The Punic War was not forced on Rome. She had no good motive for
it; not even a decent excuse. It was simply that she was
accustomed to do the next thing; and Carthage presented itself
as the next thing to fight,--Sicily, the next thing to be
conquered. The war lasted from 264 to 241; and at the end of it
Rome found herself out of Italy; mistress of Sicily, Sardinia,
and Corsica. The Italian laya center had expanded; Italy had
boiled over. It was just the time when Ts'in at the other end of
the world was conquering China, and the Far Eastern Manvantara
was beginning. Manvantaras do not begin or end anywhere, I
imagine, without some cyclic event marking it in all other parts
of the world.
---------
* This lecture, like the preceding one, is based on Mr. J. H.
Stobart's, _The Grandeur that was Rome._
---------
We have heard much talk of how disastrous the result would have
been if Carthage, not Rome, had won. But Carthage was a far and
belated outpost of West Asia and of a manvantara that had ended
over a century before:--there was no question of her winning.
Though we see her only through Roman eyes, we may judge very well
that no possibility of expansion was left in her. There was no
expansive force. She threw out tentacles to suck in wealth and
trade, but was already dead at heart. All the greatness of old
West Asia was concentrated, in her, in two men: Hamilcar Barca
and his son: they shed a certain light and romantic glory over
her, but she was quite unworthy of them. Her prowess at any time
was fitful: where money was to be made, she might fight like a
demon to make it; but she was never a fighting power like Rome.
She won her successes at first because her seat was on the sea,
and the war was naval, and sea-battles were won not by fighting
but by seamanship. If Carthage had won, they say;--but Carthage
could not have won, because the cycles were for Rome. You will
note how that North African rim is tossed between European and
West Asian control, according to which is in the ascendant. Now
that Europe's up, and West Asia down, France, Italy, and England
hold it from Egypt to the Atlantic; and in a few centuries'
time, no doubt it will be quite Europeanized. But West Asia,
early in its last manvantara, flowed out over it from Arabia,
drove out all traces of Europeanism, and made it wholly Asiatic.
Before that, while a European manvantara was in being, it was
European, no less Roman than Italy; and before that again, while
the Crest-Wave was in West Asia, it was West Asian, under Egypt
and Phoenician colonies. As for its own native races, they
belong, I suppose, to the fourth, the Iberian Sub-race; and now
in the days of our fifth Sub-race (the Aryan), seem out of the
running for wielding empires of their own.
So if Carthage had won then, things would only have been delayed
a little; the course of history would have been much the same.
Rome might have been destroyed by Hannibal; she would have been
rebuilt when Hannibal had departed; then gone on with her
expansion, perhaps in other directions,--and presently turned,
and come on Carthage from elsewhere; or absorbed her quietly,
and let her do the carrying trade of the Mediterranean 'under the
Roman flag' as you might say,--or something of that sort. Rome
eradicated Carthage for the same reason that the Spaniards
eradicated the Moors: because the West Asian tide, to which
Moors and Carthaginians belonged, had ebbed or was ebbing, and
the European tide was flowing high. Hamilcar indeed, and
Hannibal, seem to have been touched by cyclic impulses, and to
have felt that a Spanish Empire might have received the influx
which a West Asian town in Africa could not. But Italy's turn
came before Spain's; and all Hamilcar's haughty heroism, and
Hannibal's magnanimous genius, went for nothing; and Rome, the
admirable and unlovely, that had suffered the Caudine Forks, and
then conquered Samnium and beheaded that noble generous Samnite
Gaius Pontius, conquered in turn the conqueror at Cannae, and did
for his reputation what she had done with the Samnite hero's
person: chopped its head off, and dubbed him in perfect
sincerity 'perfidus Hannibal.' Over that corpse she stood, at
the end of the third century B.C., mistress of Italy and the
Italian islands; with proud Carthage at her feet; and the old
cultured East, that had known of her existence since the time of
Aristotle at least, now keenly aware of her as the strongest
thing in the Mediterranean world.
Now while she had been a little provincial town in an Italy deep
in pralaya, Numa's religion, what remained of it, had been enough
to keep her life from corruption. Each such impulse from the
heaven-world's, in its degree, an elixiral tincture to sweeten
life and keep it wholesome; some, like Buddhism, being efficient
for long ages and great empires; some only for tiny towns like
early Rome. What we may call the exoteric basis of Numaism
was a ritual of many ceremonies connected with home-life and
agriculture, and designed to keep alive a feeling for the
sacredness of these. It was calculated for its cycle: you could
have given no high metaphysical system to peasant-bandits of
that type;--you could not take the Upanishads to Afghans or
Abyssinians today. But as soon as that cycle was ended, and Rome
was called on to come out into the world, there was need of a new
force and a new sanction.
Has it occurred to you to wonder why, in that epochal sixth
century B.C., when in so many lands the Messengers of Truth
were turning away from the official Mysteries, and preaching
their Theosophy upon a new plan broadcast among the peoples,
Pythagoras, after wandering the east and west to gather up the
threads of wisdom, should have elected not to return to Greece,
but to settle in Italy and found his Movement there? I suppose
the reason was this: He knew in what direction the cycles should
flow, and that the greatest need of the future ages would be for
a redeemed Italy; he foresaw, or Those who sent him foresaw,
that it was Italy should mold the common life of Europe for a
couple of thousand years. Greece was rising then, chiefly on the
planes of intellect and artistic creation; but Italy was to rise
after a few centuries on planes much more material, and therefore
with a force much more potent and immediate in its effects in
this world. The Age of Greece was nearer to the Mysteries; which
might be trusted to keep at least some knowledge of Truth alive;
the Age of Italy, farther away and on a lower plane, would be in
need of a Religion. So he chose Croton, a Greek city, because if
he had gone straight to the barbarous Italians, he could have
said nothing much at that time,--and hoped that from a living
center there, the light might percolate up through the whole
peninsula, and be ready for Rome when Rome was ready for it. He
left Athens to take care of itself;--much as H. P. Blavatsky
chose New York at first, and not immediately the then world-capitals
Paris and London;--I suppose we may say that Magna Graecia
stood to old Greece in his time as America did to western
Europe forty years ago. Had his Movement succeeded; had it
struck well up into the Italian lands; how different the whole
after-history of Europe might have been! Might?--certainly
would have been! But we know that a revolution at Croton
destroyed, at the end of the sixth century, the Pythagorean
School; after which the hope and messengers of the Movement--
Aeschylus, Plato--worked in Greece; and that although the
Pythagorean individual Lucanians, Iapygians, and even Samnites--
that noble Gaius Pontius of the Caudin Forks was himself a
Pythagorean and a pupil of the Pythagorean Archytas,--it was, in
the Teacher's own lifetime, practically broken up and driven out
into Sicily, where those two great Athenians contacted it. We
have seen that it was not effectless; and, what glimmer of it
came down, through Plato, into the Middle Ages. But its main
purpose: to supply nascent Italy with a saving World-Religion;
had been defeated. Of all the Theosophical Movements of the
time, this so far as we know was the only one that failed.
Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, each lasted on as a grand force
for human upliftment; but Pythagoreanism, as an organized
instrument of the Spirit, passed. When Aeschylus made his
protests in Athens, the Center of the Movement to which he
belonged had already been smashed. Plato did marvels; but the
cycle had gone by and gone down, and it was too late for him to
attempt that which Pythagoras had failed to accomplish.
So Rome, when she needed it most, lacked divine guidance; so
drifted out on to the high seas of history pilotless and
rudderless;--so _Weltpolitik_ only corrupted and vulgarized her.
She had no Blue Pearl of Laotse to render her immortal; no
Confucian Doctrine of the Mean to keep her sober and straight;
and hence it came that, though later a new start was made, and
great men arose, once, twice, three times, to do their best for
her, she fell to pieces at last, a Humpty-Dumpty that all the
king's horses and all the king's men could never reweld into
one;--and the place she should have filled in history as Unifier
of Europe was only filled perfunctorily and for a time; and her
great duty was never rightly done. _Hinc lacrimae aetatum_--hence
the darkness and miseries of the Christian Era!
Take your stand here, at the end of the Punic War, on the brink
of the Age of Rome; and you feel at once how fearfully things
have gone down since you stood, with Plato, looking back
over the Age of Grecce. There is nothing left now of the
high possibilities of artistic creation. Of the breath of
spirituality that still remained in the world then, now you can
find hardly a trace. A Cicero presently, for a Socrates of old;
it is enough to tell you how the world has fallen. Some fall, I
suppose, was implied in the cycles; still Rome might have gone
to her more material duties with clean heart, mind, and hands;
she might have built a structure, as Ts'in Shi Hwangti and Han
Wuti did, to endure. It would not be fair to compare the Age of
Han with the Augustan; the morning glory of the East Asian, with
the late afternoon of the European manvantara; and yet we cannot
but see, if we look at both dispassionately and with a decent
amount of knowledge, how beneficently, the Eastern Teachers had
affected their peoples, and what a dire thing it was for Europe
that the work of the Western Teacher had failed. Chow China and
Republican Rome fell to pieces in much the same way: in a long
orgy of wars and ruin;--but the rough barbarian who rebuilt China
found bricks to his hand far better than he knew he was using,--
material with a true worth and vitality of its own,--a race with
elements of redemption in its heredity; whereas the great
statesman, the really Great Soul who rebuilt Rome, had to do it,
if the truth should be told, of materials little better than
stubble and rottenness. Roman life, when Augustus came to work
with it for his medium, was fearfully infected with corruption;
one would have said that no power human or divine could have
saved it. That he did with it as much as he did, is one of the
standing wonders of time.
But now back to the place where we left Rome: in 200 B.C., at the
end of the Carthaginian War. No more now of Farmer Balbus's
fields; no more of the cows of Ahenobarbus; Dolabella's rod and
line, and his fish-stories, shall not serve us further. It is
the navigable river now; on which we must sail down and out on
to the sea.
Already the little Italian city is being courted by fabulously
rich Egypt, the doyen of culture since Athens declined; and soon
she is to be driven by forces outside her control into conquest
of all the old seats of Mediterranean civilization;--and withal
she is utterly unfitted for the task in any spiritual or cultural
sense: she is still little more than the same narrow little
provincial half-barbarous Rome she has always been. No grand
conceptions have been nourished in her by a literature of her own
with high lights couched in the Grand-Manner; no olden Homer has
sung to her, with magnificent roll of hexameters to set the wings
of her soul into magnificent motion. Beyond floating folk
ballads she has had no literature at all; though latterly, she
is trying to supply the place of one with a few slave-made
translations from the Greek, and a few imitations of the decadent
Greek comedy of Alexandria;--also there has been a poet Naevius,
whom--she found altogether too independent to suit her tastes;
and a Father Ennius,--uncouth old bone of her bone, (though he
too Greek by race) who is struggling to mold her tough inflexible
provincial dialect into Greek meter of sorts,--and thereby doing
a real service for poets to come. And there is a Cato the
Censor, writing prose; Cato, typical of Roman breadth of view;
with, for the sum of a truly national political wisdom, yelping
at Rome continually that fool's jingo cry of his:--your finest
market in the western seas, your richest potential commercial
asset, must be destroyed. There you have the high old Roman
conception of _Weltpolitik;_ whereby we may understand how
little fitted Rome was for _Weltpolitik_ at all; how hoeing
cabbages and making summer campaigns,--as Mr. Stobart says, with
a commissariat put up for each soldier in a lunch-bag by his
wife,--were still her metier,--the Italian soil, whether in
actual or only potential possession--held already, or by the
grace of God soon to be stolen--still her inspiration. And this
Italian soil she was now about to leave forever.
The forces that led her to world-conquest were twofold, inner and
outer. The inner one was the summer campaign habit, formed
during several centuries; and the fact that she could form no
conception of life that did not include it: the impulse to
material expansion was deep in her soul, and ineradicable. She
might have followed it, perhaps, north and westward; finished
with Spain; gone up into Gaul (though in Gaul she might have
found, even at that time, possibly, an unmanageable strength);
she might even have carried her own ultimite salvation up into
Germany. But we have seen Darius flow victorious eastward
towards India, but unsuccessful when he tried the passes of the
west; and Alexander follow him in the same path, and not turn
westward at all. So you may say an eastward habit had been
formed, and inner-channels were worn for conquest in that
direction, but none in the other. Besides,--and this was the
outer of the two forces,--the East was crying out to Rome. There
were pirates on the other side of the Adriatic; and for the
safety of her own eastern littoral she had been dealing with
them, as with Spain, during and before the terrible Hannibalic
time. To sit securely at home she must hold the Illyrian coast:
and, she thought, or events proved it to her, to hold that coast
safely, she must go conquering inland. Then again Egypt had
courted her alliance, for regions. The Ptolemy of the time was a
boy; and Philip of Macedon ind Antiochus of Syria had hatched a
plan to carve up his juicy realm for their own most delectable
feasting. It was the very year after peace--to call it that--had
been forced on prostrate Carthage; and you might think an
exhausted Rome would have welcomed a breathing time, even at the
expense of losing her annual outing. And so indeed the people
were inclined to do. But the summer was icumen in; and
what were consuls and Senate for? Should they be as these
irresponsibles of the comitia? Should they fail to look about
them and take thought?--As if someone should offer you a cottage
(with all modern appointments) by the seaside, or farmhouse among
the mountains, free of rent for July and August, here were all
the respectabilities of the East cooingly inviting Rome to spend
her summer with them; they to provide all accessories for a
really enjoyable time.
In this way eastern politics assorted themselves,--thus was the
Levant divided: on the one hand you had the traditional seats
of militariasm; on the other, famous names--and the heirs to the
glory (a good deal tarnished now) that once had been Greece. The
former were Macedon and Syria, or Macedon with Syria in the
background; what better could you ask that a good square se-to
with these? Oh, one at a time; that was the fine old Roman way;
_divide et impera;_ Mecedon now, and, a-grace of God, Syria--But
let be; we are talking of this summer; for next, the Lord
(painted bright vermilion) it may be hoped will provide. So for
the present Philip of Mecedon figures as the desired enemy.--As
to the other side, the famous names to be our allies, they are:
Egypt, chief seat in recent centuries of culture and literature,
and incidentally the Golconda of the time, endowed past dreaming
of with commerce, wealth, and industries; and Rhodes, rich and
republican, and learned too; and the sacred name of Athens; and
Pergamum in Asia, cultured Attalus's kingdom. Are we not to ally
ourselves with the arts and humanities, with old fame, with the
most precious of traditions?--For Rome, it must be said, was not
all Catos: there was something in her by this time that could
thrill to the name of Greece. And Philip had been in league with
Hannibal, though truly he had left him shamefully unsupported.
_Philip had been in league with Hannibal--with Hannibal!_--Why,
it was a glorious unsought fight, such as only fortune's favored
soldiers might attain. The comitia vote against it? They say
Hannibal has made them somewhat tired?--Nonsense! let 'em vote
again! let 'em vote again!--They do so; assured pithily that it
is only a question whether we fight Philip in Macedon, or he us
on our own Italian soil. Of course, if you put it that way, it
is Hobson's choice: the voting goes all right this time. So we
are embarked on the great Eastern Adventure; and Flamininus sets
out for Greece.
Now your simple savage is often a gentleman. I don't mean your
Congo Quashi or Borria Bungalee from the back-country blocks of
New South Wales--our Roman bore no resemblance to them; but say
your Morocco kaid, your desert chieftain from Tunis or Algiers.
Though for long generations he has lost his old-time civilized
attainments, he retains in full his manners, his native dignity,
his wild Saharan grace. But banish him to Paris, and see what
happens. He buys up automobiles,--and poodles,--and astrolabes,
--and patent-leather boots,--and a number of other things he were
much better without. He exchanges his soul for a pass into the
_demi-monde;_ and year by year sees him further sunk into depths
of vulgarism. This is precisely what in a few generations
happened to Rome.
But meanwhile she was at an apex; touched by some few luminous
ideals here and there, and producing some few great gentlemen.
Unprovincial egos; like Scipio Africanus had been edging their
way into Roman incarnation; they were swallows of a still
far-off summer; they stood for Hellenization, and the modification
of Roman rudeness with a little imported culture. Rome had
conquered Magna Graccia, and had seen something there; had felt
a want in herself, and brought in slaves like Livius Andronicus
to supply it. Flamininus himself was really a very great
gentleman: a patrician, type of the best men there were in Rome.
He went to Greece thrilled with generous feelings, as to a sacred
land. When he restored to the Greek cities their freedom,--
handed them back to their own uses and devices, after freeing
them from Philip,--it was with an infinite pride and a high
simplicity. We hear of him overcome in his speech to their
representatives on that occasion, and stopping to control the
lump in his throat: conqueror and master of the whole peninsula
and the islands, he was filled with reverence, as a great
simple-hearted gentleman might be, for the ancient fame and genius
of the peoples at his feet. He and his officers were proud to be
admitted to the Games and initiated at Eleusis. I think this is
the finest chapter in early Roman history. There is the
simplicity, pride, and generosity of the Roman gentleman,
confronted with a culture he was able to admire, but conscious he
did not possess;--and on the other hand the fine flow of Greek
gratitude to the liberator of Greece, in whom the Greeks
recognised that of old time, and which had been so rare in their
own life. At this moment Rome blossomed: a beautiful bloom,
we may say.
But it was a fateful moment for her, too. The Greeks had long
lost what capacity they had ever had for stable politics.
Flamininus might hand them back their liberties with the utmost
genuineness of heart; but they were not in a condition to use
the gift. Rome soon found that she had no choice but to annex
them, one way or another. They were her proteges; and Antiochus
attacked them;--so then Antiochus had to be fought and conquered.
That fool had great Hannibal with him, and resources with which
Hannibal might have crushed Rome; but it did not suit Antiochus
that the glory should be Hannibal's. Then presently Attalus
bequeathed Pergamum to the Senate; which involved Rome in Asia
Minor. So step by step she was compelled to conquer the East.
Now there was a far greater disparity of civilization between
Rome and this Hellenistic Orient and half-orientalized Greece,
than appeared afterwards between the Romans and Spaniards and
Gauls. Spain, very soon after Augustus completed its conquest,
was producing most of the brightest minds in Latin literature:
the influx of important egos had hardly passed from Italy before
it began to appear in Spain. Had not Rome become the world
metropolis, capable of attracting to herself all elements of
greatness from every part of the Mediterranean world, we should
think of the first century A.D., as a great Spanish Age. Gaul,
too, within a couple of generations of Ceasar's devastating
exploits there, had become another Egypt for wealth and
industries. The grandson's of the Vercingetorixes and Dumnorixes
were living more splendidly, and as culturedly, in larger and
better villas than the patricians of Italy; as Ferrero shows.
We may judge, too, that there was a like quick rise of manvantaric
conditions in Britain after the Claudian conquest: we have
news of Agricola's speaking of the "labored studies of the
Gauls," as if that people were then famed for learning,--to
which, he said, he preferred the "quick wits and natural genius
of the Britons." And here I may mention that, even before the
conquest of Gaul, Caesar's own tutor was a man of that nation, a
master of Greek and Latin learning;--but try to imagine a Roman
tutoring Epaminondas or Pelopidas! So we may gather that a touch
from Italy--by that time highly cultured,--was enough to light up
those Celtic countries at once; and infer from that that no such
long pralayic conditions had obtained in them as had obtained in
Italy during the centuries preceding the Punic Wars. Spain at
thirteen decades before Scipio, Gaul at as much before Caesar,
Britain at as much before Caesar or Claudius, may well have
been strong and cultured countries: because you wake quickly
after the thirteen decade period of rest, but slowly after
the long pralayas.
Roman Italy woke very slowly at the touch of Greece; and woke,
not like Spain and Gaul afterwards at Rome's touch, to culture;
not to learning or artistic fertility. What happened was what
always does happen when a really inferior civilization comes
in contact with a really superior one. Rome did not become
civilized in any decent sense: she simply forwent Roman virtues
and replaced them with Greek vices; and made of these, not the
vices of a degenerate culture, but the piggishness of cultureless
boors.--Behold her Gadarene stations, after Flamininus's return:--
Millions of money, in indemnities, loot, and what not,--in bribes
before very long,--are flowing in to her. Where not so long
since she was doing all her business with stamped lumps of bronze
or copper, a pound or so in weight, in lieu of coinage, nor
feeling the need of anything more handy,--now she is receiving
yearly, monthly, amounts to be reckoned in millions sterling;
and has no more good notion what to do with them than ever she
had of old. If the egos (of Crest-Wave standing) had come in as
quickly as did the shekels, things might have gone manageably;
but they did not by any means. Her great misfortune was to enter
the world-currents only on the material plane; to find her poor
little peasant-bandit-souled self mistress of the world and its
money, and still provincial to the core and with no ideas of
bigness that were not of the earth earthy; with nothing whatever
that was both spiritual and Roman to thrill to life the higher
side of her;--a multimillionaire that could hardly read or write,
and knew no means of spending her money that was not essentially
vulgar. She had given up her sole means of salvation--which was
hoeing cabbages; her slaves did all that for her now;--and so
was at a loss for employment; and Satan found plenty of mischief
for her idle hands to do. There were huge all-day-long banquets,
where you took your emetic from time to time to keep you going.
There were slaves,--armies of them; to have no more than a dozen
personal attendants was poverty. There were slaves from the East
to minister to your vices; some might cost as much as five
thousand dollars; and there were dirt-cheap Sardinians and
'barbarians' of all sorts to run your estates and farms. All the
work of Italy was done by slave labor; and the city swarmed with
an immense slave population; the country slaves with enough of
manhood left in them to rise and butcher and torture their
masters when they could; the city slaves, one would say, in no
condition to keep the semblance of a soul in them at all,--living
dead. For the most part both were shamefully treated; Cato,--
high old Republican Cato, type of the free and nobly simple
Roman--used to see personally to the scourging of his slaves
daily after dinner, as a help to his digestion.--So the rich
wasted their money and their lives. They bought estates galore,
and built villas on them; Cicero had--was it eighteen?--
country-houses. They bought up Greek art-treasures, of which
they had no appreciation whatever,--and which therefore only helped
to vulgarize them. Such things were costly, and thought highly of
in Greece; so Rome would have them for her money, and have them
_en masse._ Mummius brought over a shipload; and solemnly
warned his sailors that they would have to replace any they might
break or lose. The originals, or such substitutes as the sailors
might supply,--it was all one to him. As to literature,--well, we
have seen how it began with translations made by a Greek slave,
Livius Andronicus, who put certain Hellenistic comedies and the
Odyssey into Latin ballad meters; the kind of verse you would
expect from a slave ordered promiscuously by his master to get
busy and do it. Then came Father Ennius; and here I shall
diverge a little to try to show you what (as I think) really
happened to the soul of Rome.
It was a queer set-out, this job that Ennius attempted,--of
making a real Roman poem, an epic of Roman history. Between old
Latin and Greek there was the same kind of difference as between
French and English: one fundamental in the rhythm of the
languages. I am giving my own explanation of a very puzzling
problem; and needless to say, it may be wrong. The ancient
Roman ballads were in what is called Saturnian meter, which
depends on stress and accent; it is not unlike the meter of the
Scotch and English ballads. That means that old Latin was spoken
like English is, with syllabic accent. But Greek was not. In
that, what counted, what made the meters, was tone and quantity.
Now we have that in English too; but it is a subtler and more
occult influence in poetry than accent is. In English, the
rhythm of a line of verse depends on the stresses; but where
there is more than rhythm,--where there is music,--quantity is a
very important factor. For example, in the line
"That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,"
you can hear how the sound is held up on the word _take,_ because
the _k_ is followed by the _t_ in _to;_ and what a wonderful
musical effect is given thereby to the line. All the swing and
lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no
stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were
to denote the tones the syllables should be--shall I say _sung
on?_ Now French is an example of a language without stresses;
you know how each syllable falls evenly, all taking an unvarying
amount of time to enounce. I imagine the basic principle of
Greek was the same; only that you had to add to the syllables a
length of sound where two consonants combining after a vowel
retarded the flow of tone, as in _take to_ in the line quoted
just now.
Now if you try to write a hexameter in English on the Greek
principle, you get something without the least likeness either to
a Greek hexameter or to music; because the language is one of
stresses, not, primarily, of tones.
"This is the forest pimeval; the murmuring pines and
the hemlocks."
will not do at all; there is no Greek spondee in it but--_rest
prime_--; and Longfellow would have been surprised if you had
accused that of spondeeism. What you would get would be
something like these--I forget who was responsible for them:
"Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent,
After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order."
Lines like these could never be poetry; poetry could never be
couched in lines like these;--simply because poetry is an
arrangement of words upon a frame-work of music: the poet has to
hear the music within before his words can drop naturally into
the places in accordance with it. You could not imitate a French
line in English, because each of the syllables would have to be
equally stressed; you could not imitate an English line in
French, because in that language there are none of the stresses
on which an English line depends for its rhythm.
But when I read Chaucer I am forced to the conclusion that what
he tried to do was precisely that: to imitate French music; to
write English without regard to syllabic accent. The English
lyrics of his time and earlier depend on the principle of accent:
Sum'--mer is'--i-cum'--en in,
Loud'--e sing'--cuccu';
--but time and again in Chaucer's lines we find that if we allow
the words their natural English stresses, we break up the music
altogether; whereas if we read them like French, without
syllabic accent, they make a very reasonable music indeed. Now
French had been in England the language of court and culture; it
was still spoken in polite circles at Stratforde-at-le-Bowe; and
Chaucer was a courtier, Anglo-French, not Anglo-Saxon; and he
had gone to France for his first models, and had translated a
great French poem; and Anglo-Saxon verse-methods were hardly
usable any longer. So it may well have appeared to him that
serious poetry was naturally French in meter and method. There
was no model for what he wanted to do in English; the English
five-iambic line had not been invented, and only the popular
lyricists, of the proletariat, sang in stresses. And anyhow, as
the upper classes, to which he belonged more or less, were only
growing out of French into English, very likely they pronounced
their English with a good deal of French accent.
Now it seems to me that something of the same kind, with a
difference, is what happened with Ennius. You are to understand
him as, though Greek by birth, _Romanior ipsis Romanis:_ Greek
body, but ultra-Roman ego. One may see the like thing happen
with one's own eyes at any time: men European-born, who are
quite the extremest Americans. In his case, the spark of his
Greek heredity set alight the Roman conflagration of his nature.
He was born in Calabria, a Roman subject, in 239; and had fought
for Rome before Cato, then quaestor, brought him in his train
from Sardinia in 204.
A glance at the cycles, and a measuring-up of things with our
thirteen-decade yardstick, will suggest the importance of the
time he lived in. The _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ gives A.D. 42
as the date for the end of the golden Age of Latin Literature.
Its first great names are those of Cicero, Caesar, and Lucretius.
Thirteen decades before 42 A.D., or in 88 B.C., these three were
respectively eighteen, fourteen, and eight years old; so we may
fairly call that Golden Age thirteen decades long, and beginning
in 88. Thirteen decades back from that bring us to 218; and as
much more from that, to 348. You will remember 348 as the year
of the death of Plato, which we took as marking the end of the
Golden Age of Greek. In 218 Ennius was twenty-one. He was the
Father of Latin Poetry; as Cato the Censor, seven years his
junior, was the Father of Latin Prose. So you see, he came right
upon a Greek cycle; right upon the dawn of what should have been
a new Greek day, with the night of Hellenisticism in between.
And he took, how shall I put it?--the forces of that new day, and
transmuted them, in himself as crucible, from Greek to Roman... A
sort of Channel through which the impulse was deflected from
Greek to Latin...
I think that, thtilled with a patriotism the keener-edged because
it was acquired, he went to work in this way:--He was going to
make one of these long poems, like those (inferior) Greek fellows
had; and he was going to make it in Latin. (I do not know which
was his native language, or which tradition he grew up in.) He
didn't see why we Romans should not have our ancient greatness
sung in epic; weren't we as good as Homer's people, anyhow?
Certainly we were; and a deal better! Well, of course there was
our old Saturnian meter; but that wasn't the kind of way serious
poetry was written. Serious poetry was written in hexameters. If
Greek was his native tongue, he may have spoken Latin all his
life, of course, with a Greek accent; and the fact that he was
sitting down to make up his 'poem' in a meter which no native-born
Latin speaker could hear as a meter at all, may have been
something of which he was profoundly unconscious. But that is
what he did. He ignored (mostly) the stresses and accents
natural to Latin, and with sweet naivete made a composition that
would have scanned if it had been Greek, and that you could make
scan by reading with a Greek rhythm or accent. The Romans
accepted it. That perhaps is to say, that he had no conception
at all of poetry as words framed upon an inner music. I think he
was capable of it; that most Romans of the time, supposing they
had had the conviction of poethood, would have been capable of
it. It was the kind of people they were.
But that was not all there was to Ennius, by any means. A
poet-soul had incarnated there; he had the root of the matter
in him; it was only the racial vehicle that was funny, as you
may say. He was filled with a high conception of the stern
grandeur Romans admired; and somehow or other, his lines
carry the impress of that grandeur at times: there is inspiration
in them.
And now comes the point I have fetched all this compass to arrive
at. By Spenser's time, or earlier, in England, all traces of
Chaucer's French accent had gone; the language and the poetry
had developed on lines of their own, as true expressions of the
national soul. But in Rome, not so. Two centuries later great
Roman poetry was being written: a major poet was on the scenes,
--Virgil. He, I am certain, wrote with genuine music and
inspiration. We have accounts of his reading of his own poems;
how he was carried along by the music, chanting the lines in a
grand voice that thrilled all who heard. He chanted, not spoke,
them; poets always do. They formed themselves, grew in his
mind, to a natural music already heard there, and existent before
the words arose and took shape to it. That music is the creative
force at work, the whirr of the loom of the Eternal; it is the
golden-snooded Muses at song. And therefore he was not, like
Ennius, making up his lines on an artificial foreign plan; to my
mind that is unthinkable;--he was writing in the Latin spoken by
the cultured; in Latin as all cultured Romans spoke it. But,
_mirabile dictu,_ it was Latin as Ennius had composed it: he was
writing in Ennius' meter. I can only understand that Greek had
so swamped the Latin soul, that for a century or more cultured
Latin had been spoken in quantity, not in accent; in the Greek
manner, and with the Greek rhythm. Ennius had come to be
appreciable as meter and music to Roman ears; which he certainly
could not have been in his own day.
So we may say that there is in a sense no Roman literature at
all. Nothing grew out of the old Saturnian ballad-meter,--except
perhaps Catullus, who certainly had no high inspiring impersonal
song to sing. The Roman soul never grew up, never learned to
express itself in its own way; before it had had time to do so,
the Greek impulse that should have quickened it, swamped it. You
may think of Japan, swamped by Chinese culture in the sixth
century A.D., as a parallel case; but no; there Buddhism, under
real spiritual Teachers, came in at the same time, and fostered
all that was noblest in the Japanese soul, so that the result was
fair and splendid. A more cognate case is that of the Turks, who
suffered through suddenly conquering Persia while they were still
barbarous, and taking on, outwardly, Persian culture wholesale;
Turkish and Latin literature are perhaps on a par for originality.
But if the Greek impulse had touched and wakened Rome under
the aegis of Pythagoreanism,--Rome might have become, possibly,
as fine a thing as Japan. True, the Crest-Wave had to roll
in to Rome presently, and to raise up a great literature
there. But whose is the greatest name in it? A Gaul's, who
imitated Greek models. There is something artificial in the
combination; and you guess that whatever most splendid effort
may be here, the result cannot be supreme. The greatest name in
Latin prose, too,--Livy's--was that of a Gaul.
And herefrom we may gather what mingling of forces is needed to
produce the great ages and results in literature. You have a
country; a tract of earth with the Earth-breath playing up
through the soil of it; you have the components or elements of a
race mixed together on that soil, and molded by that play of the
Earth-breath into homogeneity, and among them, from smallest
beginnings in folk-verse, the body of a literature must grow up.
Then in due season it must be quickened: on the outer plane by
an impulse from abroad,--intercourse with allies, or resistance
to an invader; and on the inner, by an inrush of Crest-Wave
egos. There must be that foreign torch applied,--that spark of
inter-nationalism; and there must be the entry of the vanguard
of the Host of Souls with its great captains and marshals,
bringing with them, to exhibit once more in this world, the loot
of many lands and ages and old incarnations; which thing they
shall do through a sudden efflorescence of the literature that
has grown up slowly to the point of being ready for them. Such
natural growth happened in Greece, in China; in our own cycle,
in France, Italy, England: where the trees of the nation
literatures received buddings and manurings from abroad, but
produced always their own natural national fruit:--Shakespeare
was your true English apple, grown from the Chaucer stock;
although in him flower for juices the sweetness and elixir of all
the world and the ancient ages. But in Rome, before the stock
was more than a tiny seedling, a great branch of Greece was
grafted on it,--and a degenerate Greece at that--and now we do
not know even what kind of fruit-tree that Roman stock should
have grown to be.
How, then, did this submersion and obliteration of the Roman soul
come to pass? It is not difficult to guess. Greek meant
culture: if you wanted culture you learnt Greek. All education
was in Greek hands. The Greek master spoke Latin to his boys;
no doubt with a Greek accent. So cultured speech, cultured
Latin, came to mean Latin without its syllabic stresses; spoken,
as nearly as might be, with Greek evenness and quantity.--As if
French should so submerge us, that we spoke our United States
dapping out syllable by syllable like Frenchmen. But it is a
fearful thing for a nation to forgo the rhythm evolved under the
stress of its own Soul,--especially when what it takes on instead
is the degenerate leavings of another: Alexandria, not Athens.
This Rome did. She gained the world, and lost her own soul; and
the exchange profited her as little as you might expect.
Imitation of culture is often the last touch that makes the
parvenu unbearable; it was so in Rome. One likes better in some
ways Cato's stult old Roman attitude: who scorned Greek all his
life for sheer foppery, while he knew of nothing better written
in it than such trash as poetry and philosophy; but at eighty
came on a Greek treatise on manure and straightway learned the
language that he might read and enjoy something profitable and
thoroughly Roman in spirit.--Greek artists flocked to Rome; and
doubtless the more fifth-rate they were the better a thing they
made of it: but it was risky for good men to rely on Roman
appreciations. Two flute-players are contending at a concert;
Greek and perhaps rather good. Their music is soon drowned in
catcalls: What the dickens do we Romans want with such _footling
tootlings?_ Then the presiding magistrate has an idea. He calls
on them to quit that fooler and get down to business:--Give us
our money's worth, condemn you to it, ye naughty knaves:
_fight!_--And fight they must, poor things, while the audience,
that but now was bored to death, howls with rapture.
So Rome passed away. Where now is the simple soul who, while
his feet were on his native soil and he asked nothing better
than to hoe his cabbages and turn out yearly for patriotic
throat-cuttings, was reputable--nay, respect-worthy,--and above
all, not a little picturesque? Alas! he is no more.--You remember
Kelly,--lovable Kelly, who in his youth, trotting the swate ould
bogs of Cohhacht, heard poetry in every sigh of the wind,--saw
the hosts of the Danaan Sidhe riding their flamey steeds
through the twilight,--listened, by the cabin peat-fire in
the evenings, to tales of Finn MacCool and Cuculain and the
ancient heroes and Gods of Ireland?--Behold this very Kelly
now!--What! is this he?--this raucous, pushing, red-haired,
huge-handed, green-necktied vulgarian who has made his pile
bricklaying in Chicago;--this ward-politician; this--Well,
well; _Sic transit gloria mundi!_ And the Roman cad of the
second century B.C. was worse than a thousand Kellys. He
had learned vice from past-masters in the Levant; and added
to their lessons a native brutality of his own. His feet
were no longer on the Italian soil; _that_ was nothing sacred
to him now. His moral went as his power grew. His old tough
political straightforwardness withered at the touch of Levantine
trickery; his subjects could no longer expect a square deal
from him. He sent out his gilded youth to govern the provinces,
which they simply fleeced and robbed shamelessly; worse
than Athens of old, and by much. The old predatory instinct
was there still: Hellenisticism had supplied no civilizing
influence to modify that. But it was there minus whatever
of manliness and decency had once gone with it.
Karma travels by subtle and manifold links from the moral cause
to the physical effect. There are historians who will prove to
you that the ruin of Rome came of economic causes: which were,
in fact, merely some of the channels through which Karma flowed.
They were there, of course; but we need not enlarge on them too
much. The secret of it all is this: a people without the
Balance of the Faculties, without the saving doctrine of the
Mean, with but one side of their character developed, was called
by cyclic law, while still semi-barbarian, to assume huge
responsibilities in the world. Their qualities were not equal to
the task. The sense of the Beautiful, their feeling for Art and
Poetry, had not grown up with their mateial strength. Why should
it? some may ask; are not strength and moral enough?--No; they
are not: because it is only the Balance which can keep you on
the right path; strength without the beauty sense,--yes, even
fortitude, strength of will,--turns at the touch of quickening
time and new and vaster conditions, into gaucherie, disproportion,
brutality; ay, it is not strength:--the saving quality of
strength, morale, dribbles out and away from it: only the
Balance is true strength. The empires that were founded upon
uncompassion, through they swept the world in a decade, within a
poor century or so were themselves swept away. Rome, because she
was only strong, was weak; her virtues found no exit into life
except in things military; the most material plane, the farthest
from the Spirit. Her people were not called, like the Huns
or Mongols, to be a destroyer race: the Law designed them
for builders. But to build you must have the Balance, the
proportionate development spiritual, moral, mental, and physical:
it is the one foundation. Rome's grand assets at the start were
a sense of duty, a natural turn for law and order: grand assets
indeed, if the rest of the nature be not neglected or atrophied.
In Rome it was, largely.
To be strong-willed and devoted to duty, and without compassion:
--that means that you are in train to grow a gigantic selfhood,
which Nature abhors; emptiness of compassion is the vacuum
nature most abhors. You see a strong man with his ambitions:
scorning vices, scorning weakness; scorning too, and lashing
with his scorn, the weak and vicious; bending men to his will
and purposes. Prophesy direst sorrow for that man! Nature will
not be content that he shall travel his chosen path till
a master of selfishness and a great scourge for mankind has
been evolved in him. She will give him rope; let him multiply
his wrong-doings; because, paradoxically, in wrong-doing is
its own punishment and cure. His selfishness sinks by its own weight
to the lowest levels; prophesy for him that in a near life he shall
be the slave of his body and passions, yet keeping the old desire
to excel;--that common vice shall bring him down to the level of
those he scorned, while yet he forgets not the mountain-tops
he believed his place of old. Then he shall be scourged with
self-contempt, the bitterest of tortures; and the quick natural
punishments of indulgence shall be busy with him, snake-locked
Erinyes with whips of wire. In that horrible school, struggling
to rise from it, he shall suffer all that a human being can in
ignominy, sorrow and shame;--and at last shall count it all well
worth the while, if it has but taught him That which is no
atribute, but Alaya's self,--Compassion. So Karma has its
ministrants within ourselves; and the dreadful tyrants within
are to be disthroned by working and living, not for self, but for
man. This is why Brotherhood is the doctrine and practice that
could put a stop to the awful degeneratioin of mankind.
Rome was strong without compassion; so her strength led her on
to conquests, and her conquests to vices, and her vices to
hideous ruin and combustion. She loved her _gravitas,_--which
implied great things;--but contemned the Beautiful; and so, when
a knowledge of the Beautiful would have gone far to save her, by
maintaining in her a sense of proportion and the fitness of
things--she lost her morale and became utterly vulgarian. But
think of China, taking it as a matter of course that music was an
essential part of government; or of France, with her _Ministre
des Beaux Arts_ in every cabinet. Perhaps; these two, of all
historical nations, have made the greatest achievements; for you
must say that neither India nor Greece was a nation.--As for
Rome, with all her initial grandeur, it would be hard to find
another nation of her standing that made such an awful mess of it
as she did; one refers, of course, to Republican Rome; when
Augustus had had his way with her, it was another matter.
She took the Gadarene slope at a hand-gallop; and there you have
her history during the second century B.C. Not till near the end
of that century did the egos of the Crest-Wave begin to come in
in any numbers. From the dawn of the last quarter, there or
thereabouts, all was an ever-growing rout and riot; the hideous
toppling of the herd over the cliff-edge. It was a time of wars
civil and the reverse; of huge bloody conscriptions and
massacre; reforms and demagogism and murder of the Gracchi:--
Marius and Sulla cat and dog;--the original Spartican movement,
that wrecked Italy and ended with six thousand crucifixions along
the road to Capua;--ended so, and not with a slave conquest
and wiping-out of Rome, simply because Spartacus's revolted
slave-army was even less disciplined than the legions that
Beast-Crassus decimated into a kind of order and finally conquered
them with. It was decade after decade of brutal devasting wars,
--wars chronic and incurable, you would say: the untimely wreck
and ruin of the world.
It is a strange gallery of portraits that comes down to us from
this time: man after notable man arising without the qualities
that could save Rome. Here are a few of the likenesses, as they
are given Dr. Stobart: there were the Gracchi, with so much that
was fine in them, but a ruining dash of the demagog,--an idea
that socialism could accomplish anything real;--and no wisdom to
see through to ultimite causes. There was Marius, simple peasant
with huge military genius: a wolf of a soldier and foolish lamb
of a politician; a law-maker who, captured by the insinuations
and flatteries of the opposite side, swears to obey his own laws
"so far as they may be legal." There was Sulla, of the class
of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belonged, but an
inferior specimen of the class and unscrupulous rip, and a brave
successful commander; personally beautiful, till his way of
living made his face "like a mulberry sprinkled with flour";--
with many elements of greatness always negatived by sudden
fatuities; much of genius, more of fool, and most of rake-helly
demirep; highly cultured, and plunderer of Athens and Delphi;
great general, who maintained his hold on his troops by unlimited
tolerance of undiscipline. There was Crassus the millionaire,
and all his millions won by cheatery and ugly methods; the man
with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing
out of looting at fires. There was Cicero, with many noble and
Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity: thundering orator
with more than a _soupcon_ of the vaudeville favorite in him: a
Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he came to die.
And there was Pompey;--real honesty in Pompey, perhaps the one
true-hearted gentleman of the age: a man of morale, and a
great soldier,--who might have done something if his general
intelligence had been as great as his military genius and his
sense of honor:--surely Pompey was the best of the lot of them;
only the cursed spite was that the world was out of joint, and it
needed something more than a fine soldier and gentleman to set it
right.--And then Caesar--could he not do it? Caesar, the
Superman,--the brilliant all-round genius at last,--the man of
scandalous life--scandalous even in that cesspool Rome,--the
epileptic who dreamed of world-dominion,--the conqueror of Gaul,
says H.P. Blavatsky, because in Gaul alone the Sacred Mysteries
survived in their integrity, and it was his business, on behalf
of the dark forces against mankind, to quench their life and
light for ever;--could not this Caesar do it? No; he had the
genius; but not that little quality which all greatest
personalities,--all who have not passed beyond the limits of
personality: tact, impersonality, the power that the disciple
shall covet, to make himself as nothing in the eyes of men:--
and because he lacked that for armor, there were knives
sharpened which should reach his heart before long.--And then,
in literature, two figures mentionable: Lucretius, thinker and
philosopher in poetry: a high Roman type, and a kind of
materialist, and a kind of God's warrior, and a suicide. And
Catullus: no noble type; neither Roman nor Greek, but Italian
perhaps; singing in the old Saturnian meters with a real lyrical
fervor, but with nothing better to sing than his loves.--And
then, in politics again, Brutus: type, in sentimental history of
the Republican School, of the high old roman and republican
virtues; Brutus of the "blood-bright splendor," the tyrant-slayer
and Roman Harmodios-Aristogeiton; the adored of philosophic
French liberty-equality-fraternity adorers; Shakespeare's
"noblest Roman of them all";--O how featly Cassius might
have answered, when Brutus accused him of the "itching palm,"
if he had only been keeping _au fait_ with the newspapers
through the preceding years! _"Et tu, Brute,"_ I hear him say,
quoting words that should have reminded his dear friend of the
sacrd ties of friendship,--
"Art thou the man will rate thy Cassius thus?
This is the most unkindest cut of all;
For truly I have filched a coin or two:--
Have been, say, _thrifty;_ gathered here and there
_Pickings,_ we'll call them; but, my Brutus, thou--
Didst thou not shut the senators of Rhodes
(I think 'twas Rhodes) up in their senate-house,
And keep them there unfoddered day by day.
Until starvation forced them to disgorge
All of their million to thee? Didst not thou--"
Brutus is much too philosophical, much to studious, to listen
to qualities of that kind, and cuts the conversation short right
there. Cassius was right: that about starving the senators of
his province that surrendered their wealth was precisely what our
Brutus did.--Then there was Anthony, the rough brave soldier,--a
kind of man of the unfittest when the giants Pompey and Caesar
had been in; Anthony, master of Rome for awhile,--and truly, God
knows Rome will do with bluff Mark Anthony for her master!--It is
a very interesting list; most of them queer lobsided creatures,
fighting with own hands or for nothing in particular; most with
some virtues: Then that might have saved Rome, if, as Mrs Poyser
said, "they are hatched again, and hatched different."