The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s” to include scattering incense on his altars. Too many of them had been brought up in the punctilious exclusiveness of the Jewish tradition for them to display on such points the laxity which is sometimes called broad-mindedness. Even in the private intercourse of social life the Christians were unpleasantly apt to insist upon their scruples. The meat in the butchers’ shops had often been slain in sacrifice, and the Christian conscience revolted at “meat offered to idols.” The libation with which the wine-cup started on its rounds was another offence to the tender monotheistic conscience. These things made the Christians unpopular. Their close associations, their secret meetings and love-feasts, the communism which they practised, all aroused the suspicions which are begotten of mystery. Lastly, their conviction that the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment were at hand made them ardent proselytes. It made them utter prognostications of death and damnation to all around them, and to see apocalyptic visions of the fall of the kingdoms of this earth. Such prophecies were sometimes misunderstood as involving treasonable designs. The first persecution under Nero was largely the result of such suspicions.

But the official attitude of the permanent Roman Government is probably revealed in the famous correspondence between Pliny and his emperor, Trajan. Imperial Rome is not to set up an inquisition. No man is to be punished for his faith, but if he is accused to the governor and is obstinate in refusing to pay the obeisance demanded by the state he is to be punished for his contumacy. That is precisely the attitude which the most humane and enlightened Christian states have adopted towards heresy. Later, when the Faith grew in importance, and when it even reached the point of soldiers refusing the military oaths, occasional emperors, often the better emperors, strove to fight against it. Then there were sometimes inquisitions and wholesale martyrdoms as under Decius and Diocletian. But no martyrdom, however public or agonising, could quench the faith of those who saw the heavens opening and the Angels of God descending with their crowns of glory. The publicity of the scenes and the constancy of the victims increased, as usual, the number of the converts. Foolish magistrates sought to encounter obstinacy with further severity, and the Faith only grew the more abundantly. It was not so much his personal conversion—for that was tardy and half-hearted—as the motive of policy to secure an advantage over Maxentius, which induced Constantine to promulgate the Edict of Milan in 313, by which toleration was extended to the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire.

We must not be surprised that the best emperors, including the philosopher and saint, Marcus Aurelius, were the most bitterly hostile to Christianity. That is human nature. Stoic philosophers were teaching very much in common with Christian philosophy, but that renders it all the less likely that Stoic philosophers should be among the converts. Nevertheless Christian doctrine, especially in the Græco-Jewish communities of Asia Minor, was falling on prepared soil. The Stoic paradoxes had undoubtedly prepared the way for the Christian paradoxes. The doctrines of humility and asceticism were a commonplace of the Cynics. “No Cross, no Crown,” “He who would save his life must lose it”—such sayings as these would gain immediate assent from thoughtful Romans. Epictetus, a heathen slave of Domitian’s day, wrote his answer to the tyrant: “No man hath power over me. I have been set free by God. I know His Commandments; henceforth no man can lead me captive.” The Stoics were daily teaching that it is hard for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God. This is the creed of Marcus Aurelius: “To venerate the gods and bless them, and to do good to men, and to practise tolerance and self-restraint.” The horrors of the amphitheatre are one side of imperial society. But on the other side Musonius Rufus, a Stoic who stood high in the favour of Vespasian and Titus, went among the soldiers to preach against militarism. Slave-drivers as the Romans were, they were beginning to feel a sense of the brotherhood of man.

Seneca was calling the slaves “humble friends.” “Man is a holy thing to man,” he says; and such teaching was reflected even in the legislation of the day. Juvenal pleads passionately for kindness to slaves and for moral purity in the home. Seneca not only feels that men are brothers, but that God is the Father of us all. We have seen how public charity was finding expression in the alimenta and the free schools. “Love them that hate you” would not strike the Romans of the second century as anything more than a strong expression of the truth they had already begun to recognise. Thus the practical side of Christian ethics found its harmonies in the conduct as well as the theory of the more enlightened pagans. Peace and humanitarianism were in the air of the Antonine Age.

As for religious dogma the whole tendency of thought was towards monotheism. “God is a Spirit” would find an instant acquiescence among educated Romans, even though they frequented the temples of a hundred different gods. Philosophy among Greeks and Romans alike had always been monotheistic. On the subject of immortality the philosophers were divided. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are on the whole not hopeful. Probably the beliefs of the common folk—as testified in the epitaphs of their cemeteries—were equally divided. The laconic epitaph: “I was not, I was: I am not, I care not,” is common. But other epitaphs equally common express the hope of reunions in the other world or even of being “received among the number of the gods.” But on the whole the commonest view of Death was as a happy release and an unending sleep. It was the immediate hope of eternal bliss, which was the greatest thing that Christianity had to offer to the pagan world.

Rome, then, was in many ways prepared for the reception of Christianity, whose doctrines found an echo in the aspirations of the day. She did much to give to Christian theology its Western form, and of course the ritual and practice of the Roman Church was in many ways merely a continuation of old pagan rites and ceremonies. Ancient deities became Christian saints without change of rite or cult; images were often adapted and even names scarcely altered. But, in fact, the whole conception of that mighty Church which conquered the world, including the barbarian invaders, was the offspring of the Roman political system. It was her genius for statecraft which made Rome the Eternal City. In one form or another she has governed the world for twenty centuries.

EPILOGUE

Here again the impression of pessimism which we get from reading the account of the Empire is due to the historians as much as to the history. Lampridius and the other writers of the Augustan History are small-minded writers who label the various princes as good or bad largely according to their treatment of the senate. The Augustan historians are trained in the school of Suetonius, they dwell upon gossip and can form no large political judgments. Very little of the gossip is authentic. If they have decided to revile an emperor they repeat the scandals narrated by Suetonius about Tiberius or Nero. It is only in their accounts of military action that they can be trusted, and this fact creates a false preponderance of warfare in the annals of the period.

The succession to the imperial throne continued to be the weak point of the whole system. The throne itself passed through unspeakable degradations. The guards who murdered Pertinax formally put the succession up to auction in the prætorian camp. Septimius Severus (193-198) gave a brief respite of strong government which almost destroyed the fiction of senatorial authority, for Severus held the proconsular power even over Rome and Italy. Caracalla was probably the worst of all the emperors in personal vice and brutality, but he was the author of that famous decree which conferred the citizenship on all the western provinces. In Elagabalus (218-222) Rome had for master the vile and effeminate priest of the Sungod, who brought the fetish-stone of Emesa into the city and attempted to make all the gods bow down to it. Alexander Severus was a blameless prince, and Maximin the Thracian drove the barbarians back behind the limites of the Rhine and Danube. After the Gordians the senate enjoyed for a brief space the opportunity of governing Rome through their nominee Pupienus, but the disorders of the period may be gauged from the fact that in the eighteen years following Alexander Severus, who died in 235, twelve persons wore the purple. Then Gallienus assumed it, having for his colleague that Valerian who was the first of Roman emperors to be taken prisoner by the enemy. Strange and horrible tales hung about his mysterious fate when taken captive by Shapur, the Persian king. In the latter years of Gallienus the Empire was practically divided, for his rebellious general Postumus was recognised as emperor throughout Gaul, Spain, and Britain. In this period, too, Palmyra rose into independent power as the meeting-place of the caravan routes across the Syrian plains. Under the famous Queen Zenobia it practically ruled over the eastern parts of the Empire, and its splendid ruins prove its wealth and magnificence. Gallienus then almost allowed the Empire to disintegrate under his feeble grasp, but his successor Claudius Gothicus (268) was a man and a soldier. He smote the Goths and would have restored the Empire in full, but the plague, which had never wholly disappeared since the time of Marcus Aurelius, carried him off in the third year of his reign. The task was left for Aurelian, that Pannonian peasant whose brilliant generalship hurled back the enemy on every side, while his statesmanship restored the authority of the emperor and even the financial credit of the Empire. The mighty wall with which he surrounded Rome is, however, a sad testimony of the dark days upon which the imperial city had fallen. The Palmyrene kingdom was defeated and the rich city plundered. The rebel Empire of the Gauls was destroyed for ever. The grandest triumph ever witnessed in Rome was that of Aurelian in 274. It is thus described by Vopiscus:

Aurelian endeavoured to establish Mithraism as the state religion, and earned the gratitude of the vulgar by supplementing the free supply of corn with a daily ration of pork. Oil and salt were given gratuitously, and he even prepared to supply free wine. The three emperors who succeeded Aurelian, Tacitus, Probus, and Carus, were men of good character, and the first two were, once more, the nominees of the senate.

Throughout this troubled age the causes of confusion were twofold. On the one hand the Empire itself was so vast and scattered that it tended now to fall to pieces of its own momentum, as the seedbox opens to scatter its seeds. Britain, Gaul, Germany, Palmyra—each in its turn began to feel a unity of its own. Rome was far away, and the government was often weak and negligent. Here was an opportunity for the local generals to carve out thrones for themselves. While the emperor hurried this way and that fresh rebellions broke out in his rear. It was no one’s fault in particular. The world-state was impossible in theory as in practice. It was only possible while the provinces were barbarian. When they became civilised and self-conscious they were bound to feel their natural unity.

In the second place, the barbarians were now grown to full stature. They were no longer quarrelsome tribes which could be turned against one another by adroit statecraft, but nations much less barbarous than of old, with some organisation and a purpose above that of mere plunder. No artificial ramparts could hold them. It is very doubtful whether even the legions of Rome at their best could have resisted these repeated assaults on all sides. The first great inroad across the Danube took place in the reign of M. Aurelius. It was crushed, as the column of that emperor depicts, and Sarmatia and Marcomannia were added as short-lived provinces. It is in the third century that we begin to hear of the greater barbarian nations, or groups of tribes, of the Alemanni and the Suevi, the Franks, the Saxons, the Goths, and the Vandals. Battle after battle was fought and triumph after triumph won against them, but they still pressed on. The weaker emperors essayed to buy them with gold, the wiser with land, the craftier set them to slay one another, but still they moved forward resistlessly, wave after wave, like the sea. This again was nobody’s fault. It may have been the movement of Tartar savages in the Far East which set the Wandering of the Nations in motion. Whatever it was, all eastern and northern Europe was seething with restless movement and the tide rolled on irresistibly against the bulwarks of civilisation. Triumphs as great and glorious as those of Scipio and Marius were gained by Roman armies even in the fourth century. But the enemy was ubiquitous, the task impossible.

It is, however, true that those bulwarks were weaker than they should have been, partly by reason of the internal disorganisation caused by perpetual struggles for the succession, and partly through certain visible errors in Roman statesmanship. For one thing, the spirit of peace and humanity which was ripening in the securer central parts of the Empire had probably impaired its instincts of defence. The modern world is trying just now to believe that you can retain the power of defence when you have given up all thoughts of aggression. It may be so. The Roman world failed in the attempt. Rome’s statesmen were now no longer soldiers, but lawyers and financiers. Even the prefects of the prætorian guard were lawyers. The army was a profession apart. Moreover, even the army had become so civilised that it had lost many of its martial qualities. Hadrian more than any other ruler is responsible for allowing the cannabæ or “booths” which had sprung up around the camps to grow into towns and even cities. The legions were now permanently established in their quarters, the soldiers married wives and occupied their leisure in business or husbandry. Hadrian it was, too, who in his large cosmopolitan spirit had introduced many and doubtless useful barbarian methods of fighting, so that the old Roman military traditions had fallen into desuetude. A legion was now no better than its auxiliaries. The auxiliaries were often barbarians and soon the legions themselves became completely barbarised. It was only a step further when barbarians were recruited in tribes to fight Rome’s battles under their own commanders.

Secondly, the whole Roman world was being slowly strangled with good intentions. The bureaucracy had grown so highly organised and efficient, so nicely ordered through its various grades of official life, that everybody walked in leading-strings to the music of official proclamations. Paternalism regulated everything with its watchful and benignant eye. The triumph of the system may be seen in the famous Edict of Prices issued by Diocletian in A.D. 301. Here we find scheduled a maximum price for every possible commodity of trade and a maximum wage for every kind of service. Death is the penalty for any trader who asks, or any purchaser who pays a higher price. No difference of locality or season is permitted. Trade is forbidden to fluctuate under penalty of death. This delightful scheme, which was engraved on stone in every market in Europe, was evidently the product of a highly efficient Board of Trade, which had sat late of nights over the study of statistics and political economy. Benevolent officials of this type swarmed all over the empire, spying and reporting on one another as well as on the general public.

The same system of blear-eyed officialism had found a still more ingenious method of throttling the society which it was endeavouring to nurse back into infancy. It was under Severus Alexander (about A.D. 230) that the various collegia or guilds were incorporated by charter, so that every industry whatever became a close corporation. This rendered the task of administration much simpler. It meant that every human occupation became hereditary. There was, for example, a guild of the coloni or tillers of the soil. The most benevolent of the emperors, Marcus Aurelius and the two Severi, had planted barbarians on Roman soil under condition of military service in lieu of rent. This service became hereditary also. Before long each piece of ground had to supply a recruit. The decuriones, moreover, or municipal senators, who had once been the honoured magistrates of their townships, also became a caste. As they were made responsible for the collection of property tax in their boroughs, and as wealth began to decline and taxation to increase, they were reduced to a condition of penury and misery. The exemption from taxation of whole classes of society, such as the soldiers and eventually the Christian clergy, added to their burdens. Then, since many of them attempted to evade the distresses entailed upon their rank by joining the army or even selling themselves into slavery, a decree was issued which made their office hereditary. It became a form of punishment to enrol an offender among these curiales. A decree of Constantine bound all the tillers of the soil in hereditary bondage for ever. In these ways Roman society fell into stagnation. Since the progress of the Manchurian Empire in China proceeded on very similar lines, it looks as if the benevolent despotism engendered by highly centralised government of very large areas was one of the methods by which Providence is accustomed to bring great empires low.

At the close of the third century Diocletian endeavoured to save the state by a bold revolution. He swept away the hollow pretence of republicanism and frankly surrounded the throne with every circumstance of majesty and ceremony. The free access which had generally been granted by the most despotic princes was replaced by an elaborate system of intermediaries. To meet the obvious needs of devolution in government, as well as to stop the incessant struggles for the succession, he invented an ingenious division of responsibility. Henceforth there were to be two Augusti, one taking the East and one the West. The Empire was not actually divided, for the joint writ of the two colleagues was to run all over it. Moreover each Augustus was to have a junior colleague, a “Cæsar,” acting as his lieutenant and prepared to step into his place. Ties of marriage were to unite all four into one close family alliance. There were now one hundred and sixteen provinces and Diocletian grouped them into thirteen “dioceses” each under a “vicar,” directly responsible to one of four “prætorian prefects,” who shared the administration of the whole. The troops were no longer subject to the provincial governors, but each army had a “Duke” (dux) of its own. Each frontier—and these were still further fortified—was under its own “Duke.” At the same time steps were taken to organise a central striking force—the comitatus of the emperors. The four Prefectures and thirteen Dioceses were as follows:

Italy, it will be observed, has now definitely declined into the status of a province among many, and Rome itself was not sufficiently near the frontier armies to be a convenient capital. Diocletian preferred to make his residence at Nicomedia. The senate, as a necessary consequence, receded into the background, and remained little more than a title of dignity. The emperor’s Consistory, a privy council composed of the heads of departments, took its place for practical purposes. The new hierarchy of officials rejoiced in barbaric titles which would have shocked the ears of a genuine Roman.

Naturally these advances in the direction of more and stronger government proved no alleviation of the woes which sprang from too much supervision. The most visible sign of decay was the decline of population which began to lay the central parts of the Empire desolate, and this sprang not only from economic burdens, but from racial decline. Money became so debased and worthless that the world actually went back to the system of barter.

Constantine signalised Diocletian’s plan of dividing the responsibility of government by founding a new capital at Byzantium. His motives were probably mixed. In the first place he would be free of the awkward republican traditions which still kept reasserting themselves, and in the second place Constantinople was a more central and a much more defensible situation. But, more than all, in this new Rome he could break away from the old religion. Constantine’s plan for restoring the tired and afflicted world was the adoption of Christianity. The Decree of Milan (313) made Christianity the official religion, though not the only religion, of the Empire. It was already the religion of the court—ever since Constantine had seen his famous vision of the Angel descending from Heaven with the sign of the Cross and uttering the words ἐν τούτω νίκα—“Hoc signo vinces.” Still half-pagan, the emperor had made the Cross his mascot, and in the strength of it had defeated his rival at the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome.[92] Constantine himself was by no means a saint; in murdering kinsmen he was, in fact, among the worst of the emperors, but unwittingly he saved the world by his conversion. Meanwhile the extravagance with which he adorned his new city afflicted the whole Empire with the burdens of fresh taxations.

The scheme of a divided Empire failed. After Theodosius (395) the division became permanent. The Eastern throne remained secure for another thousand years, protected by the admirable strategic position of Constantinople. The contempt with which it has hitherto been treated by historians is now beginning to break down, and it is seen that the Byzantine Empire not only stood as the bulwark for the West against the East but preserved for us the inestimable treasures of Greek intellect. The Roman tradition, now inextricably mingled with the Greek, lingered on there unchanged, even to the very chariot-races which still threw society into a ferment. To this day the inhabitants of Greece and Roumania distinguish themselves from their oriental neighbours by the proud title of “Romans.”

But in the West a series of phantoms succeeded one another upon the throne. The floodgates of the Rhine and Danube frontiers broke down completely and the new nations streamed into their heritage. Then it was found how truly Constantine’s policy had saved the world. Though the Goths took and plundered Rome (410), they came in not as pagan destroyers, but as Christian immigrants, and it was Gothic generals and Gothic armies who saved Europe from destruction. About 447 the Mongolian Huns under their terrible Attila came riding into western Europe from the steppes of Russia. They crossed the Rhine half a million strong, destroying and burning as they came. The Roman emperor’s sister Honoria proposed marriage to Attila, and the proud barbarian offered her a place in his harem if she would bring half the Western Empire as her dowry. The Roman general Aetius with a half-barbarian army in alliance with the Visigoths checked them at “The Battle of Chalons” and the peril drifted away. Aetius who had saved Rome was stabbed by his ungrateful emperor.

The Vandals had already overrun Spain and streamed across to Africa, whence they issued forth to make a second sack of Rome. Britain had been deserted rather by the choice of its army than by command of any emperor, and left a prey to the pagans of the north in 406. Italy itself was wholly in the hands of the barbarians, who lived on terms of apparent

equality with the Romans. Puppets wore the imperial purple and did the behests of barbarian “Patricians,” Ricimer the Suevian, Gundobald his nephew, and finally Odoacer, a tribeless barbarian from the north. By this time the Western Empire was dismembered for ever, and western Europe was merely a series of barbarian principalities. In 476 Odoacer removed the last puppet-emperor of Rome, who bore the significant name of Romulus Augustulus. The seat of the Western Empire had long been removed from the twice-sacked city of Rome, and the later princes had ruled from Ravenna, where the little mausoleum of the Empress Placidia, sister of Honorius, still stands as a type of the shrunken glories of the last successors of Augustus.[93]

In theory the Western Empire did not come to an end in 476. The Eastern emperors now claimed authority over the whole Roman world and exercised it so far as they could obtain obedience. Strong Cæsars like Justinian made their rule respected far and wide. Geographically and politically, the West had now begun its mediæval existence as a congeries of small kingdoms generally of uncertain extent.

But in a far truer sense Rome continued to rule the world as before. Her two great legacies, the Roman Law and the Roman Church, ruled it as completely as ever the legions had done. Even in politics, the grand conception of the Christian Republic, Church and State in one, with the Pope as the successor of St. Peter bearing the keys of Heaven and Hell, while the emperor as the successor of Augustus wielded its sword, continued for another thousand years to dominate Europe. It was under the ægis of this great idea that the young nations grew up and came into their own.

Thus the true history of Rome from this point is the history of the Church, and this is no place to relate it. But it may be contended here that the visible Church was as truly a creation of the Roman spirit as was the Empire itself. Rome had seized upon the teaching of One who lived in poverty and obscurity among slaves and outcasts, who preached against worldliness, formality, and ambition, who sent out His disciples to beg their way, and out of this, with her wonderful genius for government, she had created a powerful monarchy which could humble kings, and an organised ecclesiastical state which spread like a network over the earth and tamed the fury of the barbarians.

In the same way the culture of these latter days is to be found in Church History. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, and Tertullian are its representative writers and thinkers more truly than Ausonius or Claudian. Except for the Arch of Constantine,[94] which was mainly compiled out of earlier remains, its Art is to be found in the sacred mosaics of Constantinople or Torcello, or in the Byzantine ivories such as the famous Barberini panel, showing Constantine as the establisher of the Christian Faith.[95] Architecture continues to show remarkable developments, and in the wonderful palace which Diocletian constructed for his retirement at Spalato on the Dalmatian coast there are new combinations of the Roman arch with the Greek columns which are full of promise for the birth of Gothic art.[96] The earliest Christian churches designed on the plan of a Greek cross, with a dome covering the intersection of nave and transepts, is derived from Asia Minor and bears traces of the oriental influence which is so powerful in Byzantine Art.

CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY