DIGRESSION ON THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES OF ROME.
PREPARATION FOR RESUMING THE EXAMINATION OF THE INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS OF
EUROPE.
_Religious Ideas of the primitive Europeans.--The Form of
their Variations is determined by the Influence of
Rome.--Necessity of Roman History in these Investigations._
_Rise and Development of Roman Power, its successive Phases,
territorial Acquisitions.--Becomes Supreme in the
Mediterranean.--Consequent Demoralization of
Italy.--Irresistible Concentration of Power.--Development of
Imperialism.--Eventual Extinction of the true Roman Race._
_Effect on the intellectual, religious, and social Condition
of the Mediterranean Countries.--Produces homogeneous
Thought.--Imperialism prepares the Way for
Monotheism.--Momentous Transition of the Roman World in its
religious Ideas._
_Opinions of the Roman Philosophers.--Coalescence of the new
and old Ideas.--Seizure of Power by the Illiterate, and
consequent Debasement of Christianity in Rome._
[Sidenote: Transition from Greece to Europe.]
From the exposition of the intellectual progress of Greece given in the
preceding pages, we now turn, agreeably to the plan laid down, to an
examination of that of all Europe. The movement in that single nation is
typical of the movement of the entire continent.
[Sidenote: European age of Inquiry.]
The first European intellectual age--that of Credulity--has already, in
part, been considered in Chapter II., more especially so far as Greece
is concerned. I propose now, after some necessary remarks in conclusion
of that topic, to enter on the description of the second European
age--that of Inquiry.
For these remarks, what has already been said of Greece prepares the
way. Mediterranean Europe was philosophically and socially in advance of
the central and northern countries. The wave of civilization passed from
the south to the north; in truth, it has hardly yet reached its extreme
limit. The adventurous emigrants who in remote times had come from Asia
left to the successive generations of their descendants a legacy of
hardship. In the struggle for life, all memory of an Oriental parentage
was lost; knowledge died away; religious ideas became debased; and the
diverse populations sank into the same intellectual condition that they
would have presented had they been proper autochthons of the soil.
[Sidenote: Religion of the old Europeans.]
The religion of the barbarian Europeans was in many respects like that
of the American Indians. They recognized a Great Spirit--omniscient,
omnipotent, omnipresent. In the earliest times they made no
representation of him under the human form, nor had they temples; but
they propitiated him by sacrifices, offering animals, as the horse, and
even men, upon rude altars. Though it was believed that this Great
Spirit might sometimes be heard in the sounds of the forests at night,
yet, for the most part, he was too far removed from human supplication,
and hence arose, from the mere sorcerous ideas of a terrified fancy, as
has been the case in so many other countries, star worship--the second
stage of comparative theology. The gloom and shade of dense forests, a
solitude that offers an air of sanctity, and seems a fitting resort for
mysterious spirits, suggested the establishment of sacred groves and
holy trees. Throughout Europe there was a confused idea that the soul
exists after the death of the body; as to its particular state there was
a diversity of belief. As among other people, also, the offices of
religion were not only directed to the present benefit of individuals,
but also to the discovery of future events by various processes of
divination and augury practised among the priests.
[Sidenote: Their priesthood,]
Although the priests had thus charge of the religious rites, they do not
seem to have been organized in such a manner as to be able to act with
unanimity or to pursue a steady system of policy. A class of female
religious officials--prophetesses--joined in the ceremonials. These
holy women, who were held in very great esteem, prepared the way for the
reception of Mariolatry. Instead of temples--rock-altars, cromlechs, and
other rustic structures were used among the Celtic nations by the
Druids, who were at the same time priests, magicians, and medicine-men.
Their religious doctrines, which recall in many particulars those of the
Rig-Veda, were perpetuated from generation to generation by the aid of
songs.
[Sidenote: and objects of adoration.]
[Sidenote: Influence of Roman Christianity upon them.]
The essential features of this system were its purely local form and its
want of a well-organized hierarchy. Even the Celts offer no exception,
though they had a subordination from the Arch-Druid downward. This was
the reason of the weakness of the old faith and eventually the cause of
its fall. When the German nations migrated to the south in their warlike
expeditions, they left behind them their consecrated groves and sacred
oaks, hallowed by immemorial ages. These objects the devotee could not
carry with him, and no equivalent substitute could be obtained for them.
In the civilized countries to which they came they met with a very
different state of things; a priesthood thoroughly organized and
modelled according to the ancient Roman political system; its objects of
reverence tied to no particular locality; its institutions capable of
universal action; its sacred writings easy of transportation anywhere;
its emblems moveable to all countries--the cross on the standards of its
armies, the crucifix on the bosom of its saints. In the midst of the
noble architecture of Italy and the splendid remains of those Romans who
had once given laws to the world, in the midst of a worship
distinguished by the magnificence of its ceremonial and the solemnity of
its mysteries, they found a people whose faith taught them to regard the
present life as offering only a transitory occupation, and not for a
moment to be weighed against the eternal existence hereafter--an
existence very different from that of the base transmigration of
Druidism or the Drunken Paradise of Woden, where the brave solace
themselves with mead from cups made of the skulls of their enemies
killed in their days upon earth.
[Sidenote: Importance of Roman history in this investigation.]
The European age of inquiry is therefore essentially connected with
Roman affairs. It is distinguished by the religious direction it took.
In place of the dogmas of rival philosophical schools, we have now to
deal with the tenets of conflicting sects. The whole history of those
unhappy times displays the organizing and practical spirit
characteristic of Rome. Greek democracy, tending to the decomposition of
things, led to the Sophists and Sceptics. Roman imperialism, ever
constructive, sought to bring unity out of discords, and draw the line
between orthodoxy and heresy by the authority of councils like that of
Nicea. Following the ideas of St. Augustine in his work, "The City of
God," I adopt, as the most convenient termination of this age, the sack
of Rome by Alaric. This makes it overlap the age of Faith, which had, as
its unmistakable beginning, the foundation of Constantinople.
Greek intellectual life displays all its phases completely, but not so
was it with that of the Romans, who came to an untimely end. They were
men of violence, who disappeared in consequence of their own conquests
and crimes. The consumption of them by war bore, however, an
insignificant proportion to that fatal diminution, that mortal
adulteration occasioned by their merging in the vast mass of humanity
with which they came in contact.
[Sidenote: Great difficulty of treating it.]
I approach the consideration of Roman affairs, which is thus the next
portion of my task, with no little diffidence. It is hard to rise to a
point of view sufficiently elevated and clear, where the extent of
dominion is so great geographically, and the reasons of policy are
obscured by the dimness and clouds of so many centuries. Living in a
social state the origin of which is in the events now to be examined,
our mental vision can hardly free itself from the illusions of
historical perspective, or bring things into their just proportions and
position. Of a thousand acts, all of surpassing interest and importance,
how shall we identify the master ones? How shall we discern with
correctness the true relation of the parts of this wonderful phenomenon
of empire, the vanishing events of which glide like dissolving views
into each other? Warned by the example of those who have permitted the
shadows of their own imagination to fall upon the scene, and have
mistaken them for a part of it, I shall endeavour to apply the test of
common sense to the facts of which it will be necessary to treat; and,
believing that man has ever been the same in his modes of thought and
motives of action, I shall judge of past occurrences in the same way as
of those of our own times.
[Sidenote: Triple form of Roman power.]
In its entire form the Roman power consists of two theocracies, with a
military domination intercalated. The first of these theocracies
corresponds to the fabulous period of the kings; the military domination
to the time of the republic and earlier Cæsars; the second theocracy to
that of the Christian emperors and the Popes.
[Sidenote: The first theocracy and legendary times.]
[Sidenote: Early Roman history.]
The first theocracy is so enveloped in legends and fictions that it is
impossible to give a satisfactory account of it. The biographies of the
kings offer such undeniable evidence of being mere romances, that, since
the time of Niebuhr, they have been received by historians in that
light. But during the reigns of the pagan emperors it was not safe in
Rome to insinuate publicly any disbelief in such honoured legends as
those of the wolf that suckled the foundlings; the ascent of Romulus
into heaven; the nymph Egeria; the duel of the Horatii and Curiatii; the
leaping of Curtius into the gulf on his horse; the cutting of a flint
with a razor by Tarquin; the Sibyl and her books. The modern historian
has, therefore, only very little reliable material. He may admit that
the Romans and Sabines coalesced; that they conquered the Albans and
Latins; that thousands of the latter were transplanted to Mount Aventine
and made plebeians; these movements being the origin of the castes which
long afflicted Rome, the vanquished people constituting a subordinate
class; that at first the chief occupation was agriculture, the nature of
which is not only to accustom men to the gradations of rank, such as the
proprietor of the land, the overseer, the labourer, but also to the
cultivation of religious sentiment, and even the cherishing of
superstition; that, besides the more honourable occupations in which the
rising state was engaged, she had, from the beginning, indulged in
aggressive war, and was therefore perpetually liable to reprisal--one of
her first acts was the founding of the town of Ostia, at the mouth of
the Tiber, on account of piracy; that, through some conspiracy in the
army, indicated in the legend of Lucretia, since armies have often been
known to do such things, the kings were expelled, and a military
domination fancifully called a republic, but consisting of a league of
some powerful families, arose.
Throughout the regal times, and far into the republican, the chief
domestic incidents turn on the strife of the upper caste or patricians
with the lower or plebeians, manifesting itself by the latter asserting
their right to a share in the lands conquered by their valour; by the
extortion of the Valerian law; by the admission of the Latins and
Hernicans to conditions of equality; by the transference of the election
of tribunes from the centuries to the tribes; by the repeal of the law
prohibiting the marriage of plebeians with patricians and by the
eventual concession to the former of the offices of consul, dictator,
censor, and prætor.
[Sidenote: The domestic necessity for foreign war.]
In these domestic disputes we see the origin of the Roman necessity for
war. The high caste is steadily diminishing in number, the low caste as
steadily increasing. In imperious pride, the patrician fills his private
jail with debtors and delinquents; he usurps the lands that have been
conquered. Insurrection is the inevitable consequence, foreign war the
only relief. As the circle of operations extends, both parties see their
interest in a cordial coalescence on equal terms, and jointly tyrannize
exteriorly.
[Sidenote: Gradual spread of Roman influence to the south.]
[Sidenote: Rome builds a navy,]
[Sidenote: and invades Africa.]
[Sidenote: Results of the first Punic War.]
[Sidenote: Results of the second Punic War.]
[Sidenote: Rome invades Greece,]
[Sidenote: and compels the cession of all the European provinces of
Antiochus.]
[Sidenote: Revolt of Perses.]
[Sidenote: Dreadful social effects on Rome.]
[Sidenote: Plunder of Greece and annexation of Spain.]
[Sidenote: Seizure of Asia Minor.]
[Sidenote: The Servile and Social wars.]
[Sidenote: Gradual convergence of power.]
[Sidenote: Cæsar the master of the world.]
The geographical dominion of Rome was extended at first with infinite
difficulty. Up to the time of the capture of the city by the Gauls a
doubtful existence was maintained in perpetual struggles with the
adjacent towns and chieftains. There is reason to believe that in the
very infancy of the republic, in the contest that ensued upon the
expulsion of the kings, the city was taken by Porsenna. The direction in
which her influence first spread was toward the south of the peninsula.
Tarentum, one of the southern states, brought over to its assistance
Pyrrhus the Epirot. He did little in the way of assisting his allies--he
only saw Rome from the Acropolis of Præneste; but from him the Romans
learned the art of fortifying camps, and caught the idea of invading
Sicily. Here the rising republic came in contact with the Carthaginians,
and in the conflict that ensued discovered the military value of Spain
and Gaul, from which the Carthaginians drew an immense supply of
mercenaries and munitions of war. The advance to greatness which Rome
now made was prodigious. She saw that everything turned on the
possession of the sea, and with admirable energy built a navy. In this
her expectations were more than realized. The assertion is quite true
that she spent more time in acquiring a little earth in Italy than was
necessary for subduing the world after she had once obtained possession
of the Mediterranean. From the experience of Agathocles she learned that
the true method of controlling Carthage was by invading Africa. The
principles involved in the contest, and the position of Rome at its
close, are shown by the terms of the treaty of the first Punic War--that
Carthage should evacuate every island in the Mediterranean, and pay a
war-fine of six hundred thousand pounds. In her devotion to the
acquisition of wealth Carthage had become very rich; she had reached a
high state of cultivation of art; yet her prosperity, or rather the mode
by which she had attained it, had greatly weakened her, as also had the
political anomaly under which she was living, for it is an anomaly that
an Asiatic people should place itself under democratic forms. Her
condition in this respect was evidently the consequence of her original
subordinate position as a Tyrian trading station, her rich men having
long been habituated to look to the mother city for distinction. As in
other commercial states, her citizens became soldiers with reluctance,
and hence she had often to rely on mercenary troops. From her the Romans
received lessons of the utmost importance. She confirmed them in the
estimate they had formed of the value of naval power; taught them how to
build ships properly and handle them; how to make military roads. The
tribes of Northern Italy were hardly included in the circle of Roman
dominion when a fleet was built in the Adriatic, and, under the pretence
of putting down piracy, the sea power of the Illyrians was
extinguished. From time immemorial the Mediterranean had been infested
with pirates; man-stealing had been a profitable occupation, great gains
being realized by ransoms of captives, or by selling them at Delos or
other slave-markets. At this time it was clear that the final mastery of
the Mediterranean turned on the possession of Spain, the great
silver-producing country. The rivalry for Spain occasioned the second
Punic War. It is needless to repeat the well-known story of Hannibal,
how he brought Rome to the brink of ruin. The relations she maintained
with surrounding communities had been such that she could not trust to
them. Her enemy found allies in many of the Greek towns in the south of
Italy. It is enough for us to look at the result of that conflict in the
treaty that closed it. Carthage had to give up all her ships of war
except ten triremes, to bind herself to enter into no war without the
consent of the Roman people, and to pay a war-fine of two millions of
pounds. Rome now entered, on the great scale, on the policy of
disorganizing states for the purpose of weakening them. Under pretext of
an invitation from the Athenians to protect them from the King of
Macedon, the ambitious republic secured a footing in Greece, the
principle developed in the invasion of Africa of making war maintain war
being again resorted to. There may have been truth in the Roman
accusation that the intrigues of Hannibal with Antiochus, king of Syria,
occasioned the conflict between Rome and that monarch. Its issue was a
prodigious event in the material aggrandizement of Rome--it was the
cession of all his possessions in Europe and those of Asia north of
Mount Taurus, with a war-fine of three millions of pounds. Already were
seen the effects of the wealth that was pouring into Italy in the
embezzlement of the public money by the Scipios. The resistance of
Perses, king of Macedon, could not restore independence to Greece; it
ended in the annexation of that country, Epirus and Illyricum. The
results of this war were to the last degree pernicious to the victors
and the vanquished; the moral greatness of the former is truly affirmed
to have disappeared, and the social ruin of the latter was so complete
that for long marriage was replaced by concubinage. The policy and
practices of Rome now literally became infernal; she forced a quarrel
upon her old antagonist Carthage, and the third Punic War resulted in
the utter destruction of that city. Simultaneously her oppressions in
Greece provoked revolt, which was ended by the sack and burning of
Corinth, Thebes, Chalcis, and the transference of the plundered statues,
paintings, and works of art to Italy. There was nothing now in the way
of the conquest of Spain except the valour of its inhabitants. After the
assassination of Viriatus, procured by the Consul Cæpio, and the
horrible siege of Numantia, that country was annexed as a province. Next
we see the gigantic republic extending itself over the richest parts of
Asia Minor, through the insane bequest of Attalus, king of Pergamus. The
wealth of Africa, Spain, Greece, and Asia, was now concentrating in
Italy, and the capital was becoming absolutely demoralized. In vain the
Gracchi attempted to apply a remedy. The Roman aristocracy was
intoxicated, insatiate, irresistible. The middle class was gone; there
was nothing but profligate nobles and a diabolical populace. In the
midst of inconceivable corruption, the Jugurthine War served only to
postpone for a moment an explosion which was inevitable. The Servile
rebellion in Sicily broke out; it was closed by the extermination of a
million of those unhappy wretches: vast numbers of them were exposed,
for the popular amusement, to the wild beasts in the arena. It was
followed closely by the revolt of the Italian allies, known as the
Social War--this ending, after the destruction of half a million of men,
with a better result, in the extortion of the freedom of the city by
several of the revolting states. Doubtless it was the intrigues
connected with these transactions that brought the Cimbri and Teutons
into Italy, and furnished an opening for the rivalries of Marius and
Sylla, who, in turn, filled Rome with slaughter. The same spirit broke
out under the gladiator Spartacus: it was only checked for a time by
resorting to the most awful atrocities, such as the crucifixion of
prisoners, to appear under another form in the conspiracy of Catiline.
And now it was plain that the contest for supreme power lay between a
few leading men. It found an issue in the first triumvirate--a union of
Pompey, Crassus, and Cæsar, who usurped the whole power of the senate
and people, and bound themselves by oath to permit nothing to be done
without their unanimous consent. Affairs then passed through their
inevitable course. The death of Crassus and the battle of Pharsalia left
Cæsar the master of the world. At this moment nothing could have
prevented the inevitable result. The dagger of Brutus merely removed a
man, but it left the fact. The battle of Actium reaffirmed the destiny
of Rome, and the death of the republic was illustrated by the annexation
of Egypt. The circle of conquest around the Mediterranean was complete;
the function of the republic was discharged: it did not pass away
prematurely.
[Sidenote: Ancient necessity for slave-wars.]
From this statement of the geographical career of Rome, we may turn to
reflect on the political principles which inspired her. From a remote
antiquity wars had been engaged in for the purpose of obtaining a supply
of labour, the conqueror compelling those whom he had spared to
cultivate his fields and serve him as slaves. Under a system of
transitory military domination, it was more expedient to exhaust a
people at once by the most unsparing plunder than to be content with a
tribute periodically paid, but necessarily uncertain in the vicissitudes
of years. These elementary principles of the policy of antiquity were
included by the Romans in their system with modifications and
improvements.
[Sidenote: Depopulation of countries after Roman conquest.]
[Sidenote: Atrocity of the Roman slave-laws.]
[Sidenote: Social effects of the Roman slave-system.]
The republic, during its whole career, illustrates the observation that
the system on which it was founded included no conception of the actual
relations of man. It dealt with him as a thing, not as a being endowed
with inalienable rights. Recognizing power as its only measure of value,
it could never accept the principle of the equality of all men in the
eye of the law. The subjugation of Sicily, Africa, Greece, was quickly
followed by the depopulation of those countries, as Livy, Plutarch,
Strabo, and Polybius testify. Can there be a more fearful instance than
the conduct of Paulus Æmilius, who, at the conquest of Epirus, murdered
or carried into slavery 150,000 persons? At the taking of Thebes whole
families were thus disposed of, and these not of the lower, but of the
respectable kind, of whom it has been significantly said that they were
transported into Italy to be melted down. In Italy itself the
consumption of life was so great that there was no possibility of the
slaves by birth meeting the requirement, and the supply of others by war
became necessary. To these slaves the laws were atrociously unjust.
Tacitus has recorded that on the occasion of the murder of Pedanius,
after a solemn debate in the senate, the particulars of which he
furnishes, the ancient laws were enforced, and four hundred slaves of
the deceased were put to death, when it was obvious to every one that
scarcely any of them had known of the crime. The horrible maxim that not
only the slaves within a house in which a master was murdered, but even
those within a circle supposed to be measured by the reach of his voice,
should be put to death, shows us the small value of the life of these
unfortunates, and the facility with which they could be replaced. Their
vast numbers necessarily made every citizen a soldier; the culture of
the land and the manufacturing processes, the pursuits of labour and
industry, were assigned to them with contempt. The relation of the slave
in such a social system is significantly shown by the fact that the
courts estimated the amount of any injury he had received by the damage
his master had thereby sustained. To such a degree had this system been
developed, that slave labour was actually cheaper than animal labour,
and, as a consequence, much of the work that we perform by cattle was
then done by men. The class of independent hirelings, which should have
constituted the chief strength of the country, disappeared, labour
itself becoming so ignoble that the poor citizen could not be an
artisan, but must remain a pauper--a sturdy beggar, expecting from the
state bread and amusements. The personal uncleanness and shiftless
condition of these lower classes were the true causes of the prevalence
of leprosy and other loathsome diseases. Attempts at sanitary
improvement were repeatedly made, but they so imperfectly answered the
purpose that epidemics, occurring from time to time, produced a dreadful
mortality. Even under the Cæsars, after all that had been done, there
was no essential amendment. The assertion is true that the Old World
never recovered from the great plague in the time of M. Antoninus,
brought by the army from the Parthian War. In the reign of Titus ten
thousand persons died in one day in Rome.
The slave system bred that thorough contempt for trade which animated
the Romans. They never grudged even the Carthaginians a market. It threw
them into the occupation of the demagogue, making them spend their
lives, when not engaged in war, in the intrigues of political factions,
the turbulence of public elections, the excitement of lawsuits. They
were the first to discover that the privilege of interpreting laws is
nearly equal to that of making them; and to this has been rightly
attributed their turn for jurisprudence, and the prosperity of advocates
among them. The disappearance of the hireling class was the immediate
cause of the downfall of the republic and the institution of the empire,
for the aristocracy were left without any antagonist, and therefore
without any restraint. They broke up into factions, involving the
country in civil war by their struggles with each other for power.
[Sidenote: The war system.]
The political maxims of the republic, for the most part, rejected the
ancient system of devastating a vanquished state by an instant,
unsparing, and crushing plunder, which may answer very well where the
tenure is expected to be brief, but does not accord with the formula
subdue, retain, advance. Yet depopulation was the necessary incident.
Italy, Sicily, Asia Minor, Gaul, Germany, were full of people, but they
greatly diminished under Roman occupation. Her maxims were capable of
being realized with facility through her military organization,
particularly that of the legion. In some nations colonies are founded
for commercial purposes, in others for getting rid of an excess of
population: the Roman colony implies the idea of a garrison and an
active military intent. Each legion was, in fact, so constructed as to
be a small but complete army. In whatever country it might be encamped,
it was in quick communication with the head-quarters at Rome; and this
not metaphorically, but materially, as was shown by the building of the
necessary military roads. The idea of permanent occupation, which was
thus implied, did not admit the expediency of devastating a country,
but, on the contrary, led to the encouragement of provincial prosperity,
because the greater the riches the greater the capacity for taxation.
Such principles were in harmony with the conditions of solidity and
security of the Roman power, which proverbially had not risen in a
single day--was not the creation of a single fortunate soldier, but
represented the settled policy of many centuries. In the act of conquest
Rome was inhuman; she tried to strike a blow that there would never be
any occasion to repeat; no one was spared who by possibility might
inconvenience her; but, the catastrophe once over, as a general thing,
the vanquished had no occasion to complain of her rule. Of course, in
the shadow of public justice, private wrong and oppression were often
concealed. Through injustice and extortion, her officers accumulated
enormous fortunes, which have never since been equalled in Europe.
Sometimes the like occurred in times of public violence; thus Brutus
made Asia Minor pay five years' tribute at once, and shortly after
Antony compelled it to do it again. The extent to which recognized and
legitimate exactions were carried is shown by the fact that upon the
institution of the empire the annual revenues were about forty millions
of pounds sterling.
[Sidenote: Value of gold and silver.]
The comparative value of metals in Rome is a significant political
indication. Bullion rapidly increased in amount during the Carthaginian
wars. At the opening of the first Punic War silver and copper were as 1
to 960; at the second Punic War the ratio had fallen, and was 1 to 160;
soon after there was another fall, and it became 1 to 128. The republic
debased the coinage by reducing its weight, the empire by alloying it.
[Sidenote: Connexion between debasement of coinage and political
decline.]
The science, art, and political condition of nations are often
illustrated by their coinage. An interesting view of the progress of
Europe might be obtained from a philosophical study of its numismatic
remains. The simplicity of the earlier ages is indicated by the pure
silver, such as that coined at Crotona, B.C. 600--that of the reign of
Philip of Macedon by the native unalloyed gold. A gradual decline in
Roman prosperity is more than shadowed forth by the gradual
deterioration of its money; for, as evil times befell the state, the
emperors were compelled to utter a false coinage. Thus, under Vespasian,
A.D. 69, the silver money contained about one fourth of its weight of
copper; under Antoninus Pius, A.D. 138, more than one third; under
Commodus, A.D. 180, nearly one half; under Gordian, A.D. 236, there was
added to the silver more than twice its weight of copper. Nay, under
Gallienus, a coinage was issued of copper, tin and silver, in which the
first two metals exceed the last by more than two hundred times its
weight. It shows to what a hopeless condition the state had come.
The Roman demagogues, as is the instinct of their kind, made political
capital by attacking industrial capital. They lowered the rate of
interest, prohibited interest, and often attempted the abolition of
debts.
[Sidenote: Indescribable depravity in the Roman decline.]
[Sidenote: Dissoluteness of the women, and avoidance of marriage.]
The concentration of power and increase of immorality proceeded with an
equal step. In its earlier ages, the Roman dominion was exercised by a
few thousand persons; then it passed into the hands of some score
families; then it was sustained for a moment by individuals, and at last
was seized by one man, who became the master of 120 millions. As the
process went on, the virtues which had adorned the earlier times
disappeared, and in the end were replaced by crimes such as the world
had never before witnessed and never will again. An evil day is
approaching when it becomes recognized in a community that the only
standard of social distinction is wealth. That day was soon followed in
Rome by its unavoidable consequence, a government founded upon two
domestic elements, corruption and terrorism. No language can describe
the state of that capital after the civil wars. The accumulation of
power and wealth gave rise to a universal depravity. Law ceased to be of
any value. A suitor must deposit a bribe before a trial could be had.
The social fabric was a festering mass of rottenness. The people had
become a populace; the aristocracy was demoniac; the city was a hell. No
crime that the annals of human wickedness can show was left
unperpetrated--remorseless murders; the betrayal of parents, husbands,
wives, friends; poisoning reduced to a system; adultery degenerating
into incests, and crimes that cannot be written. Women of the higher
class were so lascivious, depraved, and dangerous, that men could not be
compelled to contract matrimony with them; marriage was displaced by
concubinage; even virgins were guilty of inconceivable immodesties;
great officers of state and ladies of the court, of promiscuous bathings
and naked exhibitions. In the time of Cæsar it had become necessary for
the government to interfere, and actually put a premium on marriage. He
gave rewards to women who had many children; prohibited those who were
under forty-five years of age, and who had no children, from wearing
jewels and riding in litters, hoping by such social disabilities to
correct the evil. It went on from bad to worse, so that Augustus, in
view of the general avoidance of legal marriage and resort to
concubinage with slaves, was compelled to impose penalties on the
unmarried--to enact that they should not inherit by will except from
relations. Not that the Roman women refrained from the gratification of
their desires; their depravity impelled them to such wicked practices as
cannot be named in a modern book. They actually reckoned the years, not
by the consuls, but by the men they had lived with. To be childless, and
therefore without the natural restraint of a family, was looked upon as
a singular felicity. Plutarch correctly touched the point when he said
that the Romans married to be heirs and not to have heirs. Of offences
that do not rise to the dignity of atrocity, but which excite our
loathing, such as gluttony and the most debauched luxury, the annals of
the times furnish disgusting proofs. It was said, "They eat that they
may vomit, and vomit that they may eat." At the taking of Perusium,
three hundred of the most distinguished citizens were solemnly
sacrificed at the altar of Divus Julius by Octavian! Are these the deeds
of civilized men, or the riotings of cannibals drunk with blood?
[Sidenote: The whole system is past cure.]
The higher classes on all sides exhibited a total extinction of moral
principle; the lower were practical atheists. Who can peruse the annals
of the emperors without being shocked at the manner in which men died,
meeting their fate with the obtuse tranquillity that characterizes
beasts? A centurion with a private mandate appears, and forthwith the
victim opens his veins and dies in a warm bath. At the best, all that
was done was to strike at the tyrant. Men despairingly acknowledged that
the system itself was utterly past cure.
[Sidenote: Testimony of Tacitus.]
That in these statements I do not exaggerate, hear what Tacitus says:
"The holy ceremonies of religion were violated; adultery reigning
without control; the adjacent islands filled with exiles; rocks and
desert places stained with clandestine murders, and Rome itself a
theatre of horrors, where nobility of descent and splendour of fortune
marked men out for destruction; where the vigour of mind that aimed at
civil dignities, and the modesty that declined them, were offences
without distinction; where virtue was a crime that led to certain ruin;
where the guilt of informers and the wages of their iniquity were alike
detestable; where the sacerdotal order, the consular dignity, the
government of provinces, and even the cabinet of the prince, were seized
by that execrable race as their lawful prey; where nothing was sacred,
nothing safe from the hand of rapacity; where slaves were suborned, or
by their own malevolence excited against their masters; where freemen
betrayed their patrons, and he who had lived without an enemy died by
the treachery of a friend."
[Sidenote: Effects in the provinces. Free trade.]
[Sidenote: Intellectual advancements.]
But, though these were the consequences of the concentration of power
and wealth in the city of Rome, it was otherwise in the expanse of the
empire. The effect of Roman domination was the cessation of all the
little wars that had heretofore been waged between adjacent peoples.
They exchanged independence for peace. Moreover, and this, in the end,
was of the utmost importance to them all, unrestricted commerce ensued,
direct trade arising between all parts of the empire. The Mediterranean
nations were brought closer to each other, and became common inheritors
of such knowledge as was then in the world. Arts, sciences, improved
agriculture, spread among them; the most distant countries could boast
of noble roads, aqueducts, bridges, and great works of engineering. In
barbarous places, the legions that were intended as garrisons proved to
be foci of civilization. For the provinces, even the wickedness of Rome
was not without some good. From one quarter corn had to be brought; from
another, clothing; from another, luxuries; and Italy had to pay for it
all in coin. She had nothing to export in return. By this there was a
tendency to equalization of wealth in all parts of the empire, and a
perpetual movement of money. Nor was the advantage altogether material;
there were conjoined intellectual results of no little value.
Superstition and the amazing credulity of the old times disappeared. In
the first Punic War, Africa was looked upon as a land of monsters; it
had serpents large enough to stop armies, it had headless men. Sicily
had its Cyclops, giants, enchantresses; golden apples grew in Spain; the
mouth of Hell was on the shores of the Euxine. The marches of the
legions and the voyages of merchants made all these phantasms vanish.
[Sidenote: Disappearance of the Roman ethnical element.]
It was the necessary consequence of her military aggrandizement that the
ethnical element which really constituted Rome should expire. A small
nucleus of men had undertaken to conquer the Mediterranean world, and
had succeeded. In doing this they had diffused themselves over an
immense geographical surface, and necessarily became lost in the mass
with which they mingled. On the other hand, the deterioration of Italy
was insured by the slave system, and the ruin of Rome was accomplished
before the barbarians touched it. Whoever inquires the cause of the fall
of the Roman empire will find his answer in ascertaining what had become
of the Romans.
[Sidenote: Roman conquest produces homogeneous thought,]
The extinction of prodigies and superstitious legends was occasioned by
increased travel, through the merging of many separate nations into one
great empire. Intellectual communication attends material communication.
The spread of Roman influence around the borders of the Mediterranean
produced a tendency to homogeneous thought eminently dangerous to the
many forms of faith professed by so many different people.
[Sidenote: and revolutionizes religious ideas.]
After Tarquin was expelled the sacerdotal class became altogether
subordinate to the military, whose whole history shows that they
regarded religion as a mere state institution, without any kind of
philosophical significance, and chiefly to be valued for the control it
furnished over vulgar minds. It presented itself to them in the light of
a branch of industry, from which profit might be made by those who
practised it. They thought no more of concerning themselves individually
about it than in taking an interest in any other branch of lucrative
trade. As to any examination of its intellectual basis, they were not
sophists, but soldiers, blindly following the prescribed institutions of
their country with as little question as its military commands. For
these reasons, throughout the time of the republic, and also under the
early emperors, there never was much reluctance to the domestication of
any kind of worship in Rome. Indeed, the gods of the conquered countries
were established there to the gratification of the national vanity. From
this commingling of worship in the city, and intercommunication of ideas
in the provinces, the most important events arose.
[Sidenote: Imperialism prepares the way for monotheism.]
For it very soon was apparent that the political unity which had been
established over so great a geographical surface was the forerunner of
intellectual, and therefore religious unity. Polytheism became
practically inconsistent with the Roman empire, and a tendency arose for
the introduction of some form of monotheism. Apart from the operations
of Reason, it is clear that the recognition by so many nations of one
emperor must soon be followed by the acknowledgment of one God. There is
a disposition to uniformity among people who are associated by a common
political bond. Moreover, the rivalries of a hundred priesthoods
imparted to polytheism an intrinsic weakness; but monotheism implies
centralization, an organized hierarchy, and therefore concentration of
power. The different interests and collisions of multitudinous forms of
religion sapped individual faith; a diffusion of practical atheism,
manifested by a total indifference to all ceremonies, except so far as
they were shows, was the result, the whole community falling into an
unbelieving and godless state. The form of superstition through which
the national mind had passed was essentially founded upon the
recognition of an incessant intervention of many divinities determining
human affairs; but such a faith became extinct by degrees among the
educated. How was it possible that human reason should deal otherwise
with all the contradictions and absurdities of a thousand indigenous and
imported deities, each asserting his inconsistent pretensions. A god who
in his native grove or temple has been paramount and unquestioned, sinks
into insignificance when he is brought into a crowd of compeers. In this
respect there is no difference between gods and men. Great cities are
great levellers of both. He who has stood forth in undue proportions in
the solitude of the country, sinks out of observation in the solitude of
a crowd.
[Sidenote: Roman philosophy.]
[Sidenote: Varro. Lucretius.]
[Sidenote: Cicero.]
The most superficial statement of philosophy among the Romans, if
philosophy it can be called, shows us how completely religious sentiment
was effaced. The presence of sceptical thought is seen in the
explanations of Terentius Varro, B.C. 110, that the anthropomorphic gods
are to be received as mere emblems of the forces of matter; and the
general tendency of the times may be gathered from the poem of
Lucretius: his recommendations that the mind should be emancipated from
the fear of the gods; his arguments against the immortality of the soul;
his setting forth Nature as the only God to be worshipped. In Cicero we
see how feeble and wavering a guide to life in a period of trouble
philosophy had become, and how one who wished to stand in the attitude
of chief thinker of his times was no more than a servile copyist of
Grecian predecessors, giving to his works not an air of masculine and
independent thought, but aiming at present effect rather than a solid
durability; for Cicero addresses himself more to the public than to
philosophers, exhibiting herein his professional tendency as an
advocate. Under a thin veil he hides an undisguised scepticism, and,
with the instinct of a placeman, leans rather to the investigation of
public concerns than to the profound and abstract topics of philosophy.
As is the case with superficial men, he sees no difference between the
speculative and the exact, confusing them together. He feels that it is
inexpedient to communicate truth publicly, especially that of a
religious kind. Doubtless herein we shall agree when we find that he
believes God to be nothing more than the soul of the world; discovers
many serious objections to the doctrine of Providence; insinuates that
the gods are only poetical creations; is uncertain whether the soul be
immortal, but is clear that popular doctrine of punishment in the world
to come is only an idle fable.
[Sidenote: Quintus Sextius. Seneca.]
[Sidenote: Epictetus. Antoninus.]
[Sidenote: Maximus Tyrius].
[Sidenote: Alexander of Aphrodisias.]
It was the attribute of the Romans to impress upon every thing a
practical character. In their philosophy we continually see this
displayed, along with a striking inferiority in original thought.
Quintus Sextius admonishes us to pursue a virtuous life, and, as an aid
thereto, enjoins an abstinence from meat. In this opinion many of the
Cynical school acquiesced, and some it is said, even joined the
Brahmans. In the troublous times of the first Cæsars, men had occasion
to derive all the support they could from philosophy; there was no
religion to sustain them. Among the Stoics there were some, as Seneca,
to whom we can look back with pleasure. Through his writings he
exercised a considerable influence on subsequent ages, though, when we
attentively read his works, we must attribute this not so much to their
intrinsic value as to their happening to coincide with the prevalent
tone of religious thought. He enforces the necessity of a cultivation of
good morals, and yet he writes against the religion of his country, its
observances, and requirements. Of a far higher grade was Epictetus, at
once a slave and a philosopher, though scarcely to be classed as a true
Stoic. He considers man as a mere spectator of God and his works, and
teaches that every one who can no longer bear the miseries of life is
upon just deliberation, and a conscientious belief that the gods will
not disapprove, free to commit suicide. His maxim is that all have a
part to play, and he has done well who has done his best--that he must
look to conscience as his guide. If Seneca said that time alone is our
absolute and only possession, and that nothing else belongs to man,
Epictetus taught that his thoughts are all that man has any power over,
every thing else being beyond his control. M. Aurelius Antoninus, the
emperor, did not hesitate to acknowledge his thankfulness to Epictetus,
the slave, in his attempt to guide his life according to the principles
of the Stoics. He recommends every man to preserve his dæmon free from
sin, and prefers religious devotions to the researches of physics, in
this departing to some extent from the original doctrines of the sect;
but the evil times on which men had fallen led them to seek support in
religious consolations rather than in philosophical inquiries. In
Maximus Tyrius, A.D. 146, we discover a corresponding sentiment,
enveloped, it is true, in an air of Platonism, and countenancing an
impression that image worship and sanctuaries are unnecessary for those
who have a lively remembrance of the view they once enjoyed of the
divine, though excellent for the vulgar, who have forgotten their past.
Alexander of Aphrodisias exhibits the tendency, which was becoming very
prevalent, to combine Plato and Aristotle. He treats upon Providence,
both absolute and contingent; considers its bearings upon religion, and
shows a disposition to cultivate the pious feelings of the age.
[Sidenote: Ancient Physicians.]
Galen, the physician, asserts that experience is the only source of
knowledge; lays great stress on the culture of mathematics and logic,
observing that he himself should have been a Pyrrhonist had it not been
for geometry. In the teleological doctrine of physiology he considers
that the foundations of a true theology must be laid. The physicians of
the times exerted no little influence on the promotion of such views;
for the most part they embraced the Pantheistic doctrine. As one of
them, Sextus Empiricus may be mentioned; his works, still remaining,
indicate to us the tendency of this school to materialism.
[Sidenote: Philosophical atheism among the educated.]
Such was the tone of thought among the cultivated Romans; and to this
philosophical atheism among them was added an atheism of indifference
among the vulgar. But, since man is so constituted that he cannot live
for any length of time without a form of worship, it is evident that
there was great danger, whenever events should be ripe for the
appearance of some monotheistic idea, that it might come in a base
aspect. At a much later period than that we are here considering, one of
the emperors expressed himself to the effect that it would be necessary
to give liberty for the exercise of a sound philosophy among the higher
classes, and provide a gorgeous ceremonial for the lower; he saw how
difficult it is, by mere statesmanship to co-ordinate two such
requirements, in their very nature contradictory. Though polytheism had
lost all intellectual strength, the nations who had so recently parted
with it could not be expected to have ceased from all disposition to an
animalization of religion and corporealization of God. In a certain
sense the emperor was only a more remote and more majestic form of the
conquered and vanished kings, but, like them, he was a man. There was
danger that the theological system, thus changing with the political,
would yield only expanded anthropomorphic conceptions.
[Sidenote: Principles, to be effective, must coincide with existing
tendencies.]
History perpetually demonstrates that nations cannot be permanently
modified except by principles or actions conspiring with their existing
tendency. Violence perpetrated upon them may pass away, leaving, perhaps
in a few generations, no vestige of itself. Even Victory is conquered by
Time. Profound changes only ensue when the operating force is in unison
with the temper of the age. International peace among so many people
once in conflict--peace under the auspices of a great overshadowing
power; the unity of sentiment and brotherhood of feeling fast finding
its way around the Mediterranean shores; the interests of a vast growing
commerce, unfettered through the absorption of so many little kingdoms
into one great republic, were silently bringing things to a condition
that political force could be given to any religious dogma founded upon
sentiments of mutual regard and interest. Nor could it be otherwise
than that among the great soldiers of those times one would at last
arise whose practical intellect would discover the personal advantages
that must accrue from putting himself in relation with the universally
prevailing idea. How could he better find adherents from the centre to
the remotest corner of the empire? And, even if his own personal
intellectual state should disable him from accepting in its fulness the
special form in which the idea had become embodied, could there be any
doubt, if he received it, and was true to it as a politician, though he
might decline it as a man, of the immense power it would yield him in
return--a power sufficient, if the metropolis should resist, or be
otherwise unsuited to his designs, to enable him to found a rival to her
in a more congenial place, and leave her to herself, "the skeleton of so
much glory and of so much guilt."
[Sidenote: The coming Monotheism must be bounded by the limits of Roman
influence.]
Thus, after the event, we can plainly see that the final blow to
Polytheism was the suppression of the ancient independent nationalities
around the Mediterranean Sea; and that, in like manner, Monotheism was
the result of the establishment of an imperial government in Rome. But
the great statesmen of those times, who were at the general point of
view, must have foreseen that, in whatever form the expected change
came, its limits of definition would inevitably be those of the empire
itself, and that wherever the language of Rome was understood the
religion of Rome would prevail. In the course of ages, an expansion
beyond those limits might ensue wherever the state of things was
congenial. On the south, beyond the mere verge of Africa, nothing was to
be hoped for--it is the country in which man lives in degradation and is
happy. On the east there were great unsubdued and untouched monarchies,
having their own types of civilization, and experiencing no want in a
religious respect. But on the north there were nations who, though they
were plunged in hideous barbarism, filthy in an equal degree in body and
mind, polygamists, idolaters, drunkards out of their enemies' skulls,
were yet capable of an illustrious career. For these there was a
glorious participation in store.
[Sidenote: The new ideas coalesce with the old.]
Except the death of a nation, there is no event in human history more
profoundly solemn than the passing away of an ancient religion, though
religious ideas are transitory, and creeds succeed one another with a
periodicity determined by the law of continuous variation of human
thought. The intellectual epoch at which we have now arrived has for its
essential characteristic such a change--the abandonment of a
time-honoured but obsolete system, the acceptance of a new and living
one; and, in the incipient stages, opinion succeeding opinion in a
well-marked way, until at length, after a few centuries of fusion and
solution, there crystallized on the remnant of Roman power, as on a
nucleus, a definite form, which, slowly modifying itself into the
Papacy, served the purposes of Europe for more than a thousand years
throughout its age of Faith.
[Sidenote: Conduct of the Roman educated men at this period.]
In this abandonment, the personal conduct of the educated classes very
powerfully assisted. They outwardly conformed to the ceremonial of the
times, reserving their higher doctrines to themselves, as something
beyond vulgar comprehension. Considering themselves as an intellectual
aristocracy, they stood aloof, and, with an ill-concealed smile,
consented to the transparent folly around them. It had come to an evil
state when authors like Polybius and Strabo apologized to their compeers
for the traditions and legends they ostensibly accepted, on the ground
that it is inconvenient and needless to give popular offence, and that
those who are children in understanding must, like those who are
children in age, be kept in order by bugbears. It had come to an evil
state when the awful ceremonial of former times had degenerated into a
pageant, played off by an infidel priesthood and unbelieving
aristocracy; when oracles were becoming mute, because they could no
longer withstand the sly wit of the initiated; when the miracles of the
ancients were regarded as mere lies, and of contemporaries as feats of
legerdemain. It had come to an evil pass when even statesmen received it
as a maxim that when the people have advanced in intellectual culture to
a certain point, the sacerdotal class must either deceive them or
oppress them, if it means to keep its power.
[Sidenote: Religious condition of the intellectual classes in Rome.]
In Rome, at the time of Augustus, the intellectual
classes--philosophers and statesmen--had completely emerged from the
ancient modes of thought. To them, the national legends, so jealously
guarded by the populace, had become mere fictions. The miraculous
conception of Rhea Sylvia by the god Mars, an event from which their
ancestors had deduced with pride the celestial origin of the founder of
their city, had dwindled into a myth; as a source of actual reliance and
trust, the intercession of Venus, that emblem of female loveliness, with
the father of the gods in behalf of her human favourites, was abandoned;
the Sibylline books, once believed to contain all that was necessary for
the prosperity of the republic, were suspected of an origin more
sinister than celestial; nor were insinuations wanting that from time to
time they had been tampered with to suit the expediency of passing
interests, or even that the true ones were lost and forgeries put in
their stead. The Greek mythology was to them, as it is to us, an object
of reverence, not because of any inherent truth, but because of the
exquisite embodiments it can yield in poetry, in painting, in marble.
The existence of those illustrious men who, on account of their useful
lives or excellent example, had, by the pious ages of old, been
sanctified or even deified, was denied, or, if admitted, they were
regarded as the exaggerations of dark and barbarous times. It was thus
with Æsculapius, Bacchus, and Hercules. And as to the various forms of
worship, the multitude of sects into which the pagan nations were broken
up offered themselves as a spectacle of imbecile and inconsistent
devotion altogether unworthy of attention, except so far as they might
be of use to the interests of the state.
[Sidenote: Their irresolution.]
Such was the position of things among the educated. In one sense they
had passed into liberty, in another they were in bondage. Their
indisposition to encounter those inflictions with which their illiterate
contemporaries might visit them may seem to us surprizing: they acted as
if they thought that the public was a wild beast that would bite if
awakened too abruptly from its dream; but their pusillanimity, at the
most, could only postpone for a little an inevitable day. The ignorant
classes, whom they had so much feared, awoke in due season
spontaneously, and saw in the clear light how matters stood.
[Sidenote: Surrender of affairs in the illiterate classes,]
[Sidenote: and consequent debasement of Christianity in Rome.]
Of the Roman emperors there were some whose intellectual endowments were
of the highest kind; yet, though it must have been plain to them, as to
all who turned their attention to the matter, in what direction society
was drifting, they let things take their course, and no one lifted a
finger to guide. It may be said that the genius of Rome manifested
itself rather in physical than in intellectual operations; but in her
best days it was never the genius of Rome to abandon great events to
freedmen, eunuchs, and slaves. By such it was that the ancient gods were
politically cast aside, while the government was speciously yielding a
simulated obedience to them, and hence it was not at all surprizing
that, soon after the introduction of Christianity, its pure doctrines
were debased by a commingling with ceremonies of the departing creed. It
was not to be expected that the popular mind could spontaneously
extricate itself from the vicious circle in which it was involved.
Nothing but philosophy was competent to deliver it, and philosophy
failed of its duty at the critical moment. The classical scholar need
scarcely express his surprize that the Feriæ Augusti were continued in
the Church as the Festival St. Petri in Vinculis; that even to our own
times an image of the holy Virgin was carried to the river in the same
manner as in the old times was that of Cybele, and that many pagan rites
still continue to be observed in Rome. Had it been in such incidental
particulars only that the vestiges of paganism were preserved, the thing
would have been of little moment; but, as all who have examined the
subject very well know, the evil was far more general, far more
profound. When it was announced to the Ephesians that the Council of
that place, headed by Cyril, had decreed that the Virgin should be
called "the Mother of God," with tears of joy they embraced the knees of
their bishop; it was the old instinct peeping out; their ancestors would
have done the same for Diana. If Trajan, after ten centuries, could have
revisited Rome, he would, without difficulty, have recognized the drama,
though the actors and scenery had all changed; he would have reflected
how great a mistake had been committed in the legislation of his reign,
and how much better it is, when the intellectual basis of a religion is
gone, for a wise government to abstain from all compulsion in behalf of
what has become untenable, and to throw itself into the new movement so
as to shape the career by assuming the lead. Philosophy is useless when
misapplied in support of things which common sense has begun to reject;
she shares in the discredit which is attaching to them. The opportunity
of rendering herself of service to humanity once lost, ages may elapse
before it occurs again. Ignorance and low interests seize the moment,
and fasten a burden on man, which the struggles of a thousand years may
not suffice to cast off. Of all the duties of an enlightened government,
this of allying itself with Philosophy in the critical moment in which
society is passing through so serious a metamorphosis of its opinions as
is involved in the casting off of its ancient investiture of Faith, and
its assumption of a new one, is the most important, for it stands
connected with things that outlast all temporal concerns.