The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  Ye Troyan ashes and dear shades of mine,

  I call you witness, that at your last fall

  I fled no stroke of any Greekish sword,

  And if the fates would I had fallen in fight,

  That by my hand I did deserve it well.

  But Homer’s heroes never want to die. Death is the worst of ills. “Then Hector knew the truth in his heart and he spoke and said, Aye, now verily is evil death come very nigh me nor is there way of escape. He ended and the dark shadow of death came down and his soul flew forth and was gone to the house of Hades, wailing his fate, leaving fair youth and vigor.”

  Nowhere, indeed, is the distinction between the classicist and the romanticist seen more clearly than in the way they regard death. On the whole, in Latin literature death is desirable. Even to Horace, the most classic in spirit of all Roman writers, it is “sweet and seemly to die for one’s country.” English poetry has the same tendency in a notable degree, “Eloquent, just and mighty death,” “Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just”—there are endless examples. It is the romantic view: the lure to the spirit of the mystery life cannot solve, the sense of all that the unknown may hold, the thrill of the final great adventure. But to the classicist death is always evil unalloyed. Homer’s heroes speak in that respect for all Greece. His familiar line that it is better to be a serf on earth than to rule over the dead gives the Greek point of view.

  Quotations to decorate soldiers’ monuments are found by the score in Latin, but not in Greek. Greek heroism wears an air of soberness always. It is never exultant. The epitaphs the Greeks set on their own soldiers’ monuments do not praise heroic death or speak of glory. In all their literature they talk very little of either. They saw too clearly the agony they are rooted in. The Roman boy’s thrusting his hand into the fire was beyond question magnificent, a superb gesture of defiance, but I believe a Greek would have been hard put to it to understand it. The Greeks had no gestures. Æneas, when the great storm comes upon him, lifts his hands to heaven and cries aloud, “Oh, thrice and four times blessed, those who died beneath the walls of Troy.” The words are taken from the Odyssey, but spoken so differently. Odysseus huddled in the bottom of the boat says them wretchedly to himself. It is impossible to imagine the Greek hero declaiming them to the winds and waves, but it is completely in keeping with the Latin. All the talk in the Æneid is grand. To Virgil, the romantic, the ordinary had no place in an epic. But the classic Homer thought otherwise.

  The real subject of the Æneid is not Æneas, as the real subject of the Iliad is the wrath of Achilles; it is Rome and the glories of her empire, seen as the romanticist sees the great past. The first title given it was The Deeds of the Roman People. Æneas is important because he carries Rome’s destiny; he is to be her founder by the high decrees of fate. Repeatedly in the poem the names of the men who made Rome are rehearsed, glowing history in noble poetry: “Love of country shall conquer and the unmeasured thirst for glory. Look—the Decii and the Drusi and Torquatus with his pitiless ax, and Camillus bringing home the standards saved. What tongue would leave you unpraised, great Cato, or you, great Cossus, or pass over in silence the race of the Gracchi or the two Scipios, twin thunderbolts of war, Africa’s ruin, or Fabricius mighty in his poverty, or you, Serranus, sowing your own ploughed field? Others, I doubt not, will mold better the breathing bronze to life-like softness and from marble draw forth living faces. They will plead better at the bar, and mark out the courses of the sky with their rod and tell of the rising stars. Do you, Roman, remember to rule nations with power supreme. Your art shall be this, to impose the custom of peace, to spare the humbled and war down the proud.”

  The words are a poetical condensation of Livy’s history. No connection or acquaintance, even, between the two men is mentioned anywhere, but the connection between their work is close. Livy was considerably the younger, but he had been engaged upon his history for some ten or twelve years before Virgil died. The two must have known each other’s work. Livy’s idea of “the founding of this great city and the establishment of an empire which is now in power next to the immortal gods” is precisely Virgil’s. Both men took the same theme and the prose writer saw it almost as romantically as the poet: Rome was built up by men of grand character, who were the instruments of divine providence and who were governed by a standard of simple goodness unknown to the corruptions of civilization.

  Through Livy’s pages moves a solemn pageant of stately figures, all the heroes, the soldiers, statesmen, patriots, who for Rome’s sake endured to die and are immortal for ever. That classic sense for fact which so drove on Polybius, Terence’s friend, the Greek historian, that he must travel over the Alps, a terrific journey then, to test the accounts of Hannibal’s passage before writing about it, that sent him hurrying here and there to read an old inscription or an ancient book, never troubled Livy at all. He was sure of the only ground he really cared about, that “Romans never were worsted in an open fight or upon equal terms,” that every war Rome fought was “just and pious,” and that all of Rome’s enemies were base and treacherous. His simple course when authorities differed was to choose the account most favorable to Rome. As a historian he must yield to the Greek, but he has been a living influence through the centuries since he wrote, while Polybius, so accurate and so dull, has not lived at all outside the scholar’s library. Polybius’ account of Hannibal is painstakingly careful and completely unimpressive. The Hannibal we know, the brilliant genius of war, the indomitable master of the Alps, the scourge of Italy, is Livy’s creation, as is too the picture of the magnificent tenacity and endurance which finally defeated him.

  Livy is a great writer, endowed with the fire and the power of a great imagination. It must not be supposed that he let himself be carried away to invent on occasion. He was a conscientious man who wanted to write only what was true. In his preface he says: “Such things as are reported either before or at the founding of the city, set out more by poet’s fables than grounded upon pure and faithful records, I mean neither to assert nor disprove.” There was no defect in his honesty, but only in his criticism, and artists are seldom critics.

  Goethe’s sweeping statement about English writers, that inspiration is everything to them, reflection nothing, is exactly applicable to Livy. He saw only the actors on history’s stage; the causes responsible for the drama and what went on behind the scenes meant nothing to him. His real interest was in the good and the great of mankind—of Roman mankind. He had that delightful characteristic, so often a companion to the romantic temperament, enthusiasm. The characters in his history live because he was himself so fired by what they did and suffered. Yet he never lost his grasp on the essential truths of human nature; he had in a high degree imaginative insight. And just as he was able to put himself in the place of one of his great Romans and understand him with an unerring perception, in the same way, through his passionate love for what he saw in that early Rome of republican simplicity and hardihood and self-sacrificing patriotism, and through his sure grasp of the combination of great qualities that was truly Roman, unlike any before or since, he was able to produce a characterization of a nation which lives as much as any of literature’s foremost characters live. Rome to us is Livy’s Rome.

  His place is hardly among historians, as we understand the term. He was more than that. What he wrote has an interest altogether independent of its accuracy. He was a great romantic historian—if the term may be allowed. Like Virgil he showed romance at its best, presenting an ideal which is not supernatural or superhuman, but felt instantly to be realizable, although never yet realized, and which has aroused in unnumbered readers the longing to bring it to pass.

  But just as there always follows close upon classicism the danger of an arid superficiality, a pedantry that seeks only correctness and dispenses with life, losing the spirit in the passion for the fact, so romanticism has an evil attending genius, sentimentality. The boundary between the two is so tenuous, so easily overpassed. V
irgil transgressed it more than once. The romantic is imaginative, the sentimental is unreal; the romantic is idealistic, the sentimental is false. The mark of insincerity is upon all the sentimental: sentimentality is unconscious insincerity. The romanticist, as such, is as sincere as the classicist; it is only that his idea of truth is different. But the sentimentalist does not care about truth. He is always able to believe what he wants to believe.

  Sentimental romance came to Rome very shortly after Livy and Virgil died, and took possession of a field which has ever since been peculiarly open to it, the drama. It was almost inevitable that the sentimental play should be a Roman product. There is a kinship between exaggeration and sentimentality. The sentimental always inclines to the exaggerated, and the Romans with their strong natural leaning toward exaggeration were peculiarly liable to it. In sentimental romance anything is admissible. The writer’s only object is to say what his audience want to hear in a way that will hold their interest. And as regards the latter, his field of choice is wide: bent as he is only on what is agreeable, he has no need to trouble himself with considerations of what is natural and probable. Forms of sentimentality vary in different ages and in different countries, but their common source is always easy to see. The Roman variety, of course, insisted upon human nature’s being grand and heroic; dauntless courage and unshaken fortitude were the qualities all the sympathetic characters in their romance must possess. It is safe to say that the notion of lovely helplessness would never have had a real development in ancient Rome even if she had lasted centuries longer than she did. But on the whole the general range of sentimental ideas was much what it is today. The popular hero and heroine everywhere show their Roman descent by always regarding death as a negligible matter. To the Roman sentimentalist, exactly as to the modern, every man went joyfully to die for his country and every mother wanted to send her son for the same purpose. The poor and lowly were happier than the rich and powerful; the old farm of boyhood’s days to be preferred to marble halls; a mother always a mother, and so on.

  All this is completely opposed to what the Greeks wanted. A Greek tragic drama has always, indeed, a romantic subject. The central idea of tragedy is rooted in strangeness, great souls suffering extraordinary calamities, but to the Greek it must be presented classically, which is to say, in the way most opposed to the sentimental, nothing exaggerated, nothing distorted away from nature. A Greek tragedy has no popular appeal, as we understand the words. It is the product of an art austere, reserved, precise to the verge of hardness; tragedy achieved in the manner most difficult for that achievement, with strict economy of adjective, description, detail. It had no popular appeal, as the Romans understood the words, either. The idea of rewriting it to suit modern Roman taste occurred to a very able man shortly after Virgil died and he became thereby the father of the sentimental drama.

  His name was Seneca and he is best known as a statesman who for a few years held the reins in Rome, and as a devoted preacher of the Stoic doctrine. But his influence upon the theatre is his most enduring title to fame. Along with his Stoicism he had an ardent romanticism. He set himself to make Greek plays over into romantic dramas that should give Roman audiences what they wanted, and to read him is like turning a magnifying glass on romance and on Rome.

  Perhaps the most striking example of what resulted is his Trojan Women, based on Euripides’ tragedy. A comparison between the two illustrates clearly the methods of the sentimental romantic.

  In both plays the curtain rises upon the battlefield some days after Troy has fallen. Euripides shows an old woman asleep on the ground in front. As the day brightens she wakes slowly and lifts herself up painfully. She talks to herself in words that could be spoken only quietly, almost dully, as an old woman brought to the utmost of misery would speak:

  Up from the earth, O weary head.

  This is not Troy, about, above—

  Not Troy, nor we the lords thereof.

  Thou breaking neck, be strengthened.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Who am I that I sit

  Here at a Greek king’s door—

  A woman that hath no home,

  Weeping alone for her dead—

  The whole speech is purely human; there is nothing in it of what we call a queenly spirit. To Seneca it seemed very poor, unworthy of royalty and sure to put a Roman audience completely off. His Hecuba is discovered erect with flashing eyes; her queenly spirit is visible in every inch of her, and her speech is delivered to the universe:

  Whoever puts his faith in royal power,

  Who rules in a great hall and trusts to riches,

  Let him behold you, Troy, and look on me.

  Never has fortune shown a greater proof

  How frail is the dependence of the proud.

  Now breaks and falls the lofty pillar—Mighty Asia falls.

  Divinities, hostile to me and mine,

  I call you witness, and I call you too,

  Great sons, my children: bear me witness that

  I, Hecuba, saw all the woe to come.

  I saw it first nor did I fear to speak.

  I told you—

  The speech is all like that, with never a touch of pitifulness or human weakness. This Hecuba is not a suffering woman; she is the great queen whose courage no calamity can break. She is also the authoritative and weighty Roman matron as she was popularly conceived, ready to speak her mind on any subject and always able to say, I told you so. Of course she is completely disdainful of death. “Mourn not that Priam has died,” she and the Trojan women tell each other. “Dead he is happy, as are all who die in battle.” Euripides’ Hecuba says:

  Death cannot be what life is, Child. The cup

  Of death is empty and life hath always hope.

  She is not heroic. When she hears that the Greek chiefs have drawn lots for her and her companions, and that she has fallen to one of Troy’s bitterest foes, she only mourns:

  Weep for me.

  Mine is the crown of misery.

  But Seneca’s Hecuba hears exultingly that not a man in the host is willing to draw for her—a disposition quite comprehensible to the reader—and cries:

  They fear me! I alone make Greeks afraid.

  The climax of each play is the death of Andromache’s little son who must be killed in order that Hector’s race shall end. In Euripides a very human herald comes to get the boy, who speaks gently to the mother in her agony:

  ’Tis ordered that this child—Oh,

  How can I tell her of it? ’Tis their will

  Thy son shall die. . . . Nay, let the thing

  Be done. Thou shalt be wiser so. Nor cling

  So fiercely to him—

  Such a herald of the host would not have impressed a Roman audience, and Seneca himself no doubt thought the speech a very tame prelude to the death of mighty Hector’s son. His herald enters, as he declares with his first words, terrified to the depths of his being, a horrid tremor shaking his limbs. As well it might, for he has seen—“I saw it, I myself”—the sun eclipsed and a fearful earthquake that convulsed the sea and sent cliffs crashing down and laid forests low and tore the land apart and opened a fearful cavern from which there breathed a breath as from the dead—to usher forth the ghost of Achilles.

  Euripides uses Andromache’s farewell to the child to give a picture of suffering as moving as any ever painted:

  Go, die, my best beloved, my cherished one,

  In fierce men’s hands, leaving me here alone. . . .

  Weepest thou?

  Nay, why, my little one? Thou canst not know. . . .

  Thou little thing

  That curlest in my arms, what sweet scents cling

  All round thy neck. . . . Kiss me. This one time.

  Not ever again—

  Seneca did not like that. The Greek poet brought the great mythical figure of the Trojan princess down to earth and made her feel only what any woman in agony might feel. A Roman audience expected somethi
ng better from Hector’s wife. Seneca’s Andromache is the Mother, in the grandest aspect of that character known to the stage. She tells the Trojan women that she would of course have killed herself as soon as Hector died except for her child:

  He held me back. ’Tis he who masters me.

  ’Tis he forbids me to seek death.

  . . . Ah, he has taken from me

  The great reward that greatest evils bring,

  To be afraid of nothing.

  She then decides to hide him and tell the Greeks that he is dead, but he, in accordance with the best traditions of the Roman boy, refuses with a proud gesture to stoop to such an act. She is joyful at this proof of proper spirit: “You scorn a safe hiding place,” she cries, “I know your noble nature.” His reluctance is but just overcome and he hidden, when Ulysses comes to get him and instantly suspects a trick. He threatens Andromache with torture, described in detail, if she will not give him up. She, of course, is utterly unmoved. Mothers, she tells him, are never afraid for themselves. Even when the child is finally discovered she keeps her haughty composure; she bids her son be glad, because their reason for killing him is that they are afraid of him: “You are a little boy, indeed, but already one to be feared.”

  In Euripides’ play, when the herald returns he is bringing back the dead child to his mother, but she has gone, a captive in a Greek ship to her son’s murderers. The grandmother receives the little dead body and speaks quietly to it:

  Poor little child.

  Was it our ancient wall so savagely hath rent

  Thy curls . . . here where thy mother laid

  Her kisses. Where the bone-edge frayed

  Grins white above—ah, heaven, I will not see. . . .

  Oh, dear proud lips, so full of hope,