We have seen an eastward flow of cycles: which without too much
Procrusteanizing may be given dates thus:--Greece, 478 to 348;
Maurya India, 320 to 190; Western Han China, 194 to 63; in this
current, West Asia, being then in long pralaya, is overleaped.
We have also seen a tide in the other direction; it was first
Persia that touched Greece to awakenment; and there is that
problematical Indian period (if it existed), thirteen decades
after the fall of the Mauryas, and following close upon the
waning of the first glory of the Hans. So we should look for the
Greek Age to kindle something westward again, sooner or later;--
which of course it did. 478 to 348; 348 to 218; 218 to
88 B.C.; 88 B.C. to 42 A. D.: we shall see presently the
significance of those latter dates in Roman history. Meanwhile
to note this: whereas Persia woke Greece at a touch, thirteen
decades elapsed before Greece began to awake Italy. It waited to
do so fully until the Crest-Wave had sunk a little at the eastern
end of the world; for you may note that the year 63 B.C., in
which Han Chaoti died, was the year in which Augustus was born.
With him in the same decade came most of the luminaries that made
his age splendid: Virgil in 70; Horace in 65; Vipsanius
Agrippa in 63; Cilnius Maecenas in what precise year we do not
know. The fact is that the influx of vigorous light-bearing
egos, as it decreased in China, went augmenting in Italy: which
no doubt, if we could trace it, we should find to be the kind of
thing that happens always. For about four generations the
foremost souls due to incarnate crowd into one race or quarter of
the globe; then, having exhausted the workable heredity to be
found there,--_used up_ that racial stream,--they must go
elsewhere. There you have the _raison d'etre,_ probably, of
the thirteen-decade period. It takes as a rule about four
generations of such high life to deplete the racial heredity for
the time being,--which must then be left to lie fallow. So now,
America not being discovered, and there being no further eastward
to go, we must jump westward the width of two continents
(nearly), and (that last lecture being parenthetical as it were)
come from Han Chaoti's death to Augustus' birth, from China
to Rome.
But before dealing with Augustus and the Roman prime, we must get
some general picture of the background out of which he and it
emerged: this week and next we must give to early and to
Republican Rome. And here let me say that these two lectures
will be, for the most part, a very bare-faced plagiarism;
summarizing facts and conclusions taken from a book called _The
Grandeur that was Rome,_ by Mr. J. C. Stobart, of the English
Cambridge. One greatest trouble about historical study is, that
it allows you to see no great trends, but hides under the record
of innumerable fidgety details the real meanings of things. Mr.
Stobart, with a gift of his own for taking large views, sees this
clearly, and goes about to remedy it; he does not wander with
you through the dark of the undergrowth, labeling bush after
bush; but leads you from eminence to eminence, generalizing, and
giving you to understand the broad lie of the land: he makes you
see the forest in spite of the trees. As this is our purpose,
too, we shall beg leave to go with him; only adding now and
again such new light as Theosophical ideas throw on it;--and for
the most part, to avoid a tautology of acknowledgments, or a
plethora of footnotes in the PATH presently, letting this one
confession of debt serve. The learning, the pictures, the
marshaling of facts, are all Mr. Stobart's.
In the fifth and sixth centuries A. D., when the old manvantara
was closing, Europe was flung into the Cauldron of Regeneration.
Nations and fragments of nations were thrown in and tossing and
seething; the broth of them was boiling over, and,--just as the
the Story of Taliesin, flooding the world with poison and
destruction: and all that a new order of ages might in due time
come into being. One result that a miscellany of racial
heterogeneities was washed up into the peninsular and island
extremities of the continent. In the British you had four Celtic
and a Pictish remnant,--not to mention Latins galore,--pressed on
by three or four sorts of Teutons. In Spain, though it was less
an extremity of Europe than a highway into Africa, you had a fine
assortment of odds and ends: Suevi, Vandals, Goths and what not;
superimposed on a more or less homogenized collection of
Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, and Italians;--and in Italy you had
Italians broken up into numberless fragments, and overrun by all
manner of Lombards, Teutons, Slavs, and Huns. Welded by cyclic
stress, presently first England, then Spain, and lastly Italy,
became nations; in all three varying degrees of homogeneity
being attained. But the next peninsula, the Balkan, has so far
reached no unity at all; it remains to this day a curious museum
of racial oddments, to the sorrow of European peace; and each
of them represents some people strong in its day, and perhaps
even cultured.
What the Balkan peninsula has been in our own time, the Apennine
peninsula was after the fall of Rome, and also before the rise of
Rome: a job-lot of race-fragments driven into that extremity of
Europe by the alarms and excursions of empires in dissolution
whose history time has hidden. The end of a manvantara, the
break-up of a great civilization and the confusion that followed,
made the Balkans what they are now, and Italy what she was in the
Middle Ages. The end of an earlier manvantara, the break-up of
older and forgotten civilizations, made Italy what she was in the
sixth century B.C. Both peninsulas, by their mere physical
geography, seem specially designed for the purpose.
Italy is divided into four by the Apennines, and is mostly
Apennines. Everyone goes there: conquerors, lured by the _dono
fatale,_ and for the sake of the prizes to be gathered; the
conquered, because it is the natural path of escape out of
Central Europe. The way in is easy enough; it is only the way
out that is difficult. The Alps slope up gently on the northern
side; but sharply fall away in grand precipices on the southern.
There, too, they overlook a region that would always tempt
invaders: the great rich plain the Po waters; a land no
refugees could well hope to hold. It has been in turn Cisalpine
Gaul, the Plain of the Lombards, and the main part of Austrian
Italy; this thrice a possession of conquerors from the north.
It is the first of the four divisions.
There never would be safety in it for refugees; you would not
find in it a great diversity of races living apart; conquerors
and conquered would quickly homogenize,--unless the conquerors
had their main seat in, and remained in political union with,
transalpine realms. Refugees would still and always have to move
on, if they desired to keep their freedom. Three ways would be
open to them, and three destinies, according to which way they
chose. They might go down into the long strip of Adriatic
coastland, where there are no natural harbors--and remain
isolated and unimportant between the mountain barrier and the
sea. Those who occupied this _cul de sac_ have played no great
part in history: the isolated never do.--Or they might cross the
Apennines and pour down into the lowlands of Etruria and
Latium, where are rich lands, some harbors, and generally, fine
opportunities for building up a civilization. Draw-backs also,
for a defeated remnant: Etruria is not too far from Lombardy to
tempt adventurers from the north, the vanguard of the conquering
people;--although again, the Apennine barrier might make their
hold on that middle region precarious. They might come there
conquering; but would form, probably, no very permanent part of
the northern empire: they would mix with the conquered, and at
any weakening northward, the mixture would be likely to break
away. So Austria had influence and suzerainty and various crown
appanages in Tuscany; but not such settled sway as over the
Lombard Plain. Then, too, this is a region that, in a time of
West Asian manvantara and European pralaya, might easily tempt
adventurers from the Near East.
But the main road for true refugees is the high Apennines; and
this is the road most of them traveled. Their fate, taking it,
would be to be pressed southward along the backbone of Italy by
new waves and waves of peoples; and among the wild valleys to
lose their culture, and become highlandmen, bandit tribes and
raiding clans; until the first comers of them had been driven
down right into the hot coastlands of the heel and toe of Italy.
Great material civilizations rarely originate among mountains:
outwardly because of the difficulty of communications; inwardly,
I suspect, because mountain influences pull too much away from
material things. Nature made the mountains, you may say, for the
special purpose of regenerating effete remnants of civilizations.
Sabellians and Oscans, Samnites and Volscians and Aequians and
dear knows what all:--open your Roman Histories, and in each one
of the host of nation-names you find there, you may probably see
the relic of some kingdom once great and flourishing north or
south of the Alps;--just as you can in the Serbians, Roumanians,
Bulgars, Vlachs, and Albanians in the next peninsula now.
One more element is to be considered there in the far south. Our
Lucanian and Bruttian and Iapygian refugees,--themselves, or some
of them, naturally the oldest people in Italy, the most original
inhabitants,--would find themselves, when they arrived there,
very much de-civilized; but, because the coast is full of fine
harbors, probably sooner or later in touch with settlers from
abroad. It is a part that would tempt colonists of any cultured
or commercial peoples that might be spreading out from Greece or
the West Asian centers or elsewhere; and so it was Magna Graecia
of old, and a mixing-place of Greek and old Italian blood; and
so, since, has been held by Saracens, Normans, Byzantines, and
Spaniards.
The result of all this diversity of racial elements would be that
Italy could only difficultly attain national unity at any time;
but that once such unity was attained, she would be bound to play
an enormous part. No doubt again and again she has been a center
of empire; it is always your ex-melting-pot that is.
Who were the earliest Italians? The earliest, it least, that we
can guess at?--Once on a time the peninsula was colonized by folk
who sailed in through the Straits of Gibraltar from Ruta and
Daitya, those island fragments of Atlantis; and (says Madame
Blavatsky) you should have found a pocket of these colonists
surviving in Latium, strong enough for the most part to keep the
waves of invaders to the north of them, and the refugees to the
high Apennines. Another relic of them you would have found,
probably, driven down into the far south; and such a relic, I
understand, the Iapygians were.
One more ethnic influence,--an important one. Round about the
year 1000 B.C., all Europe was in dead pralaya, while West Asia
was in high manvantara: under which conditions, as I suggested
just now, such parts as the Lombard Plain and Tuscany might tempt
West Asians of enterprise;--as Spain and Sicily tempted the
Moslems long afterwards. Supposing such a people came in; they
would be, while the West Asian manvantara was in being, much more
cultured and powerful than their Italian neighbors; but the
waning centuries of their manvantara would coincide with the
first and orient portion of the European one; so, as soon as
that should begin to touch Italy, things would begin to equalize
themselves; till at last, as Europe drew towards noon and West
Asia towards evening, these West Asians of Etruria would go the
way of the Spanish Moors. There you have the probable history of
the Etruscans.
All Roman writers say they came from Lydia by sea; which
statement could only have been a repetition of what the Etruscans
said about themselves. The matter is much in dispute; but most
likely there is no testimony better than the ancient one. Some
authorities are for Lydia; some are for the Rhaetian Alps; some
are for calling the Etruscans 'autochthonous,'--which I hold to
be, like _Mesopotamia,_ a 'blessed word.' Certainly the Gauls
drove them out of Lombardy, and some of them, as refugees, up
into the Rhaetian Alps,--sometime after the European manvantara
began in 870. We cannot read their language, and do not know
enough about it to connect it even with the Turanian Group; but
we know enough to exclude it, perhaps, from every other known
group in the Old World,--certainly from the Aryan. There is
something absolutely un-Aryan (one would say) about their art,
the figures on their tombs. Great finish; no primitivism; but
something queer and grotesque about the faces.... However, you
can get no racial indications from things like that. There is a
state of decadence, that may come to any race,--that has perhaps
in every race cycles of its own for appearing,--when artists go
for their ideals and inspiration, not to the divine world of the
Soul, but to vast elemental goblinish limboes in the sub-human:
realms the insane are at home in, and vice-victims sometimes, and
drug-victims I suppose always. Denizens of these regions, I take
it, are the models for some of our cubists and futurists. . . . I
seem to see the same kind of influence in these Etruscan faces.
I think we should sense something sinister in a people with
art-conventions like theirs;--and this accords with the popular
view of antiquity, for the Etruscans had not a nice reputation.
The probability appears to be that they became a nation
in their Italian home in the tenth or eleventh century B.C.;
were at first war-like, and spread their power considerably,
holding Tuscany, Umbria, Latium, with Lombardy until the Gauls
dispossessed them, and presently Corsica under a treaty with
Carthage that gave the Carthaginians Sardinia as a _quid pro
quo._ Tuscany, perhaps, would have been the original colony;
when Lombardy was lost, it was the central seat of their power;
there the native population became either quite merged in them,
or remained as plebeians; Umbria and Latium they possessed
and ruled as suzerains. The Tuscan lands are rich, and the
_Rasenna,_ as they called themselves, made money by exporting the
produce of their fields and forests; also crude metals brought
in from the north-west,--for Etruria was the clearing-house for
the trade between Gaul and the lands beyond, and the eastern
Mediterranean. From Egypt, Carthage, and Asia, they imported in
exchange luxuries and objects of art; until in time the old
terror of their name,--as pirates, not unconnected with something
of fame for black magic; one finds it as early as in Hesiod, and
again in the _Medea _of Euripides,--gave place to an equally ill
repute for luxurious living and sensuality. We know that in war
it was a poor thing to put your trust in Etruscan alliances.
According to their own account of it, they were destined to
endure as a distinct people for about nine centuries; which is
probably what they did. Their power was at its height about 600
B.C. As they began to decline, certain small Italian cities that
had been part of their empire broke away and freed themselves;
particularly in Latium, where lived the descendants of those
old-time colonists from Ruta and Daitya,--priding themselves still
on their ancient descent, and holding themselves Patricians or
nobles, with a serf population of conquered Italians to look down
upon. Or, of course, it may have been _vice versa:_ that the
Atlanteans were the older stock, nearer the soil, and Plebeians;
and that the Patricians were later conquerors lured or driven
down from Central Europe.
At any rate, as their empire diminished, Etruria stood like some
alien civilized Granada in the midst of surrounding medieval
barbarism; for Italy, in 500 B.C., was simply medieval. Up in
the mountains were war-like highlanders: each tribe with its
central stronghold,--like Beneventum in Samnium, which you could
hardly call a city, I suppose: it was rather a place of refuge
for times when refuge was needed, than a group of homes to live
in; in general, the mountains gave enough sense of security, and
you might live normally in your scattered farms.--But down in the
lowlands you needed something more definitely city-like: at once
a group of homes and a common fortress. So Latium and Campania
were strewn with little towns by river and seashore, or hill-top
built with more or less peaceful citadel; each holding the lands
it could watch, or that its citizen armies could turn out quickly
to defend. Each was always at war or in league with most of the
others; but material civilization had not receded so far as
among the mountaineers. The latter raided them perpetually, so
they had to be tough and abstemious and watchful; and then again
they raided the mountaineers to get their own back, (with
reasonable interest); and lastly, lest like Hotspur they should
find such quiet life a plague, and want work, it was always
their prerogative, and generally their pleasure, to go to war
with each other.--A hard, poor life, in which to be and do right
was to keep in fit condition for the raidings and excursions and
alarms; ethics amounted to about that much; art or culture, you
may say, there was none. Their civilization was what we know as
Balkanic, with perpetual Balkanic eruptions, so to speak. Their
conception of life did not admit of the absence of at least one
good summer campaign. Mr. Stobart neatly puts it to this effect:
no man is content to live ambitionless on a bare pittance and the
necessaries; he must see some prospect, some margin, as well;
and for these folk, now that they had freed themselves from the
Etruscans, the necessaries were from their petty agriculture, the
margin was to be looked for in war.
Among these cities was one on the Tiber, about sixteen miles up
from the mouth. It had had a great past under kings of its own,
before the Etruscan conquest; very likely had wielded wide
empire in its day. A tradition of high destiny hung about it,
and was ingrained in the consciousness of its citizens; and I
believe that this is always what remains of ancient greatness
when time, cataclysms, and disasters have wiped all actual
memories thereof away. But now, say in 500 B.C., we are to think
of it as a little peasant community in an age and land where
there was no such wide distinction between peasant and bandit.
It had for its totem, crest, symbol, what you will, very
appropriately, a she-wolf....
Art or culture, I said, there was none;--and yet, too, we might
pride ourselves on certain great possessions to be called
(stretching it a little), _in that line;_ which had been left to
us by our erstwhile Etruscan lords, or executed for us by
Etruscan artists with their tongues in their cheeks and sides
quietly shaking.--Ha, you men of Praeneste! you men of Tibur!
sing small, will you? _We_ have our grand Jupiter on the
Capitoline, resplendent in vermilion paint; what say you to
that? Paid for him, too, (a surmise, this!) with cattle raided
from your fields, my friends!
Everything handsome about us, you see; but not for this must you
accuse us of the levity of culture. We might patronize; we did
not dabble.--One seems to hear from those early ages, echoes of
tones familiar now. Ours is the good old roast beef and common
sense of--I mean, the grand old _gravitas_ of Rome. What! you
must have a Jupiter to worship, mustn't you? No sound as by
Parliament-Established-Religion of Numa Pompilius, Sir, and the
world would go to the dogs! And, of course, vermilion paint. It
wears well, and is a good bloody color with no levity about it;
besides, can be seen a long way off--whereby it serves to keep
you rascals stirred up with jealousy, or should. So: we have our
vermilion Jupiter and think of ourselves very highly indeed.
Yes; but there is a basis for our boasting, too;--which
boasting, after all, is mainly a mental state; we aim to be
taciturn in our speech, and to proclaim our superiority with
sound thumps, rather than like wretched Greeks with poetry and
philosophy and such. We do possess, and love,--at the very least
we aim at,--the thing we call _gravitas;_ and--there are points
to admire in it. The legends are full of revelation; and what
they reveal are the ideals of Rome. Stern discipline; a rigid
sense of duty to the state; unlimited sacrifice of the
individual to it; stoic endurance in the men; strictest
chastity in the women:--there were many and great qualities.
Something had come down from of old, or had been acquired in
adversity: a saving health for this nation. War was the regular
annual business; all the male population of military age took
part in it; and military age did not end too early. It was an
order that tended to leave no room in the world but for the
fittest, physically and morally, if not mentally. There was
discipline, and again and always discipline: _paterfamilias_
king in his household, with power of life and death over his
children. It was a regime that gave little chance for loose
living. A sterile and ugly regime, Nevertheless; and, later,
they fell victims to its shortcomings. Vice, that wrecks every
civilization in its turn, depend upon it had wrecked one here:
that one of which we get faint reminiscences in the stories of
the Roman kings. Then these barren and severe conditions ensued,
and vice was (comparatively speaking) cleaned out.
What were the inner sources of this people's strength? What
light from the Spirit shone among them? Of the Sacred Mysteries,
what could subsist in such a community?--Well; the Mysteries
had, by this time, as we have seen, very far declined. Pythagoras
had made his effort in this very Italy; he died in the first
year of the fifth century soon after the expulsion of the
kings, according to the received chronology;--in reality,
long before there is dependable history of Rome at all. There
had been an Italian Golden Age, when Saturn reigned and the
Mysteries ruled human life. There were reminiscences of a long
past splendor; and an atmosphere about them, I think, more
mellow and peace-lipped than anything in Hesiod or Homer. I
suppose that from some calmer, firmer, and more benignant Roman
Empire manvantaras back, when the Mysteries were in their flower
and Theosophy guided the relations of men and nations, some thin
stream of that divine knowledge flowed down into the pralaya;
that an echo lingered,--at Cumae, perhaps, where the Sibyl was,--
or somewhere among the Oscan or Sabine mountains. Certainly
nothing remained, regnant and recognised in the cities, to
suggest a repugnance to the summer campaigns, or that other
nations had their rights. Yet there was something to make life
sweeter than it might have been.
They said that of old there had been a King in Rome who was a
Messenger of the Gods and link between earth and heaven; and
that it was he had founded their religion. Was Numa Pompilius, a
real person?--By no means, says modern criticism. I will quote
you Mr. Stobart:--
"The Seven Kings of Rome are for the most part mere names
which have been fitted by rationalizing historians, presumably
Greek, with inventions appropriate to them. Tomulus is simply
the patron hero of Rome called by her name. Numa, the second,
whose name suggests _numen,_ was the blameless Sabine who
originated most of the old Roman cults, and received a complete
biography largely borrowed from that invented for Solon."
--He calls attention, too, to the fact that Tarquin the Proud is
made a typical Greek Tyrant, and is said to have been driven out
of Rome in 510,--the very year in which that other typical Greek
Tyrant, Hippias, was driven out of Athens;--so that on the whole
it is not a view for easy unthinking rejection. But Madame
Blavatsky left a good maxim on these matters: that tradition
will tell you more truth than what goes for history will; and
she is quite positive that there is much more truth in the tales
about the kings than in what comes down about the early Republic.
Only you must interpret the traditions; you must understand
them. Let us go about, and see if we can arrive at something.
Before the influx of the Crest-Wave began, Rome was a very petty
provincial affair, without any place at all in the great sweep of
world-story. Her annals are about as important as those of the
Samnium of old, of which we know nothing; or those, say, of
Andorra now, about which we care less. Our school histories
commonly end at the Battle of Acium; which is the place where
Roman history becomes universal and important: a point wisely
made and strongly insisted on by Mr. Stobart. I shows how
thoroughly we lack any true sense of what history is and is for.
We are so wrapped up in politics that our vision of the motions
of the Human Spirit is obscured. There were lots of politics in
Republican Rome, and you may say none in the empire; so we make
for the pettiness that obsesses us, and ignore the greatness
whose effects are felt yet. Rome played at politics: old-time
conqueror-race Patricians against old-time conquered-race
Plebians: till the two were merged into one and she grew tired
of the game. She played at war until her little raidings and
conquests had carried her out of the sphere of provincial
politics, and she stood on the brink of the great world. Then
the influx of important souls began; she entered into history,
presently threw up politics forever, and performed, so far as it
was in her to do so, her mission in the world. What does History
care for the election results in some village in Montenegro? Or
for the passage of the Licinian Rogations, or the high exploits
of Terentilius Harsa?
Yet, too, we must get a view of this people in pralaya, that we
may understand better the workings of the Human Spirit in its
fulness. But we must see the forest, and not lose sight and
sense of it while botanizing over individual trees. We must
forget the interminable details of wars and politics that amount
to nothing; that so we may apprehend the form, features, color,
of this aspect of humanity.
Here is a mighty river: the practical uses of mankind are mainly
concerned with it as far up as it may be navigable; or at most,
as far up as it may be turning mills and watering the fields of
agriculture. There may be regions beyond when poets and
mythologists may bring great treasures for the Human Spirit; but
do you do well to treat such treasures as plug material for
exchange and barter? They call for another kind of treatment.
The sober science of history may be said to start where the
nations become navigable, and begin to affect the world. You can
sail your ships up the river Rome to about the beginning of the
third century B.C., when she began to ermerge from Italian
provincialism and to have relations with foreign peoples:
Pyrrhus came over to fight her in 280. What is told of the
century before may be true or not; as a general picture it is
probably true enough, and only as a general picture does it
matter; its details are supremely unimportant. The river here
is pouting through the gorges, or shallowly meandering the meads.
It is watering Farmer Balbus's fields; Grazier Ahenobarbus's
cows drink at it; idle Dolabell angles in its quiet reaches:
there are bloody tribal affrays yearly at its fords. It is
important, certainly, to Babbus and Dolabella, and the men slain
in the forays;--but to us others--.
And then at 390 there are falls and dangerous rapids; you will
get no ships beyond these. The Gauls poured down and swept away
everything: the records were burnt; and Rome, such as it was,
had to be re-founded. Here is a main break with the past;
something like Ts'in Shi Hwangti's Book-burning; and it serves
to make doubly uncertain all that went before. Go further now,
and you must take to the wild unmapped hills. There are no
fields beyond this; the kine keep to the lush lowland meadows;
rod and line must be left behind,--and angler too, unles he is
prepared for stiff climbing, and no marketable recompense. Nor
yet, perhaps, for some time, much in things unmarketable: I will
not say there is any great beauty of scenery in these rather
stubborn and arid hills.
As to the fourth century, then (or from 280 to 390)--we need not
care much which of Ahenobarbus's cows was brindled, or which had
the crumpled horn, or which broke off the coltsfoot bloom with
lazy ruthless hoof. As to the fifth,--we need not try to row the
quinqueremes of history beyond that Gaulish waterfall. We need
not bother with the weight Dolabella claims for the trout he says
he caught up there: that trout has been cooked and eaten these
twenty-three hundred years. Away beyond, in the high mountains,
there may be pools haunted by the nymphs; you cannot sail up to
them, that is certain; but there may be ways round.....
Here, still in the foot-hills, is a pool that does look, if not
_nymphatic,_ at least a little fishy, as they say; the story
of Rome's dealings with Lars Porsenna. It even looks as if
something historical might be caught in it. The Roman historians
have been obviously camouflaging: they do not want you to
examine this too closely. Remember that all these things came
down by memory, among a people exceedingly proud, and that had
been used to rely on records,--which records had been burnt by
the Gauls. Turn to your English History, and you shall probably
look in vain in it for any reference to the Battle of Patay; you
shall certainly find Agincourt noised and trumpted _ad lib._ Now
battles are never decisive; they never make history; the very
best of them might just as well not have been fought. But at
Patay the forces which made it inevitable France should be a
nation struck down into the physical plane and made themselves
manifest: as far as that plane is concerned, the centuries of
French history flow from the battlefield of Patay. But what made
trumpery Agincourt was only the fierce will of a cruel, ambitious
fighting king; and what flowed from it was a few decades of war
and misery. That by way of illustration how history is envisaged
and taught: depend upon it, by every people; it is not peculiar
to this one or that.--Well then, the fish we are at liberty to
catch in this particular Roman pool is a period during which Rome
was part of the Etruscan Empire.
The fact is generally accepted, I believe; and is, of course,
the proposition we started from. How long the period was, we
cannot say. The Tarquins were from Tarquinii in Etruria;
perhaps a line of Etruscan governors. The gentleman from Clusium
who swore by the Nine Gods was either a king who brought back a
rebellious Rome to temporary submission, or the last Etruscan
monarch in whose empire it was included. But here is the point:
whether fifty or five hundred years long--and perhaps more likely
the former than the latter--this period of foreign rule was long
enough to make a big break in the national tradition, and to
throw all preceding events out of perspective.
At the risk of _longueurs_--and other things--let me take an
illustration from scenes I know. I have heard peasants in Wales
talking about events before the conquest;--people who have never
learnt Welsh history out of books, and have nothing to go on but
local legends;--and placing the old unhappy far-off things and
battles long ago at "over a hundred years back, I shouldn'
wonder." It is the way of tradition to foreshorten things like
that,--Nothing much has happened in Wales since those ancient
battles with the English; so the six or seven centuries of
English rule are dismissed as "over a hundred years." Rome under
the Etruscans, like Wales under the English, would have had no
history of her own: there would have been nothing to impress
itself on the race-memory. Such times fade out easily: they
seem to have been very short, or are forgotten altogether. But
this same Welsh peasant, who thus forgets and foreshortens recent
history, always remembers that there were kings of Wales once.
Perhaps, if he were put to it to write a history, with no books
to guide him, he would name you as many as seven of them, and
supply each with more or less true stories. In reality, of
course, there were eight centuries of Welsh kings; and before
them, the Roman occupation,--which he also remembers, but very
vaguely; and before that, he has the strongest impression that
there were ages of wide sovereignty and splendor. The kings he
would name, naturally, are the ones that made the most mark.--I
think the Romans, in constructing or making Greeks construct for
them their ancient history, did very much the same kind of thing.
They remembered the names of seven kings, with tales about them,
and built on those. There were the kings who had stood out and
stood for most; and the Romans remembered what they stood for.
So here I think we get real history; whereas in the stories of
republican days we may see the efforts of great families to
provide themselves with a great past. But I doubt we could take
anything _aupied de la lettre;_ or that it would profit us to do
so if we could. Here is a pointer: we have seen how in India
a long age of Kshattriya supremacy preceded the supremacy
of the Brahmins. Now observe Kshattriya Romulus followed
by Brahmin Numa.
I do not see why Madame Blavatsky shold have so strongly insisted
on the truth of the story of the roman Kings unless there were
more in it than mere pralayic historicity. Unless it were of
bigger value, that is, than Andorran or Montenegrin annals.
Rome, after the Etruscan domination, was a meanly built little
city; but there were remains from pre-Etruscan times greater
than anything built under the Republic. Rome is a fine modern
capital now; but there were times in the age of papal rule, when
it was a miserable depopulated village of great ruins, with
wolves prowling nightly through the weed-grown streets. Yet even
then the tradition of _Roma Caput Mundi_ reigned among the
wretched inhabitants,--witness Rienzi: it was the one thing,
besides the ruins, to tell of ancient greatness. Some such
feeling, borne down out of a forgotten past, impelled Republican
Rome on the path of conquest. It was not even a tradition, at
that time; but the essence of a tradition that remained as a
sense of high destinies.
Who, then, was Romulus?--Some king's son from Ruta or Daitya, who
came in his lordly Atlantean ships, and builded a city on the
Tiber? Very likely. That would be, at the very least, as far
back as nine or ten thousand B.C.; which is contemptibly modern,
when you think of the hundred and sixty thousand years of our
present sub-race. The thing that is in the back of my mind is,
that Rome is probably as old as that sub-race, or nearly so; but
wild horses should not drag from me a statement of it. Rome,
London, Paris,--all and any of them, for that matter.--But a
hundred and sixty thousand or ten thousand, no man's name could
survive so long, I think, as a peg on which to hang actual
history. It would pass, long before the ten millenniums were
over, into legend; and become that of a God or demigod,--whose
cult, also, would need reviving, in time, by some new avatar.
Now (as remarked before) humanity has a profound instinct for
avatars; and also (as you would expect) for Reincarnation. The
sixth-century Britons were reminded by one of their chieftains of
some mighty king or God of prehistory; the two got mixed, and
the mixture came down as the Arthur of the legend. This is what
I mean by 'reviving the cult.' Now then, who was Romulus?--Some
near or remote descendant of heroic refugees from fallen Troy,
who rebuilt Rome or reestablished its sovereignty?--Very likely,
again;--I mean, very likely both that and the king's son from
Ruta or Daitya. And lastly, very likely some tough little
peasant-bandit restorer, not so long before the Etruscan
conquest, whom the people came to mix up witl mightier figures
half forgotten. . . . .
We see his history, as the Romans did, through the lens of a
tough little peasant-bandit city; through the lens of a pralaya,
which makes pralayic all objects seen. It is like the Irish
peasant-girl who has seen the palace of the king of the fairies;
she describes you something akin to the greatest magnificence she
knows,--which happens to be the house of the local _squireen._
Now the Etruscan domination, as we have noted, could probably
not have begun before 1000 B.C.; at which time, to go by our
hypothesis as to the length and recurrence of the cycles, Europe
was in dead pralaya, and had been since 1480. So that, possibly,
you would have had between 1480 and 1000 a Rome in pralaya, but
independent--like Andorra now, or Montenegro. The stories we get
about the seven kings would fit such a time admirably. They tell
of pralayic provincials; and Rome, during that second half of
the second millennium B.C., would have been just that.
But again, if the seven kings had been just that and nothing
more, I cannot see why H. P. Blavatsky should have laid such
stress on the essential truth of their stories. She is
particular, too, about the Arthurian legend:--saying that it is
at once symbolic and actually historical,--which latter, as
concerns the sixth-century Arthur, it is not and she would not
have considered it to be: no Briton prince of that time went
conquering through Europe. So there must be some further value
to the tales of the Roman kings; else why are they so much
better than the Republican annals? Why?--unless all history
except the invented kind or the distorted-by-pride-or-politics
kind is symbolic; and unless we could read in these stories the
record, not merely of some pre-Etruscan pralayic centuries, but
of great ages of the past and of the natural unfoldment of the
Human Spirit in history through long millenniums? Evolution is
upon a pattern; understand the drift of any given thousand years
in such a way that you could reduce it to a symbol, and probably
you have the key to all the past.
So I imagine there would be seven interpretations to these kings,
as to all other symbols. Romulus may represent a Kshattriya, and
Numa a Brahmin domination in the early ages of the sub-race.
Actual men, there may yet be mirrored in them the history--shall
we say of the whole sub-race? Or Root-race? Or the whole
natural order of human evolution? It is business for imaginative
meditation,--which is creative or truth-finding meditation. But
now let us try, diffidently, to search out the last, the
historic, pre-Etruscan Numa.
If you examined the Mohammedan East, now in these days of its
mid-pralaya and disruption: Turkey especially, or Egypt: you
should find constantly the tradition of Men lifted by holiness
and wisdom and power above the levels of common humanity: Unseen
Guardians of the race,--a Great Lodge or Order of them. In
Christendom, in its manvantara, you find no trace of this
knowledge; but it may surprise you to know that it is so common
among the Moslems, that according to the Turkish popular belief,
there is always a White Adept somewhere within the mosque of St.
Sophia,--hidden under a disguise none would be likely to
penetrate. There are hundreds of stories. The common thought is
that representatives of this Lodge, or their disciples, often
appear; are not so far away from the world of men; may be
teaching, quite obscurely, or dropping casual seeds of the Secret
Wisdom, in the next village. Well; I imagine pralayic
conditions may allow benign spiritual influences to be at work,
sometimes, nearer the surface of life than in manvantara. The
brain-mind is less universally dominant; there is not the same
dense atmosphere of materialism. You get on the one hand a
franker play of the passions, and no curbs imposed either by a
sound police system or a national conscience; in pralaya
time there is no national conscience, or, I think, national
consciousness,--no feeling of collective entity, of being a
nation,--at all; perhaps no public opinion. As it is with a man
when he sleeps: the soul is not there; there is nothing in that
body that feels then 'I am I'; nothing (normally) that can
control the disordered dreams. . . . Hence, in the sleeping
nation, the massacres, race-wars, mob-murders, and so on; which,
we should remember, affect parts, not the whole, of the race.
But on the other hand that very absence of brain-mind rule may
imply Buddhic influences at work in quiet places; and one cannot
tell what unknown graciousnesses may be happening, that our
manvantaric livelinesses and commercialism quite forbid. . . .
Believe me, if we understood the laws of history, we should waste
a deal less time and sanity in yelling condemnations.
Italy then was something like Turkey is now. Dear knows whom you
might chance on, if you watched with anointed eyes . . . in St.
Sophia . . . or among the Sabine hills. Somewhere or other, as I
said just now, reminiscences of the Mysteries would have
survived. I picture an old wise man, one of the guardians of
those traditions, coming down from the mountains, somewhere
between 1500 and 1000 B. C., to the little city on the Tiber;
touching something in the hearts of the people there, and
becoming,--why not?--their king. For I guess that this one was
not so different from a hundred little cities you should have
found strewn over Italy not so long ago. The ground they
covered,--and this is still true,--would not be much larger than
the Academy Garden; their streets but six or seven feet across.
Their people were a tough, stern, robberish set; but with a
side, too, to which saintliness (in a high sense) could make
quick appeal. Intellectual culture they had none; the brain-mind
was the last thing you should look for (in ancient Rome at
least);--and just because it was dormant, one who knew how to go
about it could take hold upon the Buddhic side. That was perhaps
what this Numa Pompilius achieved doing. There would be nothing
extraordinary in it. The same thing may be going on in lots of
little cities today, in pralayic regions: news of the kind does
not emerge. We have a way of dividing time into _ancient and
modern;_ and think the one forever past, the other forever to
endure. It is quite silly. There are plenty of places now where
it is 753 B.C.; and no doubt there were plenty then where it was
pompous 1919.--Can anyone tell me, by the bye, what year it
happens to be in Europe now?
How much Numa may have given his Romans, who can say? Most of it
may have worn away, before historic times, under the stress of
centuries of summer campaigns. But something he did ingrain into
their being; and it lasted, because not incompatible with the
life they knew. It was the element that kept that life from
complete vulgarity and decay.
You have to strip away all Greekism from your conceptions, before
you can tell what it was. The Greek conquest was the one Rome
did not survive. Conquered Greece overflowed her, and washed her
out; changed her traditions, her religion, the whole color of
her life. If Greece had not stepped in, myth-making and
euhemerizing, who would have saved the day at Lake Regillus?
_Not_ the Great Twin Brothers from lordly Lace-daemon, be sure.
Who then? Some queer uncouth Italian nature-spirit gods? One
shakes one's head in doubt: the Romans did not personalize their
deities like the Greeks. Cato gives the ritual to be used at
cutting down a grove; says he--"This is the proper Roman way to
cut down a grove. Sacrifice with a pig for a peace-offering.
This is the verbal formula: 'Whether thou art a god or a goddess
to whom that grove is sacred,' "--and so on. Their gods were
mostly like that: potentialities in the unseen, with whom good
relations must be kept by strict observance of an elaborate
ritual. There were no stories about them; they did not marry
and have families like the good folk at Olympus.
Which is perhaps a sign of this: that Numa's was a religion, the
teaching of a (minor) Teacher who came long after the Mysteries
had disappeared. Because in the Mysteries, cosmogenesis was
taught through dramas which were symbolic representations of its
events and processes; and out of these dramas grew the stories
about the gods. But when the real spiritual teaching has ceased
to flow through the Mysteries, and the stones are accepted
literally, and there is nothing else to maintain the inner life
of the people,--a Teacher of some kind must come to state things
in plainer terms. This, I take it, is what happened here; and
the very worn-outness of conditions that this implies, implies
also tremendous cultural and imperial activities in forgotten
time; I imagine Italy, then, at two or three thousand B.C.,
was playing a part as much greater outwardly than Greece
was, as her part now is greater than Greece's, and has been
during recent centuries.
This, then, is what Numa's religion did for Rome:--it peopled the
woods and fields and hills with these impersonal divinities; it
peopled the moments of the day with them; so that nothing in
space or time, no near familiar thing or duty, was material
wholly, or pertained to this world alone;--there was another side
to it, connected with the unseen and the gods. There were Great
Gods in the Pantheon; but your early Roman had no wide-traveling
imagination; and they seemed to him remote and uncongenial
rather,--and quickly took on Greekishness when the Greek
influence began. Minerva, vaguely imagined, assumed soon the
attributes of the very concretely imagined Pallas; and so on.
But he had nearer and Numaish divinities much more a part of his
life,--which indeed largely consisted of rituals in their honor.
There were Lares and Penates and Manes, who made his home a kind
of temple, and the earth a kind of altar; there were deities
presiding over all homely things and occasions; formless
impersonal deities; presences to be felt and remembered, not
clothed imaginatively with features and myths:--Cuba, who gave
the new-born child its first breath; Anna Perenna of the
recurring year; hosts of agricultural gods without much
definition, and the unseen genii of wood, field, and mountain.
Everything, even each individual man, had a god-side: there was
something in it or him greater, more subtle, more enduring, than
the personality or outward show.--To the folk-lorist, of course,
it is all 'primitive Mediterranean' religion or superstition;
but the inner worlds are wonderful and vast, if you begin to have
the smallest inkling of an understanding of them. I think
we may recognise in all this the hand of a wise old Pompilius
from the Sabine hills, at work to keep the life of his Romans,
peasant-bandits as they were, clean in the main and sound. Yes,
there were gross elements: among the many recurring festivals,
some were gross and saturnalian enough. The Romans kept near
Nature, in which are, both animal and cleansing forces; but
the high old _gravitas_ was the virtue they loved. And supposing
Numa established their religion, it does not follow that he
established what there came to be of grossness in it.
They kept near Nature; very near the land, and the Earth Breath,
and the Earth Divinities, and the Italian soil,--and that
southern laya center and gateway into the inner world which,
I am persuaded, is in Italy. There are many didactic poems in
world-literature,--poems dealing with the operations of agriculture;--
and they are mostly as dull as you would expect, with that for
their subject; but one of them, and one only, is undying poetry.
That one is the Roman one. Its author was a Celt, and his models
were Greek; and he was rather a patient imitative artist than
greatly original and creative;--but he wrote for Rome, and with
the Italian soil and weather for his inspiration; and their
forces pouring through him made his didactics poetry, and poetry
they remain after nineteen centuries. Nothing of the kind comes
from Greece. As if whenever you broke the Italian soil, a voice
sang up to you from it: _Once Saturn reigned in Italy!_
It is this that brings Cincinnatus back to his cabbage-field from
the war,--and politics, as to something sacred, a fountain at
which life may be renewed. Plug souls; no poetry in them;--but
the Earth Breath cleanses and heals and satisfies them. In place
of a literature, they have wild unpoetical chants to their Mayors
to raise as they go into battle; for art and culture, they have
that bright vermilion Jove; nothing from the Spirit to comfort
them in these! But put the ex-dictator to hoe his turnips, and
he is in a dumb sort of way in communication at once with the
Spirit and all deepest sources of comfort.--What is Samnite gold
to me, when I have my own radishes to toast,--sacred things out
of my own sacred soil? The Italian sun shines down on me, and
warms more than my physicality and limbs. See, I strike my hoe
into Italy, and the sacred essences of Earth our Mother flow up
to me, and quiet my mind from anxious and wasting thought, and
fill me with calmness and vigor and Italy, and her old quaint
immemorial gods!
Not that the Roman had any conception, patriotically speaking,
about Italy; it was simply the soil he was after,--which
happened to be Italian. Not for him, in the very slightest,
Filicaia's or Mazzini's dream! Good practical soul, what would
he have done with dreaming?--But he had his feet on the ground,
and was soaked through, willy nilly, with its forces; he lived
in touch with realities, with the seasons and the days and
nights,--how we do forget those great, simple, life-giving,
cleansing things!--and his mind was molded to what he owed to the
soil, to the realities, to _Dea Roma;_--and Duty became a great
thing in his life. Out of all this comes something that makes
this narrow little cultureless bandit city almost sympathetic to
us,--and very largely indeed admirable.
They knew how to keep their heads. There were those two races
among them,--races or orders;--and a mort of politics between the
two. Greek cities, in like manner but generally less radically
divided, knew no method but for one side to be perpetually
banishing the other, turn and turn about, and wholesale; but
these spare, tough Romans effect compromise after compromise,
till Patricians and Plebs are molten down into one common type.
They are not very brilliant, even at their native game of war:
given a good general, their enemies are pretty sure to trounce
them. Pyrrhus, a fine tactician but no great strategist, does so
several times;--and then they reply to his offers of peace, that
they make no peace with enemies still camped on Italian soil.--
Comes next a real master-strategist, Hannibal; and senate and
people, time after time, are forced (like Balbus in the poem)
"With a frankness that I'm sure will charm ye
To own it is all over with the army."
He wipes them out in a most satisfactory and workmanlike manner.
Their leading citizens, _ipso facto_ their generals (amateur
soldiers always cabbage-hoers at heart) afford him a good deal of
amusement; as if you should send out the mayor of Jonesville,
Arkansaw, against a Foch or a Hindenburg. One of them, a fool of
a fellow, blunders into a booby-trap and loses the army which is
almost the sole hope of Rome; and comes home, utterly defeated,
--to be gravely thanked by the Senate for not committing suicide
after his defeat: "for not despairing of the Republic." Ah,
there is real Great Stuff in that; they are admirable peasant
bandits after all! Most people would have straight court
martialed and beheaded the man; as England hanged poor Admiral
Byng _pour encourager les autres._ And all the while they have
been having the sublime impudence to keep an army in Spain
conquering there. How to account for this unsubduability? Well;
there is Numa's teaching; and what you might call a latent habit
of _Caput-Mundi-ship:_ imperial seeds in the soil.
There is that indestructible god-side to everything; especially,
behind and above this city on the seven hills, there is divine
eternal ROME. So, after the Gaulish conquest, they rejected
proffered and more desirable Etruscan sites, and came back and
provided _Dea Roma_ with a new out-ward being; the imperial
seeds, molds of empire, were on the Seven Hills, not at Veii.
So, when this still greater peril of Hannibal so nearly submerged
them, they took final victory for granted,--could conceive of no
other possibility,--and placidly went forward while being whipped
in Italy with the adventure in Spain. There was one thing they
could not imagine: ultimate defeat. It was a kind of stupidity
with them. They were a stupid people. You might thrash them;
you might give them their full deserts (which were bad), and
fairly batter them to bits; all the world might think them dead;
dozens of doctors might write death-certificates; you might have
Rome coffined and nailed down, and be riding gaily to the
funeral;--but you could not convince _her_ she was dead; and at
the very graveside, sure enough, the 'pesky critter' (as they
say) would be bursting open the coffin lid; would finish the
ceremony with you for the corpse, and then ride home smiling to
enjoy her triumph, thank God for his mercies,--and get back to
her hoe and her cabbages as quickly as might be.
It is this that to my mind makes it philosophically certain that
she had had a vast antiquity as the seat of empire; I mean,
before the Etruscan domination. _Dea Roma,_--the Idea of Rome,--
was an astral mold almost cast in higher than astral stuff: it
was so firmly fixed, so unalterably there, that I cannot imagine
a few centuries of peasant-bandits building it,--unimaginative
tough creatures at the best. No; it was a heritage; it was
built in thousands of years, and founded upon forgotten facts.
There was something in the ideal world, the deposit of long ages
of thinking and imagining. How, pray, are nations brought
into being?
By men thinking and willing and imagining them into being. Such
men create an astral matrix; with walls faint and vague at
first, but ever growing stronger as more and more men reinforce
them with new thought and will and imagination. But in Rome we
see from the first the astral mold so strong that the strongest
party feelings, the differences of a conqueror and a conquered
race, are shaped by it into compromise after compromise. And
then, too, an instinct among those peasant-bandits for empire:
an instinct that few European peoples have possessed; that it
took the English, for example, a much longer time to learn than
it took the Romans. For let us note that even in those early
days it was not such a bad thing to come under Roman sway; if
you took it quietly, and were misled by no patriotic notions.
That is, as a rule. Unmagnanimous always to men, Rome was not
without justice, and even at times something quite like
magnanimity, to cities and nations. She was no Athens, to
exploit her subject peoples ruthlessly with never a troubling
thought as to their rights. She had learned compromise and horse
sense in her politics it home: if her citizens owed her a duty,
--she assumed a responsibility towards them. It took her time to
learn that; but she learned it. She went conquering on the same
principle. Her plebeians had won their rights; in other towns,
mostly, the plebeians had not.
Roman dominion meant usually a betterment of the conditions of
the plebs in the towns annexed, and their entering in varying
degrees upon the rights the plebs had won at Rome. She went
forward taking things as they came, and making what arrangements
seemed most feasible in each case. She made no plans in advance;
but muddled trough like an Englishman. She had no Greek or
French turn for thinking things out beforehand; her empire grew,
in the main, like the British, upon a subconscious impulse to
expand. She conquered Italy because she was strong; much
stronger inwardly in spirit than outwardly in arms; and because
(I do but repeat what Mr. Stobart says: the whole picture really
is his) what should she do with her summer holidays, unless go on
a campaign?--and because while she had still citizens without
land to hoe cabbages in, she must look about and provide them
with that prime necessity. All of which amounts to saying that
she began with a habit of empire-winning,--which must have been
created in the past. On her toughness the spirited Gaul broke
as a wave, and fell away. On her narrow unmagnanimity the
chivalrous mountain Samnite bore down, and like foam vanished.
She had none of the spiritual possibilities of the Gaul; but the
Crest-Wave was coming, and the future was with Italy. She had
none of the high-souled chivalry of the Samnite; but she was the
heart of Italy, and the point from which Italy must expand. She
was hard, tough, and based on the soil; and that soil, as it
happened, the laya center,--a sort of fire-fountain from within
and the unseen. You stood on the Seven Hills, and let heaven and
hell conspire together, you _could not_ be defeated. Gauls,
Samnites, Latins,--all that ever attacked her,--were but taking a
house-cloth to dry up a running spring. The Crest-Wave was
coming to Italy; whose vital forces, all centrifugal before,
must now be made to turn and flow towards the center. That was
Rome; and as they would not flow to her of their own good will,
out she must go and gather them in. Long afterwards, when the
Caesars and Augusti of the West left her for Milan and Ravenna,
it was because the Crest-Wave was departing, the forces turning
centrifugal, and Italy breaking to pieces; long afterwards
again, in the eighteen-seventies, when the Crest-Wave was
returning, Italy must flow in centripetally to Rome; no Turin,
no Florence would do.
So, by 264 B.C., she had conquered Italy. Then, still land-hungry,
she stepped over into Sicily, invited by certain rascals in
Messana, and light-heartedly challenged the Mistress of the
Western Seas. At this point the stream is leaving Balbus's
fields and Ahenobarbus's cattle, and coming to the broad waters,
where the ships of the world ride in.