The Story of Civilization

by Will Durant

  The most extensive, industrious, and unscientific product of Italian science was the Historia Naturalis (77) of Caius Plinius Secundus. Though busy nearly all his life as soldier, lawyer, traveler, administrator, and head of the western Roman fleet, he wrote treatises on oratory, grammar, and the javelin, a history of Rome, another of Rome’s wars in Germany, and—sole survivor of this flood—thirty-seven “books” of natural history. How he managed all this in fifty-five years is explained in a letter of his nephew’s:

  He had a quick apprehension, incredible zeal, and an unequaled capacity to go without sleep. He would rise at midnight or at one, and never later than two in the morning, and begin his literary work. . . . Before daybreak he used to wait upon Vespasian, who likewise chose that season to transact business. When he had finished the affairs which the Emperor committed to his charge, he returned home to his studies. After a short light repast at noon ... he would frequently, in the summer, repose in the sun; but during that time some author was read to him, from whom he made extracts and notes ... as was his method with whatever he read. . . . Thereafter he generally went into a cold bath, took a light refreshment, and rested for a while. Then, as if it were a new day, he resumed his studies till dinner, when again a book was read to him, and he made notes. . . . Such was his manner of life amid the noise and hurry of the town. But in the country his whole time was devoted to study, except when he was actually bathing; all the while he was being rubbed and wiped he was employed in hearing some book read to him, or in dictating. In his journeys a stenographer constantly attended him in his chariot or sedan chair. ... He once reproved me for walking; “you need not have lost those hours,” he said, for he counted all time lost that was not given to study.66

  His book, so sheared and sewn, was a one-man encyclopedia summarizing the science and errors of his age. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give a general description of everything that is known to exist throughout the earth.”67 He deals with 20,000 topics and apologizes for omitting others; he refers to 2000 volumes by 473 authors, and admits his indebtedness by name with a candor exceptional in ancient literature; he notes, in passing, that he found many authors transcribing their predecessors word for word without acknowledgment. His style is dull, though sometimes purple, but we must not expect encyclopedias to be fascinating.

  Pliny begins by rejecting the gods; they are, he thinks, merely natural phenomena, or planets, or services, personified and deified. The sole god is Nature, i.e., the sum of natural forces; and this god apparently pays no special attention to mundane affairs.68 Pliny modestly refuses to measure the universe. His astronomy is a galaxy of absurdities (e.g., “In the war of Octavian against Antony the sun remained dim for almost a year”69); but he notes the aurora borealis,70 states with approximate modernity the orbital period of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn as respectively two, twelve, and thirty years, and argues for the spherical form of the earth.71 He tells of islands rising from the Mediterranean in his time, and surmises that Sicily and Italy, Boeotia and Euboea, Cyprus and Syria, were gradually sundered by the patience of the sea.72 He treats of the laborious and servile mining of precious metals and regrets that “many hands are worn down that one little joint may be adorned.”73 He wishes that iron had never been found, since it has made war more terrible; “as if to bring death upon man more swiftly, we have given wings to iron and taught it to fly”74—referring to iron missiles equipped with leather feathers to help them keep their course. Following Theophrastus, he mentions under the name of anthracitis a “stone that burns,”75 but says no more about coal. He speaks of “an incombustible linen,” called by the Greeks asbestinon, “which is used to embalm the cadavers of kings.”76 He describes or lists many animals, lauds their sagacity, and tells how to predetermine their sex: “If you wish to have females, let the dams face north while being covered.”77 He has twelve wondrous books on medicine—i.e., on the curative value of various minerals and plants. Books xx-xxv are a Roman herbal, which the Middle Ages passed down to form the initial plant lore of modern medicine. He offers cures for everything from intoxication and halitosis78 to “a pain in the neck”;79 he provides “stimulants for the sexual passion,”80 and warns women against sneezing after coitus, lest they abort there and then.81 He recommends coitus for physical weariness, hoarseness, pains in the loins, dim eyesight, melancholy, and “alienation of the mental faculties”;82 here is a panacea rivaling Bishop Berkeley’s tar water. Amid such nonsense occurs much useful information, especially about ancient industry, manners, or drugs; with interesting references to atavism, petroleum, and change of sex after birth. “Mucianus informs us that he once saw at Argos a person whose name was then Arescon, but had formerly been Arescusa; that this person had been married to a man, but that shortly afterward he developed a beard and other male characteristics, upon which he took a wife.”83 Here and there valuable hints occur; e.g., Himly (1800) was led to investigate the action of jusquiamus and belladonna on the pupil by reading in Pliny a passage84 about the use of anagallis juice before operations for cataract.85 There are precious chapters on painting and sculpture, which constitute our oldest and principal account of ancient art.

  Pliny was not content with natural history; he wished also to be a philosopher; and throughout his pages he scatters comments on mankind. The life of animals, he thinks, is preferable to man’s, for “they never think about glory, money, ambition, or death”;86 they can learn without being taught and never have to dress; and they do not make war upon their own species. The invention of money was fatal to human happiness; it made interest possible, by which some could live in idleness while others worked”;87 hence the rise of great estates owned by absentee landlords, and the ruinous replacement of tillage with pasturage. Life, in Pliny’s estimate, gives us much more grief and pain than happiness, and death is our supreme boon.88 After death there is nothing.89

  The Natural History is a lasting monument to Roman ignorance. Pliny gathers superstitions, portents, love charms, and magic cures as assiduously as anything else, and apparently believes in most of them. He thinks that a man, especially if fasting, can kill a snake by spitting into its mouth.90 “It is well known that in Lusitania the mares become impregnated by the west wind”91—a point missed in Shelley’s ode. Pliny condemns magic; but “on the approach of a menstruating woman,” he informs us, “must will sour and seeds touched by her will become sterile; and fruit will fall from the tree under which she sits. Her look will blunt the edge of steel and take the polish from ivory; if it falls upon a swarm of bees they will die at once.”92 Pliny rejects astrology and then fills pages with “prognostics” derived from the behavior of the sun and the moon.93 “In the consulship of M. Acilius, and frequently at other times, it rained milk and blood.”94 When we reflect that this book, and Seneca’s Quaestiones, were the chief legacy of Roman natural science to the Middle Ages, and compare them with the corresponding works and temper of Aristotle and Theophrastus four hundred years earlier, we begin to feel the slow tragedy of a dying culture. The Romans had conquered the Greek world, but they had already lost the most precious part of its heritage.

  VI. ROMAN MEDICINE

  They did better in medicine. Medical science too they borrowed from the Greeks, but they formulated it well, and applied it ably to personal and public hygiene. Rome, almost surrounded by marshes, and subject to mephitic floods, had particular need of public sanitation. About the second century B.C. we hear of malaria in Rome; the anopheles mosquito had settled down in the Pontine swamps.95 Gout spread as luxury increased; the younger Pliny tells how his friend Corellius Rufus suffered its pains from his thirty-third to his sixty-seventh year before committing suicide, just to have the pleasure of outliving by one day “that brigand Domitian.”96 Some passages in the Roman satirists suggest the appearance of syphilis in the first century A.D.97 Great epidemics swept central Italy in 23 B.C., A.D. 65, 79, and 166.

  The people had of old tried to meet disease and plague with magic and prayer; even
now they begged the skeptical but complaisant Vespasian to heal their blindness with his spittle and their lameness with the touch of his foot.98 They brought their illnesses and votive offerings to the temples of Aesculapius and Minerva and many left gifts in gratitude for cures. But in the first century B.C. they turned more and more to secular medicine. There was as yet no state regulation of medical practice; shoemakers, barbers, carpenters, added it to their operations as they pleased, called in magic to their aid, and compounded, touted, and sold their own drugs.99 There were the usual satires and complaints. Pliny repeated old Cato’s imprecations upon Greek physicians who “seduce our wives, grow rich by feeding us poisons, learn by our suffering, and experiment by putting us to death.”100 Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal joined in the assault; and a century later Lucian would score incompetent practitioners who hide their incapacity under the elegance of their apparatus.101

  Nevertheless, medicine, as we shall see, had made great progress in Alexandria, Cos, Tralles, Miletus, Ephesus, and Pergamum; and from these centers came Greek physicians who so raised the level of Roman practice that Caesar enfranchised the profession in Rome, and Augustus exempted it from taxation. Asclepiades of Prusa won the friendship of Caesar, Crassus, and Antony. He declared that the heart pumps blood and air through the body; rarely prescribed drugs or drastic purges; and accomplished impressive cures by hydrotherapy (baths, fomentations, enemas), massage, sunshine, exercise (walking, horseback riding), diet, fasting, and abstinence from meat. He was distinguished for his treatment of malaria, his operations on the throat, and his humane handling of the insane.102 He gathered pupils about him and took some of them with him on his rounds. After his death they and similar students formed themselves into collegia and built for themselves a meeting place, on the Esquiline, called Schola Medicorum.

  Under Vespasian auditoria were opened for the teaching of medicine, and recognized professors were paid by the state. Greek was the language of instruction, as Latin is now the language of prescription, and for a like reason-its intelligibility to persons of diverse tongues. Graduates of these state schools received the title of medicus a republica, and after Vespasian they alone could legally practice medicine in Rome.103 The lex Aquilia provided for state supervision of physicians, and held them responsible for negligence; and the lex Cornelia severely punished practitioners whose carelessness or culpable ignorance caused the death of a patient.104 Quacks continued, but sound practice increased. Midwives saw most Romans into the world, but many of these women were well trained.105 About A.D. 100 military medicine reached its ancient zenith: every legion had twenty-four surgeons, first-aid and field-ambulance service were well organized, and hospitals were maintained near every important encampment.106 Private hospitals (valetudinaria) were opened by physicians; from these evolved the public hospitals of the Middle Ages. Doctors were appointed and paid by the state to give free treatment to the poor.107 Rich men kept their own physicians, and well-paid archiatri (“chief healers”) took care of the emperor, his family, his servants, and his aides. Sometimes families would contract with a doctor to attend to their health and illnesses for a period of time; in this way Quintus Stertinius made 600,000 sesterces a year.108 The surgeon Alcon, fined 10,000,000 sesterces by Claudius, paid it with a few years’ fees.109

  The profession now reached a high degree of specialization. There were urologists, gynecologists, obstetricians, ophthalmologists, eye and ear specialists, veterinarians, dentists. Romans could have gold teeth, wired teeth, false teeth, bridgework, and plates.110 There were many women physicians; some of them wrote manuals of abortion, which were popular among great ladies and prostitutes. Surgeons were divided into further specialities and seldom engaged in general practice. Mandragora juice or atropin was used as an anesthetic.111 Over 200 different surgical instruments have been found in the ruins of Pompeii. Dissection was illegal, but the examination of wounded or dying gladiators offered a frequent substitute. Hydrotherapy was popular; in a measure the great thermae were hydrotherapeutic institutes. Charmis of Marseilles made a fortune by administering cold baths. Consumptives were sent to Egypt or north Africa. Sulphur was used as a skin specific and to fumigate rooms after an infectious disease.112 Drugs were a final but frequent resort. Physicians made then by processes kept secret from the public and charged for them all that patients could be persuaded to pay.113 Repulsive drugs were held in high honor: the offal of lizards was used as a purgative, human entrails were sometimes prescribed, Antonius Musa recommended the excreta of dogs for angina, Galen applied a boy’s dung to swellings of the throat.114 In compensation for all this a cheerful quack offered to cure almost any ailment with wine.115

  Of the known medical writers in this age only one was a Roman, and he was not a physician. Aurelius Cornelius Celsus was an aristocrat who about A.D. 30 gathered into an encyclopedia De Artibus his studies in agriculture, war, oratory, law, philosophy, and medicine; only the section De Medicina survives. It is the greatest work on medicine that has come down to us from the six centuries between Hippocrates and Galen; it has also the distinction of being written in such pure and classical Latin that Celsus was dubbed Cicero medicorum. The Latin terms into which he translated the nomenclature of Greek medicine have ruled the science ever since. The sixth book shows considerable knowledge, in antiquity, of venereal disease. The seventh is an illuminating description of surgical methods; it contains the earliest known account of ligature, and describes tonsillectomy, lateral lithotomy, plastic surgery, and operations for cataract. Altogether this is the soundest achievement in Roman scientific literature, and suggests that we might have a better opinion of Roman science if Pliny had not been preserved. It is a pity that scholarship has concluded that Celsus’ treatise is largely a compilation or paraphrase of Greek texts.116 Lost in the Middle Ages, it was rediscovered in the fifteenth century, was printed before Hippocrates or Galen, and took a leading part in stimulating the reconstruction of medicine in modern times.

  VII. QUINTILIAN

  When Vespasian established a state professorship of rhetoric in Rome he appointed to it a man who, like so many authors of this Silver Age, was of Spanish birth. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was born at Calagurris (A.D. 35?), went to Rome to study oratory, and opened a school of rhetoric there which numbered Tacitus and the younger Pliny among its pupils. Juvenal describes him in his prime as handsome, noble, wise, well bred, with a fine voice and delivery, and a senatorial dignity. In old age he retired to write for the guidance of his son the classic treatment of his subject, the Institutio Oratoria (96).

  I thought that this work would be the most precious part of the inheritance of my son, whose ability was so remarkable that it called for the most anxious cultivation on the part of his father. . . . Night and day I pursued this design, and hastened its completion in the fear that death might cut me off with my task unfinished. Then misfortune overwhelmed me with such suddenness that the success of my labors now interests no one less than myself. ... I have lost him of whom I had formed the highest expectations, and in whom I reposed all the hopes that should solace my old age.117

  His wife had died at nineteen, leaving him two sons; one of these had died at the age of five, “robbing me, as it were, of one of my two eyes”; now the other went, leaving the old teacher “to outlive all my nearest and dearest.”

  He defines rhetoric as the science of speaking well. The training of the orator should begin before birth: it is desirable that he should come of educated parents, so that he may receive correct speech and good manners from the very air he breathes; it is impossible to become both educated and a gentleman in one generation. The future orator should study music, to give him an ear for harmony;, the dance, to give him grace and rhythm; drama, to animate his eloquence with gesture and action; gymnastics, to keep him in health and strength; literature, to form his style, train his memory, and arm him with a treasury of great thoughts; science, to acquaint him with some understanding of nature; and philosophy, to mold his character
on the dictates of reason and the precepts of wise men. For all preparations will be of no avail unless integrity of conduct and nobility of spirit are present to generate an irresistible sincerity of speech. Then the student must write as much as possible and with the utmost care. It is a hard training, and “I trust,” says Quintilian, “that no one among my readers would think of calculating its monetary value.”118

  The oration itself has five phases: conception, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Having chosen his subject and clearly conceived his purpose, let the orator gather his material, from observation, inquiry, and books, and arrange it both logically and psychologically—so that each part will be in its proper place and lead as naturally to the next as in geometry.119 A well-organized address will consist of introduction (exordium), proposition, proof, refutation, and peroration. The speech should be written out only if it is to be fully memorized; otherwise fragmentary memories of the written form will obstruct and confuse an extempore style. If it is written it must be with care. “Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly”; shun the lazy “luxury of dictation now so fashionable among writers.”120 “Clearness is the first essential,” then brevity, beauty, and vigor. Correct repeatedly and stoically: