ANCIENT HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD
I
ANCIENT SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
At the end of the year 1906, while sojourning in Paris, where I had
been giving at the Collège de France a course of lectures on Roman
history, I received an invitation from Emilio Mitré, the son of the
famous Argentine general, to undertake a long expedition to South
America. This invitation evoked general surprise. What, my friends
asked, was I, the historian of the ancient world, going to do in the
newest of new worlds, in ultra-modern countries, in countries without
a past and caring only for the future, where industry and agriculture
fill the place which for the ancients was occupied by war? Why, if I
was willing to leave my studies and my books for one moment, did I not
repair to Egypt or the East, the scene of so much of the history which
I had recounted, where the Romans have left so many traces of the world
which has passed away, and where so many important excavations, tending
to enrich history with new documentary evidence, are in progress?
I answered my questioners by pointing out that I was not a bookworm,
whose interest was confined to ancient books and archæological
parchments; that life in all its aspects interested me, and that I
was, therefore, curious, after devoting so much attention to ancient
peoples, to study awhile the most modern of nations, the newest
comers in the history of our civilisation. Did my friends suppose
that, because I had written a history of Rome, I had pledged myself
never again to direct my gaze to modern life? But, though I explained
the reason for my voyage in this way, I, no less than my friendly
objectors, was convinced at that time that my travels in America
would be only a parenthesis in my intellectual life. In other words,
I thought that I was going to America in search of an intellectual
diversion, hoping for some relaxation for my mind, obsessed for the
last ten years by ancient history, in bringing it to bear on an
entirely different world. That this diversion would be useful to me,
I had no doubt; but not because America might help me to a better
understanding of ancient Rome, but because to change every now and
again the subject-matter of my studies and to enrich my mind with new
impressions always seemed to me one of the most profitable intellectual
exercises, especially for a historian to whom a wide experience of
human nature is a necessity. To-day, after having made not one, but two
journeys to America, after having seen not only the two largest and
most flourishing states of South America, but also that North America
which, more than all the other states of the New World, represents in
the eyes of contemporaries the more modern part of our civilisation,
the reign of machinery, the empire of business, the rule of money, I
am no longer of this opinion. It is my present belief that a journey
in the New World is of supreme benefit intellectually to a historian
of the ancient world; and that, in order to understand the life and
history of Greek or Roman society, it is perhaps just as important
to visit the countries of America as Asia Minor or Northern Africa.
That is what I said on one of the last days of my stay in the United
States to a genial professor of ancient history connected with Cornell
University, with whom I was discussing the most famous schools of the
present day for the pursuit of historical studies, and the methods
adopted in these schools. “Many of you Americans,” I said, “go to
European universities to study ancient history. It seems to me that
you might well invite many European professors to come and go through
a finishing course in America, studying not only in libraries but in
the live world, and observing what happens in American society. Nobody
is in a better position than are you to understand ancient society.”
My remark may seem at first sight a paradox. But it is no paradox, if
one goes to the root of the problem. For what we, men of the twentieth
century, call ancient civilisations, were really, when they flourished,
new and young civilisations, with but few centuries of history behind
them; and so are the American civilisations of the present day. For
this reason, we find in ancient civilisations, on however much
reduced a scale, many phenomena which are now peculiar to American
social systems; while we should look for them in vain in European
civilisation, which has more right to call itself ancient civilisation
than have the civilisations of Greece and of Rome. This I propose
briefly to prove.
One of the social phenomena which are most characteristic of North
America, but which would be looked for in vain in Europe, is the
munificence of the donations of wealthy men to the public. Families of
great wealth in America nowadays feel it incumbent on them, as a social
duty, to spend a part of their substance on the people; to encourage
education and culture, to bestow benefactions, to help the more needy
classes, and to assist with their purses the public authorities in the
execution of their functions. In Europe, the case is different. Large
fortunes may be numerous, but they are kept more in the background than
in America. Rich men are much more selfish in the enjoyment of their
riches. Even the richest are, as a rule, content to leave some small
sum in their wills to the poor, or to some educational institution.
But donations in excess of four thousand pounds are rare, and make a
great stir. It is for this reason that certain sections of society
in Europe accuse the upper classes of selfishness and hold up before
them American generosity as an example to follow. But this censure is
exaggerated, for the times and the social conditions are different in
Europe. The history of the ancient world shows that this generosity on
the part of the rich is a phenomenon peculiar to a certain stage in the
development of society, which recurs in all flourishing and prosperous,
but as yet not very ancient, societies. In these, some of the public
functions are assumed by the rich, because the State has not yet had
the time to bring them under its control and to direct them according
to laws by it established. If the millionaires of America have, as a
matter of fact, but few imitators in Europe, they can boast numberless
forerunners in the histories of Greece and Rome. In Athens to begin
with, and, later, in the Roman Empire, to mention only the most famous
states of the ancient world, education, charity, public amusements,
even public works, such as roads, theatres, and temples, were always
in part left by the State to the generosity of wealthy individuals,
who felt it their duty to contribute out of their means to the public
welfare.
Amongst the inscriptions which have reached us from the Roman world,
and which have been collected in the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_,
we find a considerable number referring to these donations. In all
the provinces of the vast Empire, in all the cities great and small,
stories have been found recounting, often in forcible terms, the
donation by some citizen, during his life or at his death, of a certain
sum to the city, it might be to construct or repair an edifice, it
might be to distribute grain to the people in time of dearth, or to
give bounties of oil on festive occasions, or to assure to the people
the enjoyment of certain periodical spectacles, or to supplement the
finances of the city, which had been thrown into disorder by excessive
expenditure, or which were not equal to all the calls made upon them.
Every city, then, had her own millionaire benefactors, her little
Carnegies, her Huntingtons, Morgans, and Rockefellers in miniature,
whose generosity was necessary to the public good, and to whom were
raised in gratitude monuments, many of which have come down to our time.
The Roman Emperor himself was, at first at any rate, only the most
generous and the best known of these rich donors: a kind of Carnegie,
Morgan, and Rockefeller of the Empire. Suetonius, for instance, tells
us what sums Augustus spent in the course of his life, out of his
private patrimony, on public objects. Augustus himself, in the famous
_Monumentum Ancyranum_, the great inscription found in Asia, in which
he gives a clear résumé of the story of his life, enumerates many
of the gifts which he made to the public out of his own pocket. On
several occasions, he simply liquidated the deficit in the Empire’s
budget out of his private purse. At another time, he repaired at his
own expense the roads of Italy which after the civil wars had through
neglect fallen into disrepair. On countless occasions, he spent money
for public works, for the relief of famine, for popular amusements, for
all the forms of beneficence then customary, without paying any regard
to the serious inroads he was making on the fortune which he would
have to leave to his own heirs. This is exactly what many wealthy men
are doing to-day in the New World. It would be in accord with the facts
to say that those striking largesses were one of the means by which
imperial authority was gradually concentrated at the heart of the Roman
State, and surrounded itself with so much gratitude, so many interests,
and so many hopes as to be able definitely to secure the principal
position amongst all the organs of the State.
But if the Emperor was the most generous of the public benefactors,
he was not the only one. The chief men throughout the Empire followed
his example, some of them on so elaborate a scale as to challenge
comparison with the most munificent American millionaires, when account
is taken of the difference in the standards of riches in the respective
epochs. The best-known figure among these donors is Herodes Atticus, an
immensely rich Athenian of the second century A.D. What was his origin,
and whence he got his money, we do not know. Probably he belonged to
one of those families which had accumulated immense property in the
provinces, during the first century of the Christian era, a century
of rapidly acquired and great fortunes. This much is certain, that he
applied himself to study, and became what was then called a rhetor,
corresponding more or less closely to what we term a professor of
literature, not however with a view to earning a livelihood, but with
the object of cultivating his own and other people’s minds. Highly
cultured, erudite, and at the same time one of the richest men in the
Empire, Herodes was a great friend of Antoninus Pius and of Marcus
Aurelius. But, great as was his reputation for wisdom and literary
taste, and notwithstanding the enhancement of his prestige through
the friendships of the two celebrated emperors, he left a name in the
social history of the Roman world more particularly because of the vast
sums he gave away all over the Empire. At Athens, he repaired in a
splendid way the most ancient and famous buildings of that celebrated
city. He presented, repaired, and maintained theatres, aqueducts,
temples, and stadia in the cities of Greece and Italy.
For the rest, several of the most highly admired buildings and most
imposing ruins in Rome are actually gifts made to the public by ancient
citizens. Out of them all, I may cite the Pantheon, that marvellous
Pantheon, which we all still admire in the heart of Rome, the monument
which stands deathless while the stream of ages flows by. This was
constructed by Agrippa, the friend of Augustus, at his own expense, and
can be compared in this respect to Carnegie Hall in New York. Agrippa
built the Pantheon from the same notions of civic zeal that impelled
Carnegie to endow New York with his great Hall. And the two monuments,
built by the personal munificence of two ultra-wealthy citizens, with
an interval of twenty centuries between them, express the same desire
to extend to the whole people a share in the enjoyment of the donor’s
private fortune.
Naturally, my earliest studies in Roman history led me to fix my
attention on this bountiful munificence on the part of private persons
in the ancient world, by which the rich, either spontaneously or at
the call of public opinion, took upon themselves a share of the public
burdens. But I had not fully grasped the meaning of this system, until
I visited America, and saw the colleges, schools, and hospitals founded
and subsidised, the museums and universities endowed, and all the other
public institutions aided with millions of dollars by the rich business
men and bankers of America. For Europeans, living on a continent where
nowadays the State has almost monopolised these functions and exercises
them zealously, seeming to resent the interference of private persons,
it is difficult to picture correctly a social system in which private
generosity is at once possible and necessary, the advantages by which
such generosity is accompanied, and the manner in which it is exercised.
* * * * *
The munificence of the wealthy citizens is only a special instance of a
more general and more extensive phenomenon in which America approaches
more nearly to the ancient world than Europe; I mean, in that her
society is less essentially bureaucratic. In the ancient world, there
was no bureaucratic organisation in any of the Greco-Asiatic monarchies
founded by Alexander or in the latest period of the Roman Empire which
could be considered to resemble even remotely, on a smaller scale
and merely in broad outlines, that which flourishes in the Europe of
to-day. Now, in the most splendid moments of Greek and Roman history,
we find states in which all the public functions, even the executive
ones, were elective; so that they all changed periodically according
to the whims of an electoral body. The need for technical training and
professional education for the exercise of certain executive functions
was so little recognised that even the command of the military forces
and the chief magistracy were filled by public election. A general
became a general, not in the course of his professional career, but at
the will of the people, assembled in the _comitia_; and with generals
chosen in this way, Rome conquered the world. It is impossible to
imagine a social constitution in more striking contradiction to the
social constitution of contemporary Europe, which entrusts all the
executive functions to a bureaucracy professionally trained, formed
into a rigid hierarchy, and dependent on the State, over which the
people have practically no power. Men in Europe become generals or
judges because they have studied the art of war or law in special
schools, not because the majority of an electoral body have thought it
opportune to entrust the office to an individual who has been clever
enough to appeal to them more strongly than do his rivals.
This difference was and is one of the greatest difficulties met with
by European historians in the study of the ancient world. I am of
opinion, for example, that this is one of the weakest points in
Mommsen’s history. Accustomed to see bureaucratic states at work,
European historians find it difficult to imagine how those states can
have prospered in which the magistrates changed periodically, sometimes
every year, and in which there was no professional division between
the different functions. Instinctively, they tend also to paint the
ancient state in the colours of the European state, attributing to it
the same virtues and the same defects, and, therefore, representing its
weaknesses as well as its merits in a false light. For an American,
on the other hand, especially for a North American, the difficulty of
understanding the ancient states is much less formidable. Certainly the
principle of professional specialisation is much more highly developed
in modern American society than it was in the ancient societies. Modern
civilisation is nowadays too complex and too technical to admit of
the principle of popular election being applied indiscriminately, as
at Athens or Rome, to all the public offices. What sensible man would
consent to-day, even in the purest of democracies, to the election of
the admirals, for instance, by universal suffrage? Nevertheless, in
the American confederation many of the public offices, which are now
entrusted in Europe to the professional bureaucracy, are elective. And
this fact by itself is enough to represent a distinct _rapprochement_
between American society and ancient society.
For this reason, an inhabitant of New York can more easily than an
inhabitant of London or Paris picture to himself certain aspects
of the life of the Athens or Rome of ancient days; especially the
continual and frequent succession of elections, and the complete
change of interests and of directing forces involved in the change
of the magistrates in office. It is true that we in Europe have
periodical elections, as in America. Periodically, in the Old, as in
the New World, the people assemble to exercise their sovereign right
by means of the ballot. But if, regarded superficially, the act and
the procedure are identical, their value and importance are different.
The populace in the old states of Europe elect only consultative and
legislative bodies, while the executive power remains to a great extent
independent of the people, residing in a professional bureaucracy whose
members cannot be changed from day to day.
In America, on the contrary, as in ancient Athens and Rome, many of the
magistrates who hold in their hands and exercise directly governing
powers are periodically changed at the will of the people, which,
therefore, moulds more directly the government and its different organs
and more directly inspires and controls its particular functions, just
as it used to control them in the ancient states.
It is not strange, therefore, that we find ancient Rome reappearing
in one of the most important juridical institutions of the United
States, an institution which we should search for in vain in Europe,
great mistress of laws though she be accounted. One of the American
institutions which seems to Europeans most contrary to the modern
spirit, and for that reason most deserving of severe blame, is the
right of “injunctions” with which American magistrates are invested. To
Europe, where the bureaucracy, though immovable and little subject to
control, cannot step outside the precise prescriptions of the law in
the exercise of its functions, this discretionary power of the American
magistrates seems little less than an instrument of intolerable
tyranny. A brilliant European, who is a distinguished professor of
literature in one of the universities of North America, but who,
notwithstanding a very lengthy sojourn in the American republic, has
preserved intact the ideas and the spirit of the Old World, said to me
one day in New York: “In this land of liberty, there is one tyranny
more terrible than all the tyrannies of Europe, that of the judicial
power!” That a magistrate should have the power to give orders, be they
of only momentary validity, which are the expressions of his own will
and not of the letter of the law, seems to the European a monstrous
thing, a relic of the ancient tyrannies, which harmonises but ill with
republican institutions.
A historian of the ancient world, on the other hand, is in a position
to understand more easily this seeming contradiction. The injunction
is nothing else than the _edictum_ of the Roman magistrate; the power,
that is to say, which the Roman magistrate possessed, and which the
American magistrate, maybe in a less degree, possesses, of making good
with his personal authority the lacunæ and deficiencies in the law, on
every occasion when public order or the principles of justice seemed
to demand it urgently. In the eyes of ancient Rome, the magistrate
was not only, as in the bureaucratic states of Europe, the cautious
and impartial servant and executor of the law. He was also the living
personification of the State and of the general interest, invested with
full powers of exercising his own judgment, over and above the laws, on
behalf of the State and of the general interest, when the law was found
wanting. In short, by reinforcing the authority of the magistrates,
the ancient states endeavoured to make amends for the weakening of the
State which was bound to ensue from the continual electoral changes and
the instability of all the offices; while Europe, on the other hand,
which, with her rigid bureaucracies, has made the power of the State
so strong, can rigorously limit the powers of her functionaries with
laws of immense scope. But one last remnant of the ancient conception,
tempered by the modern spirit of the State, survives in North America,
where, the elective principle being more extensively applied than in
the states of Europe, the tendency is, by way of compensation, to
reinforce by some discretionary power, like the “injunction,” some
at least of the judicial offices. Perhaps we may explain in this way
the fact that some European writers in the nineteenth century have
ventured to assert that the ancients never knew what liberty was, even
in what were apparently the most democratic republics; while others
have maintained that more liberty is to be found in the constitutional
monarchies of Europe than in the authoritative American republics.
Another instance still more curious is afforded us by those dictators
who, under varying titles and with varying success, have appeared in
almost all the republics of Spanish America, after the emancipation
of these territories from the mother country. The latest of these
dictators was Porfirio Diaz, who governed Mexico for so many years.
Europe has never properly understood these dictators. She has mistaken
them for caricatures, now of Nero, now of Napoleon, and has drawn
the conclusion that the republics in question were impregnated with
the disease of tyranny, and could not exist in a state of liberty.
But a historian of the ancient world recognises at once in these
dictators a modern incarnation of a figure which constantly appears
in ancient history, the Greek τύραννος, the Roman _princeps_.
Pisistratus and Augustus, not Nero and Napoleon, are the prototypes
of these dictators. States based on an electoral system which is not
controlled by organised parties or by other social forces calculated
to ensure its working in conformity with precise and certain rules,
are subject to eruptions of disorder, which end in establishing the
personal power of that individual who succeeds in making the political
and administrative machine work with comparative regularity. Augustus
was throughout forty-one years re-elected every five or ten years
head of the republic, because he had succeeded, by his influence and
personal ability, in making the machine of the _comitia_ and senate run
smoothly, at a time when the Roman aristocracy, which had controlled
it for centuries, could no longer, owing to its own discords, do so.
The reason why the power of Augustus was prolonged and extended in all
directions until it became a dictatorship for life, cloaked under legal
forms, was that he alone seemed capable of ensuring a wise government
and of preventing civil wars. And was not just this the real reason
for the long tenure of power by Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, and for his
prolonged presidency, which was merely a dictatorship masquerading
under republican forms? Anyone who wishes to understand the government
of Mexico during the last forty years might find the history of
Augustus of great service; just as a profound knowledge of the recent
history of Mexico might help to the understanding of the ancient
history of Augustus.
A profound study of ancient history is, therefore, an excellent
preparation for the rapid understanding of certain parts, at any
rate, of the American constitution and of American society; just as a
knowledge of America should be an excellent aid to the study of ancient
history. In fact, in the course of my travels and observations in
America, after having devoted ten years to the study of a large section
of ancient history, I have realised how much the ancient history,
which I had studied in Europe, helped me to understand America; and
how much the America which I had before my eyes helped me to a better
understanding of the distant reality of that vanished world of long
ago. And if we follow the track of these studies and reflections, I
think that we shall be able to attribute also a more precise meaning to
that epithet of “young,” which is constantly applied to America. Who
does not talk a hundred times a year of old Europe and young America?
Now what do these two much-used and much-abused epithets mean? That
Europe has a longer history than America? In that case the contrasting
terms would not mean much. For that is a simple chronological
statement, which only demands a knowledge of the fact that America
was not discovered till 1492 A.D. Do they mean that America is more
vigorous, more active, more daring than Europe, just as young men
usually possess these qualities in a greater degree than the old? As a
matter of fact, many people do use the two adjectives in this sense.
But, in that case, they assume as proved one of the most complex, one
of the deepest and most difficult problems of modern life, that is to
say, the problem whether a comparison can be struck between Europe and
America, and if so, on the basis of what criterion? That there should
be those who strike this comparison and resolve it in this way, is
not surprising. But no one will be found to pretend that the judgment
contained in those two words “young” and “old,” thus interpreted, can
or ought to be accepted as true by everyone.
On the other hand, it is possible to agree on a more narrow and precise
interpretation of these words; to say that America is young and Europe
old, because America reproduces some of the characters and phenomena
which we find in antiquity, that is to say, in the remotest epochs of
our history. European civilisation, as the result of her migration to
America, there to found new states and societies, has really become,
in a certain sense, regenerated, because she has again become, in the
light of certain characteristics and certain institutions, what she
was twenty centuries ago. And if the “youth” of America is understood
in this sense, it is not rash to argue that it too will grow old.
The study of ancient history can be of a certain practical value to
those who consider America with the object of divining, in this great
community, the tendencies and inclinations of the future. For students
of that history can bring a plausible criterion of prevision to their
observations. In fact, it is not rash to suppose, at least if some
unknown force does not unexpectedly divert the course of events in
the New World, that all the parts of American life and society which
most resemble ancient society are destined to disappear gradually,
as America grows older and elaborates a complex and artificial
civilisation; just as the ancient institutions and ideas of which we
find so many traces in America gradually disappeared in Europe in the
progress of time, as civilisation in the Old World became artificial
and complex. If this prophecy is not fallacious, we should expect
history, which eternally repeats herself, to require the man of the
New World to witness the same phenomena whose more gradual realisation
they have already witnessed in the ancient world. In the New World
also, we should expect to see a society regulated by elective and
authoritative institutions gradually become bureaucratic and at the
same time fetter every branch of political and administrative powers
with the tight bonds of rigid juridical principles. This will be a
slow, but profound transformation, in the course of which many things
will change their position and value. Perhaps the inexhaustible public
munificence of the millionaires will become exhausted, and the State
will grow in prestige and influence, if not in power.
II
QUANTITY AND QUALITY
Suetonius recounts that one day a man presented himself to the Emperor
Vespasian, and showed him the models of a machine, thanks to which
the Emperor could have finished off the construction of certain of
his great public works with fewer labourers, and at a great saving
of expense. Vespasian was full of praise for the man’s ingenuity,
and recompensed him with a sum of money; but he subsequently had the
model destroyed, saying that he did not wish to have any machines
which would cause his people to go hungry. Applying the standard of
modern ideas, how should we judge this sentiment and act? Of course,
we should consider it a strange and absurd mistake. Suetonius, on
the contrary, quotes the incident to prove how wise Vespasian was.
In this divergence of opinion is revealed the essential difference
between ourselves and the ancients, between modern civilisation and
Greco-Roman civilisation, for all that these resemble each other in so
many particulars; the principal difference between the ancient world
and America. Although, as I have shown in my preceding essay, America
in certain of its institutions and forms of social life resembles the
ancient world more than Europe, this comparison does not hold true
so far as the instruments of economic production are concerned. In
this respect America is much further removed from the ancient world
than is Europe, and represents to-day the beginning of a new era
and a new civilisation, whose spirit and tendencies would be quite
incomprehensible to a re-embodied Greek or Roman.
Greco-Roman antiquity never dreamed that it might be a useful,
beautiful, glorious work to invent machines of increasing speed
and power, and therefore never gave a thought to those technical
elaborations which are the pride of our times. It possessed the
elementary machines, the lever, jack-screw, the inclined plane; but
it never tried to combine these into more complicated machines. In
particular, it never called into play the effort to which all the
mechanism of modern times owes its birth; that is to say, it never
tried to endow its machines with a more rapid motion than the muscles
of men or of animals can endow them with, or to search nature for
motive forces of greater power than these. It availed itself only
sparingly and on rare occasions of the force of running water or of
the wind. The latter it used only for navigation, and even then with
regret, hesitation, and fear, as if it were doing an illicit and
shameful thing. It knew of no combustible other than the wood of the
trees. Notwithstanding the fact that Pliny the elder has preserved for
us so much precious information about agriculture and the ancient arts
and industries, his writings contain scarcely a single hint suggesting
that the men of his civilisation had any desire to make the instruments
of economic production more perfect and effective. In one place, the
sail, as compared with the oar, inspires him to write a passage in
which the modern reader imagines just at first that he has lighted on
a sentiment containing a distant echo of contemporary enthusiasm for
progress. “Is there a greater marvel in the whole world?” he writes.
A grass exists [flax, of which sails are made] which brings
Egypt and Italy so close together that two prefects of Egypt,
Galerius and Balbillus, crossed from Alexandria to the straits
of Messina, one in seven days and the other in six; and that
last summer the senator Valerius Marianus reached Alexandria
from Pozzuoli in a light wind in nine days. There is a grass
which brings me in seven days from Gades, the harbour near the
Pillars of Hercules, to Ostia, in four from this side of Spain,
in three from the province of Narbonne, in two from Africa, as
C. Flavius, the envoy of the proconsul Vilius Crispus, found.
Does it not seem as if we were reading an anticipation by eighteen
hundred years of that hymn which moderns so often raise to the power
of steam and to the great ocean liners which cross the Atlantic in
five or six days? But ours is only a brief illusion. The wonder and
the admiration of Pliny are soon over, and a sort of awe takes their
place. “_Audax vita, scelerum plena!_” he quickly adds. “Creature
full of wicked daring!” The invention of sails seems to him almost a
sacrilegious impiety, and his view was that of all the ancients.
In short, the few victories which the ancients had won over nature
were to them a cause of embarrassment rather than of enthusiasm; for
they saw in them merely a proof of the perversity and foolhardiness
of human pride. If a contemporary of Sophocles or Horace came back to
the world, he would probably just at first be terrified by what he
saw all round him, as by the spectacle of a gigantic and unheard-of
madness. Machinery, which to us seems the most marvellous instrument
of our energy and intelligence, appeared to the ancients a danger, an
enemy, and almost a sacrilege: an attempt to rebel against the gods
and their wishes. Consequently, they invented and adopted machines—and
those but simple and primitive ones—only for use in war, especially for
siege-work. The necessity of conquering made them forget to some extent
their usual fears.
So great a difference in thought and feeling, in a matter which to us
seems of such vital importance, must arise from deep-seated causes.
Why did the ancients invent and construct so few machines, and hold in
such fear the few they had? Why did they wish the hand of man to be the
principal and the most powerful among the instruments of production?
Many attribute the inferiority of the ancients in this department to
the comparatively undeveloped state of science. Vast and profound
knowledge of science, they say, is required for the construction
of modern machines. The ancients did not possess this knowledge;
therefore, they conclude, they could not construct the machines.
But, in this deduction there are two exaggerations. The services of
science, especially in early times, to machines and their progress,
are exaggerated; so also is the scientific ignorance of the ancients.
Science has helped materially to perfect certain machines, but has
actually invented scarcely one. Many of the marvellous machines which,
at a giddy rate, multiply riches all round us, have been conceived
for the first time in the minds of artisans, _contre-maîtres_,
managers of factories, and other persons more expert in practice
than rich in scientific lore. The founder of the great mechanical
industry, Arkwright, who invented the cotton-spinning machine, was
a barber. Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine, though perhaps a
better-educated man than Arkwright, was not in any sense a great
scientist. For the rest, whoever knows the history of machinery is
aware that science did not begin to concern herself with machinery,
or to inquire whether her studies might help inventors with useful
suggestions, until the great mechanical industry had already invaded
the world. Science, then, only followed a movement which had already
begun, and did not give it the first impulse.
Furthermore, the scientific ignorance of the ancients is exaggerated.
Ancient science is not so well-known as ancient art and literature;
and it certainly did not make very striking progress during the last
brilliant period of ancient history—the Roman Empire. Therefore to
many, whose knowledge regarding it is comparatively superficial, the
ancient world may seem empty of scientific wisdom. But such is not
the case. If the Romans never applied much thought to the scientific
study of nature, the Greeks for their part had laid the foundations of
many sciences, and had laid them boldly and truly. Even the Copernican
system had been anticipated by Greek astronomers, like Aristarchus
of Samos and Seleucus of Seleucia, who had maintained that the earth
revolved round the sun, and that the firmament was much more vast than
was generally supposed.
We need not, therefore, believe that the ancients were not able to
construct more complicated machines than those they used, because they
lacked scientific knowledge. It would be nearer the truth to say that
they did not make much effort to raise sciences out of the necessarily
narrow domain of purely theoretical problems, because, independent
as they were of machinery, they had no need of the practical aids
which science, if developed in certain directions, can lend to the
construction of machines. In fact, we men of the present day encourage
the sciences to search and investigate in every direction and to try
every path, not from a disinterested love of the True nor from an
intellectual curiosity to spy out the mysteries of nature; but because
we hope that we shall discover, in the course of our all-embracing
search, laws or bodies or forces which will help us to subdue and
exploit nature.
The ancients then abstained from inventing and constructing machines,
not from lack of knowledge but from lack of will. The effort seemed
to them useless, nay, pernicious; and the enterprise did not attract
them. It remains, therefore, to consider why the ancients, in their
great struggle to extend the dominion of man over nature, felt no need
of help from swift engines of iron, and, therefore, did not make the
effort necessary to invent them. This is a question of the highest
importance for the history of civilisation, for by its solution
only can we gain an insight into what is perhaps the most profound
difference between ancient and modern civilisation. The difference
consists in this: while our civilisation is a mechanical-scientific
civilisation, the ancient was above all things an artistic
civilisation. Therefore our civilisation tends in the main to multiply
the needs and the consumption of man, so as to quicken production
as much as possible, while the ancient civilisation tended to limit
man’s needs and consumption, to hold up to esteem and imitation
customs of simplicity and parsimony which involved a reduction in
consumption, and therefore in production. If we are to grasp the very
essence of our history, we must understand clearly how indisolubly
united are the artistic civilisation and the ideal of a simple life,
the mechanical-scientific civilisation and the ideal of a life of
extravagance and luxury.
Even at the present day, many will be found to extol the greatness,
the wealth, and the might of the Roman Empire as a marvel never
surpassed in history. But this is a delusion. The Roman Empire seemed
marvellously wealthy and powerful to the ancients, because they had
never yet seen greater wealth and greater might. But what are the
wealth and the might of the Roman Empire compared with the might
and the wealth of the great modern states of Europe and America?
One observation will suffice to give an idea of the difference.
We are justified in deducing from the great number of facts and
data in our possession that in the most flourishing and wealthy
centuries the budget of the Empire, the sum total, that is, of all
the items of expenditure which the central government at Rome had to
meet—expenditure on the most important public services of so immense
an empire, which comprised the whole basin of the Mediterranean, and
a large part of Europe, Asia, and Africa—fell short, far short, of
the municipal budget of the city of New York. Only the man who is
conversant with the customs of the past in their minutest details
can fully estimate how much simpler, poorer, and more economical the
civilisation of the ancients was than that which has permeated America
and Europe since the invention of the steam-engine and electricity,
when the riches of the New World, exploited intensively with the help
of machinery, began to flood the earth.
Consuming little, and content with a life of simplicity and poverty,
the ancients had no need to produce much or to produce at great
speed. So they had no requirement for machines, whether steam- or
electricity-driven. The few simple machines, which the hand of man
or the muscular force of domestic animals can operate,—the domestic
loom, the horse-propelled mill,—sufficed. Therefore, they had no need
of science to help them to construct new machines of greater size
and power. They had no need to work at high pressure. They could
work slowly, with their hands and with a few simple instruments, and
with them produce beautiful, accurate, and finished articles, which
aspired to a lofty and difficult ideal of perfection. Accordingly, art
occupied in the ancient world the position which science occupies in
modern civilisation. It was not a refined luxury for the few, but an
elementary and universal necessity. Governments and wealthy citizens
were obliged to adorn their cities with monuments, sculptures, and
pictures, to embellish squares, streets, and houses, because the masses
wished the cities to be beautiful, and would have rebelled against an
authority which would have them live in an unadorned city; just as
nowadays they would rebel against a municipal authority which would
have them dwell in a city without light, or against a government which
placed obstacles and hindrances in the way of the construction of
railways. In those times, the requirement was that everything, down
to the household utensils, even of the most modest description and
destined for the use of the poorer classes, be inspired with a breath
of beauty. Anyone who visits a museum of Greco-Roman antiquities, in
which are exposed to view objects found in rich and highly cultivated
districts,—that of Naples, for example, where so many objects excavated
from the ashes of Pompeii are to be seen,—can easily convince himself
of this curious phenomenon, and realise more vividly, by contrast, the
carelessness, roughness, and commonplace vulgarity of the objects made
by modern machinery. In short, if the quantity of the things produced
by the industry of the ancients was small, for that very reason, and by
way of compensation, their quality was refined and excellent.
The contrary is the case in the modern world. The quantity of the
things which modern industry, thanks to electricity- and steam-driven
machinery, produces, is prodigious. No century ever witnessed the
realisation of the miracle of abundance in a more marvellous way. But
the quality of the things suffers in consequence. The ugliness and the
crude vulgarity of so many objects, which in much poorer times had an
elegance and a beauty which have now vanished, are the price we pay
for the abundance of our times. The necessities of man have increased
beyond all measure, and to satisfy them lavish and rapid production is
required. The need for rapid production accounts for the invention of
so many machines. But it is not possible to secure the manufacture by
rigid hands of iron of so many things at such speed, and at the same
time to impart to them an exquisitely artistic appearance, revealing
the personal excellence of the artist. It is as much as we can do to
impart to them a coarse and rude appearance of beauty, with a few
ornamentations copied casually from the beautiful things which our
fathers succeeded in creating in poorer and less busy times. Machinery,
driven by steam or electricity, has the advantage of speed over the
hand of man. It can produce in the same time a much greater number of
objects. For this reason it has triumphed in a time like ours, in which
the increased necessities of the world demand an extraordinary growth
in production. But the hand of man,—that living and mind-inspired
machine,—if it cannot compete with machines of iron for speed, is alone
capable of imparting to things that perfection, that grace, and that
excellence of form which can fill us with a joy which is different
from, but perhaps more intense than, that afforded by easy and coarse
abundance.
* * * * *
This contrast between ancient and modern times, between the
civilisations which preceded the French Revolution and the modern
American civilisation, should and would have received more attention
than it has, had not the students of antiquity been too prone to lose
their way in the maze of a dead erudition. We are proud of our wealth
and power. We are proud of having extended our dominion over the whole
planet, only a small part of which was known to the ancients, and that
but vaguely. We are proud of having surprised so many of nature’s
secrets, of having deciphered the mystery of so many laws, of having
thrown light on so many lurking-places of disease and death, of having
shaken ourselves free from so many vain fears which tormented our
ancestors, of having released ourselves from so many yokes—political,
moral, and intellectual—which used to weigh upon their necks. We feel
ourselves strong, sure of ourselves and of our destiny as no men before
us in history, in face of the blind forces of the Universe, so many
of which we have subjected to our dominion and forced to serve our
necessities, our ambitions, and our whims.
Nevertheless, in the midst of all this wealth, this power, and this
knowledge, a dull sense of disquietude vexes men’s souls. Man is
not yet content. Every day he finds new pretexts or motives for
complaining. One of the most oft-repeated of these pretexts or motives
is, that the world is becoming uglier. If in our cities any beautiful
part remains, it is nearly always the old part. In the historical
cities, the new parts are horrible, and form a strange contrast with
the older. The altogether-new cities—especially those which have sprung
up in the last century in America—appear to the artistic eye almost
always like a sort of anteroom to the infernal regions. Architecture
has become a mother of monsters. Sculpture and painting, which were
once upon a time the two most select amongst the decorative arts,
protected and pampered by the great ones of the earth and adored by the
masses, are reduced to the necessity of employing a thousand artifices
to extort orders out of the negligent malevolence of an epoch, whose
ornaments and monuments seem an encumbrance and an excrescence rather
than a beauty. There was a time when the dress of men and women was a
work of art. At the present day, only that of women has preserved a
certain artistic grace and beauty. Let us not dwell upon the countless
other forms of ugliness which have invaded our houses with the
furniture, the carpets, the candelabra, and the china.
The artistic mediocrity of our epoch is surpassed only by the
superficiality and confusion of its tastes. Each succeeding year sees
that which used to appear the height of elegance and beauty to its
predecessors, despised, neglected, and forgotten. All the styles of
the past and all the styles of the different countries swirl round
us, before the fickle gusts of fashion. Every picture which excites
admiration for a moment is quickly forgotten by the fickle taste
of an age which ransacks every corner in search of the beautiful,
because nowhere can the beautiful be found. Many ask themselves what
is the origin of this strange corruption of taste and of the æsthetic
sense. But no two people agree on the answer. This one attributes the
degeneration to the decadence of traditions, and therefore proposes to
open schools and to institute courses of instruction. That one, on the
other hand, traces the responsibility to the lack of liberty afforded
the public taste and the genius of the artists, a condition of things
for which these same traditions are to blame. Such a one therefore
inveighs against the schools and the rules of tradition, and would like
to see them all swept away. Nobody can explain how it happens that so
rich, so wise, and so powerful a civilisation does not succeed in being
beautiful, and shows itself powerless to infuse a breath of beauty into
anything it creates, be it big or little, into its cities or into the
small objects of daily use.
But the history of civilisation explains this apparent mystery. A
civilisation cannot deck itself with the most exquisite beauties of
art, if it cannot persuade itself to live with a certain simplicity and
to work with a certain deliberation. What kills art in our civilisation
is the mad desire for wealth, the giddy increase of necessities, the
universal craze for speed, the effort to multiply production, the
general restlessness of body and mind. Beauty is not so simple and
commonplace a thing as to admit of its examples being multiplied by
machinery in furious haste. Whether in big things or in little, it can
only be the result of a long and steady effort of the intellect and the
will, which must be expressed at all costs through the medium of that
living and marvellous machine, the human hand. If we wish to accumulate
round us the wealth of the world at express speed, if we wish to
produce and to consume with giddy rapidity, we must not be too exacting
in our demands for quality and beauty in the things produced. We cannot
have a great deal in this world, and have that great deal beautiful.
Therefore, speaking still more generally, we might say that in the
ancient civilisation the dominant principle was quality, in the modern
civilisation, on the other hand, quantity. In ancient times, the more
cultured, powerful, and wealthy a nation became, the greater efforts it
made to produce in every branch of human activity but few things, but
to ensure the materialisation in those things of a difficult and lofty
ideal of perfection which should find common acceptance and admiration.
Men of our time, on the other hand, direct their efforts towards
production in large quantities, and at great speed, and are proud of
seeing their power and grandeur expressed in the formidable figures
of modern statistics. That the goods produced are of deteriorating
quality is of small account. Thus the ancient civilisations tended, so
to speak, towards eternity, towards the manufacture of things which,
if not eternal in the precise meaning of the word, should last a long
time, should conquer the ages, and should succeed in conveying to
distant posterity a supreme image of their past existence. In very
truth, after numberless catastrophes and pillagings, the material
remains of ancient civilisations, which are piously preserved to this
day, are very numerous. Our age produces in great quantities, but
maybe not a single one of the buildings and material objects produced
by it in such abundance can hope to conquer the ages. Everything is
precarious, ephemeral, destined to live a few months or a few years;
destined to a premature death from the very first hour of its birth.
And this diversity crops up again in every branch of human activity;
in industrial as in intellectual activity, in art as in literature.
We look upon the literatures of Greece and Rome as a treasure of
inestimable value, almost as the foundation of our culture; and we
still recommend them as models to all who wish to learn the difficult
art of writing and of speaking with precision, elegance, and clearness.
And yet how little the ancients wrote and read compared with ourselves!
The press did not exist; paper, now the cheapest of materials, was
a rare luxury—the papyrus was a most precious Egyptian monopoly.
Consequently, the number of persons who could provide themselves with
books was very small, and such persons were found only among the
_élite_ of culture or of wealth. The only opportunities of reading
the people had were afforded by the public notices, and by the laws
engraved on bronze or marble tablets. In those times, there was nothing
to correspond in any way at all with the newspapers of to-day. In
view of the very scanty numbers of the readers of books, those also
who wrote them were bound to be few in number; these could not write
much. With but very few exceptions, the works bequeathed to us by the
ancients are by no means voluminous. Of all the qualities commonly
found in Greek and Latin writers, sobriety and conciseness are the
most prominent. These virtues were to some extent the product of
circumstances. For in times in which paper was so dear, and every copy
of a book had to be prepared specially by an amanuensis, conciseness
and brevity were the two qualities of importance to insure the wide
circulation and preservation of a book.
It was, however, just the circumstance that the ancients wrote
so little that enabled them to carry the art of writing to an
indescribable pitch of perfection; that enabled them to obtain that
clearness, that harmony, that cadence and proportion of phrase, that
concentration which has made them the great masters of the literary
art for all time. And to-day!—A wolfish, insatiable hunger for printed
paper and reading matter is the scourge of our civilisation. Look at
the Pantagruelian literary orgies to which Europe and America surrender
themselves! Every day brings its daily paper, every week its journals,
illustrated or otherwise, every month its reviews and magazines.
Then we have the special publications devoted to a particular art,
a particular profession, a particular industry, a favourite sport,
in number without end. We have, too, the volumes of every kind and
quality with which a crowd of publishers congests the book market:
novels, poems, books of travel, science, political economy, religion,
sport. Who could enumerate all the kinds of books which are published
nowadays? Many of these, it is true, do not find readers, but many do;
and a certain number, so many readers as to be sold in thousands, in
tens of thousands, and to be scattered broadcast all over the world.
But to satisfy a public which is so greedy of reading, an extraordinary
number of writers is required at the present day, from the obscure
editors of provincial journals to the favoured few who succeed in
winning world-fame, and in reaching the position of sovereigns or,
if you prefer it, satraps of literature. And all this enormous
multitude of writers is compelled to write prolifically and rapidly,
because the public wants to read voraciously. It must choose diverse
topics, and vary its themes according to the varieties of fashion and
events. On the other hand, it is no longer compelled to be concise,
both because the public often likes prolixity, which makes reading
comfortable and easy, and because, nowadays, printing is so cheap
and facile. But the art of writing is being lost through this haste,
this instability of public interest, this prolixity. Every tongue is
becoming a muddy mixture of words and phrases which have dripped from
every point of heaven on to the daily language and literature. Taste is
being corrupted, with writers as with readers, deteriorating now into
negligence and carelessness, now into affectation and grotesqueness.
* * * * *
Quality and quantity: these are the two principles of the two
civilisations, the ancient and the modern. They are two opposite
principles, a circumstance which explains why in the last fifty years
the gradual triumph of the civilisation of machinery or of industry on
a large scale, which aims at multiplying the quantity of riches, has
been accompanied by a decline in classical studies. The new generation,
even that portion of it that represents the educated classes, has
broken away from the study of a world which, though resembling the
modern world in so many of its ideas and institutions, differed from
the present era in the fundamental conception of life, and professed an
entirely different idea of perfection.
However, if the two principles are mutually exclusive, we must ask
ourselves, which is true and which false, which is good and which is
not. Who is in the right,—we, who wish to fill the world with riches,
even at the cost of disfiguring it and making it hideous; or the
ancients, who were content to live a life of greater simplicity, of
more leisurely and more peaceful activity, but wished to spend it in a
persevering effort to materialise their ideals of beauty? In how many
of the confused disputes which set the men of our times by the ears
is this problem obscurely implied, though the disputants are unaware
of it? But the problem is a terrible one, because it involves all the
fundamental problems of contemporary life and the very destiny of
the gigantic operations to which our own generation, and those which
preceded it, have applied themselves with such frenzied activity.
So I will not attempt to solve the formidable problem. Yet may I
be permitted to express a thought, simple in itself, but one which
presents itself with the smiling countenance of hope. It is, that
“opposite” principles do not mean “irreconcilable” principles. Is it
not just possible that this craze for work, for riches, and for speed,
of which we are victims, may slacken somewhat, and give men time to
collect their thoughts, and to piece together again the shattered
grandeur of the modern world in the image of a more serene and composed
beauty? Are men really doomed to become more insatiable, the richer
they become; or will the day arrive when they will think it wiser
to employ a larger part of the immense riches they possess, not in
producing other riches, but in embellishing the world, seeing that
beauty is no less a joy in life than wealth, and that we ourselves,
though all athirst for gold, prove that it is so, by searching
untiringly in every corner for the few remains of ancient beauty?
I feel that I have not the courage to answer this question with a
brutal “No”; and I hope that many others will be of the same opinion.
For one cannot help thinking that one of the most marvellous epochs
in history would really begin on the day on which Europe and America
succeeded in reconciling in a new civilisation the two opposite
principles of quantity and quality, and in employing the extraordinary
riches at their disposal in adorning and beautifying the world, which
their energy and audacity have so immeasurably enlarged in recent
centuries.
III
WOMAN AND HOME
Some years ago, in the course of the excavations which are being made
with such success in Egypt, a papyrus was found which is now known
among archæologists by the name of _The Petition of Dionysia_. This
papyrus, which belongs to the second century A.D., contains on one
side some books of the _Iliad_, on the other a defence presented by a
certain Dionysia to an Egyptian court, before which she was defending
an action brought against her by her own father affecting her dowry
and other questions of interest. To escape paying his daughter and
her husband the sums which they demanded, the father had directed the
husband to return him his daughter, and had dissolved the marriage.
But the daughter, on her side, maintained in her defence that the
father had forfeited his right to dissolve her marriage and to
separate her from her husband, because her marriage was a “written”
marriage—established, that is to say, by an act or document in
writing. If it had been an “unwritten” marriage, Dionysia would not
have contested her father’s right in that case to dissolve it, for no
motive whatever, merely because it so pleased him.
It would be difficult to imagine a document more strange than this,
from the point of view of the ideas which prevail at the present day
in European and American society. Matrimony is for us an act of so
great social importance that the state alone—that is to say, the law,
and the law courts—can recognise or dissolve it. To leave the destiny
of a family at the mercy of the will of the father of one of the two
parties, to recognise as his the right to destroy a family at any
moment to suit his individual interest, without being accountable to
anyone for so doing, would seem to us a monstrous thing. And yet this
monstrous thing seemed to the whole of antiquity, with few restrictions
and reservations, legitimate, reasonable, and wise. Differences in
the organisation of the family existed in different countries and
in different centuries; but they were but superficial, unessential
differences. On one point, the whole world agreed: that matrimony
should never be considered an act to be left to the will of the
contracting parties, but a business transaction which the young people
should leave to their fathers to arrange.
Matrimony, as it was in Rome, will serve to give a clear idea of the
ancient world’s conception of the family. In Rome, fathers often
betrothed their sons when they were still children. They made them
marry when they were still quite young, the males before they were
twenty, the girls at about sixteen; and they had the right to oblige
them at any moment to divorce each other, without being forced to
give any reason or explanation. A man might be an exemplary husband,
might live with his wife in the most perfect bliss. If the son’s wife,
for one reason or another, did not suit the fancy of his father, the
son might be obliged any day to put her away. Amongst others to whom
this happened was no less a person than Tiberius, at a time when he
had already become one of the first figures in the Empire, and had
commanded armies in battle. He had married a daughter of Agrippa,
and loved her devotedly. The couple were considered in Rome a model
of affection and faithfulness. But, at a certain moment, Augustus,
who was the adoptive father of Tiberius, judged that for political
motives another marriage might have suited Tiberius better; and he,
accordingly, obliged Tiberius to divorce her. Tiberius was so much
upset, that—as Suetonius tells us—every time he met his first wife in
society, he burst into tears—he, who was one of the most formidable
generals of his time; so that Augustus had to take measures to prevent
their meeting each other. And yet Tiberius had to give way; for his
father, in the eyes of the law and in accordance with the ideas current
in his time, was absolute arbiter in these matters! Not even a man in
the circumstances of Tiberius, who had already been consul, could think
of rebelling against the paternal authority.
These few facts suffice to prove how often the ideas which to one epoch
and to one civilisation seem the most natural, the most evident, and
the most simple, are, on the contrary, complex and difficult ideas,
at which mankind has arrived only after a long effort, and weary
struggles. Is there anything which seems to us more reasonable than to
leave to young people, who wish to found a family, ample liberty of
judgment and of choice in the matter of the person with whom they will
have to pass their lives? Fathers, it is true, often help their sons
by giving advice. They readily place at the disposal of their children
their own experience. But it is only in very rare instances that they
maintain a struggle _à outrance_, to withhold their children from a
marriage on which their hearts are set, or to force on them a repugnant
alliance. We consider that the individual’s happiness may depend to
some extent on his marriage. It is, therefore, just that everybody
should have ample liberty of choice. If the law purported to restore
to fathers the right to make or unmake their sons’ marriages, we are
convinced that at the present day the vast majority of fathers would
refuse to assume such a responsibility, and would consider such a power
unjust, excessive, and tyrannical. There is not a father to-day who,
however averse he may be to a marriage desired by his son or daughter,
does not end by telling him or her, provided a little firmness is shown
in resisting his arguments, that after all it is not he, but his son or
daughter who has to take the husband or wife in question. Indeed, this
inclination to pliability on the part of fathers towards their sons is
increasing every day. Every day sees a growing disinclination on the
part of fathers to fetter, in a matter of such delicacy and of such
importance to the personal happiness of the young, the freedom of the
latter’s inclinations, the spontaneous rush of their feelings. Besides,
what would be the use of having conquered liberty in so many other
spheres, if it were withheld in this which, especially to the young,
seems the most important of all: the liberty of yielding to the impulse
of that passion which at a certain moment of life is the strongest of
all, love?
And yet no idea would have appeared more absurd and scandalous to the
men of the ancient world, the contemporaries of Pericles and Cæsar.
The difference is so radical and profound that it must arise from
important reasons. In fact, whoever compares ancient with modern times
easily recognises that the rights of sentiment and the principles of
liberty have been able to triumph in modern society only by virtue of
a complete transformation in social customs and ordinances, which has
stripped the family in our times of much of its social importance.
To-day the family is purely and simply a form of social life in common.
Man and woman cannot live solitary lives. A powerful instinct impels
them towards each other. Even when the instinct is not felt, or is
spent, the man needs to live in the company of other human beings,
to have round him a circle of persons with whom he may find himself
in relations of the closest intimacy. To-day the family performs
this profoundly human office—this office and practically no other.
Nowadays, man and woman study, work, take part in government, compete
for the conquest of wealth and power, and exercise an influence on
society—engage in all these activities quite outside the family.
But it was not so in ancient times. The family was then an independent
economic organisation, in which the woman had a predominant part. She
wove and spun, providing every member of the family with clothes.
She made bread, she dried the fruits for the winter, she seized the
right moment for laying in the necessary supplies of provisions—a most
important task, in times in which commerce was much less developed
than it is now. In poor or moderately wealthy families, the women wove
and performed similar tasks with their own hands. Rich women learned
to do these tasks as children, but later contented themselves with
superintending their performance by women slaves or freedwomen. But,
especially in the rich families, the woman could contribute a great
deal to the prosperity or the ruin of the house, according as she
was or was not active in the performance of her work, zealous in her
surveillance, energetic and shrewd in giving her orders, moderate in
her expenditure. Even to-day the woman can contribute a great deal, in
the wealthy classes, to the prosperity of the family. But for this she
requires only one negative virtue, for all that this virtue is not too
common or easily acquired: to know how to confine her expenses within
reasonable limits, and not to be too ready to gratify her whims. In
ancient times, on the contrary, if a woman was to be useful to her
family she needed as well a positive virtue: to know how to produce
much and well. This explains how we come to know that certain emperors’
wives, Livia for instance, directed the weaving operations in their
homes personally and with great zeal, and that Augustus was particular
not to wear any togas but those woven in his house under the eyes of
his wife. The Emperor and his wife by their example meant to recall to
all the Roman women the duty of attending with zeal and alacrity to
their domestic duties.
The ancient family, especially among the upper classes, was also a
school. The ancient world had few institutions of public education;
and private instruction did not reach a high level of development,
except in the closing years of the Empire. Though Rome was the greatest
military power in the world, the family took the place of military
schools, which were then non-existent. The officers, who all belonged
to the nobility, were prepared in the family. The father was the first
military instructor of his sons, and on him fell the duty of making
good soldiers of them. This, indeed, was one of the reasons why the
aristocracy became indispensable to the Roman Empire; because it alone
could prepare the officers and generals in the family.