipate his son, he sold him three
times in succession, and this comedy of sale sufficed to emancipate
him.
The law required that before beginning war a herald should be sent to
declare it at the frontier of the enemy. When Rome wished to make war
on Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, who had his kingdom on the other side of
the Adriatic, they were much embarrassed to execute this formality.
They hit on the following: a subject of Pyrrhus, perhaps a deserter,
bought a field in Rome; they then assumed that this territory had
become territory of Epirus, and the herald threw his javelin on this
land and made his solemn declaration. Like all other immature peoples,
the Romans believed that consecrated formulas had a magical virtue.
=Jurisprudence.=--The Law of the Twelve Tables and the laws made after
them were brief and incomplete. But many questions presented
themselves that had no law for their solution. In these embarrassing
cases it was the custom at Rome to consult certain persons who were of
high reputation for their knowledge of questions of law. These were
men of eminence, often old consuls or pontiffs; they gave their advice
in writing, and their replies were called the Responses of the Wise.
Usually these responses were authoritative according to the respect
had for the sages. The emperor Augustus went further: he named some of
them whose responses should have the force of law. Thus Law began to
be a science and the men versed in law formulated new rules which
became obligatory. This was Jurisprudence.
=The Praetor's Edict.=--To apply the sacred rules of law a supreme
magistrate was needed at Rome. Only a consul or a praetor could direct
a tribunal and, according to the Roman expression, "say the law." The
consuls engaged especially with the army ordinarily left this care to
the praetors.
There were always at Rome at least two praetors as judges: one
adjudicated matters between citizens and was called the praetor of the
city (praetor urbanus); the other judged cases between citizens and
aliens and was called praetor of the aliens (praetor peregrinus), or,
more exactly, praetor between aliens and citizens. There was need of at
least two tribunals, since an alien could not be admitted to the
tribunal of the citizens. These praetors, thanks to their absolute
power, adjusted cases according to their sense of equity; the praetor
of the aliens was bound by no law, for the Roman laws were made only
for Roman citizens. And yet, since each praetor was to sit and judge
for a year, on entering upon his office he promulgated a decree in
which he indicated the rules that he expected to follow in his
tribunal; this was the Praetor's Edict. At the end of the year, when
the praeter left his office, his ordinance was no longer in force, and
his successor had the right to make an entirely different one. But it
came to be the custom for each praetor to preserve the edicts of his
predecessors, making a few changes and some additions. Thus
accumulated for centuries the ordinances of the magistrates. At last
the emperor Hadrian in the second century had the Praetorian Edict
codified and gave it the force of law.
=Civil Law and the Law of Nations.=--As there were two separate
tribunals, there developed two systems of rules, two different laws.
The rules applied to the affairs of citizens by the praetor of the city
formed the Civil Law--that is to say, the law of the city. The rules
followed by the praetor of aliens constituted the Law of Nations--that
is to say, of the peoples (alien to Rome). It was then perceived that
of these two laws the more human, the more sensible, the simpler--in a
word, the better, was the law of aliens. The law of citizens, derived
from the superstitious and strict rules of the old Romans, had
preserved from this rude origin troublesome formulas and barbarous
regulations. The Law of Nations, on the contrary, had for its
foundation the dealings of merchants and of men established in Rome,
dealings that were free from every formula, from every national
prejudice, and were slowly developed and tried by the experience of
several centuries. And so it may be seen how contrary to reason the
ancient law was. "Strict law is the highest injustice," is a Roman
proverb. The praetors of the city set themselves to correct the ancient
law and to judge according to equity or justice. They came gradually
to apply to citizens the same rules that the praetor of the aliens
followed in his tribunal. For example, the Roman law ordained that
only relatives on the male side should be heirs; the praetor summoned
the relatives on the female side also to participate in the
succession.
The old law required that a man to become a proprietor must perform a
complicated ceremony of sale; the praetor recognized that it was
sufficient to have paid the price of the sale and to be in possession
of the property. Thus the Law of Nations invaded and gradually
superseded the Civil Law.
="Written Reason."=--It was especially under the emperors that the new
Roman law took its form. The Antonines issued many ordinances (edicts)
and re-scripts (letters in which the emperor replied to those who
consulted him). Jurisconsults who surrounded them assisted them in
their reforms. Later, at the beginning of the third century, under the
bad emperors as under the good, others continued to state new rules
and to rectify the old. Papinian, Ulpian, Modestinus, and Paullus were
the most noted of these lawyers; their works definitively fixed the
Roman law.
This law of the third century has little resemblance to the old Roman
law, so severe on the weak. The jurisconsults adopt the ideas of the
Greek philosophers, especially of the Stoics. They consider that all
men have the right of liberty: "By the law of nature all men are born
free," which is to say that slavery is contrary to nature. They also
admit that a slave could claim redress even against his master, and
that the master, if he killed his slave, should be punished as a
murderer. Likewise they protect the child against the tyranny of the
father.
It is this new law that was in later times called Written Reason. In
fact, it is a philosophical law such as reason can conceive for all
men. And so there remains no longer an atom of the strict and gross
law of the Twelve Tables. The Roman law which has for a long time
governed all Europe, and which today is preserved in part in the laws
of several European states is not the law of the old Romans. It is
constructed, on the contrary, of the customs of all the peoples of
antiquity and the maxims of Greek philosophers fused together and
codified in the course of centuries by Roman magistrates and
jurisconsults.
FOOTNOTES:
[157] Sometimes called the Age of Cicero.
[158] Lucretius.--ED.
[159] One of the most noted, the plea for Milo, was written much later.
Cicero at the time of the delivery was distracted and said almost
nothing.
[160] See the "Dialogue of the Orators," attributed to Tacitus.
[161] The word "rhetor" signified in Greek simply orator; the Romans
used the word in a mistaken sense to designate the men who made a
profession of speaking.
[162] The same reserve must be maintained with regard to the arts as to
the literature. The builders of the Roman monuments were not Romans, but
provincials, often slaves; the only Roman would be the master for whom
the slaves worked.
[163] This estimate is too liberal. 1,500,00 is probably nearer the
truth. See Friedlaender, Sittengeschichte Roms, i. 25.--ED.
[164] Cicero describes this juridical comedy which was still in force in
his time.