By W. T. HARRIS.
In these chapters, as I have before stated, my attempt is not so much to show what the schools accomplished in the ancient nations herein discussed, as to show their educative influence upon the world. Each nation has a mission given it to perform. Divine Providence gives to each a special work that is useful to all mankind. The national development is first an education of itself and secondly an education of mankind. This is true, in an especial sense, of the Jews, the Greeks and the Romans. All modern civilization grows from a three-fold root—Roman law, Greek science and art, Hebrew spirituality. Of course I restrict the word “civilization” in the above statement to Christian and Mohammedan nations—Mohammedan nations have more Hebrew and Greek and less Roman in their civilization.
We have given some consideration, already, to the Jewish and Greek educations, and it remains for us here to study the Roman character and achievements.
Let us place before ourselves the conclusion that thoughtful writers on the subject have long since reached: The Roman principle is that of compromise or mutual concession for the sake of the highest good and the safety of the state. A more attractive rendering of this principle would run somewhat as follows: The Roman people learned to distinguish between individual wishes and desires, and the duty owed to the state or political whole, and they were the first to define with great precision the spheres of private and public rights and duties. Then they conquered the world and disciplined all peoples into this recognition of private and public spheres, and destroyed all local patriotism and all local religions. This destruction of local patriotism and religion prepared the way for the coming of Christianity.
According to the general tradition, the origin of Rome was in the collection of a band of outlaws on one of the Seven Hills. The historian, Livy, calls them a colluvies, to express their coming together from different surrounding nations. Here was the border land of the Sabines, Latins, and Etruscans. The robbers must stand by each other as they have a common cause against all surrounding states. Here in the very beginning we have the most important element of the Roman principle. We see a union of different national stocks, different personal habits, different dialects, different social prejudices, and especially different religious ideas. All was difference except the common cause against avenging justice that pursued them. This however was a cause that involved life and death. They band together like robbers and make the safety of the community the chief object, and do not interfere with whatever private customs and usages the members of the league may have.
Here we see at the beginning the principle of toleration of a private or personal sphere for each citizen as contrasted with the sphere of public duty. The citizen is protected in the exercise of his own pleasure in his personal affairs where they are different to the public world, but on the other hand he must unhesitatingly sacrifice all when Rome’s interest demands it. His home and religion are matters that the state does not regulate nor allow neighbors to interfere with. The public concern of all is the safety of Rome. The citizen is in constant training to preserve his two-fold attitude of private and public life. He is always on the watch to control himself from stepping beyond the prescribed boundary and trespassing on the province of others, and he is always jealously defending his own domain from trespass. He is cultivating a consciousness of legality, a consciousness of statutes and regulations which are not in conformity with his own inclination, but necessary for Rome.
Each citizen learns to subordinate his caprice and inclination to the command of the state. This seems so much a matter of course with us that we do not at first see anything strange in the attitude of the Roman citizen. We forget that we have inherited this from Rome, and that it began with Rome and had no existence in other nations. With other people the religious principle and the state were homogeneous. Where the one penetrated the other penetrated. The individual lived in harmony with the state because the political life was all of one piece with the manners, customs, and habits of private life. The religion extended over both public and private spheres of life. Hence there was unity of religion and political duty, without any feeling of distinction existing between the public and private spheres of life.
But the Roman life was the beginning of a much deeper spiritual life. After the individual learns to distinguish and unite these two phases of his life—the public and private—he is a much deeper and stronger man, and is capable of exercising and improving greater personal freedom. He can realize within himself a far deeper spiritual experience and attain to a higher and purer idea of God and the divine life. In fact, after he has been through the Roman national education, he is fitted for a faith in the divine-human nature of God.
When the Roman makes treaties with the surrounding nations he bows to a common will, the will that unites his own national will with the opposing national will of another people. A treaty is a sort of higher public will uniting two national public wills. As opposed to the public will expressed in the treaty, the public will of either nation is a relatively private will. Thus the Romans who are famous for making treaties seem to be occupied with making distinctions between higher and lower will-powers, and realizing the difference between public and private wills at every step and in every degree.
When the treaty is broken, the Roman conceives it necessary to conquer the nation that breaks its faith and compel the vanquished people to submit and pass under the yoke of Roman law. Thus the Roman becomes a conqueror of the world. There being no higher power that can act as umpire between Rome and the nations with whom it makes a treaty, each nation acts as its own judge and is very apt to accuse the other one of broken faith. An appeal to arms results in the justification of the strongest. The vanquished must yield his convictions and submit.
Curtius defines the spirit of the Roman as that of the destruction of national peculiarities. Rome conquers the world and educates all nations into the same state of mind as its own people. The people in Spain and Gaul and Britain, in Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, as well as in Greece, all become like the people of Italy in this respect, and grow to be very considerate of the boundary line between public and private life.
Out of this isolation of the private life grows the great respect for property and ownership which we find in connection with Roman institutions. The public is not one with the private, but distinguished from it by the Roman idea. But the law defines the limits of each and so they do not conflict.
In private property the citizen finds a sphere wherein he can realize his personal freedom. By means of property man satisfies his wants of food, clothing, and shelter. He is able, by means of property, to gratify a higher spiritual want of amusement and culture. He may avail himself of the observation and reflection of his fellow-men and profit by learning their experience. What our fellow-men have learned by error and suffering, as well as by observation and reflection, go to make up the wisdom of the race, which may be collected, preserved and distributed by means of the institution of private property.
Property is thus something that connects the particular individual with the social whole or the human race. In the sphere of ownership the individual is free and self-determined; he makes and unmakes at pleasure. With property he extends the sphere of his private personality and enters into free alliance with other personalities. By bargain and sale of chattels he exercises his own private freedom, not by limiting the freedom of others, but by and through the equal exercise of freedom on the part of those others. Thus by the invention of the institution of property the private freedom of each individual interpenetrates the sphere of the freedom of others without conflicting with it, but in fact reinforcing it, so that each man is freer through the freedom of others. Such is the wonderful significance of this Roman invention of private right of property.
What we see among other nations in Europe and Asia, before the Roman law came in vogue, is not the completed realization of the idea of private property but only the crude first appearance of it. Property under the Romans is as different from property in Persia, or even in Sparta, as commerce is different from piracy. It is the Roman who eliminates the element of external violence by freeing private rights from absorption in public rights. Then the freedom of one individual comes to reinforce that of another instead of limiting and circumscribing it.
It is one thing to be able to see the universal law in the particular facts and phenomena. It is quite another thing to see the universal forms of the will, rules that all individuals may conform their actions to, and by so doing avoid all conflict and collision of wills. These general forms of actions and deeds, when defined in words, become civil laws. The civil laws define the limits and boundaries within which each and all individuals may act without mutual conflict. If these laws are not obeyed one individual act will neutralize another and both will reduce to zero.
The Roman is able to formulate the general will, and he compiles the code of laws that descends to modern nations as one of the three most precious heir-looms. These laws define the forms in which men may act without contradicting each other, the forms by which the individual may accumulate property and realize his personality, and at the same time help, and not hinder, the personal freedom of all others. The Roman invented the forms by which a city, a town, a state may be governed and justice rendered to all, the forms in which a corporation may exist for the accomplishment of undertakings too great or too long continued for the single individual.
Religion in Rome had the two fold character of public and private. The family had its household gods, its Lares and Penates. The city had its tutelary deities, under various forms and names, but all amounting to the same thing, to wit: the expression of the abstract power of the state. The state was the highest divinity that the Roman knew. The gods Jupiter, Quirinus, Janus, etc., all meant the might of Rome. The deification of abstractions was carried out to a degree of superstitious whimsicality that astonishes us. There was conceived a god or goddess for every process of growth and decay and for every instrumentality of the natural or of the spiritual, and there was a divinity that made the bones grow in the child, and a divinity that assisted the flow of the sewers.
The Roman conception of the divine defined it as some invisible power that could be made useful to the individual or the state by some sacrifice or service performed toward it. The Roman therefore made vows to a particular deity when he found himself in an emergency. If the deity gave him success he fulfilled his vow with the greatest punctiliousness, offering a sacrifice, or founding a temple, or establishing some worship, in return for the service obtained. Thus the principle of contract entered the Roman idea of religion.
Contract is the essential legal basis for the transfer of property in such a manner as to secure joint freedom of individuals. Contract in religion as the relation of the individual to God seems the most terrible of all impiety. But the Roman in effect made contracts with his gods, showing the all-powerful hold of the idea of property and legality over the mind of this nation.
In the family there prevailed a form of ancestor worship almost as primitive as we found among the Chinese. All other nations, according to De Coulanges, had ancestor-worship at one time. It would seem that a more spiritual faith superseded it in other nations quite early. The special circumstances of Rome and China encouraged the preservation of family traditions. In China the entire state government is patriarchal, and thus wholly conservative of the principle of the family. In Rome on the other hand the state separates, as public affair, from the family, as a private affair, and carefully defines the limits between itself and the family so as to preserve the latter in the primitive form. Each family worshiped with stated ceremony the male ancestors of the family, the oldest son acting as the priest after the death of his father.
This principle of non-interference with the family customs and a careful guarding of the sacred privacy of the family developed a very noble type of woman. The Roman matrons were sublime examples of heroism, dignity and purity. The mother had much more influence in the education of the Roman youth, than in the education of youth in any other of the ancient nations. On the ninth day the Roman child was enrolled on the citizen’s register. But up to his fifteenth year his education was chiefly at home under the supervision of the mother. He studied reading, writing, and arithmetic, much the same as the boy of other nations. But he committed to memory the laws of the Twelve Tables as carefully as the Hebrew child learned the Ten Commandments. The Roman child was educated to be a soldier, to fight for Rome and to be a supporter of the laws. In his sixteenth year he studied Roman law with some jurist. One may read in Plutarch, or in Shakspere’s Coriolanus, how powerful was the influence of the mother over her son, and how devoted was the mother to Rome. Roman education prepared the world for Christianity, by breaking down national idiosyncrasies and leading up to the idea of the human race—genus humanum.
The system practiced by the Romans after the conquest of a country was to conscript the young men into the army and send their legions to a distant frontier. The young men from Britain might be sent to Spain or Egypt, and those from Illyria and the Danube, to Britain. In the presence of a hostile people, speaking a foreign tongue, the raw conscript found his only safe course to be a faithful adherence to the Roman eagles. He could not revolt with any hope of success. In a few years he had become attached to the Roman cause and cherished it as his second nature; while his relatives and countrymen afar away had also been obliged to obey Roman laws until their customs and usages had also changed to Roman. Thus each conquered nation became a means in turn of subduing every other nation and converting them into Romans.
The Persians had conquered nations and held them in subjection, but they had not attempted to mould the character and institutions of the conquered people, but had left them untrammeled, only requiring them to acknowledge supremacy and pay tribute. After a people recovered independence from Persia, little evidence remained of Persian influence. The Roman institutions, on the other hand, became so firmly rooted among a conquered people that they remained ever after substantially Roman in character.
The Greeks, we saw, were a cheerful people. They made games a religious ceremonial, celebrating the physical beauty of the gods by becoming beautiful themselves. Beautiful bodies and graceful movements seemed to them divine. The gods and goddesses fell in love with beautiful mortals. The Romans on the contrary, were sober and serious, and would not exercise for the sake of developing personal beauty, but only to become good soldiers for Rome. It was shameful in the estimation of the Roman to expose the naked body. Even within the family the utmost care was taken to develop and foster the sense of shame and of decency in the care of the person. The Roman was a haughty spectator at the games, but would not himself condescend to appear as a contestant. He bought slaves or forced his prisoners taken in battle to exhibit their skill in the arena. He delighted in spectacles where death-contests of beasts and men took place, because he felt its symbolic expression of the struggle within his own character, and his sacrifice of self for the state, and of his arbitrary will for the general abstract law. The Roman was sober and thoughtful because his life was occupied in self-restraint. He perpetually watched himself lest he should go beyond the limits fixed between the private and the public spheres of duty.
The result of mingling all nations in the Roman armies brought about a feeling of brotherhood among the soldiers and then among the people. There arose conviction that peculiarities of nation and even of race are accidents that do not affect the substance of a common humanity. The objects of affection for the individual—his native land, his country’s gods, his ties of kindred and friendship, were all ruthlessly broken by the irresistible might of the Roman empire, and for these objects of the heart were substituted only the abstract devotion to the state and devotion to the private right of property. There resulted a deep heart-hunger for a spiritual faith that would give to all an object commensurate with this new idea of the human race. This want was supplied by Christianity.