Rome, by W. Warde Fowler: a Project Gutenberg eBook

Yet this did not happen before the name and fame of Rome had made such deep impression on their minds that they sought to deserve the inheritance which had thus fallen to them; despising, indeed, the degenerate provincials who struck no blow in their own defence, but full of respect for the majestic power which had for so many centuries confronted and instructed them.[19] They never swept away the civilisation of the Mediterranean; from Julius onwards the Roman rulers had done so much to defend it, had raised its prestige so high, had so thoroughly organised its internal life, that uncivilised peoples neither could nor would destroy it.

We still enjoy its best fruits—the art, science and literature of Hellas, the genius of Rome for law—for “the just interference of the State in the interests and passions of humanity.”[20] We may be apt at the present day, when science has opened out for us so many new paths of knowledge, and inspired us with such enthusiasm in pursuing them, to forget the value of the inheritance which Rome preserved for us. But this is merely a passing phase of feeling; it is really quite inconsistent with the character of an age which recognises the doctrine of evolution as its great discovery. It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else, will never be successfully disputed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following books are suggested as among those most likely to be useful to students who wish to pursue the subject further—

I. Large Histories. Mommsen: History of Rome to the Death of Cæsar, with an additional volume entitled The Provinces of the Roman Empire; the whole, in the English translation, is in seven volumes. Heitland: The Roman Republic, in three volumes (a recent publication). Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by Prof. Bury.

II. Smaller histories in one volume. Pelham: Outlines of Roman History (a masterly work). How and Leigh: A History of Rome to the Death of Cæsar. Bury: The Student’s Roman Empire. There are many school histories, but these are rather fuller and more interesting.

III. Books on special subjects of Roman life, etc. Greenidge: Roman Public Life, in Macmillan’s Handbooks of Art and Archæology. Warde Fowler: Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero. Life of Cicero, by Strachan-Davidson, and Life of Cæsar, by Warde Fowler, both in Putnam’s series of “Heroes of the Nations.” Cæsar’s Conquest of Gaul, by T. Rice Holmes. Dill: Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius.

IV. Ancient authorities in translation. Plutarch’s Roman Lives may be read with advantage in any translation, e.g. that of Langhorne. The most valuable lives are those of Cato the Elder, Æmilius Paullus, the two Gracchi, Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Cæsar, Brutus and Antony. There is a translation of the whole Correspondence of Cicero with his Friends, by E. S. Shuckburgh, published by Bell & Sons.

FOOTNOTES

[1]The best known of these, and perhaps the most beautiful, is that of Coriolanus, which has descended from Plutarch to Shakespeare, and so become immortal.

[2]The Latin words which expressed these two mutual rights, commercium and connubium, are still in use in various forms in the languages of modern Europe.

[3]The Latin word is fauces, i.e. jaws, etymologically the same word as the hause of our Lakeland, which means a narrow pass.

[4]Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 105.

[5]With the exception of the southern Samnites, who joined Hannibal after Cannæ.

[6]This was Fabius Maximus, who has given his name to the familiar phrase, “Fabian tactics.”

[7]Seeley’s Life of Stein, II. 422.

[8]Plutarch’s Lives of Cato the Elder and Æmilius Paullus, which can be read in a translation, will give examples of this better type of education.

[9]In Plutarch’s Life of him, especially chaps, v. and vi., where Plutarch is plainly reproducing the evidence of an eyewitness.

[10]He came of an old Roman patrician family.

[11]See below, p. 184.

[12]Georgics I, 463 foll.

[13]See below, p. 206.

[14]From Mr. James Rhoades’s version.

[15]Sir A. H. Layard.

[16]Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, 1st edn., p. 163.

[17]This is the title by which the princeps was usually known in the Empire; see e.g. Matt. xxii. 17 foll., or Acts xxv. 10 foll.

[18]By Hastings Crossley: Macmillan & Co.

[19]Bryce, Holy Roman Empire.

[20]This is Mommsen’s definition of Law.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FOOTNOTES

INDEX

Transcriber’s Notes