doomed; they feared what for the moment was not dangerous. They are
the last representatives of the policy initiated by the Scipios and
not the initiators of the policy that created the bureaucratic Empire
of Diocletian: yet this is exactly their glory. They were right to
be wrong; and they rendered to the Empire an immense service, for
the very reason that the definite outcome of their efforts was
diametrically opposed to the idea that animated them. But we need not
dwell on this point. Such were the ideas of the two emperors and the
results of their work; the true Empire, known to all, the monarchic,
Asiaticised, bureaucratic Empire, grew out of this little-governed
beginning that Augustus and Tiberius allowed to live in the freedom
of the largest autonomy. How was it formed? This is the great problem
that I shall try to solve in the sequence of my work. Naturally, I
cannot now résumé all the ideas I mean to develop: I confine myself
here to some of the simplest considerations, which seem to me surest.
The picture of the Empire, so brilliant from the economic stand-point,
is much less so from the intellectual: here we touch its great
weakness. Destroying so many governments, especially in the Orient,
Rome had at the same time decapitated the intellectual _élites_ of
the ancient world; for the courts of the monarchies were the great
firesides of mental activity. Rome had therefore, together with states
and governments, destroyed scientific and literary institutions,
centres of art, traditions of refinement, of taste, of æsthetic
elegance. So everywhere, with the Roman domination, the practical
spirit won above the philosophical and scientific, commerce over arts
and letters, the middle classes over historic aristocracies. Already
weakened by the overthrow of the most powerful Asiatic monarchies,
these _élites_ received the final blow on the disappearance of their
last protection, the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt.
When Augustus began to govern the Empire, the classes that represent
tradition, culture the elevated and disinterested activities of the
spirit, were everywhere extensive in number in wealth, in energy.
It was not long before these ultimate remainders vanished under the
alluvial overflow of the middle classes, swollen by the big economic
gains of the first century. In this respect, the first and second
centuries of the Christian era resemble our own time. In the whole
Empire, alike in Rome, in Gaul, in Asia, there were old aristocratic
families, rich and illustrious, but they were not the class of
greatest power. Under them stood a middle class of merchants,
land-owners, orators, jurists, professors, and other intellectual men,
and this was so numerous, comfortable, and so potent as to cause all
the great social forces, from government to industry, to abandon
the old aristocracy and court it like a new mistress. Art, industry,
literature, were vulgarised in those two centuries, as to-day in
Europe and America, because they had to work mainly for this middle
class which was much more numerous, and yet cruder than the ancient
_élites_. It was the first era of the _cheap_, of vulgarisations, I
was about to say of the _made in Germany_, that enters into
history. There was invented the art of silver-plating, to give the
_bourgeoisie_ at moderate prices the sweet illusion of possessing
objects of silver; great thinkers disappeared; instead were multiplied
manuals, treatises, encyclopaedias, professors that summarised and
vulgarised. Philosophy gradually gave out, like all the higher forms
of literature, and there began the reign of the declaimers and the
sophists; that is, the lecture-givers, the lawyers, the journalists.
In painting and sculpture, original schools were no more to be found,
nor great names, but the number of statues and bas-reliefs increased
infinitely. The paintings of Pompeii and many statues and marbles
that are now admired in European museums are examples of this
industrialised art, inexpensive, creating nothing original, but
furnishing to families in comfortable circumstances passable copies of
works of art--once a privilege only of kings.
The imperial bureaucracy that was formed mainly in the second century
was another effect of this enlargement of the middle classes. In the
second century there came into vogue many humanitarian ideas, which
have a certain resemblance to modern ones. There increased solicitude
for the general well-being, for order, for justice, and this augmented
the number of functionaries charged with insuring universal felicity
by administrative means. The movement was supported by intellectual
men of the middle classes, especially by jurists, who sought to put
their studies to profit, getting from the government employments in
which they might make use, well or ill, of their somewhat artificial
aptitudes. If the aristocratic idea, personified by Augustus
and Tiberius, delayed, it could not stop, the invasion of these
bureaucratic locusts; the government showed itself constantly weaker
with the intellectual classes. Little by little the whole Empire
was bureaucratised; founded by an aristocracy exclusively Roman in
statesmen and soldiers, it was finally governed by a cosmopolitan
bureaucracy of men of brains: orators, _litterati_, lawyers.
Therefore, to my thinking, they are wrong who believe that the
imperial bureaucracy created the unity of the Empire; whereas, the
formation of the imperial bureaucracy was one of the consequences of
that natural unification, the chief reason for which should be sought
in the great economic movement. The economic unification was first
and was entire; then came the political unity, made by the imperial
bureaucracy, which was less complete than the unifying of material
interests.
After the material unity, after the political, there should have been
formed the moral and intellectual; but at this point, the forces of
Rome gave way. Rome had gathered under its sceptre too many races,
too many kinds of culture, religions too diverse; its spirit was too
exclusively political, administrative, and judicial; it could not
therefore conciliate the ideas, assimilate the customs, weld the
sentiments, unify the religions, by its laws and decrees. To this
end was necessary the power of ideas, of doctrines, of beliefs that
officials of administration could neither create nor propagate. The
work was to be accomplished outside of, and in part against, the
government. It is the work of Christianity.
Many have asked me how I shall consider Christianity in the sequence
of my work. In brief, I may say that I shall follow a different method
from that which its historians have taken up to this time: they have
studied especially how there was formed that part of Christianity
which yet lives and is the soul of it, namely, the religious doctrine.
On this account, they generally separate its history from the history
of the Empire, making of it the principal argument, considering the
history of Roman society as subordinate to it and therefore only an
appendix. I propose to reverse the study, taking Christianity as a
chapter, important but separate, in the history of the Empire. If
for three centuries Christianity has been gradually returning to its
origin, that is, becoming purely a religion and a moral teaching,
for some centuries in the ancient world it was a thing much more
complicated; a government and an administration that willed not only
to regulate the relations between man and God, but to govern the
intellectual, social, moral, political, and economic life of the
people! The historian ought to explain how this new Empire--for it was
indeed a new Empire--was formed in Rome and upon its ruins: this is a
problem much more intricate than at first appears.
It has been said and often repeated that the Church was in the Middle
Ages in Europe the continuation of the Roman Empire, that the Pope is
yet the real successor of the Emperor in Rome. In fact he carries one
of the Emperor's titles, _Pontifex maximus_. The observation is just,
but it should not make us forget that the Christian Empire, so to call
it, and the Roman Empire, were between themselves as radically
opposed as two forces that created the one and the other; politics and
intellectuality. The diplomatists, the generals, the legislators of
Rome created by political means, by wars, treaties, laws, a grand
economic and political unity, which they consolidated, quite giving
up the formation of a large intellectual and moral unity. The
intellectual men, who formed the most powerful nucleus of the Church
after the fourth century, took up again the Roman idea of unity and of
empire; but they transferred it from matter to mind, from the concrete
world of economic and political interests, to the world of ideas
and beliefs. They tried to re-do, by pen and word, the work of the
Scipios, of Lucullus, and of Cæsar, to conquer the world, not indeed
invading it with armies, but spreading a new faith, creating a new
morality, a new metaphysics which must gather up within themselves
the intellectual activities of Græco-Latin culture, from history to
science, from law to philosophy.
The Church of the Middle Ages was therefore the most splendid edifice
that the intellectual classes have so far created. The power of this
empire of men of letters increased, as little by little the other
empire, that of the generals and diplomats, declined. Christianity saw
with indifference the Roman Empire decay; indeed, when it could,
it helped on the disintegration and was one of the causes of that
political and economic pulverising which everywhere succeeded the
great Roman unity. Political and economic unity on the one hand,
moral and intellectual on the other, seem in the history of European
civilisation things opposite and irreconcilable; when one is formed,
the other is undone. As the Roman Empire had found in intellectual
and moral disunion a means of preserving more easily the economic and
political unity, the Church broke to pieces the political and economic
unity of the ancient world to make, and for a long time preserve, its
own moral and intellectual oneness.
I shall make an effort, above all, to explain the origin, the
development, and the consequences of this contradiction, because I
believe that explaining this clears one of the weightiest and most
important points in all the history of our civilisation; in truth,
this contradiction seems to be the immortal soul of it. For instance:
in time, Augustus is twenty centuries away from us, but mentally
and morally he is, instead, much nearer, because for the last four
centuries Europe has been returning to Rome--that is, striving to
remake a great political and economic unity at the expense of the
intellectual and moral. In this fact particularly, lies the immense
historic importance of what is called the classic renaissance. It
indicates the beginning of an historic reversion that corresponds
in the opposite direction to what occurred in the third and fourth
centuries of the Christian era. The classic renaissance freed anew
the scientific spirit of the ancients from mediæval metaphysics and
therefore created the sciences; rediscovered some basic political
and juridical ideas of the ancient world, among them that of the
indivisibility of the State, which destroyed the foundations of
feudalism and of all the political orders of the Middle Ages; and gave
a great impetus to the struggle against the political domination of
the Church and toward the formation of the great states. France and
England have been in the lead, and for two centuries Europe has
been wearying itself imitating them. After the movement of political
unification followed the economic. Look about you: what do you see?
A world that looks more like the Roman Empire than it does the Middle
Ages; it is a world of great states whose dominating classes have
almost all the essential ideas of Græco-Latin civilisation; each,
seeking to better its own conditions, is forced to establish between
itself and the others the strictest economic relations and to bind
into the system of common interests also barbarous countries and those
of differing civilisation. But how? By scrupulously respecting all the
intellectual and moral diversities of men. What matters it if a people
be Roman Catholic or Protestant, Mohammedan or Buddhist, monarchic or
republican, provided it buys, sells, takes part in the economic unity
of the modern world? This is the policy of contemporary states and was
the policy of the Roman Empire. It has often been observed that in the
modern world, so well administered, there is an intellectual and moral
diversity greater than that during the fearful anarchy of the Middle
Ages, when all the lettered classes had a single language, the Latin,
and the lower classes held, on certain fundamental questions, the same
ideas--those taught by the Church. A correct observation, this, but
one from which there is no need to draw too many conclusions; since in
our history the material unity and the ideal are naturally exclusive.
We are returning, in a vaster world, to the condition of the Roman
Empire at its beginning; to an immense economic unity, which,
notwithstanding the aberrations of protectionism, is grander and
firmer than all its predecessors; to a political unity not so great,
yet considerable, because even if peace be not eternal, it is at least
the normal condition of the European states; to an indifference for
every effort put forth to establish moral and ideal uniformity
among the nations, great and small, that share in this political and
economic unity. This is why we understand Augustus and his times much
more readily than we do the times of Charlemagne, even though from the
latter we possess a greater number of documents; this is why we can
write a history of Augustus and rectify so many mistakes made about
him by preceding generations. It has often happened to me to find, _à
propos_ of the volumes written on Augustus, that my contradiction of
tradition creates a kind of instinctive diffidence. Many say: "Yes,
this book is interesting; but is it possible that for twenty centuries
everybody has been mistaken?--that it was necessary to wait till 1908
to understand what occurred in the year 8?" But those twenty centuries
reduce themselves, as far as regards the possibility of understanding
Augustus, to little more than a hundred years. Since Augustus was the
last representative of a world that was disappearing, his figure soon
became obscure and enigmatic. Tacitus and Suetonius saw him already
enveloped in the mist of that new spirit which for so many centuries
was to conceal from human eyes the wonderful spectacle of the pagan
world. Then the mist became a fog and grew denser, until Augustus
disappeared, or was but a formless shadow. Centuries passed by; the
fog began to withdraw before the returning sun of the ancient culture;
his figure reappeared. Fifty years ago, the obscurity cleared quite
away; the figure stands in plain view with outlines well defined. I
believe that the history I have written is more like the truth than
those preceding it, but I do not consider myself on that account
a wonder-worker. I know I have been able to correct many preceding
errors, because I was the first to look attentively when the moment to
see and understand arrived.
Roman History in Modern Education.
When I announced my intention to write a new history of Rome, many
people manifested a sense of astonishment similar to what they would
have felt had I said that I meant to retire to a monastery. Was it to
be believed that the hurrying modern age, which bends all its energies
toward the future, would find time to look back, even for a moment, at
that past so far away? That my attempt was rash was the common
opinion not only of friends and critics, but also of publishers, who
everywhere at first showed themselves skeptical and hesitating. They
all said that the public was quite out of touch with Roman affairs. On
the contrary, facts have demonstrated that also in this age, in aspect
so eager for things modern, people of culture are willing to give
attention to the events and personages of ancient Rome.
The thing appears strange and bizarre, as is natural, to those who had
not considered it possible; consequently, few have seen how simple
and clear is its explanation. To those who showed surprise that the
history of Rome could become fashionable in Paris salons, I have
always replied: My history has had its fortune because it was the
history of Rome. Written with the same method and in the same style,
a history of Venice, or Florence, or England, would not have had the
same lot. One must not forget that the story of Rome occupies in the
intellectual world a privileged place. Not only is it studied in all
the schools of the civilised world; not only do nearly all states
spend money to bring to light all the documentary evidence that
the earth still conceals; but while all other histories are studied
fitfully, that of Rome is, so to speak, remade every fifty years,
and whoever arrives at the right time to do the making can gain a
reputation broader than that given to most historians.
There is, so to speak, in the history of Rome an eternal youth,
and for the mind in what is commonly called European-American
civilisation, it holds a peculiar attraction. From what deep sources
springs this perennial youth? In what consists this particular force
of attraction and renewal? It seems to me that the chief reason
for the eternal fascination of the history of Rome is this, that it
includes, as in a miniature drawn with simple lines, well defined,
all the essential phenomena of social life; so that every age is
able there to find its own image, its gravest problems, its intensest
passions, its most pressing interests, its keenest struggles;
therefore Roman history is forever modern, because every new age has
only to choose that part which most resembles it, to find its own
self.
In the intellectual history of the nineteenth century this leading
phenomenon of our culture is clearly evident. If any one asked me why,
during the past century, Roman history has proved so interesting, I
should not hesitate to reply, "Because Europeans and Americans
find, there more than elsewhere what has been the greatest political
upheaval of the hundred years that followed the French Revolution--the
struggle between monarchy and republic." From the fervid admiration
for the Roman Republic which animated the men of the French Revolution
to the unmeasured Cæsarian apologies of Duruy and of Mommsen, from
the ardent cult of Brutus to the detailed studies on the Roman
administration of the first two centuries, all historians have studied
and regarded Roman history mainly from the point of view of the
struggle between the two principles that yet to-day rend in incurable
discord the mind of old Europe and from which you have emerged
fortunate! You are free, in a new world; you have ended the combat
between the Latin principle of the impersonal state and the Oriental
principle of the dynastic state; between the state conceived as the
thing of all, belonging to every one and therefore of no one, and the
state personified in a family of an origin higher and nobler than
the common in which all authority derives from some hero-founder by
a mysterious virtue unaccountable to reason and human philosophy; you
have done with the conflict between the human state, simple, without
pomp, without dramatic symbols--the republic as we men of the
twentieth century understand it, and as you Americans conceive and
practise it--and the monarchy of divine right, vainglorious, full of
ceremonies and etiquette, despotic in internal constitution, which
still exists in Europe under more or less spurious forms. Now it is
easy to explain how, in an age in which the contest between these two
conceptions and these two forms of the State was so warm, the history
of Rome should so stir the mind.
In no other history do these two political forms meet each other in a
more irreconcilable opposition of characters in extreme. The Republic,
as Rome had founded it, was so impersonal that, in contrast with
modern more democratic republics, it had not even a fixed
bureaucracy, and all the public functions were exercised by
elective magistrates--even the executive--from public works to the
police-system. In the ancient monarchy which the Orient had created,
the dynastic principle was so strong that the State was considered
by inherent right the personal property of the sovereign, who might
expand it, contract it, divide it among his sons and relatives,
bequeathing his kingdom and his subjects as a land-owner disposes of
his estate and his cattle. Furthermore, although to-day the sovereigns
of Europe are pleased to treat quite familiarly with the good Lord,
the rulers in the Orient were held to be gods in their own right.
Whence it is easy to understand how terrible must have been the
struggle between the two principles so antagonistic, from the time
when in the Empire, immeasurable and complicated, the institutions of
the Republic proved inadequate to govern so many diverse peoples and
territories so vast. The Romans kept on, as at first, rebelling at
the idea of placing a man-god at the head of the State, themselves to
become, when finally masters of the world, the slaves of a dynasty.
The conflict between the two principles lasted a century, from Cæsar
to Nero, filled the story of Rome with hideous tragedies, but ended
with the truce of a glorious compromise; for Rome succeeded in putting
into the monarchic constitution of empire some essentially republican
ideas, among others, the idea of the indivisibility of the State. Not
only Augustus and his family, but also the Flavians and the Antonines,
never thought that the Empire belonged to them, that they might
dispose of it like private property; on the contrary, they regarded it
as an eternal and indivisible holding of the Roman people which they,
as representatives of the _populus_, were charged to administer.
It is therefore easy, as I have said, to explain how, as never
before, the history of Rome was looked upon as a great war between the
monarchy and the republic. Indeed, the problem of the republic and
the monarchy, always present to the minds of writers of the nineteenth
century, has been perhaps the chief reason for the gravest mistakes
committed by Roman historiography during this period--mistakes I have
sought to correct. For example, the republicans have pinned their
faith to all the absurd tales told by Suetonius and Tacitus about the
family of the Cæsars, through preconceived hate for the monarchy; and
the monarchists have exaggerated out of measure the felicity of the
first two centuries of the Empire, to prove that the provinces lived
happy under the monarchic administration as never before or after.
Mommsen has fashioned an impossible Cæsar, almost making of that great
demagogue a literary anticipation of Bismarck.
Little by little, however, as the contest between republic and
monarchy gradually spent itself in Europe, in the last twenty-five
years of the nineteenth century, the interest for histories of Rome
conceived and written in this spirit, declined. The real reason why
Mommsen and Duruy are to-day so little read, why at the beginning of
the twentieth century Roman history no longer stirs enthusiasm through
their books is, above all, this: that readers no longer find in those
pages what corresponds directly to living reality. Therefore it was to
be believed that Roman history had grown old and out of date; whereas,
merely one of its perishing and deciduous forms had grown old, not the
soul of it, which is eternally living and young. So true is this, that
a writer had only to consider the old story from new points of view,
for Cæsar and Antony, Lucullus and Pompey, Augustus and the laws of
the year 18 B.C., to become subjects of fashionable conversation in
Parisian drawing-rooms, in the most refined intellectual centre of the
world.