The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  No other nation has tales of heroism and patriotic devotion and disinterested virtue to compare with the Roman: Horatius at the bridge, Curtius leaping into the gulf, the boy threatened with torture to make him reveal the Roman plans, who thrusts his hand into the fire and holds it there—numbers of them have come down, splendid stories, unsurpassed by those of any other people and very rarely equalled. Even if not one of them ever happened they are true, exactly as the accounts of the games are true. They were Roman conceptions and they embodied what Romans believed human beings should and could achieve. The national ideal is an important factor in understanding a nation. High honor and love of country that made nothing of torture and death was what the Romans set first as the greatest thing of all.

  As regards Roman literature and art, in the one as in the other all the Romans did for a long time was to try to follow the Greek way, in spite of the fact that it pointed in a direction where their own genius would not naturally have led them. Greek art and Greek letters have little in common with the Roman, although Cicero would have disputed the assertion, and with reason. He had been carefully trained and cultivated in the Greek tradition. Greek art was the whole of art to him; he was not aware of any other. No doubt that lovely ivy-embowered villa of his was done in strict conformity with Greek canons of taste and transplanted to Athens would have seemed perfectly in keeping there. All Roman culture came from Greece, and respectful copies and adaptations of Greek statues and temples and houses were all that Rome wanted. Horace, too, might have disputed the assertion. A Greek could hardly have been more aware than he was of the loveliness of his bit of land, his elms and poplars and smooth lawn sloping to the river. But he, like Cicero, was the foster-child of Greece. The Greek lyric poets were his models and his eye had been trained by them. He saw beauty where they pointed to it, in the ordinary surroundings of life.

  That was the peculiar gift of the Greeks, to perceive the beauty of familiar, every-day things, and their art and literature which was concerned to reveal this beauty, is the great example of classic art and literature as distinguished from romantic. The Greeks were the classicists of antiquity and they are still today the pre-eminent classicists. What marked all they did, the classic stamp, is a direct simplicity in expressing the significance of actual life. It was there the Greek artists and poets found what they wanted. The unfamiliar and the extraordinary were on the whole repellent to them and they detested every form of exaggeration. Their desire was to express truthfully what lay at hand, which they saw as beautiful and full of meaning.

  But that was not the Roman way. When not directly under Greek guidance the Roman did not perceive beauty in every-day matters, or indeed care to do so. Beauty was unimportant to him. Life in his eyes was a very serious and a very arduous business, and he had no time for what he would have thought of as a mere decoration of it. Before money and leisure had corrupted the nation, as all Romans thought they had, the natural Roman attitude toward art, even the attitude of the best and greatest spirits, was very like what that of the commander of a beleaguered fort would be if he saw one of his men busily carving into a pleasing shape the handle of his weapon. There were imperative tasks to summon men for all that was in them. Painting, sculpture, such-like trifles, were to be left to what a Roman writer called “the hungry Greekling.”

  Still, as Rome grew rich and strong and proud, she felt, of course, the need to display her power by a visible magnificence, and she built splendid temples and palaces and triumphal arches, but they were all Greekish—Greek seen through Roman eyes, bigger and better Greek. To the Roman the big was in itself admirable. The biggest temple in the world was as such better than the rest. If a Corinthian capital was lovely, two, one on top of the other, would be twice as lovely. But at bottom none of all that decorative splendor was Roman, the stately temples that housed Grecian gods, the processions of white-clad priests and vestals winding up the Capitoline with youths and maidens singing a hymn to deities whose home was a Greek island in the Ægean. Such things were all very right and proper to mark the correct grandeur of official Rome, but they had nothing to do with the real religion of a Roman. The worship dear to his heart was given to the little household gods, tiny, rude figures, to which were offered no frankincense, no choice yearling from the flock, nothing rare or precious, but only a bit of the every-day food. We do not hear of any beauty or dignity connected with their worship. That would have estranged the Roman and put him off. Beauty and dignity were appropriate in the imposing temple of Jupiter, Greatest and Best, but for daily use give him comfortable homeliness. The Greeks would have found rude homeliness uncomfortable. They had to have their very pots and pans agreeable to look at.

  But when the Romans stopped thinking about culture and the Greeks and devoted themselves to the things they really wanted to do, then they showed that they, too, could create beauty, beauty on a great scale, but always as a by-product, not deliberately sought. “In Rome the true artist is the engineer.” Roman genius was called into action by the enormous practical needs of a world empire. Rome met them magnificently. Buildings tremendous, indomitable, amphitheatres where eighty thousand could watch a spectacle, baths where three thousand could bathe at the same time, which nearly two thousand years have left practically intact. Bridges and aqueducts that spanned wide rivers and traversed great spaces with a beautiful, sure precision of soaring arches and massive piers. And always along with them the mighty Roman road, a monument of dogged, unconquerable human effort, huge stone joined to huge stone, marching on and on irresistibly, through unknown hostile forests, over ramparts of mountains, across sunbaked deserts, to the very edges of the habitable world.

  That is the true art of Rome, the spontaneous expression of the Roman spirit, its keen realization of the adaptation of practical means to practical ends, its will-power and enduring effort, its tremendous energy and audacity and pride. Beauty was a purely incidental result, not consciously brought about by any thought of it in engineers and builders faced with problems of terrific difficulty, but only by the curious agreement there exists in the nature of things between an admirably utilitarian creation and non-utilitarian beauty.

  The conscious art of such a people would be, so any one would reason, sternly realistic, revealing life as pitiless fact, with no desire to express anything except implacable truth. And such is the case with the peculiarly Roman achievement in sculpture, the portrait-bust. These heads are all implacably true with the external truth of accuracy. An exact likeness was all the sculptor sought. He reproduced in his marble every detail of the heads of the hard-faced, tired old men who were to be immortalized, not one unhappy line spared us in the deeply corrugated brow or one fold in the heavy hanging flesh beneath the chin, no least softening of the stupid brutality or the peevish ill-humor which so often dominates the whole. A Roman did not ask to be flattered. He was content with what he was. The more faithful the portrait, the greater the artist’s success in the eyes of his patron. This is as true of the women as of the men. An empress did not want her hard mouth softened or the long lobes of her big ears curtailed. A great courtesan complacently allowed the ugly lines of her head and brow to be set down without extenuation. It is impossible to avoid the conviction that they either did not see ugliness, or were indifferent to it. How far removed this photography in marble is from the realism of the Greeks becomes instantly clear if one calls to mind the statue of the Greek girl bending over the basin to wash her hands. Classic art is embodied in her; a commonplace act is invested with perfect beauty.

  Now and again among the Roman statues there is one like that of the Chief Vestal, which rises above the exact reproduction of an individual face into a kind of grandeur through the very faithfulness of the transcriber who put with precision into marble the virile force, the profound gravity, the strength without a shadow of human weakness, which made that face a type of what Rome believed herself to be. But these are the rare exceptions.

  For the rest, when the Roman sculptors were
not copying Greece—and making the copies heavy and ill-proportioned—they took with enthusiasm to allegorical bas-reliefs, the counterpart of Horace’s sermons, where the artist sermonized and admiring Rome was edified, l’art pour la moralité never more consciously pursued and the art completely over-weighted by the morality. Only in one small department Rome achieved a rich beauty of her own, in those familiar, often-copied panels of the teeming gifts of earth—fruits and flowers and chubby boys gathering great bunches of grapes from weighted vines, shocks of full-eared grain, and cows and sheep, one crowding upon the other almost without design, all the luxuriant abundance poured forth by the copious fertility of the south. They are truly Roman; they have nothing in common with the sparing use in Greek decoration of the flower-pattern. The Greek soil did not lavish her gifts from a never-emptied horn of plenty. Fruits, flowers, like everything else in Greece, were to be used by the artist “with economy.”

  One of the great Victorians has said that if classicism is the love of the usual in beauty, romanticism is the love of the strange in beauty, and the statement gives to admiration the essence of the difference between the two. The very words romance, romantic, call up a vision, vague yet bright, that banishes the drabness and monotony of every-day life with a sense of possible excitements and adventures. Of course, if every-day life did not look drab and monotonous there would be no reason to turn to romance. That is primarily why the Greeks were not romantic. Facts were full of interest to them. They found enough beauty and delight in them to have no desire to go beyond.

  But to the Romans facts were not beautiful nor, in themselves, interesting. The eagerness for inquiry into everything in the universe which had stamped Greece never reached Rome. Cicero’s remark that the investigation of nature seeks to find out either things which nobody can know or things which nobody needs to know, expresses perfectly the Roman attitude. They were not an intellectual people. Their place was the world of practical affairs, not of thought. Science ended as Greece went down and Rome came up. Romans travelled all over the earth, but they did not become geographers; they solved the problems of the arch as it had never been done before, but they were not physicists. They were persistently indifferent to theory. It was enough for them to know that such a thing could be accomplished in such a way; the reason was unimportant. They were not interested in why, only in how.

  Beauty was still less interesting. It was never quite real to them. Reality, facts, they saw as we do, chiefly as ugly and unpleasant. “Face the facts,” “Come down to reality”—the phrases would have had the same meaning to the Romans that they have to us. How hideous and grim reality can be was forced upon their attention as it is not upon ours. We have learned to protect ourselves by shutting away within stone walls shocking sights, but in Rome after the great slave insurrection the main road to the city was lined for more than a mile with the crosses of crucified slaves. Even the horrors of war we disguise in part, but when a friend of Plutarch’s visited a battlefield which had established an emperor on the throne, he found bodies piled up sometimes as high as the eaves of a little temple there. In plain, cold fact, reality, as they saw it was more often hateful than not. Their very amusements were perpetually showing them the horrible forms human agony and death can take.

  When a people see chiefly ugliness in the world, they will find a refuge from it. Roman literature took the turn which literature has again and again taken when reality is perceived as nothing from which men can get spiritual delight. The writers of Rome’s golden age of letters turned to romance.

  What we today call realism, the view that life is devoid of beauty and meaning, always has romance for a companion. They do not go hand in hand, but one follows close behind the other, to catch up ever and again and outstrip it for a while and then fall back. The human spirit will not live long at a time in the prison of senseless ugliness. Invariably a romantic reaction comes. The Greeks, who would have nothing to do with extremes, knew neither the one nor the other. They were realists to whom the real was beautiful and the direct expression of that spirit is classic art.

  But the Romans, to whom the real was the reverse of beautiful, ended inevitably by turning away from it to romance. Catullus is one of the rare examples of both points of view in one man. He is himself representative of the Roman spirit complete. He sighs to Lesbia from the very height of romantic love; he writes enchanting fairy tales of strange mythological creatures and soars away from everything on earth; then he comes down, to find only filthy mire and to write verses about his factual surroundings which are uglier by far even than the portrait-busts. Reality was in general hideous to him. He had perpetually to escape from it, only to return and then again reject it.

  In the Augustan age, the result of a cruel and bitter war which had not brought even to the victors the high exultation of a great enterprise achieved, Roman literature came to its full stature of growth, and the greatest writers of the period turned away from reality and their own world where peace had been bought at the price of republican liberty, to the world of romance and the wonderful regions open to the imagination. The golden age of Roman literature is not classic, but romantic.

  XI

  Enter the Romantic Roman

  Virgil, Livy, Seneca

  A great literary gossip of the second century A.D. whose work has come down to us in many volumes and whose name was Aulus Gellius has recorded a comparison he once heard a literary friend of his make between Pindar’s and Virgil’s description of Ætna in eruption. The Greek poet writes: “In the darkness of the night the red flame whirls rocks with a roar far down to the sea. And high aloft are sent fearful fountains of fire.” Virgil says: “Skyward are sent balls of flame that lick the stars and ever and again rocks are spewed forth, the torn entrails of the mountains, and molten crags are hurled groaning to heaven.” “Pindar,” the critic pointed out to his friend, “describes what actually happened and what he saw with his own eyes, but Virgil’s ‘balls of flame that lick the stars’ is a useless and foolish elaboration, and when he says crags are molten and groan and are hurled to heaven, this is such an account as Pindar never wrote and is monstrous.” That is a comparison between a classic and a romantic description. Pindar was using his eyes, Virgil his imagination. The man who compared them was a classicist who, of course, detested romantic exaggeration, and could not see the grandeur that we see in Virgil’s “flame that licks the stars.”

  The romantic artist must not be judged by the canon of strict accuracy. He will not be bound by fact, “the world being inferior to the soul,” as Bacon says, “by reason whereof there is a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things.” To the classicist the nature of things is the truth and he desires only to see clearly what it is. The romanticist is the adventurer drawn on by the new and the strange where to him truth is to be found. The classic writer depends upon reason no less than upon imagination. To the romantic writer imagination can transcend the narrow limits of experience and move on unhampered by it to what eye hath not seen nor ear heard.

  The Æneid from first to last is pure romance and Virgil, Rome’s greatest poet, is one of the world’s greatest romanticists.

  He was a few years older than Horace who loved him and wrote of him with tender admiration. Everyone seems to have felt like that about him. The allusions to him in Latin literature show a feeling far beyond that for any other man of letters, and in later days it is safe to say that of all poets, of all writers, indeed, he has been the most loved and praised. He was the only ancient author, either Greek or Roman, to make his way into the Christian church. There was a legend, often repeated and embodied in a hymn, that St. Paul had visited his grave and dropped a tear upon it. Again and again his name was introduced into a ritual of the church as one of the prophets, because in an early poem he wrote of a child about to be born who would bring back the golden age and the reign of peace, interpreted by the Christians as meaning the birth of Christ. S
o all his poems became in some sort sanctified. The monasteries most hostile to pagan learning could allow copies of them, and pious Christians felt it no sin to use him for looking into the future by opening the Æneid and reading the first line their eyes happened to light upon. His transformation into a magician was the next step, and as such the polished, suave man of letters figured strangely during the Middle Ages. To Dante he was “the poet,” the one to conduct him through Hell and Purgatory, and “my master and my author, he who taught me the good style that did me honor.” And from his death on to the present, from Juvenal who—early in the second century—deplored the schoolmaster’s hardships in having to listen to “the same daily fare always repeated from the soot-blackened Virgil,” up to the last June before the College Board examinations, the generations of school children have owed part of their training to him. In our western world the Bible alone has had a wider influence. From this point of view he is more important than the poets of Greece. For seventeen or eighteen hundred years, he was the master of literature to all the western nations.

  The romantic spirit took root and spread through Europe; the classic spirit departed. So much is fact. How far the great Latin romantics were responsible for the change is one of the matters not susceptible of proof. It is impossible to say what would have happened if Virgil and Livy and their greatly inferior, but very influential follower, Seneca, had not lived. In the immense German forests, in the soft sea-airs of Ireland, there were no sharp, clear outlines as in Greece. Luminous mists made dim distances where the imagination was free to see what it chose. Also as the church grew in power, side by side with the intellectualizing effort of dogmatic theology, eastern mysticism worked, with its absolute conviction of “a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness than can be found in the nature of things.” There was much apart from Roman literature that pointed to romanticism. But, at the least, it may be said with certainty that Virgil and Livy inaugurated the new movement of the spirit the world was ready for. Classicism had grown thinner and dryer from the beginning of the fourth century B.C. on. It became precious, pedantic, all polished surface. Learning and style were the combination out of which to make poetry. This tendency is the evil genius of the classic spirit and has killed it many a time since the polite and erudite and cultivated society of Alexandria dealt it the blow which by the time Virgil appeared had been fatal to it.