of myself,' he observed, 'you will make me one of your most intimate
friends. I am sure nobody can write such good verses as fast as I can.
As for my singing, I know it for a fact that Hermogenes is decidedly
jealous of me!' 'Have you a mother, Sir?' asked Horace, gravely. 'Have
you any relations to whom your safety is a matter of importance?' 'No,'
answered the other, 'no one. I have buried them all!' 'Lucky people!'
said the poet to himself, and he wished he were dead, too, at that
moment, and he thought of all the deaths he might have died. It was
evidently not written that he should die of poison nor in battle, nor of
a cough, nor of the liver, nor even of gout. He was to be slowly talked
to death by a bore. By this time they were before the temple of Castor
and Pollux, where the great Twin Brethren bathed their horses at
Juturna's spring. The temple of Vesta was before them, and the Sacred
Street turned at right angles to the left, crossing over between a row
of shops on one side and the Julian Rostra on the other, to the Courts
of Law. The Bore suddenly remembered that he was to appear in answer to
an action on that very morning, and as it was already nine o'clock, he
could not possibly walk all the way to Caesar's gardens and be back
before noon, and if he was late, he must forfeit his bail, and the suit
would go against him by default. On the other hand, he had succeeded in
catching the great poet alone, after a hundred fruitless attempts, and
the action was not a very important one, after all. He stopped short.
'If you have the slightest regard for me,' he said, 'you will just go
across with me to the Courts for a moment.' Horace looked at him
curiously, seeing a chance of escape. 'You know where I am going,' he
answered with a smile; 'and as for law, I do not know the first thing
about it.' The Bore hesitated, considered what the loss of the suit must
cost him, and what he might gain by pushing his acquaintance with the
friend of Maecenas and Augustus. 'I am not sure,' he said doubtfully,
'whether I had better give up your company, or my case,' 'My company, by
all means!' cried Horace, with alacrity. 'No!' answered the other,
looking at his victim thoughtfully, 'I think not!' And he began to move
on again by the Nova Via towards the House of the Vestals. Having made
up his mind to sacrifice his money, however, he lost no time before
trying to get an equivalent for it. 'How do you stand with Maecenas?' he
asked suddenly, fixing his small eyes on Horace's weary profile, and
without waiting for an answer he ran on to praise the great man. 'He is
keen and sensible,' he continued, 'and has not many intimate friends. No
one knows how to take advantage of luck as he does. You would find me a
valuable ally, if you would introduce me. I believe you might drive
everybody else out of the field--with my help, of course.' 'You are
quite mistaken there!' answered Horace, rather indignantly. 'He is not
at all that kind of man! There is not a house in Rome where any sort of
intrigue would be more utterly useless!' 'Really, I can hardly believe
it!' 'It is a fact, nevertheless,' retorted Horace, stoutly. 'Well,'
said the Bore, 'if it is, I am of course all the more anxious to know
such a man!' Horace smiled quietly. 'You have only to wish it, my dear
Sir,' he answered, with the faintest modulation of polite irony in his
tone. 'With such gifts at your command, you will certainly charm him.
Why, the very reason of his keeping most people at arm's length is that
he knows how easily he yields!' 'In that case, I will show you what I
can do,' replied the Bore, delighted. 'I shall bribe the slaves; I will
not give it up, if I am not received at first! I will bide my time and
catch him in the street, and follow him about. One gets nothing in life
without taking trouble!' As the man was chattering on, Horace's quick
eyes caught sight of an old friend at last, coming towards him from the
corner of the Triumphal Road, for they had already almost passed the
Palatine. Aristius, sauntering along and enjoying the morning air, with
a couple of slaves at his heels, saw Horace's trouble in a moment, for
he knew the Bore well enough, and realized at once that if he delivered
his friend, he himself would be the next victim. He was far too clever
for that, and with a cold-blooded smile pretended not to understand
Horace's signals of distress. 'I forget what it was you wished to speak
about with me so particularly, my dear Aristius,' said the poet, in
despair. 'It was something very important, was it not?' 'Yes,' answered
the other, with another grin, 'I remember very well; but this is an
unlucky day, and I shall choose another time. Today is the thirtieth
Sabbath,' he continued, inventing a purely imaginary Hebrew feast, 'and
you surely would not risk a Jew's curse for a few moments of
conversation, would you?' 'I have no religion!' exclaimed Horace,
eagerly. 'No superstition! Nothing!' 'But I have,' retorted Aristius,
still smiling. 'My health is not good--perhaps you did not know? I will
tell you about it some other time.' And he turned on his heel, with a
laugh, leaving Horace to his awful fate. Even the sunshine looked black.
But salvation came suddenly in the shape of the man who had brought the
action against the Bore, and who, on his way to the Court, saw his
adversary going off in the opposite direction. 'Coward! Villain!' yelled
the man, springing forward and catching the poet's tormentor by his
cloak. 'Where are you going now? You are witness, Sir, that I am in my
right,' he added, turning to look for Horace. But Horace had disappeared
in the crowd that had collected to see the quarrel, and his gods had
saved him after all.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF CASTOR AND POLLUX]
A part of the life of the times is in the little story, and anyone may
stroll today along the Sacred Street, past the Basilica and the sharp
turn that leads to the block of old houses where the Court House stood,
between St. Adrian's and San Lorenzo in Miranda. Anyone may see just how
it happened, and many know exactly how Horace felt from the moment when
the Bore buttonholed him at the corner of the Julian Basilica till his
final deliverance near the corner of the Triumphal Road, which is now
the Via di San Gregorio.
[Illustration: ATRIUM OF VESTA]
There was much more resemblance to our modern life than one might think
at first sight. Perhaps, after his timely escape, Horace turned back
along the Sacred Street, followed by his single slave, and retraced his
steps, past the temple of Vesta, the temple of Julius Caesar, skirting
the Roman Forum to the Golden Milestone at the foot of the ascent to the
Capitol, from which landmark all the distances in the Roman Empire were
reckoned, the very centre of the known world. Thence, perhaps, he turned
up towards the Argiletum, with something of that instinct which takes a
modern man of letters to his publisher's when he is in the
neighbourhood. There the 'Brothers Sosii' had their publishing
establishment, among many others of the same nature, and employed a
great staff of copyists in preparing volumes for sale. All the year
round the skilled scribes sat within in rows, with pen and ink, working
at the manufacture of books. The Sosii Brothers were rich, and probably
owned their workmen as slaves, both the writers and those who prepared
the delicate materials, the wonderful ink, of which we have not the like
today, the fine sheets of papyrus,--Pliny tells how they were sometimes
too rough, and how they sometimes soaked up the ink like a cloth, as
happens with our own paper,--and the carefully cut pens of Egyptian reed
on which so much of the neatness in writing depended, though Cicero says
somewhere that he could write with any pen he chanced to take up.
It was natural enough that Horace should look in to ask how his latest
book was selling, or more probably his first, for he had written but a
few Epodes and not many Satires at the time when he met the immortal
Bore. Later in his life, his books were published in editions of a
thousand, as is the modern custom in Paris, and were sold all over the
Empire, like those of other famous authors. The Satires did him little
credit, and probably brought him but little money at their first
publication. It seems certain that they have come down to us through a
single copy. The Greek form of the Odes pleased people better. Moreover,
some of the early Satires made distinguished people shy of his
acquaintance, and when he told the Bore that Maecenas was difficult of
access he remembered that nine months had elapsed from the time of his
own introduction to the great man until he had received the latter's
first invitation to dinner. More than once he went almost too far in his
attacks on men and things and then tried to remove the disagreeable
impression he had produced, and wrote again of the same subject in a
different spirit--notably when he attacked the works of the dead poet
Lucilius and was afterwards obliged to explain himself.
No doubt he often idled away a whole morning at his publisher's, looking
over new books of other authors, and very probably borrowing them to
take home with him, because he was poor, and he assuredly must have
talked over with the Sosii the impression produced on the public by his
latest poems. He was undoubtedly a quaestor's scribe, but it is more than
doubtful whether he ever went near the Treasury or did any kind of
clerk's work. If he ever did, it is odd that he should never speak of
it, nor take anecdotes from such an occupation and from the clerks with
whom he must have been thrown, for he certainly used every other sort of
social material in the Satires. Among the few allusions to anything of
the kind in his works are his ridicule of the over-dressed praetor of the
town of Fundi, who had been a government clerk in Rome, and in the same
story, his jest at one of Maecenas' parasites, a freedman, and nominally
a Treasury clerk, as Horace had been. In another Satire, the clerks in
a body wish him to be present at one of their meetings.
Perhaps what strikes one most in the study of Horace, which means the
study of the Augustan age, is the vivid contrast between the man who
composed the Carmen Saeculare, the sacred hymn sung on the Tenth
anniversary of Augustus' accession to the imperial power, besides many
odes that breathe a pristine reverence for the gods, and, on the other
hand, the writer of satirical, playfully sceptical verses, who comments
on the story of the incense melting without fire at the temple of
Egnatia, with the famous and often-quoted 'Credat Judaeus'! The original
Romans had been a believing people, most careful in all ceremonies and
observances, visiting anything like sacrilege with a cool ferocity
worthy of the Christian religious wars in later days. Horace, at one
time or another, laughs at almost every god and goddess in the heathen
calendar, and publishes his jests, in editions of a thousand copies,
with perfect indifference and complete immunity from censorship, while
apparently bestowing a certain amount of care on household sacrifices
and the like.
The fact is that the Romans were a religious people, whereas the
Italians were not. It is a singular fact that Rome, when left long to
herself, has always shown a tendency to become systematically devout,
whereas most of the other Italian states have exhibited an equally
strong inclination to a scepticism not unfrequently mixed with the
grossest superstition. It must be left to more profound students of
humanity to decide whether certain places have a permanent influence in
one determined direction upon the successive races that inhabit them;
but it is quite undeniably true that the Romans of all ages have tended
to religion of some sort in the most marked manner. In Roman history
there is a succession of religious epochs not to be found in the annals
of any other city. First, the early faith of the Kings, interrupted by
the irruption of Greek influences which began approximately with Scipio
Africanus; next, the wild Bacchic worship that produced the secret
orgies on the Aventine, the discovery of which led to a religious
persecution and the execution of thousands of persons on religious
grounds; then the worship of the Egyptian deities, brought over to Rome
in a new fit of belief, and at the same time, or soon afterwards, the
mysterious adoration of the Persian Mithras, a gross and ignorant form
of mysticism which, nevertheless, took hold of the people, at a time
when other religions were almost reduced to a matter of form.
Then, as all these many faiths lost vitality, Christianity arose, the
terribly simple and earnest Christianity of the early centuries, sown
first under the Caesars, in Rome's secure days, developing to a power
when Rome was left to herself by the transference of the Empire to the
East, culminating for the first time in the crowning of Charlemagne,
again in the Crusades, sinking under the revival of mythology and
Hellenism during the Renascence, rising again, by slow degrees, to the
extreme level of devotion under Pius the Ninth and the French
protectorate, sinking suddenly with the movement of Italian unity, and
the coming of the Italians in 1870, then rising again, as we see it now,
with undying energy, under Leo the Thirteenth, and showing itself in the
building of new churches, in the magnificent restoration of old ones,
and in the vast second growth of ecclesiastical institutions, which are
once more turning Rome into a clerical city, now that she is again at
peace with herself, under a constitutional monarchy, but threatened only
too plainly by an impending anarchic revolution. It would be hard to
find in the history of any other city a parallel to such periodical
recurrences of religious domination. Nor, in times when belief has been
at its lowest ebb, have outward religious practices anywhere continued
to hold so important a place in men's lives as they have always held in
Rome. Of all Rome's mad tyrants, Elagabalus alone dared to break into
the temple of Vesta and carry out the sacred Palladium. During more than
eleven hundred years, six Vestal Virgins guarded the sacred fire and the
Holy Things of Rome, in peace and war, through kingdom, republic,
revolution and empire. For fifteen hundred years since then, the bones
of Saint Peter have been respected by the Emperors, by Goths, by Kings,
revolutions and short-lived republics.
[Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM]
IV
There was a surprising strength in those early institutions of which the
fragmentary survival has made Rome what it is. Strongest of all,
perhaps, was the patriarchal mode of life which the shepherds of Alba
Longa brought with them when they fled from the volcano, and of which
the most distinct traces remain to the present day, while its origin
goes back to the original Aryan home. Upon that principle all the
household life ultimately turned in Rome's greatest times. The Senators
were Patres, conscript fathers, heads of strong houses; the Patricians
were those who had known 'fathers,' that is, a known and noble descent.
Horace called Senators simply 'Conscripts,' and the Roman nobles of
today call themselves the 'Conscript' families. The chain of tradition
is unbroken from Romulus to our own time, while everything else has
changed in greater or less degree.
It is hard for Anglo-Saxons to believe that, for more than a thousand
years, a Roman father possessed the absolute legal right to try, condemn
and execute any of his children, without witnesses, in his own house and
without consulting anyone. Yet nothing is more certain. 'From the most
remote ages,' says Professor Lanciani, the highest existing authority,
'the power of a Roman father over his children, including those by
adoption as well as by blood, was unlimited. A father might, without
violating any law, scourge or imprison his son, or sell him for a slave,
or put him to death, even after that son had risen to the highest
honours in the state.' During the life of the father, a child, no matter
of what age, could own no property independently, nor keep any private
accounts, nor dispose of any little belongings, no matter how
insignificant, without the father's consent, which was never anything
more than an act of favour, and was revocable at any moment, without
notice. If a son became a public magistrate, the power was suspended,
but was again in force as soon as the period of office terminated. A man
who had been Dictator of Rome became his father's slave and property
again, as soon as his dictatorship ended.
But if the son married with his father's consent, he was partly free,
and became a 'father' in his turn, and absolute despot of his own
household. So, if a daughter married, she passed from her father's
dominion to that of her husband. A Priest of Jupiter for life was free.
So was a Vestal Virgin. There was a complicated legal trick by which the
father could liberate his son if he wished to do so for any reason, but
he had no power to set any of his children free by a mere act of will,
without legal formality. The bare fact that the men of a people should
be not only trusted with such power, but that it should be forcibly
thrust upon them, gives an idea of the Roman character, and it is
natural enough that the condition of family life imposed by such laws
should have had pronounced effects that may still be felt. As the Romans
were a hardy race and long-lived, when they were not killed in battle,
the majority of men were under the absolute control of their fathers
till the age of forty or fifty years, unless they married with their
parents' consent, in which case they advanced one step towards liberty,
and at all events, could not be sold as slaves by their fathers, though
they still had no right to buy or sell property nor to make a will.
There are few instances of the law being abused, even in the most
ferocious times. Brutus had the right to execute his sons, who conspired
for the Tarquins, without any public trial. He preferred the latter.
Titus Manlius caused his son to be publicly beheaded for disobeying a
military order in challenging an enemy to single combat, slaying him,
and bringing back the spoils. He might have cut off his head in private,
so far as the law was concerned, for any reason whatsoever, great or
small.
As for the condition of real slaves, it was not so bad in early times as
it became later, but the master's power was absolute to inflict torture
and death in any shape. In slave-owning communities, barbarity has
always been, to some extent, restrained by the actual value of the
humanity in question, and slaves were not as cheap in Rome as might be
supposed. A perfectly ignorant labourer of sound body was worth from
eighty to a hundred dollars of our money, which meant much more in those
days, though in later times twice that sum was sometimes paid for a
single fine fish. The money value of the slave was, nevertheless, always
a sort of guarantee of safety to himself; but men who had right of life
and death over their own children, and who occasionally exercised it,
were probably not, as a rule, very considerate to creatures who were
bought and sold like cattle. Nevertheless, the number of slaves who were
freed and enriched by their masters is really surprising.
The point of all this, however, is that the head of a Roman family was,
under protection of all laws and traditions, an absolute tyrant over his
wife, his children, and his servants; and the Roman Senate was a chosen
association of such tyrants. It is astonishing that they should have
held so long to the forms of a republican government, and should never
have completely lost their republican traditions.
In this household tyranny, existing side by side with certain general
ideas of liberty and constitutional government, under the ultimate
domination of the Emperors' despotism as introduced by Augustus, is to
be found the keynote of Rome's subsequent social life. Without those
things, the condition of society in the Middle Age would be
inexplicable, and the feudal system could never have developed. The old
Roman principle that 'order should have precedence over order, not man
over man,' rules most of Europe at the present day, though in Rome and
Italy it is now completely eclipsed by a form of government which can
only be defined as a monarchic democracy.
The mere fact that under Augustus no man was eligible to the Senate who
possessed less than a sum equal to a quarter of a million dollars, shows
plainly enough what one of the most skilful despots who ever ruled
mankind wisely, thought of the institution. It was intended to balance,
by its solidity, the ever-unsettled instincts of the people, to prevent
as far as possible the unwise passage of laws by popular acclamation,
and, so to say, to regulate the pulse of the nation. It has been
imitated, in one way or another, by all the nations we call civilized.
But the father of the family was in his own person the despot, the
senate, the magistrate and the executive of the law; his wife, his
children and his slaves represented the people, constantly and eternally
in real or theoretical opposition, while he was protected by all the
force of the most ferocious laws. A father could behead his son with
impunity; but the son who killed his father was condemned to be all but
beaten to death, and then to be sewn up in a leathern sack and drowned.
The father could take everything from the son; but if the son took the
smallest thing from his father he was a common thief and malefactor, and
liable to be treated as one, at his father's pleasure. The conception of
justice in Rome never rested upon any equality, but always upon the
precedence of one order over another, from the highest to the lowest.
There were orders even among the slaves, and one who had been allowed to
save money out of his allowances could himself buy a slave to wait on
him, if he chose.
Hence the immediate origin of European caste, of different degrees of
nobility, of the relative standing of the liberal professions, of the
mediaeval guilds of artisans and tradesmen, and of the numerous
subdivisions of the agricultural classes, of which traces survive all
over Europe. The tendency to caste is essentially and originally Aryan,
and will never be wholly eliminated from any branch of the Aryan race.
One may fairly compare the internal life of a great nation to a building
which rises from its foundations story by story until the lower part can
no longer carry the weight of the superstructure, and the first signs of
weakness begin to show themselves in the oldest and lowest portion of
the whole. Carefully repaired, when the weakness is noticed at all, it
can bear a little more, and again a little, but at last the breaking
strain is reached, the tall building totters, the highest pinnacles
topple over, then the upper story collapses, and the end comes either in
the crash of a great falling or, by degrees, in the irreparable ruin of
ages. But when all is over, and wind and weather and time have swept
away what they can, parts of the original foundation still stand up
rough and heavy, on which a younger and smaller people must build their
new dwelling, if they build at all.
The aptness of the simile is still more apparent when we confront the
material constructions of a nation with the degree of the nation's
development or decadence at the time when the work was done.
It is only by doing something of that sort that we can at all realize
the connection between the settlement of the shepherds, the Rome of the
Caesars, and the desolate and scantily populated fighting ground of the
Barons, upon which, with the Renascence, the city of the later Popes
began to rise under Nicholas the Fifth. And lastly, without a little of
such general knowledge it would be utterly impossible to call up, even
faintly, the lives of Romans in successive ages. Read the earlier parts
of Livy's histories and try to picture the pristine simplicity of those
primeval times. Read Caesar's Gallic War, the marvellously concise
reports of the greatest man that ever lived, during ten years of his
conquests. Read Horace, and attempt to see a little of what he describes
in his good-natured, easy way. Read the correspondence of the younger
Pliny when proconsul in Bithynia under Trajan, and follow the
extraordinary details of administration which, with ten thousand others,
the Spanish Emperor of Rome carried in his memory, and directed and
decided. Take Petronius Arbiter's 'novel' next, the Satyricon, if you be
not over-delicate in taste, and glance at the daily journal of a
dissolute wretch wandering from one scene of incredible vice to another.
And so on, through the later writers; and from among the vast annals of
the industrious Muratori pick out bits of Roman life at different
periods, and try to piece them together. At first sight it seems utterly
impossible that one and the same people should have passed through such
social changes and vicissitudes. Every educated man knows the main
points through which the chain ran. Scholars have spent their lives in
the attempt to restore even a few of the links and, for the most part,
have lost their way in the dry quicksands that have swallowed up so
much.
'I have raised a monument more enduring than bronze!' exclaimed Horace,
in one of his rare moments of pardonable vanity. The expression meant
much more then than it does now. The golden age of Rome was an age of
brazen statues apparently destined to last as long as history. Yet the
marble outlasted the gilded metal, and Horace's verse outlived both, and
the names of the artists of that day are mostly forgotten, while his is
a household word. In conquering races, literature has generally attained
higher excellence than painting or sculpture, or architecture, for the
arts are the expression of a people's tastes, often incomprehensible to
men who live a thousand years later; but literature, if it expresses
anything, either by poetry, history, or fiction, shows the feeling of
humanity; and the human being, as such, changes very little in twenty or
thirty centuries. Achilles, in his wrath at being robbed of the lovely
Briseis, brings the age of Troy nearer to most men in its living
vitality than the matchless Hermes of Olympia can ever bring the century
of Greece's supremacy. One line of Catullus makes his time more alive
today than the huge mass of the Colosseum can ever make Titus seem. We
see the great stones piled up to heaven, but we do not see the men who
hewed them, and lifted them, and set them in place. The true poet gives
us the real man, and after all, men are more important than stones. Yet
the work of men's hands explains the working of men's hearts, telling us
not what they felt, but how the feelings which ever belong to all men
more particularly affected the actors at one time or another during the
action of the world's long play. Little things sometimes tell the
longest stories.
[Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM]
Pliny, suffering from sore eyes, going about in a closed carriage, or
lying in the darkened basement portico of his house, obliged to dictate
his letters, and unable to read, sends his thanks--by dictation--to his
friend and colleague, Cornutus, for a fowl sent him, and says that
although he is half blind, his eyes are sharp enough to see that it is a
very fat one. The touch of human nature makes the whole picture live.
Horace, journeying to Brindisi, and trying to sleep a little on a canal
boat, is kept awake by mosquitoes and croaking frogs, and by the
long-drawn-out, tipsy singing of a drunken sailor, who at last turns off
the towing mule to graze, and goes to sleep till daylight. It is easier
to see all this than to call up one instant of a chariot race in the
great circus, or one of the ten thousand fights in the Colosseum,
wherein gladiators fought and died, and left no word of themselves.
Yet, without the setting, the play is imperfect, and we must have some
of the one to understand the other. For human art is, in the first
place, a progressive commentary on human nature, and again, in quick
reaction, stimulates it with a suggestive force. Little as we really
know of the imperial times, we cannot conceive of Rome without the
Romans, nor of the Romans without Rome. They belonged together; when the
seat of Empire became cosmopolitan, the great dominion began to be
weakened; and when a homogeneous power dwelt in the city again, a new
domination had its beginning, and was built up on the ruins of the old.