But the doctrine that each petty tribe is the centre of the world
and the only real and important people in the universe, and that all
others are mere nobodies, is not peculiar to primitive peoples.
Ethnocentric ethics—the ethics of amity toward their own tribe or
state, their own clique or kind, and the ethics of enmity toward
outsiders—has been manifested to a greater or less extent by the
peoples of all times and of all degrees of enlightenment. Every
people that has ever existed has had its own particular point of
view, its own bias, its own knot-hole, large or small, through which
it has looked at life and the world. This is inevitable. It arises
as a necessary sequence out of the fact that all peoples above
savages are the descendants of savages, and as such have inherited
the limitations, mental and environmental, of those from whom they
have evolved.
Aliens had no legal rights in ancient times—none whatever.
International cooperation, such as exists among the political
societies of Europe and America to-day, was absolutely unknown.
International relations were everywhere those of hostility. States
and races looked upon each other as foes, as objects of plunder and
victimisation, not as friends.
Caesar says of the ancient Germans that depredations committed
beyond the boundaries of each state bore no infamy, and that
stealing from aliens was even encouraged as a means of teaching
their young men adroitness.
The ancient Jews are an excellent illustration of a narrow and
self-centred people. Notwithstanding their insignificance,
politically and intellectually, as compared with the Egyptians,
Greeks, and Persians, the Jews believed themselves to be the only
people of the first class inhabiting the earth. They conceived that
they had been selected as favourites by the gods themselves, and
that around their little district in half-arid Palestine revolved
the interests of the entire world. Their chief city was supposed to
be the sacred and central city of the world, and heaven itself only
a new and idealised edition of their metropolis. Every Jew was bound
to every other Jew by high-wrought ceremony and obligation. But all
non-Jews were ‘Gentiles,’ chaff-like ‘pagans,’ who possessed
no rights which a ‘child of Abraham’ was bound to respect. Their
tribal god is said to have been so indulgent toward them as his
‘chosen people’ that he allowed them to exact usury from
foreigners, to sell them diseased meats, and to borrow jewels from
them and afterwards run away with them. He even permitted them to
make war upon weak peoples and dispossess them of their lands.
‘Whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them
will we possess’ (Judg. xi. 24).
The kings of the ancient Assyrians were so accustomed to cruelties
upon non-Assyrians, and were so proud of these cruelties, that they
recorded them in stone as a claim to immortality among men.
Assurbanipal, in speaking of the conquered, says: ‘I pulled out
their tongues and cut off their limbs, and caused them to be eaten
by dogs, bears, eagles, vultures, birds of heaven.’
Assur-natsir-pal, another wonderful fellow, boasts similarly: ‘I
flayed the nobles and covered the pyramid with their skins, and
their young men and maidens I burned as a holocaust.’ ‘Their
carcasses covered the valleys and the tops of the mountains,’ says
Tiglath-Pileser in his account of the slain Muskayans; and
Sennacherib informs us proudly that he drove his chariot over the
dead bodies of his victims until ‘its wheels were clogged with
flesh and blood.’ ‘Evidently’ remarks Spencer, in speaking of
these monstrous inscriptions, ‘the expectation was that men of
after-times would admire these merciless destructions; for we cannot
assume that these Assyrian kings intentionally made themselves
eternally infamous’.[1]
To the ancient Greeks there were two classes of human beings in the
world: Greeks and ‘barbarians.’ The Greeks were the inhabitants
of Hellas, which was believed to be the central region of the world,
and the ‘barbarians’ were the godless denizens of the
less-favoured and less centrally located remainder of the earth. The
world was believed to be flat or shield-shaped, and in its exact
centre stood Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly. This mountain,
which is 9,700 feet high, was supposed to be the highest elevation
on the earth, and was the awful abode of the gods. The Greeks called
themselves Hellenes. According to their fabled genealogy, they were
the descendants of Hellen, son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah. While
they were often at war with each other, they spoke a common
language, and always regarded themselves as members of a single
family. All non-Greeks were ‘barbarians,’ including the Romans,
who were called ‘barbarians’ down to the time of Augustus. While
the Greeks themselves traced their ancestry back to the bright blood
of the gods, the ‘barbarians’ were generally supposed to have
originated from stones and trees. The ‘barbarians’ were looked
upon and treated by the Greeks everywhere as a different order of
beings from themselves. Those taken by them in war were regularly
reduced to slavery. The slave population created in this way was
increased by the slave traffic carried on with the East until the
slave population of Greece was several times as great as the free
population. The whole Hellenic world, in fact, even in the days of
its greatest magnificence, was one vast pen of slaves. Almost every
freeman of Attica was a slave-owner. Out of a population of about
five hundred thousand, four hundred thousand were slaves. It was
considered a real hardship by the Greeks to be compelled to get
along with less than a half-dozen slaves. In Corinth and Aegina
there were ten slaves to one freeman. In Sparta the slaves were the
vanquished Helots, the original inhabitants of the Peloponnesus,
whom the Spartans had conquered and reduced to chains in early
times. Their lot was particularly horrible. They were the property
of the state, and were distributed to the Spartan lords by lot.
‘They practically had no rights which their masters felt bound to
respect. If one of their number displayed unusual powers of either
body or mind, he was secretly assassinated, as it was deemed unsafe
to allow such qualities to be fostered in the servile class. It is
affirmed [by Thucydides] that, when the Helots grew too numerous for
the supposed safety of the state, their numbers were thinned by
deliberate massacre of the surplus population’.[2] The conception
of human slavery entertained by the common mass of Greeks may be
inferred from the fact that philosophers like Aristotle taught that
‘slaves were simply domestic animals possessed of intelligence.’
It is this fact, this utter lack of justice and humanity manifested
by the Greeks in their treatment of non-Hellenic mankind, which
gives to Greek ‘civilisation’ its seamy side. Greek society has
been appropriately likened to a pyramid, its apex gleaming with
light and splendour, while its base was sunk in darkness.
Non-Romans were called ‘barbarians’ also by the Romans, and were
considered by the Romans to be an entirely different order of beings
from themselves. Any splinter of a Roman was, according to the
Romans, superior to the most illustrious ‘barbarian.’ Men were
not treated nor estimated according to their intrinsic qualities,
but wholly as to whether they were or were not ‘Roman citizens.’
To be a ‘Roman citizen’ was to be entitled to everything; to be
a ‘barbarian’ was not to be entitled to anything necessarily,
except to serve in some way the all-glorious Romans. The elaborate
legal and ethical codes formulated by these masters of the
Mediterranean were reserved religiously for themselves. The business
of the ‘barbarians’ was to furnish fields for pillage and
conquest, to impart magnitude to triumphal pageants, to act as
slaves, and to die by ignominiously butchering each other for the
amusement of their bloodthirsty masters. ‘Barbarian’ lands were
looked upon simply as game-preserves where ambitious captains from
the Tiber went to refresh their reputations by hunting and
victimising the inhabitants. The history of Rome is the history of
infamy on a colossal, almost world-wide, scale. There has never been
displayed by any people pretending to be civilised such shameless
savagery as that displayed by the Romans in their gladiatorial
arenas, where men (generally the captives of war) were ‘butchered
to make a Roman holiday.’ These tragedies, in their magnitude and
atrocity, seem almost frightful when we read of them on the pages of
history. They were generally celebrated by victorious captains and
emperors at the close of some unusual outrage against the
‘barbarians,’ or upon the departure of Roman legions for the
field of activity. The celebrations sometimes lasted weeks, or even
months. The Emperor Trajan celebrated his victories over the Dacians
with shows that lasted more than a hundred days. During this
horrible festival ten thousand men fought upon the arena, and more
than ten thousand wild animals were slain. The gladiators in these
ancient combats fought in chariots, on horseback, on foot—in all
the ways in which soldiers fought in actual battle. They fought with
swords, lances, daggers, tridents, and every other manner of weapon.
Some had nets and lassoes with which they entangled their
adversaries, and then slew them. The life of a wounded gladiator was
in the hands of the spectators, who showed their clemency or their
lack of it by turning their thumbs respectively down or up. The
thirst of the populace for blood was sometimes such that the dying
were aroused and forced on to the fight by burning with a hot iron.
The dead bodies were dragged from the arena with hooks, like the
carcasses of animals, and the pools of blood soaked up with dry
sand.[3] There was an occasional Roman, like Seneca, sane enough to
realise the real character of these performances, and brave enough
to denounce them as crimes. But by the great mass of all classes of
Romans, even by those who pretended to think, they were regarded
with perfect moral indifference. The excuse offered by Pliny was
generally concurred in by his countrymen, that these bloody shows
were necessary for the cultivation of manliness and for keeping
awake the strenuous and red-handed instincts in the young.
Scarce less revolting than the gladiatorial arena, in its violation
of every principle of humanity, was the institution of human
slavery. During the later republic and the earlier empire, one-half
the population of the Roman state was slaves. The slave population
was recruited chiefly, as in Greece, by war and by slave-hunting.
Slave-traders and slave-markets flourished both in the capital
itself and in all the great ports visited by Roman ships. Some of
the outlying provinces of Asia and Africa were almost depopulated by
the slave-hunters. Greek slaves were the highest-priced, because the
most intelligent. Among the wealthy, who, like the illiterate rich
of every age, dawdled their time in ostentation, there were slaves
for each different function in the household. There were the
_cubicularii_, who acted as housemaids; the _triclinarii_, who
waited at table; the _culinarii_, who acted as kitchen drudges; and
the _balnearii_, who looked after the baths. Then there were
_tonsores_ or barbers; _criniflores_, or hair-crimpers;
_calceatores_, who took care of the feet; and _lectores_, whose
business it was to read aloud to their masters at meals, in the
bath, or in bed. The _ostiarius_, who was sometimes chained in the
vestibule like a dog, was the porter; the _invitator_ summoned the
guests; and the _servus ab hospitiis_ looked after their lodgment.
There was the slave called the _sandalio_, whose sole duty was to
care for his master’s sandals; and another, called the
_nomenclator_, whose exclusive business it was to accompany his
master when he went upon the street, and give him the names of such
persons as he ought to recognise. The common punishment for a
refractory slave was beating. If the runaway were caught, as he
could hardly fail to be, since there were extremely heavy penalties
for harbouring or assisting him, he was either branded or had an
iron collar like a dog’s welded around his neck, or his legs were
fettered, or, in exaggerated or repeated cases of offence, he was at
once turned into the arena or otherwise put to death. If he
attempted to take personal vengeance upon his master for any wrong
whatsoever, his whole family shared his fate, and the regular form
of capital punishment for a slave was crucifixion under the most
ignominious and agonising circumstances.[4]
‘In many cases, as a measure of precaution, the slaves were forced
to work in chains and to sleep in subterranean prisons. The feeling
entertained toward this unfortunate class in the later republican
period is illustrated by Varro’s classification of slaves as
“vocal agricultural implements,” and by Cato the Elder’s
recommendation that old and worn-out slaves be sold, as a matter of
economy. Sick and hopelessly infirm slaves were taken to an island
in the Tiber, and there left to die of starvation and
exposure’.[3] Slaves were practically without any rights whatever
to the world in which they lived. A Roman could take the life of his
Gallic slave with as complete impunity as an American can slay his
bovine servant to-day. Romans, in short, looked upon and treated
non-Romans about as human beings to-day look upon and treat
non-humans—_as mere prey_.
1. Spencer: _Principles of Ethics_, vol. i.; New York, 1893.
2. Myers: _Ancient History_, part i.; Boston, 1899.
3. Myers: _Ancient History_, part ii.; Boston, 1899.
4. Preston and Dodge: _The Private Life of the Romans_; Boston, 1896.∂