The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  It goes without saying that he never took note of slaves, but it is worthy of remark that a man sensitive and quick of feeling as he was should write of their terrible punishments with complete unconcern. He does say mildly that a man who has a slave crucified because he stole a bit of food must be out of his mind, but he speaks of slaves being beaten as a matter of course, of “the horrible scourge,” with pieces of metal attached to the lashes, and of others of the methods of torture devised to keep in order a class grown dangerous because of its enormous size. A man of position, says Horace, is mean if he walks out with only five slaves attending him; on the other hand, one who can be seen with two hundred has passed the limit of good sense. And yet in spite of their great numbers they were so completely without any human significance, so casually mistreated and murdered in that city accustomed by all the favorite forms of amusement to mortal agony and violent death, that their condition never drew a passing thought from even the very best, a man like Horace, a thinker, gentle, kindly, dutiful. His bewilderment, if he could be recalled to life and confronted with our point of view, would be pitiful. He was wise and good, yet he lived with a monstrous evil and never caught a glimpse of it. So does custom keep men blinded.

  In certain other respects, however, important too, our way would seem quite familiar to the Romans, more by far than the Greek way. Socrates in the Symposium, when Alcibiades challenged him to drink two quarts of wine, could have done so or not as he chose, but the diners-out of Horace’s day had no such freedom. He speaks often of the master of the drinking, who was always appointed to dictate how much each man was to drink. Very many unseemly dinner parties must have paved the way for that regulation. A Roman in his cups would have been hard to handle, surly, quarrelsome, dangerous. No doubt there had been banquets without number which had ended in fights, broken furniture, injuries, deaths. Pass a law then, the invariable Roman remedy, to keep drunkenness within bounds. Of course it worked both ways: everybody was obliged to empty the same number of glasses and the temperate man had to drink a great deal more than he wanted, but whenever laws are brought in to regulate the majority who have not abused their liberty for the sake of the minority who have, just such unexpected results come to pass. Indeed, any attempt to establish a uniform average in that stubbornly individual phenomenon, human nature, will have only one result that can be foretold with certainty: it will press hardest upon the best, as everyone knows who is driven by large numbers to use mass methods.

  The Athenian idea was that a gentleman could be left free and trusted not to get obnoxious to others over his wine. The Roman idea was that he assuredly could not be, but that he could and should be kept in order. Harmony, said the Athenian. Freedom, because the good life was in conformity with a man’s innermost desires. Discipline, said the Roman. Careful regulation, because the good life must be imposed upon human nature that desired evil.

  Horace deplored the drinking laws: “O country, when shall I see you. O nights and feasts of the gods where each, free from absurd rules, may drink as he pleases.” And it did not escape his keen vision that all law was an empty form unless the moral feeling of the people was back of it. Nevertheless through his poems as through Roman literature there is discernible always, expressed or implicit, the sense of life controlled and ordered by stern outside forces, along with the law “the adamantine nails of dire Necessity,” the inexorable decrees of Jove, Fate that spins and cuts the thread at will. “Must” is constantly on Horace’s lips. “This you must do—must submit to—must face—must endure.” So Romans saw life, and with all Horace’s search for freedom within, he was not able ever to feel that he was free.

  Catullus is the notable exception. “The dread goddess, Necessity” had no place among his deities. He saw his life in his own hands—and Lesbia’s, but then high passion is never aware of any necessity other than its own, and except for Catullus, high passion is the rarest of visitants in Roman literature.

  Such are the outstanding features in Horace’s miniature of Rome, but what he leaves out of it has significance too. The political game which took up all the foreground for Cicero is not there at all. The result foreshadowed by the condition in Cicero’s day came to pass: the citizen body could not cope with its own corruption; the frightful evils that followed had to be terminated; hence a dictator, with all the responsibility and all power to regulate everything in the state. And the many brilliant and able men of the great Augustan age drew deep breaths of relief at seeing themselves freed from trouble and concern about public matters to devote themselves to their own business. They had been angrily impatient of the dishonesty and stupidity and inefficiency of the Republic’s officials. They were sick to death of the wars and the mismanagement of home affairs, foreign affairs, and miscarriages of justice. That was ended now. A strong and sagacious man was emperor, whose will was the only law that counted, and Romans rejoiced. What lay before their country in the future, the most irresponsible despotism the western world has ever seen, they could not know; nor were they interested to build for the future. That kind of disinterested patriotism was dead in Rome and would not rise again except here and there in a few men, so few they never mattered at all.

  In one of Horace’s Epistles there is a little description of the theatre as he knew it, which seems to stand in brief, not indeed for him or his group, but for the general spirit of the day, as the popular theatre does stand always and everywhere: “The people, even while the actors are speaking the verses, call for a bear show or a wrestling match. Pleasure has moved away from the ear to the restless eye and entertainment with no meaning. For four hours or more the curtain is up, while troops of horsemen fly past and hordes of footmen. Kings of fallen fortune are dragged in with hands bound behind the back. War chariots hasten by, carts, carriages, ships, ivory is borne along and all the spoils of Corinth. That hybrid creature, the giraffe, then catches the crowd’s attention or, it may be, a white elephant. And what actors’ voices are strong enough to rise above the din? The spectators ask each other, ‘Has the actor said anything yet?’ ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘What are you so pleased with then?’ ‘Oh, that beautiful purple dress of his.’”

  The spectacle, ever growing more and more varied and more and more gorgeous, was what Rome by now wanted. Not what satisfied the mind nor yet the spirit, but what satisfied the restless eye. Rome’s importance was her size and her wealth and her power. Roman citizens’ lives consisted in the abundance of the things that they possessed. To Pericles, Athens’ glory was not the Parthenon, not the Acropolis, but that Athens had become the school of Greece in all ways of wisdom. Augustus’ title to glory, repeated over and over again, was that he had found Rome a city of brick and left her a city of marble.

  X

  The Roman Way

  “To the people of Romulus I set no fixed goal to achievement,” Virgil makes Jupiter in the Æneid say of Rome’s future glory, “no end to empire. I have given them authority without limit.” Unlimited is what the Romans were, in desires, in ambitions, in appetites, as well as in power and extent of empire. There is a note of exaggeration in Rome, contradicting on first sight the outstanding national quality of practical sagacity which made them great empire builders. But upon closer view it ceases to be a contradiction. The Romans were pre-eminently men of war. The only choice they had for centuries was to conquer or be conquered. Possibly war was their most natural expression; certainly it was the price they must pay for being a nation. Under the spur of its desperate necessities in eight hundred years of fighting, as Livy reckons them, from the founding of the city to his own day, they developed extraordinarily one side of their genius, a sure, keen-sighted, steady common sense, but war, with its alternations of stern repression and orgies of rapine and plunder, was not a training to modify violent desires. Always rude, primitive, physical appetites were well to the fore.

  What constitutes Rome’s greatness, in the last analysis, is that powerful as these were in her people there was something still more pow
erful; ingrained in them was the idea of discipline, the soldier’s fundamental idea. However fierce the urge of their nature was, the feeling for law and order was deeper, the deepest thing in them. Their outbreaks were terrible; civil wars such as our world has not seen again; dealings with conquered enemies which are a fearful page in history. Nevertheless, the outstanding fact about Rome is her unwavering adherence to the idea of a controlled life, subject not to this or that individual, but to a system embodying the principles of justice and fair dealing.

  How savage the Roman nature was which the Roman law controlled is seen written large in Rome’s favorite amusements, too familiar to need more than a cursory mention: wild beast hunts—so-called, the hunting place was the arena; naval battles for which the circus was flooded by means of hidden canals; and, most usual and best loved by the people, the gladiators, when the great amphitheatre was packed close tier upon tier, all Rome there to see human beings by the tens and hundreds killing each other, to give the victor in a contest the signal for death and eagerly watch the upraised dagger plunge into the helpless body and the blood spurt forth.

  That was Rome’s dearest delight and her unique contribution to the sport of the world. None of these spectacles were Greek. They entered Greece only under Roman leadership and Athens, it is claimed, never allowed gladiators. Twice, we are told, the citizens stopped a fight as it was about to begin, both times aroused by the protest of a great man. “Athenians,” cried one of them, “before you admit the gladiators, come with me and destroy the altar to Pity,” and the people with one voice declared that their theatre should never be so defiled. The second time, a revered and beloved philosopher denounced the brutality they were about to witness, and the result was the same. But everywhere else Rome went the bloody games followed, and all the time they grew more bloody and more extravagant. On one occasion we read of a hundred lions perishing and as many lionesses. On another, five thousand animals were killed, bulls, tigers, panthers, elephants. The poet Martial, who wrote endless epigrams to flatter the great Vespasian’s son, the Emperor Domitian, some seventy-five years after Augustus, says: “The hunter by the Ganges has not to fear in the countries of the Orient as many tigers as Rome has seen. This city can no longer count her joys. Caesar, your arena surpasses the triumph and splendor of Bacchus whose car only two tigers draw.”

  Of how many human beings met their death in these ways no estimate at all can be made. The supply of prisoners of war could not begin to meet the demand and men condemned to die were sent to help fill the gladiatorial schools, as they were called; masters, too, often sold their slaves to them; there were even volunteers. Cicero speaks of these more than once. As the games went on, the exaggeration in every direction resulted in what seems to the modern reader incredible, the creations of a monstrous fantasy. We hear of the arena being sprinkled with gold dust; of dwarfs matched against each other and against wild beasts; women, too. Martial tells of having seen a woman kill a lion. Emperors fought, in carefully arranged contests, of course. The son of Rome’s best ruler, Marcus Aurelius, boasted that he had killed or conquered two thousand gladiators, using his left hand only. The account ends by growing monotonous. Human ingenuity in devising new and more diverting ways of slaughter was finally exhausted and all that could be done to satisfy the impatient spectators was to increase the number engaged. In one naval battle when the arena was flooded, it is recorded that twenty-four ships took part, large enough to hold in all nineteen thousand men.

  It is impossible to escape the suspicion, as one reads description after description, that journalese was not unknown in Rome. Surely, the reader is driven to reason, a people with a tendency to exaggeration would not always successfully repress it on a subject that almost irresistibly invited it, even though they claimed to be writing accurate historical records. When finally one is told of an emperor in the later days of the empire who “would never dine without human blood,” without, that is, watching men kill each other, suspicion becomes a certainty. It is too perfectly the tabloid newspaper headline. How could such a fact be known? The gossip of palace slaves? Or even the assertion of the imperial brute himself, wanting, as a Roman would, to appear to out-Nero Nero? Especially monstrous events in the games and especially enormous numbers of those killed in them are hardly to be accepted as plain history, but they do show what Aristotle called the truth which is truer than history. Romans wrote them for Romans, and Romans enjoyed reading and believing them.

  To pass from this contemplation, from the way Rome was pleased to amuse herself, to the consideration of what she really did in the world, is to make a startling transition. The Romans did not trample all nations down before them in ruthless brutality and kill and kill in a savage lust for blood. They created a great civilization. Rome’s monumental achievement, never effaced from the world, was law. A people violent by nature, of enormous appetites and brutal force, produced the great Law of Nations which sustained with equal justice the rights of free-born men everywhere. The fact with all its familiarity has the power to astonish whenever it comes to mind, but the reasons are easily to be seen. The little town on the seven hills conquered the other little towns around her, because her citizens could obey orders. No one who knows Rome at all will feel this a mere conjecture. The father who condemned his son to death for winning a victory against orders is a legendary figure of deep significance. The orgy of the arena was a relaxation, in the same way as destroying a captured city was or a murderous civil outbreak. They were incidental merely. The conception of a power outside themselves to which they must and would submit was enduring. Over the lawless earth where petty tribes were forever fighting other petty tribes for the right to live, where there was nothing more enlightened than tribal customs untold ages old, marched the Roman, bringing with him as certainly as his sword and his lance his idea of an ordered life in which no man and no tribe was free, but all bound to obey an impersonal, absolute authority which imposed the necessity of self-controlled action. Along with the tremendous Roman roads and aqueducts went the ideal of which they were the symbol, civilization, founded and upheld by law.

  The conception was magnificent, grandiose. It was Rome who spread wherever she went the great idea that a man must be assumed to be innocent until he was proved to be guilty; who pronounced it the height of injustice to carry any law out logically without regard to the practical good or ill which resulted; who never in her law-making quite lost sight of the conception that all, men or women, free or slaves, were “by nature” equal.

  The civilization that resulted showed again and again the strength which no mere external force, however powerful, ever possesses. The Gauls were fierce fighters, people of high spirit, undisciplined too, but when once they had experienced what Roman civilization meant, its superiority was so evident, they never after Caesar’s conquest had any general uprising against the Roman rule. The Acts of the Apostles gives a wonderful picture of what it meant to belong to Rome. St. Paul, though a Jew of Tarsus, was yet a Roman, so the record states, the little Asia Minor city having been admitted to the Roman federation. In a town where he was preaching, the magistrates, induced by the Jews, seized him and ordered him to be scourged, but just before they did so Paul cried out that he was a Roman citizen, and they sent word to their officer, “Take heed what thou doest, for he is a Roman.” Then “the chief captain came and asked him, Art thou a Roman? He said, Yea. And the chief captain answered, With a great sum obtained I this freedom. And Paul said, But I was born free.” The proud words received their due: St. Paul under strong escort was sent away from the town where his enemies were determined to kill him, to the Roman governor of the province, and in his presence uttered the words which had the power to remove him from local prejudice and personal spite into an atmosphere of impersonal justice: “I appeal unto Caesar.” The governor gave the required answer, the only one that could be made: “Thou hast appealed unto Caesar, unto Caesar shalt thou go.” And Paul, conducted by Roman soldiers, went to Rome.

/>   When early in the third century all free-born citizens of every city in the empire were given the Roman citizenship, the conception of a universal community, over-riding narrow national bounds, and of a world-peace, the ideal men have always yearned for, seemed on the point of accomplishment.

  Undoubtedly the idea was of Greek not Roman origin. It came to Rome by way of Greek philosophy and Alexander the Great, but the Romans alone brought it down to earth and made it work. Law, which is the practical realization of the ideal of justice, was naturally and inevitably first and foremost a Roman product. The Greeks theorized; the Romans translated their theories into action. And it must always be remembered, too, that they and no other nation were the inheritors of the great Greek thought. The town that fought its way to the position of mistress of the western world and a considerable portion of the eastern and southern, too, did not surpass the other peoples of the earth solely in the power to obey better, to fight more intelligently, and to bear hardship with stiffer-backed endurance. Only the Romans really perceived what Greece had been. They admired her often to their own harm; they copied her instead of developing their own natural bent, but they recognized her greatness and they showed thereby their own.

  Another certain indication of a nobility in the Roman strain and a lofty ideality, too, which seems strangely remote from the Rome of Cicero and Horace, is given by their golden-deed stories. The stories a nation repeats about its great men show, as nothing does more, the national ideal. Did Nelson really say, “England expects every man to do his duty”? Did Francis I exclaim, “Tout est perdu fors l’honneur”? Perhaps they did, but certainly if they had not, some other Englishman, some other Frenchman, would have been found to hang the words upon, so completely do they express the English and the French ideas of the thing to say when a man is up against it. And whether Regulus did in actual truth go back to Carthage to die under torture because he had promised, or not, is unimportant in revealing the Roman character compared with the fact that the story was repeated through the centuries as showing how Romans thought a man should keep his word.