The Evolution of States Part 19

Thus limited in their native culture, the Roman upper cla.s.s were inevitably much affected by higher foreign cultures when they met these under conditions of wealth and leisure. Long before that stage, indeed, they consulted Greek oracles and collected responses; and they had informally a.s.similated before the conquest a whole series of Greek G.o.ds without giving them public wors.h.i.+p.[410] The very G.o.ddess of the early Latin League, the Aventine Diana, was imaged by a copy of Artemis of Ephesus, the G.o.ddess of the Ionian League.[411] As time went on the more psychologically developed cults of the East were bound to attract the Romans of all cla.s.ses. What of religious emotion there was in the early days must have played in large part around the wors.h.i.+p which the State left free to the citizens as individuals--the wors.h.i.+p of the _Lares_ and _Penates_, the cults of the hearth and the family; and in this connection the primitive mythopoeic instinct must have evolved a great deal of private mythology which never found its way into literature. But as the very possession of _Lares_ and _Penates_, ancestral and domestic spirits, was originally a cla.s.s privilege, not shared by the landless and the homeless, these had step by step to be made free of public inst.i.tutions of a similar species--the _Lares Praest.i.tes_ of the whole city, festally wors.h.i.+pped on the first day of May, and other _Lares Publici_, _Rurales_, _Compitales_, _Viales_, and so on--just as they were helped to bread. Even these concessions, however, failed to make the old system suffice for the transforming State; and individual foreign wors.h.i.+ps with a specific attraction were one by one inevitably introduced--that of aesculapius in the year 291 B.C., in a panic about pestilence; that of Cybele, the Mother of the G.o.ds, in 205: both by formal decision of the Senate. The manner of the latter importation is instructive. Beginning the Hannibalic war in a spirit of religious patriotism, the Senate decreed the destruction of the temples of the alien Isis and Serapis.[412] But as the war went on, and the devotion shown to the native G.o.ds was seen to be unrewarded, the Senate themselves, yielding to the general perturbation which showed itself in constant resort to foreign rites by the women,[413] prescribed resort to the Greek sacrificial rites of Apollo.[414] Later they called in the cult of Cybele from Phrygia;[415] and other cults informally, but none the less irresistibly, followed.

In all such steps two forces were at work--the readiness of the plebeians to welcome a foreign religion in which the patricians had, as it were, no vested rights; and the tendency of the more plastic patricians themselves, especially the women, to turn to a wors.h.i.+p with emotional attractions. When the plebeians sought admission for their cla.s.s to the higher offices of State, they were told with unaffected seriousness that their men had not the religious qualifications--they lacked the hereditary gift of reading auspices, the lore of things sacred.[416] So, when they did force entrance, their alleged blunders in these matters were exclaimed against as going far to ruin the republic.

This was not a way to make the populace revere the national religion; and as the population of foreign race steadily increased by conquest and enslavement, alien cults found more and more hold. "It was always in the popular quarters of the city that these movements began."[417]

The first great unofficial importation seems to have been the orgiastic wors.h.i.+p of Dionysos, who specially bore for the Romans his epithet of Bacchus, and was identified with their probably aboriginal _Liber_. This wors.h.i.+p, carried on in secret a.s.semblies, was held by the conservatives to be a hotbed of vice and crime, and was, according to Livy, bloodily punished (B.C. 186). So essentially absurd, however, is Livy's childish narrative that it is impossible to take anything in it for certain save the bare fact that the wors.h.i.+p was put under restrictions, as tending to promote secret conspiracies.[418] But from this time forward, roughly speaking, Rome may be said to have entered into the mythological heritage of Greece, even as she did into her positive treasure of art work and of oriental gold. Every cult of the conquered Mediterranean world found a footing in the capital, the mere craving for new sensations among the upper cla.s.s being sufficient to overcome their political bias to the old system. It is clear that when Augustus found scores of Roman temples in disrepair after the long storms of the civil wars, it was not that "religion" was out of vogue, but that it was superseded by what the Romans called "superst.i.tion"--something extraneous, something over and above the public system of rites and ceremonies. In point of fact, the people of Rome were in the ma.s.s no longer of Roman stock, but a collection of many alien races, indifferent to the indigenous cults. The emperor's restorations could but give a subsidised continuity to the official services: what vitally flourished were the cults which ministered to the new psychological needs of a population more and more divorced from great public interests, and increasingly alien in its heredity--the stimulant and hysterical wors.h.i.+ps of Adonis, of Attis, of the Lover G.o.ddess coupled with the first, or the Mourning Mother G.o.ddess with the second, of Isis and Osiris and their child--rituals of alternate lamentation and rejoicing, of initiations, austerities, confessions, penances, self-abas.e.m.e.nt, and the promise of immortality. On the general soil of devotion thus formed, there finally grew up side by side Mithraism and Christianity, the rival religions of the decadence, of which the second triumphed in virtue of having by far the larger number of adaptations to its environment.

But while Rome was thus at length fully possessed by the spirit of religious imagination which had so fruitfully stirred the art of Greece, there ensued no new birth of faculty. It was with the arts as with literature: the stimulus from Greece was received by a society rapidly on the way to that social state which in Greece had choked the springs of progress. In the last generations of the Republic the literary development was markedly rapid. In the century which saw Rome, after a terrific struggle, victorious over Carthage and prepared for the grapple with Macedon, the first pract.i.tioners of literature were playwrights, or slaves, or clients of great men, or teachers like Ennius, who could find in the now leisured and in part intelligent or at least inquisitive upper cla.s.s a sufficient encouragement to a literary career. That cla.s.s did not want recitals of the crude folklore of their fathers, so completely eclipsed by that of Greece, which was further a.s.sociated with the literary form of drama, virtually new to the Romans.[419] Drama, always the form of literature which can best support itself, is the form most cultivated down till the period of popular abas.e.m.e.nt and civil convulsion, though of a dozen dramatists we have only Plautus and Terence left in anything like completeness; and while the tragedy of Pacuvius and Attius was unquestionably an imitation of the Greek, it may have had in its kind as much merit as the comedies that have been preserved. Even more rapid than the development, however, is the social gangrene that kills the popular taste; for when we reach the time of Augustus there is no longer a literary drama, save perhaps for the small audiences of the wooden theatres, and the private performances of amateurs;[420] parades and pantomimes alone can attract the mindless mult.i.tude; and the era of autocrats begins on well-laid foundations of ignorance and artificial incivilisation.

As with the literature of the people, so with that of the lettered cla.s.s. In the last generation of freedom, we have in Lucretius and Catullus two of the great poets of all antiquity, compared with whose forceful inspiration Virgil and Horace already begin to seem sicklied o'er with the pale cast of decline. Thenceforth the glory begins to die away; and though the red blade of Juvenal is brandished with a hand of power, and Lucan clangs forth a stern memorial note, and Petronius sparkles with a sinister brilliancy, there is no mistaking the downward course of things under Caesarism. It is true we find Juvenal complaining that only the emperor does anything for literature:--

Et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum.

Solus enim tristes hac tempestate Camoenas Respexit.[421]

It is the one word of praise he ever gives to the autocrat, be it Domitian or another; and the commentators decide that only at the beginning of Domitian's reign would it apply. In effect, the satire is a description of the Roman upper cla.s.s as grown indifferent to poetry, or to any but their own. But it is not on the economic side that the autocracy and the aristocracy of the Empire are to be specially indicted. The economic difficulty was very much the same under the Republic, when only by play-writing could literary men as such make a living. As Juvenal goes on to say, Horace when he cried Evohe was well fed, and if Virgil had lacked slave and lodging the serpents would have been lacking to the fury's hair, and the tongueless trumpet have sounded nothing great. Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil were all inheritors of a patrimony; and Horace needed first an official post and later a patron's munificence to enable him to live as a poet. The mere sale of their books could not possibly have supported any one of them, so low were prices kept by the small demand.[422] What was true of the poets was still truer of the historians. Thus in the Republic as in the Empire, the men of letters, apart from the playwrights, tended to be drawn solely from the small cla.s.s with inherited incomes. The curse of the Empire was that even when the sanest emperors, as the Antonines, sought to endow studies,[423] they could not buy moral or intellectual energy.

The senate of poltroons who crouched before the Neros and Caligulas were the upper-cla.s.s version of the population which lived by bread and the circus; and in that air neither great art nor great thought could breathe. Roman sculpture is but enslaved Greek sculpture taken into pay; Latin literature ceases to be Roman with Tacitus. The n.o.ble apparition of Marcus Aurelius s.h.i.+nes out of the darkening ages like some unearthly incarnation, collecting in one life and in one book all the light and healing left in the waning civilisations; beside the babble of Fronto his speech is as that of one of the wise G.o.ds of the ancient fantasy.

Henceforth we have but ancillary history, and, in imaginative literature, be it of Apuleius or of Claudian, the portents of another age. _Roma fuit._

The last stages of the transition from the pagan to the Middle Ages can best be traced in the history of the northern province of Gaul.

Subjected to regular imperial administration within a generation of its conquest by Caesar, Gaul for some centuries actually gained in civilisation, the imperial regimen being relatively more favourable to nearly every species of material progress than that of the old chiefs.[424] The emperors even in the fourth century are found maintaining there the professors.h.i.+ps of rhetoric, language, law, philosophy and medicine first founded by Marcus Antoninus;[425] and until finance began to fail and the barbarians to invade, the material conditions were not retrograde. But the general intellectual life was merely imitative and retrospective; and the middle and upper cla.s.ses, for which the higher schools existed, were already decaying in Gaul as elsewhere. The old trouble, besides, the official veto on all vital political discussion--if indeed any appet.i.te for such discussion survived--drove literature either into mere erudition or into triviality. On the other hand, the growing Church offered a field of ostensibly free intellectual activity, and so was for a time highly productive, in point of sheer quant.i.ty of writing; a circ.u.mstance naturally placed by later inquirers to the credit of its creed. The phenomenon was of course simply one of the pa.s.sage of energy by the line of least resistance. Within the Church, to which they turned as did thoughtful Greeks to philosophy after the rise of Alexander's Empire, men of mental tastes and moderate culture found both shelter and support; and the first Gaulish monasteries, unlike those of Egypt and the East, were, as M. Guizot has noted, places for conference rather than for solitary life.[426] There, for men who believed the creed, which was as credible as the older doctrines, there was a constant exercise for the mind on interests that were relatively real, albeit profoundly divided from the interests of the community. Thus, at a time when the community needed all its mental energy to meet its political need, that mental energy was spent in the discussion of insoluble and insane problems, of predestination and freewill, of faith and works, of fasts, celibacy, the Trinity, immortality, and the wors.h.i.+p of saints.

Men such as Ambrose and Jerome in Italy, Paulinus, Ca.s.sian, Hilary, and Salvian in Gaul, Chrysostom in the East, and Augustine in the South, represent as it were the last vibrations of the civilised intelligence; their energy, vainly spent on what they felt to be great issues, hints of the amount of force that was still running to waste throughout the Empire.

Soon, however, and even before the barbarian tide had overflowed the intellectual world, the fatal principle at the core of the new creed began to paralyse even the life that centred around that. In a world of political tyranny, an established church claiming to stand for the whole of supernatural truth must needs resort to tyranny as soon as it could wield the weapons. The civil strifes which broke out alike in the Eastern and the Western Empire in the third and fourth centuries, and the mult.i.tude of sects which rapidly honeycombed the Church, wore so many more forces of social disintegration; and churchmen, reasoning that difference of dogma was the ground of civil warfare as well as of war in the Church, must needs take the course that had before been taken in politics.

After the original Arian battle had raged itself out in Egypt, Gregory of n.a.z.ianzun at Constantinople, Ambrose at Milan, and Martin at Tours,[427] fought it over again. One point secured, others were settled in turn; and as soon as the influence of Augustine set up a prevailing system of thought, theology was as much a matter of rule and precedent as government. As we read Augustine's _City of G.o.d_, with its strenuous demonstration that the calamities which men ascribe to the new religion are the fruit of their own misdeeds, we realise to the full the dissolution of antiquity. All that is valid in his polemic is the exposure of the absurdity of the old faiths, long before detected by the reason of the few, but maintained by believers and unbelievers alike for reasons of State. The due Nemesis came in the rise of a faith which first flourished on and promoted an utter disregard of State concerns, then helped directly to rob the State of the mental energy it most needed, and finally wrought for the paralysis of what mental energy itself had attracted. Of constructive truth, of the thought whereby a State could live, the polemist had much less than was once possessed by the men who framed or credited the fables he derided. He could destroy, but could not build up. And so it was with the Church, as regarded the commonweal. "Of all the various systems of government that have been attempted on this earth, theocracy, or more properly hierocracy, is undoubtedly one of the very worst."[428]

But one thing the Church could construct and conserve--the fabric of her own wealth and power. Hence it came about that the Church, in itself a State within the State, was one of the three or four concrete survivals of antiquity round which modern civilisation nucleated. Of the four, the Church, often treated as the most valuable, was really the least so, inasmuch as it wrought always more for the hindrance of progress and the sundering of communities than for advance and unification. The truly civilising forces were the other three: the first being the body of Roman law, the product of Roman experience and Greek thought in combination; and the second, the literature of antiquity, in large part lost till the time we call the New Birth, when its recovery impregnated and inspired, though it perhaps also overburdened and lamed, the unformed intelligence of modern Europe. The third was the heritage of the arts of life and of beauty, preserved in part by the populations of the western towns which survived and propagated their species through the ages of dominant barbarism; in part by the cohering society of Byzantium. From these ancient germs placed in new soil is modern civilisation derived.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 398: See E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 703; cp.

A. Schwegler, _Romische Geschichte_, i, 274-79, as to the survivals. The reversion of the remaining Etruscan aristocracy in Rome to the language of the common people, under stress of strife with Etruria, is a phenomenon on all fours with the abandonment of French by the upper-cla.s.s English in the fourteenth century, as a result of hostility with France.]

[Footnote 399: Even Eduard Meyer decides in this fas.h.i.+on (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 530) that to Italy "was denied the capacity to shape a culture for itself, to energise independently and creatively in the sphere of art, poetry, religion, and science"--this after expressly noting (ii, 155) how Greece itself developed only under the stimulus of alien culture. Compare ---- 339, 340 (ii, 533-36).]

[Footnote 400: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, Eng. tr. 1894, i, 285-300 (bk. i, ch. xv).]

[Footnote 401: "No people has ever possessed a vaster pantheon,"

observes M. Boissier, while noting the slightness of the characterisation (_La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, 4e edition, i, 8). The lack of characterisation would seem to have encouraged multiplication.]

[Footnote 402: The fact that the Etruscans, like the other Italian peoples, remained at the stage of unintellectual formalism (Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 528-29; Schwegler, _Romische Geschichte_, i, 273), suffices to show that not in race genius but in stage and conditions of culture lies the explanation. All early religion in official hands is formalist--witness the Pentateuch. The preoccupied Italians left their cults, as did the Phoenicians, to archaeological officials, while the leisured Greeks carried them into poetry and art under conditions which fostered these activities.]

[Footnote 403: The point is discussed in the author's _Christianity and Mythology_, 2nd ed. pp. 74-90; _Pagan Christs_, 2nd ed. pp. 45-46.]

[Footnote 404: Whether or not we accept Mommsen's view (bk. i, c. xiv) that the use of the alphabet in Italy dates from about 1000 B.C. On this cp. Schwegler, i, 36.]

[Footnote 405: Mommsen, _History of Rome_, bk. i, ch. xii, Eng. tr. ed.

1868, i. 189. Cp. Boissier, as cited, i, 354, as to the respective functions of priests and pontiffs.]

[Footnote 406: It is only through fragmentary vestiges (Servius on Virgil, _Georg._ i, 21; cp. Varro in Augustine, _De civitate Dei_, vi, 7-10) that we know the contents of the book of _Indigitamenta_ kept by the pontifices. It seems to have been a list, not of the _Dii Indigetes_ commonly so-called, but of all the mult.i.tudinous powers presiding over the various operations of life. See Schwegler, _Romische Geschichte_, i, 32; Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Lit._ ed. Schwabe, Eng. trans. 1900, i, 104; Boissier, _La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, i, 4, and _note_. "I have no doubt," writes Mr. Ward Fowler (_The Religious Experience of the Roman People_, 1911, p. 168), "that Wissowa is right in explaining _Indigitamenta_ as _Gebetsformeln_, formulae of invocation; in which the most important matter, we may add, would be the name of the deity. See his _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, p. 177 foll." Corssen put this view before Wissowa.]

[Footnote 407: According to Varro (cited by Augustine, _De civ. Dei_, iv, 31), the early Romans for 170 years wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.ds without images.]

[Footnote 408: Rev. Sir G.W. c.o.x, _Mythology of the Aryan Nations_, ed.

1882, p. 169.]

[Footnote 409: Keightley, _Mythol. of Anc. Greece and Italy_, 1838, pp.

506-7.]

[Footnote 410: Meyer, ii, 531.]

[Footnote 411: Mommsen, ch. 12.]

[Footnote 412: Valerius Maximus, i, 3.]

[Footnote 413: Livy, xxv, 1.]

[Footnote 414: _Id._ xxv, 12.]

[Footnote 415: _Id._ xxix, 10, 14.]

[Footnote 416: Cp. Boissier, as cited, i, 39.]

[Footnote 417: Boissier, i, 346. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 2, Bohn ed. i, 40-41, and Wenck's note.]

[Footnote 418: Livy, x.x.xix, 18. The farrago of charges of crime we have no more reason to credit than we have in regard to the similar charges made later against the Christians.]

[Footnote 419: Cp. Carl Peter, _Geschichte Roms_, 1881, i, 550.]

[Footnote 420: Cp. Merivale, _History_, small ed. iv, 67-70, and Gibbon, ch. 31 (Bohn ed. iii, 420).]

[Footnote 421: Sat, vii, 1.]

[Footnote 422: Martial, i, 67, 118; xiii, 3. But cp. Becker, _Gallus_.

Sc. iii, Excur. 3.]

[Footnote 423: Vespasian began the endowment of professors.h.i.+ps of rhetoric (Suetonius, _Vespasian_, 18). As to the Antonines, see Gibbon, ch. ii, _note_, near end; and cp. Hatch, _Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church_, 1900, pp. 38-39; and Boissier, _La Fin du Paganisme_, i, 166. Vespasian's endowments, it should be noted, were given only to the professors of rhetoric. The philosophers (presumably the Stoics, but also the astrologers) he banished, as did Domitian. On this cp. Merivale, _History_, vol. vii, ch. 60.]

[Footnote 424: Cp. Guizot, _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, 13e ed. i, 48, 49.]

[Footnote 425: _Id._, pp. 113-15.]

[Footnote 426: _Id._, i, 121, 122.]

[Footnote 427: Guizot (as cited, i, 135) makes much of the fact that Hilary, Ambrose, and Martin opposed the _capital_ punishment of heretics. He ignores the circ.u.mstance that Martin led an attack on all the pagan idols and temples of his neighbourhood, in which the peasants who resisted were slain.]

[Footnote 428: U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, M. Hume's ed. 1900, i, 115.]