under the Empire was its lack of originality. But, after all, that
had always been the deficiency of Roman writers. It was due very
largely to the overwhelming incubus of Greek civilisation, from whose
leading-strings the Romans, to the end of time, never escaped. That
in its turn arose chiefly through the nature of their education which
turned all their attention to _style_ as the end of literary endeavour.
Any one who would argue against a classical education could find no
better argument than the relations between the two “classical” peoples.
ART
With art it is much the same story; for the decoration of their villas
and colonnades the Romans of the Empire continued to prefer their
statues imported from Greece. Pausanias shows us that Greece, even
in the second century A.D., was still teeming with works of art of
every kind. Impoverished and shrunken as the old Greek cities were at
this period, it shows some high-mindedness that they still retained
treasures which would have fetched millions in the Trans-Adriatic
markets. There was, however, a brisk trade in copies and imitations
of the masterpieces. For statues, then, the Greek work of the fifth
and fourth centuries almost destroyed any attempt at originality by
the Romans. Only in portraiture was there much progress, and here work
of great power and vigour was produced. It reaches the zenith perhaps
under the Flavian emperors, but their successors of the Antonine
period and later are often depicted on their busts with triumphant but
unsparing realism. The bust of Philip the Arabian in the Vatican is
one of the most striking. Sometimes it almost seems as if there was a
malicious spirit of caricature in these too faithful portraits. Can
Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher prince, have presented to the world a
visage so weak and so tonsorially perfect?[71] Can Caracalla have borne
his bloody mind so visibly written on his face?[72] In portraiture,
there is certainly progress and not decay.
Otherwise, to judge by the remains, sculptors were almost confined to
bas-relief. This was the medium chosen by emperor after emperor for
the narration of his exploits, and advances were unquestionably made
in the art of pictorial or narrative sculpture. That this is a high
art in itself may, I think, be contested. One cannot escape from a
sense of the practical futility of telling the history of the Dacian
Wars on a serpentine band of ornament which soared away out of sight.
It is rather characteristic of the plodding Roman, who so often lost
sight of the wood in his faithful contemplation of the trees. If we
look for the end to which this art of narrative relief was tending, we
shall find it on the basis of the column of Antoninus Pius preserved
in the Vatican garden.[73] These cavalrymen placidly gyrating round
the group of standard-bearers, each on his own little shelf, are so
extremely life-like as to recall nothing in the world so much as pieces
of gingerbreads. We begin to perceive that Madame Tussaud would have
been hailed as a great creative artist in Imperial Rome. Nevertheless,
without subscribing to all the superlatives of Mrs. Strong, we may
admit that Art was still alive and vigorous and still scoring fresh
technical triumphs in the Antonine period and even later.
Roman archæologists have recently worked out the history of Imperial
Art with some precision. The reign of Tiberius continued the classical
tendencies of Augustus. Under Claudius there was great constructional
activity, mainly of a utilitarian character. The Claudian aqueduct,
whose immense arches in brick still break the level horizon of the
Campagna, is one of the greatest works of this period.[74] Nero’s
was an age of Greek curio-hunting; much of Rome was rebuilt after
the great fire in his reign and the Golden House must have been a
stupendous sight. But on his death the Romans made haste to obliterate
all traces of his work. The Flavian epoch was the culminating-point
of Roman art. Vespasian destroyed Nero’s Golden House and restored
the Capitol. He and his sons built the baths of Titus, the Arch of
Titus[75] with the celebrated Jewish relief, and the mighty Flavian
Amphitheatre, the Colosseum.[76] This was built in the style already
noticed in the theatre of Marcellus, namely, with the three Greek
orders of architecture, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, adorning the
three stories of the façade; but here, as so often, the Greek façade
is a mere shell to hide the solid Roman masonry of which the building
is really constructed. It is noteworthy that the monuments of this
age refute the historians who allege among Domitian’s other sins
that he tried to destroy the works and the memory of Titus, his more
popular brother. In the technical language of Wickhoff, this Flavian
Age shows us “illusionism” at its height in art. Under Trajan, and in
his famous column, the art of continuous narration in low relief is
fully developed.[77] Hadrian, the cultured, travelling Philhellene,
encouraged a reversion to the classical traditions of Greek art. The
art of his period was profoundly influenced by the type of Antinous,
a beautiful youth beloved by the emperor, whose romantic death by
drowning in the Nile made a powerful impression upon the whole Roman
world, because he was believed to have sacrificed his life for his
emperor’s in obedience to an oracle. This type is preserved for us in
many forms, but most notably in the colossal Mondragore bust in the
Louvre[78] and the bas-relief in the Villa Albani.[79] His features
were utilised to represent all the young male gods on Olympus. In their
tragic beauty we see a mirror of Greece tinged by the Orient, as if
Dionysus had wedded Isis and this were the offspring. The Antonine
period, as exhibited on the panels in the Palazzo dei Conservatori,
is gifted with immense technical fluency and, as Mrs. Strong remarks,
a new spiritual seriousness. As compositions they are superb, but the
weakness of expression in the face of Marcus Aurelius himself quite
spoils their effect for some spectators.[80]
Architecture was still mainly designed in the three Greek modes
variously combined, in spite of the fact that Rome had progressed far
beyond Greek limits in constructional ability. Roman builders could
manage a roof-span far in excess of the Greeks. The Roman arch gave
a strength in concrete vaulting which expensive marble was unable to
attain. Roman brickwork denuded of the marble incrustations which
generally covered it of old is probably more impressive in its ruins
than it was when it was draped with Hellenism, and, to me at least,
remains like the aqueduct at Pont du Gard[81] and the Bridge of
Alcantara[82] seem truer witnesses of the grandeur of Rome than all the
marbles in all the museums. The celebrated Castle of St. Angelo, which
still keeps watch and ward over the Tiber, is nothing but the core of
Hadrian’s tomb--the _Moles Hadriani_--once clad in a vestment of Greek
marbles and covered with Greek ornament.[83] The Pantheon, in spite of
the inscription which ascribes it to Agrippa, is proved by the marks on
its bricks to be a restoration of Hadrian’s time. It is indeed a superb
example of vaulting and a miracle of construction. The plan is that of
a dome so constructed that if the sphere were complete it would rest
upon the earth. The magnificent interior has lost little of its ancient
splendour.[84]
For temple architecture, although the Romans had adopted the forms of
Greek art they had wholly deserted the spirit of austere self-restraint
upon which that art had rested. Thus they readily adopted the
luxuriance of the East when it came to hand. In the splendid ruins
of Heliopolis (Ba’albek) and Palmyra we see a riotous luxuriance of
ornament which would have shocked the religious sense of Ictinus, but
which fitly enshrined the ritual and mysteries of the Sungod. This
craze for the colossal would have made the reverential Greeks tremble
in fear of provoking the Nemesis of a jealous Heaven, but in its ruins
it has left us superb and awful reminders of the riches and grandeur of
its authors, and of the end of all riches and grandeur.
[Illustration: _Moles Hadriani_: restored]
In domestic building the Romans had almost as little regard as the
Greeks for the exterior elevation of their villas and palaces. The
Roman gentleman still made it his favourite hobby to collect villas,
and Pliny had almost as many as Cicero. But the main idea of the villa
was comfort, and the main idea of Roman comfort was coolness, quiet,
and beautiful scenery. Thus the wealthy man’s house consisted of a
series of marble courts and cloisters spread over the ground regardless
of space. Landscape and landscape-gardening were the most charming
features. The Roman appreciated the scenery of Como or Sirmione, Tivoli
or Naples quite as keenly as the tourist of to-day. He thought much of
fresh air and good water. Nearly all Roman gentlemen were agreed in
considering Rome itself, with its smells, its noise, and its perils
by fire, as a pestilent place of abode, and they gladly fled to their
country estates at Præneste or Baiæ. Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli[85]
included reproductions of many famous buildings which he had seen and
admired on his travels. The decoration of these villas encouraged
two minor arts which figure prominently among their remains. The
floors were commonly adorned with marble mosaic, of which we still
have some charming examples.[86] The interior walls were incrusted
either with marble, in the wealthier houses, or stuccoed and painted.
Hence, it results that the Art of Painting is represented to us almost
solely by mosaics, wall-frescoes,[87] and a few portraits on Egyptian
mummy-cases. Nothing remains of the great masters of antiquity,
Polygnotus, Zeuxis, and Apelles. But there may be faint echoes of
their work on the frescoes of Pompeii executed by unnamed decorators.
Even so there is great charm in much of this work. Professor Mau, the
great authority on Pompeii, has distinguished four successive phases of
painting in that city. At first the aim was to imitate the marble slabs
used to cover the walls of the rich man’s house. Then growing bolder
the painter imitates various forms of architectural treatment dividing
up his wall space into panels and portraying cornices, columns,
pilasters, and so forth. This is roughly the style of the first century
B.C., and it is found in the so-called house of Livia on the Palatine
Hill at Rome.[88] The third style, which Mau terms the “ornate,” was
prevalent until about A.D. 50. The architectural features now make no
pretence at illusion. The columns have become mere bands of colour, and
there is profuse ornament everywhere. The colours are somewhat cold.
The fourth or “intricate” style once more emphasises the architectural
character of the decoration, but the patterns are too intricate to
present any appearance of reality. The whole wall space shows a riot
of fantastic ornament often extremely graceful and effective. Flying
goddesses and cupids impart a sense of airy lightness, and floral forms
festoon themselves in charming curves. The pictures are smaller and
the spaces wider. No more pleasing treatment of the interior walls
of a house has ever been devised, at any rate for warm climates. The
destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79 brings
the history of ancient painting to a premature close.[89] The subjects
of the pictures are almost exclusively mythological.
The minor arts of the jeweller, the gem-engraver, the goldsmith
reach a high state of technical perfection, but they do not improve
in spirit or artistic feeling with the progress of the ages. Much
of the furniture found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, especially the
bronze-work,[90] exhibits most graceful forms, always Greek in
inspiration.
LAW
The greatest intellectual achievement of the Roman people was in the
domain of law. The spiritual endowment of the typical Roman included
all the qualities of the lawyer--a sense of equity that was quite
devoid of sentimentalism, an instinct for order, discipline, and
business, a language of great clarity and precision, and above all,
a devotion to ceremonies and formulæ which sternly rejected abstract
casuistry. Their law took its rise in a series of religious formulæ
known only to priests and to the king as chief priest. The Twelve
Tables put some of the most ancient principles into words, and partly
from their use as a text-book of education, were regarded almost with
as much veneration as the Two Tables of Moses. They were, in fact,
sometimes considered as the sole fountain of jurisprudence, or at any
rate as the sole code of written law. The legislative enactments of the
State were on a far lower plane and no ancient people ever considered
its legislature capable of turning out a daily quota of legislation
as modern parliaments are supposed to do. In the main the fabric of
Roman jurisprudence consisted of “case law” made by the judges on
the tribunals. The Prætor Urbanus made the Civil Law of Rome, and
this became permanent by means of the system of Perpetual Edicts.
Religion continued to control the international law of the Roman
world, an affair of ceremonies in the hands of the priestly college of
heralds--the _jus fetiale_. But, meanwhile, the _prætor peregrinus_ who
had to decide cases between non-citizens was gradually accumulating a
body of law, wrongly termed international, in the _jus gentium_. It
was observed that there was a great deal in common between the various
codes of the Italian and other Mediterranean States, and this was put
together in the foreign prætor’s edict. The more philosophical jurists,
inspired with the Stoic doctrines about following nature, evolved the
theory that this common element of various nations was nothing but the
Natural Law, _jus naturæ_. It was a fruitful error, and it lies at the
base of much of the modern “international law” as expounded by Grotius
and other seventeenth-century jurists.
The Civil Law of Rome was in the main, then, a series of precedents
handed down by prætor to prætor from times beyond record. To it was
added a large body of “counsel’s opinions” which drew their validity
largely from the eminence of their authors. It was Hadrian who set
about the systematisation of these. He organised the _jurisprudentes_
into a regular profession. He appointed his “counsellors” from the
leading barristers of the day, and he gave to the whole body of
_responsa prudentium_, “the opinions of the learned,” the validity
of statutory law. The justice and precision of the civil law was the
most attractive feature of Roman civilisation to the barbarian world.
Gallic and British communities made haste to learn Latin in order that
they might gain the “Latin right” which admitted them to the privilege
of enjoying Roman law. In A.D. 212, Caracalla, who did little else
to deserve the gratitude of posterity, uttered a single edict called
the “Antonine Constitution” which admitted the whole empire to the
privileges of Roman citizenship. Now a single code ran throughout the
whole Western world. Hadrian had set his most distinguished lawyers,
under the leadership of Salvius Julianus, to codify the “perpetual
edict” of the prætors. It was under the Antonines that some citizen
from the East, who is only known to us by the common prænomen of Gaius,
wrote those learned “Institutes of Roman Law” which are still the
nursery of our lawyers. But it was the great Eastern emperor Justinian
(A.D. 527-565) who codified the whole body of civil law in a series
of immense documents. Roman law had already conquered its barbarian
conquerors, the Goths, and almost every European legal system except
our own is based upon that ancient law which arose from the Twelve
Tables and the prætor’s edict. The canon law of the Church was Roman
law in its essence.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
Much attention has been paid in recent years to the religious
development of the Romans under the Empire, and to the momentous
conflict of religions which was going on from the age of Hadrian until
the final triumph of Christianity. Humanly speaking, it was “touch
and go” between several religions competing for the vacant place in
the faith of the Empire, and at the last the strife was practically
narrowed down to a duel between two oriental monotheistic systems,
Mithraism[91] and Christianity. The subject is too vast for anything
like adequate treatment here. But I would emphasise one point of view
which is often overlooked.
The Roman state is too often regarded merely as the enemy and
persecutor of the Christian religion. It is forgotten how large a share
Rome may claim in its establishment. Not only did the Romans discover
Christianity, but they organised it and sent it forth conquering and
to conquer in the wake of the legions. It is not a case of a wicked
and corrupt people suddenly converted in the midst of its sins. On the
contrary it is easy to show that the thinkers of the Roman Empire were
tending towards philosophic and religious ideas which made them ready
to accept with astonishing rapidity both the ethical teaching and the
theological revelations of the Son of God. It is unnecessary to remind
the modern reader how large a part the Greek philosophy of Stoicism
with its Roman modifications had played in shaping the thoughts of one
Roman citizen, Paul of Tarsus. Philo, the Alexandrian Platonist, had
developed a doctrine of the Divine _Logos_, which profoundly influenced
the philosophy of the fourth Evangelist, and through him the whole
course of Christian teaching.
The Romans may have added little to abstract philosophy or to
metaphysics, but they made the somewhat barren abstractions of Zeno the
Stoic into something more than a philosophy, into a faith which had a
power to influence conduct far beyond the power of the State system of
half-Greek Olympian Gods. If the power and the sincerity of a religion
may be tested rather by its martyrs than by its proselytes, Stoicism
had a worthy record. Men like Thrasea Pætus, Helvidius Priscus, and
Barea Soranus were facing the tyrant’s frown for the sake of their
Stoic sense of duty, just as truly as Peter and Polycarp.
The attitude of the Roman Government towards Christianity has been
too often explained to need more than a brief recapitulation. At
first Christianity was confounded with Judaism, which had already
begun to make converts at Rome without seeking for them. The Roman
government was extraordinarily tolerant towards creed, but it demanded
an external compliance with the Cæsar-worship, which it was imposing
on the provinces as a test of loyalty. But the Christians did not take
the divine command “render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s” to
include scattering incense on his altars. Too many of them had been
brought up in the punctilious exclusiveness of the Jewish tradition for
them to display on such points the laxity which is sometimes called
broad-mindedness. Even in the private intercourse of social life the
Christians were unpleasantly apt to insist upon their scruples. The
meat in the butchers’ shops had often been slain in sacrifice, and
the Christian conscience revolted at “meat offered to idols.” The
libation with which the wine-cup started on its rounds was another
offence to the tender monotheistic conscience. These things made the
Christians unpopular. Their close associations, their secret meetings
and love-feasts, the communism which they practised, all aroused the
suspicions which are begotten of mystery. Lastly, their conviction that
the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment were at hand made them ardent
proselytes. It made them utter prognostications of death and damnation
to all around them, and to see apocalyptic visions of the fall of the
kingdoms of this earth. Such prophecies were sometimes misunderstood
as involving treasonable designs. The first persecution under Nero was
largely the result of such suspicions.
But the official attitude of the permanent Roman Government is probably
revealed in the famous correspondence between Pliny and his emperor,
Trajan. Imperial Rome is not to set up an inquisition. No man is to be
punished for his faith, but if he is accused to the governor and is
obstinate in refusing to pay the obeisance demanded by the state he is
to be punished for his contumacy. That is precisely the attitude which
the most humane and enlightened Christian states have adopted towards
heresy. Later, when the Faith grew in importance, and when it even
reached the point of soldiers refusing the military oaths, occasional
emperors, often the better emperors, strove to fight against it. Then
there were sometimes inquisitions and wholesale martyrdoms as under
Decius and Diocletian. But no martyrdom, however public or agonising,
could quench the faith of those who saw the heavens opening and the
Angels of God descending with their crowns of glory. The publicity
of the scenes and the constancy of the victims increased, as usual,
the number of the converts. Foolish magistrates sought to encounter
obstinacy with further severity, and the Faith only grew the more
abundantly. It was not so much his personal conversion--for that was
tardy and half-hearted--as the motive of policy to secure an advantage
over Maxentius, which induced Constantine to promulgate the Edict of
Milan in 313, by which toleration was extended to the Christian faith
throughout the Roman Empire.
We must not be surprised that the best emperors, including the
philosopher and saint, Marcus Aurelius, were the most bitterly hostile
to Christianity. That is human nature. Stoic philosophers were teaching
very much in common with Christian philosophy, but that renders it all
the less likely that Stoic philosophers should be among the converts.
Nevertheless Christian doctrine, especially in the Græco-Jewish
communities of Asia Minor, was falling on prepared soil. The Stoic
paradoxes had undoubtedly prepared the way for the Christian paradoxes.
The doctrines of humility and asceticism were a commonplace of the
Cynics. “No Cross, no Crown,” “He who would save his life must lose
it”--such sayings as these would gain immediate assent from thoughtful
Romans. Epictetus, a heathen slave of Domitian’s day, wrote his answer
to the tyrant: “No man hath power over me. I have been set free by
God. I know His Commandments; henceforth no man can lead me captive.”
The Stoics were daily teaching that it is hard for a rich man to
enter into the Kingdom of God. This is the creed of Marcus Aurelius:
“To venerate the gods and bless them, and to do good to men, and to
practise tolerance and self-restraint.” The horrors of the amphitheatre
are one side of imperial society. But on the other side Musonius Rufus,
a Stoic who stood high in the favour of Vespasian and Titus, went among
the soldiers to preach against militarism. Slave-drivers as the Romans
were, they were beginning to feel a sense of the brotherhood of man.
Seneca was calling the slaves “humble friends.” “Man is a holy thing to
man,” he says; and such teaching was reflected even in the legislation
of the day. Juvenal pleads passionately for kindness to slaves and for
moral purity in the home. Seneca not only feels that men are brothers,
but that God is the Father of us all. We have seen how public charity
was finding expression in the _alimenta_ and the free schools. “Love
them that hate you” would not strike the Romans of the second century
as anything more than a strong expression of the truth they had already
begun to recognise. Thus the practical side of Christian ethics
found its harmonies in the conduct as well as the theory of the more
enlightened pagans. Peace and humanitarianism were in the air of the
Antonine Age.