CHARACTERS AND EVENTS OF ROMAN HISTORY
FROM CÆSAR TO NERO
THE LOWELL LECTURES OF 1908
BY
GUGLIELMO FERRERO, LITT.D.
AUTHOR OF
"THE GREATNESS AND DECLINE OF ROME," ETC.
TRANSLATED BY
FRANCES LANCE FERRERO
[Illustration]
The Chautauqua Press
CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK
[Copyright deleted]
By G.P. Putnam's Sons
Fifth Printing
The Chautauqua Print Shop
Chautauqua, N.Y.
PREFACE
In the spring of 1906, the Collège de France invited me to deliver,
during November of that year, a course of lectures on Roman history.
I accepted, giving a résumé, in eight lectures, of the history of the
government of Augustus from the end of the civil wars to his death;
that is, a résumé of the matter contained in the fourth and fifth
volumes of the English edition of my work, _The Greatness and Decline
of Rome_.
Following these lectures came a request from M. Emilio Mitre, Editor
of the chief newspaper of the Argentine Republic, the _Nacion_, and
one from the _Academia Brazileira de Lettras_ of Rio de Janeiro, to
deliver a course of lectures in the Argentine and Brazilian capitals.
I gave to the South American course a more general character than
that delivered in Paris, introducing arguments which would interest a
public having a less specialized knowledge of history than the public
I had addressed in Paris.
When President Roosevelt did me the honour to invite me to visit the
United States and Prof. Abbott Lawrence Lowell asked me to deliver a
course at the Lowell Institute in Boston, I selected material from the
two previous courses of lectures, moulding it into the group that was
given in Boston in November-December, 1908. These lectures were later
read at Columbia University in New York, and at the University of
Chicago in Chicago. Certain of them were delivered elsewhere--before
the American Philosophical Society and at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, at Harvard University in Cambridge, and
at Cornell University in Ithaca.
Such is the record of the book now presented to the public at large.
It is a work necessarily made up of detached studies, which, however,
are bound together by a central, unifying thought; so that the reading
of them may prove useful and pleasant even to those who have already
read my _Greatness and Decline of Rome_.
The first lecture, "The Theory of Corruption in Roman History," sums
up the fundamental idea of my conception of the history of Rome. The
essential phenomenon upon which all the political, social, and moral
crises of Rome depend is the transformation of customs produced by the
augmentation of wealth, of expenditure, and of needs,--a phenomenon,
therefore, of psychological order, and one common in contemporary
life. This lecture should show that my work does not belong among
those written after the method of economic materialism, for I hold
that the fundamental force in history is psychologic and not economic.
The three following lectures, "The History and Legend of Antony and
Cleopatra," "The Development of Gaul," and "Nero," seem to concern
themselves with very different subjects. On the contrary, they present
three different aspects of the one, identical problem--the struggle
between the Occident and the Orient--a problem that Rome succeeded in
solving as no European civilisation has since been able to do, making
the countries of the Mediterranean Basin share a common life, in
peace. How Rome succeeded in accomplishing this union of Orient and
Occident is one of the points of greatest interest in its history. The
first of these three lectures, "Antony and Cleopatra," shows how
Rome repulsed the last offensive movement of the Orient against
the Occident; the second, "The Development of Gaul," shows the
establishing of equilibrium between the two parts of the Empire; the
third, "Nero," shows how the Orient, beaten upon fields of battle and
in diplomatic action, took its revenge in the domain of Roman ideas,
morals, and social life.
The fifth lecture, "Julia and Tiberius," illustrates, by one of the
most tragic episodes of Roman history, the terrible struggle between
Roman ideals and habits and those of the Græco-Asiatic civilisation.
The sixth lecture, "The Development of the Empire," summarises in a
few pages views to be developed in detail in that part of my work yet
to be written.
I have said that not all history can be explained by economic forces
and factors, but this does not prevent me from regarding economic
phenomena as also of high importance. The seventh lecture, "Wine in
Roman History," is an essay after the plan in accordance with which,
it seems to me, economic phenomena should be treated.
The last lecture deals with a subject that perhaps does not, properly
speaking, belong to Roman history, but upon which an historian of Rome
ought to touch sooner or later; I mean the rôle which Rome can still
play in the education of the upper classes. It is a subject important
not only to the historian of Rome, but to all those who are interested
in the future of culture and civilisation. The more specialisation
in technical labour increases, the greater becomes the necessity of
giving the superior classes a general education, which can prepare
specialists to understand each other and to act together in all
matters of common interest. To imagine a society composed exclusively
of doctors, engineers, chemists, merchants, manufacturers, is
impossible. Every one must also be a citizen and a man in sympathy
with the common conscience. I have, therefore, endeavoured to show
in this eighth lecture what services Rome and its great intellectual
tradition can render to modern civilisation in the field of education.
These lectures naturally cannot do more than make known ideas in
general form; it would be too much to expect in them the precision
of detail, the regard for method, and the use of frequent notes,
citations, and references to authorities or documents, that belong
to my larger work on Rome; but they are published partly because I
consider it useful to popularise Roman history, and partly because
some of the pleasantest of memories attach to them. Their origin, the
course on Augustus given at the Collège de France, which proved one of
the happiest occasions of my life, and their development, leading
to my travels in the two Americas, have given me experiences of the
greatest interest and pleasure.
I am glad of the opportunity here to thank all those who have
contributed to make the sojourn of my wife and myself in the United
States delightful. I must thank all my friends at once; for to name
each one separately, I should need, as a Latin poet says, "a hundred
mouths and a hundred tongues."
GUGLIELMO FERRERO.
TURIN, February 22, 1909.
CONTENTS
"CORRUPTION" IN ANCIENT ROME, AND ITS
COUNTERPART IN MODERN HISTORY ......... 1
THE HISTORY AND LEGEND OF ANTONY AND
CLEOPATRA ............................. 37
THE DEVELOPMENT OF GAUL ................. 69
NERO .................................... 101
JULIA AND TIBERIUS ...................... 143
WINE IN ROMAN HISTORY ................... 179
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE .. 207
ROMAN HISTORY IN MODERN EDUCATION ....... 239
INDEX ................................... 265
"Corruption" in Ancient Rome And Its Counterpart in Modern History
Two years ago in Paris, while giving a course of lectures on Augustus
at the Collège de France, I happened to say to an illustrious
historian, a member of the French Academy, who was complimenting me:
"But I have not remade Roman history, as many admirers think. On
the contrary, it might be said, in a certain sense, that I have only
returned to the old way. I have retaken the point of view of Livy;
like Livy, gathering the events of the story of Rome around that
phenomenon which the ancients called the 'corruption' of customs--a
novelty twenty centuries old!"
Spoken with a smile and in jest, these words nevertheless were more
serious than the tone in which they were uttered. All those who know
Latin history and literature, even superficially, remember with
what insistence and with how many diverse modulations of tone are
reiterated the laments on the corruption of customs, on the luxury,
the ambition, the avarice, that invaded Rome after the Second Punic
War. Sallust, Cicero, Livy, Horace, Virgil, are full of affliction
because Rome is destined to dissipate itself in an incurable
corruption; whence we see, then in Rome, as to-day in France, wealth,
power, culture, glory, draw in their train--grim but inseparable
comrade!--a pessimism that times poorer, cruder, more troubled, had
not known. In the very moment in which the empire was ordering itself,
civil wars ended; in that solemn _Pax Romana_ which was to have
endured so many ages, in the very moment in which the heart should
have opened itself to hope and to joy, Horace describes, in three
fine, terrible verses, four successive generations, each corrupting
Rome, which grew ever the worse, ever the more perverse and
evil-disposed:
Aetas parentum, peior avis, tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.
"Our fathers were worse than our grandsires; we have deteriorated from
our fathers; our sons will cause _us_ to be lamented." This is the
dark philosophy that a sovereign spirit like Horace derived from the
incredible triumph of Rome in the world. At his side, Livy, the great
writer who was to teach all future generations the story of the city,
puts the same hopeless philosophy at the base of his wonderful work:
Rome was originally, when it was poor and small, a unique
example of austere virtue; then it corrupted, it spoiled, it
rotted itself by all the vices; so, little by little, we have
been brought into the present condition in which we are able
neither to tolerate the evils from which we suffer, nor the
remedies we need to cure them.
The same dark thought, expressed in a thousand forms, is found in
almost every one of the Latin writers.
This theory has misled and impeded my predecessors in different ways:
some, considering that the writers bewail the unavoidable dissolution
of Roman society at the very time when Rome was most powerful, most
cultured, richest, have judged conventional, rhetorical, literary,
these invectives against corruption, these praises of ancient
simplicity, and therefore have held them of no value in the history of
Rome. Such critics have not reflected that this conception is
found, not only in the literature, but also in the politics and the
legislation; that Roman history is full, not only of invectives in
prose and verse, but of laws and administrative provisions against
_luxuria, ambitio, avaritia_--a sign that these laments were not
merely a foolishness of writers, or, as we say to-day, stuff for
newspaper articles. Other critics, instead, taking account of these
laws and administrative provisions, have accepted the ancient theory
of Roman corruption without reckoning that they were describing as
undone by an irreparable dissolution, a nation that not only had
conquered, but was to govern for ages, an immense empire. In this
conception of corruption there is a contradiction that conceals a
great universal problem.
Stimulated by this contradiction, and by the desire of solving it, to
study more attentively the facts cited by the ancients as examples of
corruption, I have looked about to see if in the contemporary world
I could not find some things that resembled it, and so make myself
understand it. The prospect seemed difficult, because modern men are
persuaded that they are models of all the virtues. Who could think to
find in them even traces of the famous Roman corruption? In the modern
world to-day are the abominable orgies carried on for which the Rome
of the Cæsars was notorious? Are there to-day Neros and Elagabaluses?
He who studies the ancient sources, however, with but a little of the
critical spirit, is easily convinced that we have made for ourselves
out of the much-famed corruption and Roman luxury a notion highly
romantic and exaggerated. We need not delude ourselves: Rome, even in
the times of its greatest splendour, was poor in comparison with the
modern world; even in the second century after Christ, when it stood
as metropolis at the head of an immense empire, Rome was smaller,
less wealthy, less imposing, than a great metropolis of Europe or
of America. Some sumptuous public edifices, beautiful private
houses--that is all the splendour of the metropolis of the empire.
He who goes to the Palatine may to-day refigure for himself, from the
so-called House of Livia, the house of a rich Roman family of the
time of Augustus, and convince himself that a well-to-do middle-class
family would hardly occupy such a house to-day.
Moreover, the palaces of the Cæsars on the Palatine are a grandiose
ruin that stirs the artist and makes the philosopher think; but if
one sets himself to measure them, to conjecture from the remains the
proportions of the entire edifices, he does not conjure up buildings
that rival large modern constructions. The palace of Tiberius, for
example, rose above a street only two metres wide--less than seven
feet,--an alley like those where to-day in Italian cities live only
the most miserable inhabitants. We have pictured to ourselves
the imperial banquets of ancient Rome as functions of unheard of
splendour; if Nero or Elagabalus could come to life and see the
dining-room of a great hotel in Paris or New York--resplendent with
light, with crystal, with silver,--he would admire it as far more
beautiful than the halls in which he gave his imperial feasts. Think
how poor were the ancients in artificial light! They had few wines;
they knew neither tea nor coffee nor cocoa; neither tobacco, nor the
innumerable _liqueurs_ of which we make use; in face of our habits,
they were always Spartan, even when they wasted, because they lacked
the means to squander.
The ancient writers often lament the universal tendency to physical
self-indulgence, but among the facts they cite to prove this dismal
vice, many would seem to us innocent enough. It was judged by them
a scandalous proof of gluttony and as insensate luxury, that at a
certain period there should be fetched from as far as the Pontus,
certain sausages and certain salted fish that were, it appears, very
good; and that there should be introduced into Italy from Greece the
delicate art of fattening fowls. Even to drink Greek wines seemed for
a long time at Rome the caprice of an almost crazy luxury. As late
as 18 B.C., Augustus made a sumptuary law that forbade spending for
banquets on work-days more than two hundred sesterces (ten dollars);
allowed three hundred sesterces (fifteen dollars) for the days of the
Kalends, the Ides, and the Nones; and one thousand sesterces (fifty
dollars) for nuptial banquets. It is clear, then, that the lords
of the world banqueted in state at an expense that to us would seem
modest indeed. And the women of ancient times, accused so sharply by
the men of ruining them by their foolish extravagances, would cut a
poor figure for elegant ostentation in comparison with modern dames
of fashion. For example, silk, even in the most prosperous times, was
considered a stuff, as we should say, for millionaires; only a few
very rich women wore it; and, moreover, moralists detested it, because
it revealed too clearly the form of the body. Lollia Paulina passed
into history because she possessed jewels worth several million
francs: there are to-day too many Lollia Paulinas for any one of them
to hope to buy immortality at so cheap a rate.
I should reach the same conclusions if I could show you what the Roman
writers really meant by corruption in their accounts of the relations
between the sexes. It is not possible here to make critical analyses
of texts and facts concerning this material, for reasons that you
readily divine; but it would be easy to prove that also in this
respect posterity has seen the evil much larger than it was.
Why, then, did the ancient writers bewail luxury, inclination
to pleasure, prodigality--things all comprised in the notorious
"corruption"--in so much the livelier fashion than do moderns,
although they lived in a world which, being poorer and more simple,
could amuse itself, make display, and indulge in dissipation so much
less than we do? This is one of the chief questions of Roman history,
and I flatter myself not to have entirely wasted work in writing my
book [1] above all, because I hope to have contributed a little,
if not actually to solve this question, at least to illuminate it;
because in so doing I believe I have found a kind of key that opens
at the same time many mysteries in Roman history and in contemporary
life. The ancient writers and moralists wrote so much of Roman
corruption, because--nearer in this, as in so many other things, to
the vivid actuality--they understood that wars, revolutions, the great
spectacular events that are accomplished in sight of the world, do not
form all the life of peoples; that these occurrences, on the contrary,
are but the ultimate, exterior explanation, the external irradiation,
or the final explosion of an internal force that is acting constantly
in the family, in private habit, in the moral and intellectual
disposition of the individual. They understood that all the changes,
internal and external, in a nation, are bound together and in part
depend on one very common fact, which is everlasting and universal,
and which everybody may observe if he will but look about him--on the
increase of wants, the enlargement of ideas, the shifting of habits,
the advance of luxury, the increase of expense that is caused by every
generation.
[Footnote 1: _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_. 5 vols. New York and
London.];
Look around you to-day: in every family you may easily observe the
same phenomenon. A man has been born in a certain social condition and
has succeeded during his youth and vigour in adding to his original
fortune. Little by little as he was growing rich, his needs and his
luxuries increased. When a certain point was reached, he stopped. The
men are few who can indefinitely augment their particular wants, or
keep changing their habits throughout their lives, even after the
disappearance of vigour and virile elasticity. The increase of wants
and of luxury, the change of habits, continues, instead, in the new
generation, in the children, who began to live in the ease which their
fathers won after long effort and fatigue, and in maturer age; who, in
short, started where the previous generation left off, and therefore
wish to gain yet new enjoyments, different from and greater than
those that they obtained without trouble through the efforts of the
preceding generation. It is this little common drama, which we see
re-enacted in every family and in which every one of us has been and
will be an actor--to-day as a young radical who innovates customs,
to-morrow as an old conservative, out-of-date and malcontent in the
eyes of the young; a drama, petty and common, which no one longer
regards, so frequent is it and so frivolous it seems, but which,
instead, is one of the greatest motive forces in human history--in
greater or less degree, under different forms, active in all times and
operating everywhere. On account of it no generation can live quietly
on the wealth gathered, with the ideas discovered by antecedent
generations, but is constrained to create new ideas, to make new and
greater wealth by all the means at its disposal--by war and conquest,
by agriculture and industry, by religion and science. On account of
it, families, classes, nations, that do not succeed in adding to
their possessions, are destined to be impoverished, because, wants
increasing, it is necessary, in order to satisfy them, to consume the
accumulated capital, to make debts, and, little by little, to go to
ruin. Because of this ambition, ever reborn, classes renew themselves
in every nation. Opulent families after a few generations are
gradually impoverished; they decay and disappear, and from the
multitudinous poor arise new families, creating the new _élite_ which
continues under differing forms the doings and traditions of the old.
Because of this unrest, the earth is always stirred up by a fervour
for deeds or adventure--attempts that take shape according to the
age: now peoples make war on each other, now they rend themselves in
revolutions, now they seek new lands, explore, conquer, exploit; again
they perfect arts and industries, enlarge commerce, cultivate
the earth with greater assiduity; and yet again, in the ages more
laborious, like ours, they do all these things at the same time--an
activity immense and continuous. But its motive force is always the
need of the new generations, that, starting from the point at which
their predecessors had arrived, desire to advance yet farther--to
enjoy, to know, to possess yet more.
The ancient writers understood this thoroughly: what they called
"corruption" was but the change in customs and wants, proceeding from
generation to generation, and in its essence the same as that which
takes place about us to-day. The _avaritia_ of which they complained
so much, was the greed and impatience to make money that we see to-day
setting all classes beside themselves, from noble to day-labourer; the
_ambitio_ that appeared to the ancients to animate so frantically
even the classes that ought to have been most immune, was what we call
_getting there_--the craze to rise at any cost to a condition higher
than that in which one was born, which so many writers, moralists,
statesmen, judge, rightly or wrongly, to be one of the most dangerous
maladies of the modern world. _Luxuria_ was the desire to augment
personal conveniences, luxuries, pleasures--the same passion that
stirs Europe and America to-day from top to bottom, in city and
country. Without doubt, wealth grew in ancient Rome and grows to-day;
men were bent on making money in the last two centuries of the
Republic, and to-day they rush headlong into the delirious struggle
for gold; for reasons and motives, however, and with arms and
accoutrements, far diverse.
As I have already said, ancient civilisation was narrower, poorer,
and more ignorant; it did not hold under its victorious foot the whole
earth; it did not possess the formidable instruments with which we
exploit the forces and the resources of nature: but the treasures of
precious metals transported to Italy from conquered and subjugated
countries; the lands, the mines, the forests, belonging to such
countries, confiscated by Rome and given or rented to Italians; the
tributes imposed on the vanquished, and the collection of them; the
abundance of slaves,--all these then offered to the Romans and to the
Italians so many occasions to grow rich quickly; just as the gigantic
economic progress of the modern world offers similar opportunities
to-day to all the peoples that, by geographical position, historical
tradition, or vigorous culture and innate energy, know how to excel
in industry, in agriculture, and in trade. Especially from the Second
Punic War on, in all classes, there followed--anxious for a life more
affluent and brilliant--generations the more incited to follow the
examples that emanated from the great metropolises of the Orient,
particularly Alexandria, which was for the Romans of the Republic what
Paris is for us to-day. This movement, spontaneous, regular, natural,
was every now and then violently accelerated by the conquest of
a great Oriental state. One observes, after each one of the great
annexations of Oriental lands, a more intense delirium of luxury and
pleasure: the first time, after the acquisition of the kingdom of
Pergamus, through a kind of contagion communicated by the sumptuous
furniture of King Attalus, which was sold at auction and scattered
among the wealthy houses of Italy to excite the still simple desires
and the yet sluggish imaginations of the Italians; the second time,
after the conquest of Pontus and of Syria, made by Lucullus and by
Pompey; finally, the third time, after the conquest of Egypt made by
Augustus, when the influence of that land--the France of the ancient
world--so actively invaded Italy that no social force could longer
resist it.
In this way, partly by natural, gradual, almost imperceptible
diffusion, partly by violent crises, we see the mania for luxury and
the appetite for pleasure beginning, growing, becoming aggravated
from generation to generation in all Roman society, for two centuries,
changing the mentality and morality of the people; we see the
institutions and public policy being altered; all Roman history
a-making under the action of this force, formidable and immanent in
the whole nation. It breaks down all obstacles confronting it--the
forces of traditions, laws, institutions, interests of classes,
opposition of parties, the efforts of thinking men. The historical
aristocracy becomes impoverished and weak; before it rise to power the
millionaires, the _parvenus_, the great capitalists, enriched in the
provinces. A part of the nobility, after having long despised them,
sets itself to fraternise with them, to marry their wealthy daughters,
cause them to share power; seeks to prop with their millions the
pre-eminence of its own rank, menaced by the discontent, the spirit
of revolt, the growing pride, of the middle class. Meanwhile, another
part of the aristocracy, either too haughty and ambitious, or too
poor, scorns this alliance, puts itself at the head of the democratic
party, foments in the middle classes the spirit of antagonism against
the nobles and the rich, leads them to the assault on the citadels of
aristocratic and democratic power. Hence the mad internal struggles
that redden Rome with blood and complicate so tragically, especially
after the Gracchi, the external polity. The increasing wants of
the members of all classes, the debts that are their inevitable
consequence, the universal longing, partly unsatisfied for lack of
means, for the pleasures of the subtle Asiatic civilisations, infused
into this whole history a demoniac frenzy that to-day, after so many
centuries, fascinates and appals us.
To satisfy their wants, to pay their debts, the classes now set
upon each other, each to rob in turn the goods of the other, in
the cruelest civil war that history records; now, tired of doing
themselves evil, they unite and precipitate themselves on the world
outside of Italy, to sack the wealth that its owners do not know
how to defend. In the great revolutions of Marius and Sulla,
the democratic party is the instrument with which a part of the
debt-burdened middle classes seek to rehabilitate themselves by
robbing the plutocracy and the aristocracy yet opulent; but Sulla
reverses the situation, makes a coalition of aristocrats and the
miserable of the populace, and re-establishes the fortunes of the
nobility, despoiling the wealthy knights and a part of the middle
classes--a terrible civil war that leaves in Italy a hate, a
despondency, a distress, that seem at a certain moment as if they must
weigh eternally on the spirit of the unhappy nation. When, lo! there
appears the strongest man in the history of Rome, Lucullus, and drags
Italy out of the despondency in which it crouched, leads it into the
ways of the world, and persuades it that the best means of forgetting
the losses and ruin undergone in the civil wars, is to recuperate
on the riches of the cowardly Orientals. As little by little the
treasures of Mithridates, conquered by Lucullus in the Orient, arrive
in Italy, Italy begins anew to divert itself, to construct palaces
and villas, to squander in luxury. Pompey, envious of the glory of
Lucullus, follows his example, conquers Syria, sends new treasures to
Italy, carries from the East the jewels of Mithridates, and displaying
them in the temple of Jove, rouses a passion for gems in the Roman
women; he also builds the first great stone theatre to rise in
Rome. All the political men in Rome try to make money out of foreign
countries: those who cannot, like the great, conquer an empire,
confine themselves to blackmailing the countries and petty states that
tremble before the shadow of Rome; the courts of the secondary kings
of the Orient, the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria,--all are
invaded by a horde of insatiable senators and knights, who, menacing
and promising, extort money to spend in Italy and foment the growing
extravagance. The debts pile up, the political corruption overflows,
scandals follow, the parties in Rome rend each other madly, though
hail-fellow-well-met in the provinces to plunder subjects and vassals.
In the midst of this vast disorder Cæsar, the man of destiny, rises,
and with varying fortune makes a way for himself until he beckons
Italy to follow him, to find success and treasures in regions new--not
in the rich and fabulous East, but beyond the Alps, in barbarous Gaul,
bristling with fighters and forests.
But this insane effort to prey on every part of the Empire finally
tires Italy; quarrels over the division of spoils embitter friends;
the immensity of the conquests, made in a few years of reckless
enthusiasm, is alarming. Finally a new civil war breaks out, terrible
and interminable, in which classes and families fall upon each other
anew, to tear away in turn the spoils taken together abroad. Out of
the tremendous discord rises at last the pacifier, Augustus, who is
able gradually, by cleverness and infinite patience, to re-establish
peace and order in the troubled empire. How?--why? Because the
combination of events of the times allows him to use to ends of peace
the same forces with which the preceding generations had fomented so
much disorder--desires for ease, pleasure, culture, wealth growing
with the generations making it. Thereupon begins in the whole Empire
universal progress in agriculture, industry, trade, which, on a small
scale, may be compared to what we to-day witness and share; a progress
for which, then as now, the chief condition was peace. As soon as men
realised that peace gives that greater wealth, those enjoyments more
refined, that higher culture, which for a century they had sought by
war, Italy became quiet; revolutionists became guardians and guards of
order; there gathered about Augustus a coalition of social forces that
tended to impose on the Empire, alike on the parts that wished it and
those that did not, the _Pax Romana_.
Now all this immense story that fills three centuries, that gathers
within itself so many revolutions, so many legislative reforms, so
many great men, so many events, tragic and glorious, this vast history
that for so many centuries holds the interest of all cultured nations,
and that, considered as a whole, seems almost a prodigy, you can, on
the track of the old idea of "corruption," explain in its
profoundest origins by one small fact, universal, common, of the very
simplest--something that every one may observe in the limited circle
of his own personal experience,--by that automatic increase of
ambitions and desires, with every new generation, which prevents the
human world from crystallising in one form, constrains it to continual
changes in material make-up as well as in ideals and moral appearance.
In other words, every new generation must, in order to satisfy that
part of its aspirations which is peculiarly and entirely its own,
alter, whether little or much, in one way or another, the condition
of the world it entered at birth. We can then, in our personal
experiences every day, verify the universal law of history--a law
that can act with greater or less intensity, more or less rapidity,
according to times and places, but that ceases to authenticate itself
at no time and in no place.
The United States is subject to that law to-day, as is old Europe,
as will be future generations, and as past ages were. Moreover, to
understand at bottom this phenomenon, which appears to me to be the
soul of all history, it is well to add this consideration: It is
evident that there is a capital difference between our judgment of
this phenomenon and that of the ancients; to them it was a malevolent
force of dissolution to which should be attributed all in Roman
history that was sinister and dreadful, a sure sign of incurable
decay; that is why they called it "corruption of customs," and so
lamented it. To-day, on the contrary, it appears to us a universal
beneficent process of transformation; so true is this that we call
"progress" many facts which the ancients attributed to "corruption."
It were useless to expand too much in examples; enough to cite a few.
In the third ode of the first book, in which he so tenderly salutes
the departing Virgil, Horace covers with invective, as an evil-doer
and the corrupter of the human race, that impious being who invented
the ship, which causes man, created for the land, to walk across
waters. Who would to-day dare repeat those maledictions against the
bold builders who construct the magnificent trans-Atlantic liners on
which, in a dozen days from Genoa, one lands in Boston or New York?
"Coelum ipsum petimus stultitia," exclaims Horace--that is to say, in
anticipation he considered the Wright brothers crazy.
Who, save some man of erudition, has knowledge to-day of sumptuary
laws? We should laugh them all down with one Homeric guffaw, if to-day
it entered somebody's head to propose a law that forbade fair ladies
to spend more than a certain sum on their clothes, or numbered the
hats they might wear; or that regulated dinners of ceremony, fixing
the number of courses, the variety of wines, and the total expense; or
that prohibited labouring men and women from wearing certain stuffs
or certain objects that were wont to be found only upon the persons
of people of wealth and leisure. And yet laws of this tenor were
compiled, published, observed, up to two centuries ago, without any
one's finding it absurd. The historic force that, as riches increase,
impels the new generations to desire new satisfactions, new pleasures,
operated then as to-day; only then men were inclined to consider it as
a new kind of ominous disease that needed checking. To-day men regard
that constant transformation either as beneficent, or at least as such
a matter of course that almost no one heeds it; just as no one notices
the alternations of day and night, or the change of seasons. On the
contrary, we have little by little become so confident of the goodness
of this force that drives the coming generation on into the unknown
future, that society, European, American, among other liberties has
won in the nineteenth century, full and entire, a liberty that the
ancients did not know--freedom in vice.
To the Romans it appeared most natural that the state should survey
private habits, should spy out what a citizen, particularly a citizen
belonging to the ruling classes, did within domestic walls--should see
whether he became intoxicated, whether he were a gourmand, whether
he contracted debts, spending much or little, whether he betrayed his
wife. The age of Augustus was cultured, civilised, liberal, and in
many things resembled our own; yet on this point the dominating ideas
were so different from ours, that at one time Augustus was forced
by public opinion to propose a law on adultery by which all Roman
citizens of both sexes guilty of this crime were condemned to exile
and the confiscation of half their substance, and there was given
to any citizen the right to accuse the guilty. Could you imagine it
possible to-day, even for a few weeks, to establish this regime of
terror in the kingdom of Amor? But the ancients were always inclined
to consider as exceedingly dangerous for the upper classes that
relaxing of customs which always follows periods of rapid enrichment,
of great gain in comforts; behind his own walls to-day, every one is
free to indulge himself as he will, to the confines of crime.
How can we explain this important difference in judging one of the
essential phenomena of historic life? Has this phenomenon changed
nature, and from bad, by some miracle, become good? Or are we wiser
than our forefathers, judging with experience what they could hardly
comprehend? There is no doubt that the Latin writers, particularly
Horace and Livy, were so severe in condemning this progressive
movement of wants because of unconscious political solicitude, because
intellectual men expressed the opinions, sentiments, and also the
prejudices of historic aristocracy, and this detested the progress of
_ambitio, avaritia, luxuria_, because they undermined the dominance of
its class. On the other hand, it is certain that in the modern
world every increase of consumption, every waste, every vice, seems
permissible, indeed almost meritorious, because men of industry and
trade, the employees in industries--that is, all the people that
gain by the diffusion of luxuries, by the spread of vices or new
wants--have acquired, thanks above all to democratic institutions, and
to the progress of cities, an immense political power that in times
past they lacked. If, for example, in Europe the beer-makers and
distillers of alcohol were not more powerful in the electoral field
than the philosophers and academicians, governments would more easily
recognise that the masses should not be allowed to poison themselves
or future generations by chronic drunkenness.
Between these two extremes of exaggeration, inspired by a
self-interest easy to discover, is there not a true middle way that we
can deduce from the study of Roman history and from the observation of
contemporary life?
In the pessimism with which the ancients regarded progress as
corruption, there was a basis of truth, just as there is a principle
of error in the too serene optimism with which we consider corruption
as progress. This force that pushes the new generations on to the
future, at once creates and destroys; its destructive energy is
specially felt in ages like Cæsar's in ancient Rome and ours in
the modern world, in which facility in the accumulation of wealth
over-excites desires and ambitions in all classes. They are the times
in which personal egoism--what to-day we call individualism--usurps
a place above all that represents in society the interest of the
species: national duty, the self-abnegation of each for the sake
of the common good. Then these vices and defects become always
more common: intellectual agitation, the weakening of the spirit
of tradition, the general relaxation of discipline, the loss of
authority, ethical confusion and disorder. At the same time that
certain moral sentiments refine themselves, certain individualisms
grow fiercer. The government may no longer represent the ideas, the
aspirations, the energetic will of a small oligarchy; it must make
itself more yielding and gracious at the same time that it is becoming
more contradictory and discordant. Family discipline is relaxed;
the new generations shake off early the influence of the past; the
sentiment of honour and the rigour of moral, religious, and political
principles are weakened by a spirit of utility and expediency by
which, more or less openly, confessing it or dissimulating, men always
seek to do, not that which is right and decorous, but that which is
utilitarian. The civic spirit tends to die out; the number of persons
capable of suffering, or even of working, disinterestedly for the
common good, for the future, diminishes; children are not wanted; men
prefer to live in accord with those in power, ignoring their vices,
rather than openly opposing them. Public events do not interest unless
they include a personal advantage.
This is the state of mind that is now diffusing itself throughout
Europe; the same state of mind that, with the documents at hand, I
have found in the age of Cæsar and Augustus, and seen progressively
diffusing itself throughout ancient Italy. The likeness is so great
that we re-find in those far-away times, especially in the upper
classes, exactly that restless condition that we define by the word
"nervousness." Horace speaks of this state of mind, which we consider
peculiar to ourselves, and describes it, by felicitous image, as
_strenua inertia_--strenuous inertia,--agitation vain and ineffective,
always wanting something new, but not really knowing what, desiring
most ardently yet speedily tiring of a desire gratified. Now it
is clear that if these vices spread too much, if they are not
complemented by an increase of material resources, of knowledge, of
sufficient population, they can lead a nation rapidly to ruin. We do
not feel very keenly the fear of this danger--the European-American
civilisation is so rich, has at its disposal so much knowledge, so
many men, so many instrumentalities, has cut off for itself such a
measureless part of the globe, that it can afford to look unafraid
into the future. The abyss is so far away that only a few philosophers
barely descry it in the gray mist of distant years. But the ancient
world--so much poorer, smaller, weaker--felt that it could not
squander as we do, and saw the abyss near at hand.
To-day men and women waste fabulous wealth in luxury; that is, they
spend not to satisfy some reasonable need, but to show to others of
their kind how rich they are, or, further, to make others believe them
richer than they are. If these resources were everywhere saved as they
are in France, the progress of the world would be quicker, and the
new countries would more easily find in Europe and in themselves
the capital necessary for their development. At all events, our age
develops fast, and notwithstanding all this waste, abounds in a plenty
that is enough to keep men from fearing the growth of this wanton
luxury and from planning to restrain it by laws. In the ancient world,
on the other hand, the wealthy classes and the state had only to
abandon themselves a little too much to the prodigality that for us
has become almost a regular thing, when suddenly means were wanting to
meet the most essential needs of social life. Tacitus has summarised
an interesting discourse of Tiberius, in which the famous emperor
censures the ladies of Rome in terms cold, incisive, and succinct,
because they spend too much money on pearls and diamonds. "Our money,"
said Tiberius, "goes away to India and we are in want of the precious
metals to carry on the military administration; we have to give up
the defence of the frontiers." According to the opinion of an
administrator so sagacious and a general so valiant as Tiberius, in
the richest period of the Roman Empire, a lady of Rome could not buy
pearls and diamonds without directly weakening the defence of the
frontiers. Indulgence in the luxury of jewels looked almost like high
treason.
Similar observations might be made on another grave question--the
increase of population. One of the most serious effects of
individualism that accompanies the increase of civilisation and
wealth, is the decrease of the birth-rate. France, which knows how to
temper its luxury, which gives to other peoples an example of saving
means for the future, has on the other hand given the example of
egoism in the family, lowering the birth-rate. England, for a long
time so fecund, seems to follow France. The more uniformly settled and
well-to-do parts of the North American Union, the Eastern States and
New England, are even more sterile than France. However, no one of
these nations suffers to-day from the small increase of population;
there are yet so many poor and fecund peoples that they can easily
fill the gaps. In the ancient world this was not the case; population
was always and everywhere so scanty that if for some reason it
diminished but slightly, the states could not get on, finding
themselves at the mercy of what they called a "famine of men," a
malady more serious and troublesome than over-population. In the Roman
Empire the Occidental provinces finally fell into the hands of the
barbarians, chiefly because the Græco-Latin civilisation sterilised
the family, reducing the population incurably. No wonder that the
ancients applied the term "corruption" to a momentum of desires which,
although increasing culture and the refinements of living, easily
menaced the sources of the nation's physical existence.
There is, then, a more general conclusion to draw from this
experience. It is not by chance, nor the unaccountable caprice of
a few ancient writers, that we possess so many small facts on the
development of luxury and the transformation of customs in ancient
Rome; that, for example, among the records of great wars, of
diplomatic missions, of catastrophes political and economic, we find
given the date when the art of fattening fowls was imported into
Italy. The little facts are not so unworthy of the majesty of Roman
history as one at first might think. Everything is bound together in
the life of a nation, and nothing without importance; the humblest
acts, most personal and deepest hidden in the _penetralia_ of the
home, that no one sees, none knows, have an effect, immediate or
remote, on the common life of the nation. There is, between these
small, insignificant facts and the wars, the revolutions, the
tremendous political and social events that bewilder men, a tie, often
invisible to most people, yet nevertheless indestructible.
Nothing in the world is without import: what women spend for
their toilet, the resistance that men make from day to day to the
temptations of the commonest pleasures, the new and petty needs
that insinuate themselves unconsciously into the habits of all; the
reading, the conversations, the impressions, even the most fugacious
that pass in our spirit--all these things, little and innumerable,
that no historian registers, have contributed to produce this
revolution, that war, this catastrophe, that political overturn, which
men wonder at and study as a prodigy.
The causes of how many apparently mysterious historical events would
be more clearly and profoundly known, of how many periods would the
spirit be better understood, did we only possess the private records
of the families that make up the ruling classes! Every deed we do in
the intimacy of the home reacts on the whole of our environment.
With our every act we assume a responsibility toward the nation and
posterity, the sanction for which, near or far away, is in events.
This justifies, at least in part, the ancient conception by which the
state had the right to exercise vigilance over its citizens, their
private acts, customs, pleasures, vices, caprices. This vigilance, the
laws that regulated it, the moral and political teachings that brought
pressure to bear in the exercise of these laws, tended above all to
charge upon the individual man the social responsibility of his single
acts; to remind him that in the things most personal, aside from the
individual pain or pleasure, there was an interest, a good or an evil,
in common.
Modern men--and it is a revolution greater than that finished in
political form in the nineteenth century--have been freed from these
bonds, from these obligations. Indeed, modern civilisation has made
it a duty for each one to spend, to enjoy, to waste as much as he can,
without any disturbing thought as to the ultimate consequences of
what he does. The world is so rich, population grows so rapidly,
civilisation is armed with so much knowledge in its struggle against
the barbarian and against nature, that to-day we are able to laugh at
the timid prudence of our forefathers, who had, as it were, a fear
of wealth, of pleasure, of love; we can boast in the pride of triumph
that we are the first who dare in the midst of a conquered world, to
enjoy--enjoy without scruple, without restriction--all the good things
life offers to the strong.