ANCIENT ROME AND
MODERN AMERICA
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MORALS
AND MANNERS
BY
GUGLIELMO FERRERO
AUTHOR OF “THE GREATNESS AND DECLINE OF ROME,” ETC.
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
COPYRIGHT, 1914
BY
GUGLIELMO FERRERO
Third Impression
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The reader will find in the following pages reference to another work
by Dr. Ferrero which will shortly come into publication under the title
of _Between the Old World and the New_. It is in order to explain
that _Between the Old World and the New_ was brought into print in
continental editions (in Italy, in France and elsewhere) before the
publication of the present work. The author has, however, decided,
that for the English-speaking readers of the two volumes it would be
advisable to change the order of publication and to issue first this
study of Morals and Manners. The second book, _Between the Old World
and the New_, will appear, in New York and in London, early in the
autumn of 1914.
NEW YORK,
_April, 1914_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
_PART ONE_
WHAT IS PROGRESS? 3
_PART TWO_
ANCIENT HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD
CHAPTER
I. ANCIENT SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICA 21
II. QUANTITY AND QUALITY 40
III. WOMAN AND HOME 60
IV. THE LESSON OF THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 77
V. UPS AND DOWNS 97
_PART THREE_
EUROPE AND AMERICA
I. THE AMERICAN DEFINITION OF PROGRESS 115
II. FACTS AND MOTIVES IN THE MODERN WORLD 139
III. MORE OR BETTER? 161
IV. THE LOST PARADISE OF BEAUTY 182
V. BEYOND EVERY LIMIT 201
VI. THE RIDDLE OF AMERICA 223
_PART FOUR_
POLITICS AND JUSTICE IN ANCIENT ROME
I. THE TRIAL OF VERRES 251
II. THE TRIAL OF CLODIUS 275
III. THE TRIAL OF PISO 299
_PART FIVE_
THE LIMIT OF SPORT 331
ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN AMERICA
PART I
WHAT IS PROGRESS?
WHAT IS PROGRESS?
The object of the essays collected in this volume, with the exception
of three which recount three curious episodes in Roman history, is
the investigation of the most important differences between the
ancient world and the modern, between Europe and America; in what
way and in what particulars the civilisations of the ancients and of
Europe have been modified respectively by the course of centuries
and by the passage of the Atlantic. The essays were printed in the
first instance in a monthly publication—_Hearst’s Magazine_—for the
perusal of the multitude of hasty readers who are content to skip from
argument to argument, and they are now republished in book form for
the benefit of those readers who may care to dwell on each argument
with greater deliberation. This volume may be considered as the bridge
which connects the _Greatness and Decline of Rome_ with a third work
which, under the title of _Between the Old World and the New_, will be
published shortly in New York and London.
A comparison between the ancient world and the modern, between Europe
and America, suggested to a writer of ancient history by two long tours
in the New World—such is the subject of this volume; and such is the
subject of the further book which at an early date will again take up
a number of the matters outlined in these papers and will submit these
to more exhaustive consideration. But neither in this volume nor in its
successor must the reader expect the comparison to resolve itself into
a definite judgment; and if he imagines that he has discovered such a
verdict, he may rest assured that he is mistaken. This book, and the
other which will follow it, have been written with the express purpose
of emphasising how vain it is to spend our time, as we do, passing
judgment on the progress or decadence of the times, of nations, and of
civilisations; of showing how easy it is to reverse all the reasonings
by which, impelled by passions, interests, prejudices, or illusions,
we strive now to exalt, now to abase ourselves by comparison with the
ancients and by contrasting the inhabitants of one continent with
those of another; of indicating what an easy and sure target irony and
dialectic have in all the doctrines, opinions, and beliefs with which
man endeavours to establish his by-no-means sure judgments—all the
doctrines, including that of progress, at least in the sense in which
progress is generally understood.
Including that of progress? the American reader will exclaim, with
some misgiving. But are we not living in the age of progress? Can that
idea of progress which every morning rises with the sun and sheds new
splendour on the two worlds on either side of the Atlantic, and with
the sun arouses them to their accustomed tasks—can it be that this
idea is but an illusion? No. The author of these two books has not so
much confidence in his own wisdom as to try to discover whether man
is really progressing or not; whether he is moving down the valley
of the centuries towards a fixed goal, or towards an illusion which
retreats with each step he takes in its direction. There is one point
only which the author proposes to make clear. There are at the present
day, on the one hand, those who despise the present and worship the
past, extol Europe and depreciate America; on the other hand, those who
declare that they would not give one hour of the marvellous present
in which they live for all the centuries of the past, and who rate
America far more highly than they do Europe. The author sets out to
show that the reason why the eternal disputes between the partisans of
these divergent views are so inconclusive, is that in this discussion,
as in so many others, each side postulates two different definitions
of progress, and in their discussions of the past and of the present,
of Europe and of America, they start from this dual definition as if
it were single and agreed. The result is that they cannot understand
and never will understand, if they discuss for a thousand years, each
other’s point of view.
The worshippers of the present and the admirers of America argue, more
or less consciously, from a definition of progress which would identify
it with the increase of the power and speed of machines, of riches,
and of our control over nature, however much that control may involve
the frenzied squandering of the resources of the earth, which, while
immense, are not inexhaustible. And their arguments are sound in their
application to the present age, and also to America, if we grant that
their definition of progress is the true one. For though steam- and
electricity-driven machinery claims Europe as its birthplace, it has
reached maturity and has accomplished and is accomplishing its most
extraordinary feats in America, where, so to speak, it found virgin
soil to exploit. But the opposite school indignantly denies that men
are wasting their time and contributing nothing to the improvement and
progress of the world, when they strive to embellish it or to instruct
it, to soothe and to restrain its unbridled passions. In their view,
the masterpieces of art, the great religions, the discoveries of
science, the speculations of philosophy, the reform of laws, customs,
and constitutions, are milestones along the road to progress. According
to these, our age, intent only on making money, ought to be ashamed
when it compares itself with the past. Machines are the barbarians
of modern times, which have destroyed the fairest works of ancient
civilisations. History will show the discovery of America to have been
little less than a calamity.
So two persons who, starting from these two definitions of progress,
set to work to judge the past and the present, Europe and America,
will never succeed in understanding each other, any more than two
persons who, wishing to measure a thing together, adopt two different
measures. And the discussion will be the more vain and confused, the
less clearly and precisely the thought of each disputant apprehends the
primary definition of progress, which does duty as a measure for each.
Indeed, this unfortunate state of affairs is commoner than is generally
supposed at the present day, with the need for hurry which pursues us
in every act and at every moment, and with the great whirl of ideas
and words which eddies around us. To decide, then, whether our times
are or are not greater than those of the ancients, whether America is
superior to Europe or Europe to America, we must discover which of
these two definitions is the true one. But is it possible to prove that
one of these definitions of progress is true and the other false? How
many to-day would dare to deny that man made the world progress when,
by the use of fire, he launched on the path of victory the locomotive
across the earth and the steamer across the ocean? Or when he captured
and led through threads of copper the invisible force of electricity
adrift in the universe? Or when he embellished the world with arts, and
enlightened it with studies, and tempered the innate ferocity of human
nature with laws, religion, and customs? It is clear that neither of
these two definitions will succeed in putting the other out of court,
until men are willing either to superhumanise themselves completely,
renouncing material goods in favour of spiritual joys, or, sacrificing
the latter to the former, to bestialise themselves. So long as men with
few exceptions continue to desire riches and the control of nature,
as well as beauty, wisdom, and justice, both these definitions of
progress will be _partially_ true. Each will present to us one aspect
of progress. It will be impossible, if we adopt only one of the two, to
decide whether we are progressive or decadent, whether America is worth
more or less than Europe. Every epoch and people will seem at one time
and another to be progressive or decadent, to be superior or inferior,
according as the one or the other definition is the basis of judgment.
“But,” the reader will say, “why not then combine the two definitions
in one? Why not say that progress is the increase of all the good
things which man desires: of riches, of wisdom, of power, of beauty,
of justice?” But in order to make of these two definitions a single
complete and coherent definition, we should have to be certain that it
is possible by a single effort to increase all the good things of life.
Is it possible, and to what extent is it possible? That is a second
grave question which this book and its successor endeavour to answer.
Many and various matters relating to Europe and America are discussed
in this book. Still more various and diverse are the discussions
in _Between the Old World and the New_, which presents a series of
dialogues occupying the leisure hours of a two weeks’ voyage, in the
course of which persons of different degrees of culture and diverse
casts of thought discuss Hamlet and progress, machinery and Homer, the
Copernican system and riches, science and Vedanta philosophy, Kant
and love, Europe and America, Christian Science and sexual morality.
These matters are discussed fitfully with mad rushes zigzag over the
universe; and the fits and rushes have somewhat dismayed certain
critics on this side of the Atlantic. “What a jumble!” they cry. “What
an encyclopædia, what an enormity it is! What can Homer and machinery,
Hamlet and America, Copernicus and emigration have in common?”
In short, the perusal of _Between the Old World and the New_ in the
original Italian has produced upon more than one critic the same effect
as if he had come back to his house to find all his belongings, his
letters, his furniture, his clothes, shifted and turned upside down.
“What demon has been at work here?” he cries in dismay. Such critics
are not altogether wrong from their point of view. Nevertheless, this
demon, which is always urging man to turn his home upside down in the
hopes of arranging it better, no adjuration will succeed in exorcising
from our epoch. I hope that, when presented in the form of a book,
these dialogues will produce a less alarming impression on America.
Accustomed as she is to seeing such demons raging in her house, she
should not permit herself to be prevented from taking breath in the
satisfaction of having done well, by the ambition to do better. To
be sure, between the so-called Homeric question and steam-engines,
between the discovery of America and the tendencies of philosophy,
between the troubles which torment us in private life and the French
Revolution, between transatlantic emigration and the architecture of
New York, there is a connection. It is a profound, an organic, a vital
connection; for, in the last four centuries, little by little, almost
imperceptibly at first, then with a speed which increased gradually
up to the French Revolution, finally, at headlong speed from the
Revolution to the present day, the world has changed in every part,
in form, spirit, and order. And it has changed in form, order, and
spirit, because it has changed the order of its demands upon man.
In compensation for the liberty granted him in everything else, it
has demanded of him a rapidity, a punctuality, an intensity, and a
passivity of obedience in his work, such as no other epoch has ever
dreamed of being able to exact from lazy human nature.
From the French Revolution onwards, throughout Europe and throughout
America, the political parties, the social classes, and institutions,
and the philosophical doctrines which supported the principle of
authority, little by little, but everywhere and unintermittently,
have given way before the onslaught of the parties, the classes, and
the doctrines which support the principle of liberty. The former have
been forced sooner or later to allow the right of free criticism and
discussion to oust the ancient duty of tacit obedience in the state,
in religion, in the school, and ultimately in the family. Poets
and philosophers have extolled the liberation of man from ancient
servitudes as the most glorious victory man can vaunt. A victory,
certainly; but over whom? Over himself, as it seems; since the limits,
within which man was content to rest confined until the French
Revolution, he himself had erected and invested with sacred terrors. It
is clear that the slave, the tyrant, and the liberator were one and the
same person. Moreover, one may well think that, in gaining his liberty,
man has not been born again to a new destiny nor has he regenerated
his own nature; rather has he learned to employ his own energies in a
different way. Man had lived for centuries within strict limits, which
confined in a narrow compass his curiosity, ambition, energy, and
pride. But within those limits he had lived with greater comfort and
less anxiety than we are living, without racking his brains to invent
or to understand something new every day, not spurred on every hour
to produce at greater speed and in greater abundance, not exasperated
by the multitude of his needs nor agitated from morning to night by
the pursuit of the means to satisfy them. But after the discovery of
America and the first great astronomical discoveries which shed glory
on the beginning of the sixteenth century, there arose in man the first
sparks of ambition to seek new ways in the world outside the ancient
limits. The philosophies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and still more the first discoveries of science, lent boldness to
these ambitions. One day men realised that Prometheus, that clumsy
thief, had stolen from the gods only a tiny spark of the fire. They
planned a second robbery, discovered coal and electricity, and invented
the steam-engine. And behold! the French Revolution, which confounded
and upset, from one end of Europe to the other, boundaries, laws,
institutions, and traditions—ideal and material limits. Then at last
man realised that he could conquer and exploit the whole earth with
iron and fire. At the same time as liberty, a new, untiring, formidable
eagerness invaded the two worlds. All the limits which, for so many
centuries, had confined in a narrow circle the energy and aspirations
of even the most highly venerated of men fell one after the other to
the ground. They fell, because the human mind could not have launched
out into the unknown to essay so many new marvels if those ancient
limits which imprisoned it had remained standing. The multitude would
not have bowed their necks to the hard discipline of their new work, if
in compensation they had not been liberated from other, more ancient,
disciplinary restrictions.
In short, the great era of iron and fire began, in which the principle
of liberty was destined to assault the principle of authority in
its last entrenchments, and to drive it right away to the farthest
frontiers of political, moral, and intellectual anarchy. But for this
very reason the era of iron and fire has seen the gradual confusion and
reduction to wavering uncertainty of all the criteria which served to
distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, the true from the false, good
from evil. These criteria have become confused because they are and can
be nothing else but limits; limits which are precise and sure so long
as they are restricted, but become feeble the more they are enlarged.
But how can a century, which has made itself so powerful by dint of
overturning the ancient limits on every hand, be expected to respect
these limits in the spiritual world? As a result we find a civilisation
which has built railways, studded the Atlantic with steamers,
exploited America, and multiplied the world’s riches a hundredfold in
fifty years,—we find it obsessed by grotesque doubts and eccentric
uncertainties with regard to the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, in which
generation after generation, accustomed to respect amongst other limits
those imposed by literary traditions, had unhesitatingly agreed to
recognise two masterpieces composed by a poet of genius. So we see the
epoch which has overturned and destroyed so many thrones and altars and
made Reason and Science march in triumph through the smoking ruins of
a score of revolutions,—we see it obsessed on a sudden by a thousand
scruples, halt, ask itself what is truth, whether it exists, and if it
can be recognised. We see it rack its brains to decide whether what
we know is a real and objective something or only a creation of our
fancy. All these scruples and doubts are, as it were, the brow of a
slope down which our epoch slides at headlong speed towards the abyss
of nothingness. And in the century which has given man liberty, the
certainty of food, comfort in abundance, and so many guarantees against
the oppression of individuals and authorities as were known to no
previous century; in the century which, by overthrowing so many limits,
has banished from our midst so many reasons for hatred and war, do we
not hear a thousand voices on every side cursing man for a miserable
slave and accusing the times of being corrupt; crying that conditions
must be purified with fire and sword, according to some, with war,
according to others, with revolution? Having once transgressed the
limits, man has become insatiable. The more he possesses, the more he
wants. He no longer acknowledges any restraint in his desires.
The quantity which vanquishes quality, the liberty which vanquishes
authority, the desires which blaze out anew each time they are
satisfied—these are the forces and the phenomena which shape and
fashion our civilisation. For this reason we can, it is true,
accumulate vast hordes of wealth and conquer the earth with iron and
fire. But we must resign ourselves to living in a new Tower of Babel,
in the midst of a confusion of tongues. The æsthetic, intellectual,
and moral confusion of our times is the price nature exacts for the
treasures which she is obliged to resign into our power. This book
and its successor have been written with the object of throwing light
on the obscure but vital bond which links together in a living unity
the most diverse phenomena of contemporary life. They have not been
written, as some have thought, with the view of comparing the ancient
and the modern civilisations, Europe and America, to the detriment
of the one or of the other; much less with the view of denouncing
the régime of liberty, on the ground that it corrupts the world, and
of demanding that it be suppressed. To find fault with the tendency
of a civilisation, one must postulate the fact that history has gone
wrong. And what criterion, what standard is there which justifies a man
in declaring to successive generations that they ought to have held
different objects in view, and adopted other means to attain them?
No: the author’s only object has been to sound the depths of life, in
the hope of tracing that unity from which flow forth and into which
flow back again so many apparently diverse phenomena; that unity in
which alone thought can find some respite from its weary search after
the secret of its own being and of that of things in general. Without
a doubt each one of us attains only provisional success in his search
for this unity; but is not every work of man only provisional, and what
are we but beings destined to live only for an instant? Therefore, I
have endeavoured in this book to reveal, by way of an analytical and
rational exposition, set out in the simplest and plainest terms, the
vital bond of this unity. But, inasmuch as a unity is a synthesis,
and analysis necessarily modifies and disfigures while trying to
explain, I have availed myself in my other work of what is perhaps the
most effective method of representing the phenomena of life in their
synthesis: I mean, art. For this reason I have written a dialogue, in
which I have made my characters begin by wandering haphazard over a
wide field and jumping, apparently at random, from one to another of a
series of widely different topics. But at the end the various topics
are gathered into a united whole, showing the bond which unites them,
in the speeches of the most acute and intelligent of the passengers;
especially in that speech which coincides with the entry of the ship
from the open Atlantic, the free high-road of the new world, into the
Mediterranean, the confined arena of ancient civilisation. _Livre
désordonné et pourtant bien ordonné_ is the verdict of a French critic,
André Maurel. How glad I should be if all my readers subscribed to
this verdict! In truth, this tragic conflict of the two worlds, of
the two civilisations, of man with himself, for licence to dispense
with the limits of which he, in fact, has need if he is to enjoy the
most exquisite fruits of life, is a picture so vast as to overtax the
resources of the painter. But the painter has worked at his canvas with
so much ardour and passion that he hopes to find on the other side of
the Atlantic, as on this, readers willing to view the defects in his
work with the intelligent indulgence of which really cultured men are
always so liberal; readers prompt to feel some quickening in response
to the few sparks of beauty and of truth which the author may have
succeeded in infusing into his work. It is a small thing, no doubt. But
do not even the tiny rivulets which flow through the valleys unite to
form the mighty rivers in the plain?