The family in early Rome may more unreservedly be pronounced a seed plot of morals than in the case of any other ancient people save the Chinese. It was ancestor worship which made it such a nursery of morality, for the cult of ancestors made the family a group of co-worshipers about the domestic hearth. This worship purified and braced morality, since the tutelary spirits were believed to watch over the morals of the family and to punish wrongdoing. No impure act could be committed in the presence of the chaste hearth fire, and no one guilty of unexpiated crime dared to come into its presence.522
But it was in constituting the father the high priest of the family group that this domestic worship exercised its greatest influence upon early Roman morality. It gave a religious sanction to the father’s authority and made the patria potestas for many centuries a molding force in the moral life of the Roman people.523 A little further on we shall see how, in the atmosphere of the home thus constituted, was fostered in the youth the virtues of submission to rightful authority, respect for law, and obedience to magistrates—virtues which were one secret of the strength and triumphs of early Rome.
Next after the family the state was the most important agency in the creation of the Roman type of virtue. We have to do here, as in Greece, with the city state. This was the chief sphere of duty of the Roman during his mature and active life. Consequently, just as it was the nature of the city state which in Greece determined in large measure what should constitute the supreme virtues and duties of the Greek ideal of character, so was it the constitution of Rome as a city state that, as we shall see a little later, determined what should be the leading virtues and duties entering into the Roman ideal of goodness. This made that ideal to be preëminently an ideal of civic duty. “Never since the fall of paganism have the civic virtues shone out so brilliantly.”524
Alongside domestic and political institutions stands, as we have seen, occupation as a creator and molder of the moral type of a people. The two occupations of the early Latins were farming and war, and thus it came about that in the primitive ethical type were united the sturdy moral qualities of the peasant farmer and the heroic virtues of the warrior. This blend produced one of the most admirable moral types of the ancient world.
Aside from the cult of ancestors, religion among the Romans exercised but little direct influence upon morality, for the reason that it was mainly a method of obtaining prosperity, of averting calamity, and of reading the future. There was in truth an almost complete separation of religion and morality. It was only in later times that the Roman philosophers sought in the moral character of the gods models for human imitation. But though religion had so little to do in creating the salient virtues of the moral type, it did reënforce the sentiment of patriotism, since the temple was a state institution, and in various other ways—as, for instance, in lending sanctity to oaths—quickened and strengthened the sense of obligation and duty.
In the bosom of the family was nourished what we may regard as the primal virtue of the Latin race—submission to authority.525 The son’s subjection to the father’s authority was complete throughout his whole existence. He could not disobey his father’s command. More than seven centuries after the founding of Rome the Emperor Tiberius absolved a certain person from guilt in participating in a revolt, because it was shown that he had acted under the orders of his father.526
This virtue of submission to rightful authority, of obedience to superiors, contributed much to the military efficiency of the Roman people. Indeed, it lay at the basis of their greatness in war. The consul’s authority in the field was like that of the father in the family, and obedience in the soldier was a habit, almost a religious instinct. Thus did this virtue, which had its starting point in the family, help largely to give the Romans the rule of the world.527
Patriotism, meaning submission, obedience, devotion to the state, was the saving virtue in the Roman ideal of excellence. “Patriot” and “good man” were identical terms. “Dear to us are our parents,” says Cicero, “dear our children, our kindred and our friends; but one’s country alone includes all our loves, for what good man would hesitate to die if he could promote her welfare.”528
Since war was the normal status of society in ancient times, the moral qualities of the Roman as of the Greek patriot were the virtues of the soldier—obedience, courage, and self-devotion in battle. And by no people, save perhaps the Japanese as shown in their recent history, has the soldierly virtue of self-renunciation for the fatherland been more exalted or more finely exemplified than by the Romans in early times.
In this ready self-devotion of the Roman hero to public interests we have an exhibition of the altruistic sentiment in its loftiest form, for of all forms of disinterested action, as Lecky maintains, the self-abnegation of the ancient warrior for his city was the most unselfish, for the reason that he made the sacrifice without any hope of reward in another life.529
In early Rome there was no such prejudice against labor as unworthy and morally degrading as we meet with at a later period. The fact that a large body of the citizens in primitive Rome were peasant farmers determined that the traditional virtues of this class should find a high place in the early national ideal of character. The moral or semi-moral qualities of the peasant, namely, simplicity, frugality, industry, and conservatism or respect for the past, formed the substratum of early Roman morality. It was from the primitive citizen peasantry that came the strong, tough, moral fiber of the old Roman character.
In dealing with the subject of the relation of the Roman religion to morality we may speak of religious duties but hardly of religious virtues, and for the reason that the aim of religion was the safety and welfare of the state. Neglect of the temple rites and sacrifices was believed to anger the gods, who would in their resentment bring terrible trouble and misfortune upon the nation—for the Romans never outgrew the conception of collective responsibility. Hence the careful performance of religious duties was a phase of patriotism. Neglect of these duties was antisocial conduct.530
In the performance of his religious duties the Roman conceived that all that was necessary was to do the right thing, to perform the right act, or repeat correctly the right formula; the disposition of mind and state of heart made no difference with the result. Man’s relations to deity were assimilated to his relations to nature. To secure a given result in the physical world, man needs only to do the right thing, as, for instance, to drop the seed into the ground at the right season and the harvest follows without any regard to the state of mind or heart of the person performing the act. This was the Roman’s conception of his relation to the gods. Hence religion and morality were practically separated. Religion failed to supply motives for moral action, except in so far as it reënforced the sentiment of patriotism.
From the foregoing brief notice of some of the chief expressions of the moral consciousness of the early Romans we cannot fail to recognize that their ideal of character was in many respects a very admirable one. Its realization in actual flesh and blood gives us those heroic characters which will live forever in Roman legend, and alongside the Greek heroes in the pages of Plutarch. It molded men grave, earnest, and austere, reverent toward superiors, patriotic and self-devoted to the common good.
But the ideal had great defects. One of the most conspicuous of these was its aristocratic character. Rome, writes Wedgwood, “accepts consistently and logically the aristocratic theory on which ancient society is based, and carries out the ideal of the Old World in all its naked impressiveness.”531 Though advancing far during a thousand years of eventful history toward ethical universalism, pagan Rome never actually reached this moral goal. She never recognized in practice the moral equality of all men. There were to the very last in the pagan Empire, classes, such as slaves and gladiators, who were practically outside the moral sphere. Even Roman Stoicism, which was the latest and noblest expression of the moral life of Rome, notwithstanding its cosmopolitan tendencies, was essentially aristocratic.
Another defect of the old Roman type of excellence was its exclusion of the gentler virtues—humility, tenderness, and sympathy with suffering. The type of character fostered by the ideal was hard and severe, even callous and cruel, proud and self-assertive. It was a type somewhat like the Spartan, one which, when the age of reflection came, naturally developed into the Stoic. The old Romans lacked the quality of mercy and compassion for weakness. They seemed almost destitute of the sentiment of pity for misfortune. Their treatment of prisoners of war and of their slaves in the later period was marked by a repellent brutality. The place in their amusements which the gladiatorial combats assumed evidences their callous insensibility to suffering.
Still another defect of this ideal was that it gave little or no place to the intellectual virtues. These ethical qualities which were assigned so prominent a place in the Greek type of excellence, and which since the Renaissance the Western world has come to esteem so highly, were never greatly valued by the Romans until they came under the influence of Greek culture, and then only by the few; hence their intellectual life was, in general, lacking in moral impulse. Mental self-culture was not with them, as it was with the Greeks and is coming to be with ourselves, a moral requirement.
The four essential facts in the moral life of Rome as a republic are: first, the high standard maintained in the early period; second, the gradual widening of the moral sympathies through the influence of conquest and advance in civilization; third, the general decline in morals during the two centuries preceding the establishment of the Empire; and fourth, the modification of the moral type through contact with Greece and the Orient.
Through the legendary haze which envelops all the earlier centuries of Rome, the one fact which stands out with comparative clearness is the Spartan-like loyalty of the old Roman to the ideal of character which he had conceived as the noblest and best. The legends of this period, invented or repeated by the men of a later age, celebrate qualities of character which we may believe really marked early Roman life and thought. Among these virtues were patriotic altruism, absolute self-abnegation for the common good, as illustrated by such tales as those of the self-devotion for the Roman people of Curtius and of the Elder and Younger Publius Decius Mus; reverence for law, as shown by the consul Lucius Junius Brutus in the condemnation of his sons to death for taking part in a conspiracy; and incorruptible integrity, as illustrated by the tales of Fabricius.
Even though all these stories of the heroic age of Rome be the invention of a later time, they at least show what at this later (though still comparatively early) period were highly esteemed qualities of character, just as the stories celebrating the filial piety of Chinese heroes of the olden time show how high a place this moral trait held in the ideal of the age that invented or repeated these tales with a didactic purpose.
The gradual broadening of the moral sympathies was a very important phase of the moral evolution in Roman society up to the end of the Republic. These sympathies embraced at first hardly more than the patrician class, which formed the nucleus of the early Roman community. The enlarging of the area covered by the ethical feelings was simply one phase, and, from the viewpoint of the student of morals, the most important phase of that political evolution which in the course of centuries brought within the sacred pale of Roman citizenship first the Plebeians, then the Latins, next the Italians, and finally all the freemen of the extended Roman dominions. That is to say, this central fact in Roman history, the expansion of the city into the world state, was in its deepest significance, in its remote consequences, as much a moral as a political movement. Conquest, it is true, prepared the way for the revolution, and the concessions made by the ruling class to the demands of the disfranchised classes and peoples were motived in the main by political prudence and expediency. But it is equally true that ethical sentiment worked with these other causes in determining the course and progress of the revolution, and that one of its most important results was the imparting of a great impulse to the widening moral movement going on in the ancient world, and the bringing to recognition of the principles of the moral equality and brotherhood of men.
This great all-embracing movement in the Roman world can, we believe, best be understood in its significance for the moral evolution of mankind only when translated into terms of the similar movement in modern times. We recognize the moral character, in a final analysis, of the revolution which, during the past century, has by successive enfranchisements admitted to a share in government and to the enjoyment of political rights the masses in modern civilized states. The movement has been largely ethical in its causes and still more largely ethical in its effects. The struggle of the people has had for aim to do away with unjust privilege and to establish equality and justice. The most important permanent effects of the revolution are indisputably to be looked for in the moral sphere. The incoming of democracy, meaning as it does the investing of the individual with dignity and worth, means the ennobling of the moral life of the world. It is this that constitutes the real significance of the democratic revolution and which gives it its important place in the moral history of humanity.532
The same is true of that phase of the modern movement which looks toward the formation of the world state. The forces at work here are admittedly varied and complex, but prominent among these agencies are the ethical. It is the broadening of the moral sympathies, the development of a true cosmopolitanism, a deepening consciousness of the brotherhood of men, the growth of a new social and international conscience—it is this slow evolution in the moral realm that has laid or is laying the true basis of the future world union. The universal state, once created,—this need not be argued,—would inevitably react powerfully and favorably upon the moral feelings and sympathies of men.
It was the same in the ancient world. The admission to full Roman citizenship, through successive enfranchisements, of all the freemen of the Roman dominions was at once the sign and the cause of a vast moral development. As fellow citizens with equal rights and privileges, men came to know and feel their ethical kinship. Likewise the establishment of the world state registered a great moral advance and supplied the conditions of a still greater progress. Had not the moral forces worked with the Roman legions, the world union could never have been formed, or, at least, if once formed, could never have been maintained for the long period that it was. It is probably true that the bringing by Rome of such a wide reach of lands under her rule did as much to awaken the sense of the brotherhood of man as did the teachings of Hebrew prophet or the culture and philosophy of Greece. It was certainly the political union of the civilized world that helped to awaken in Cicero and in the later philosophers of the Empire the conviction that the reach of the moral sympathies should be as extended as the human race. Thus the wide empire created by Rome was a potent influence making for ethical universalism. Never since the unification of the ancient world by Rome have the moral feelings of men been quite so narrow as before; never since has the conception of human brotherhood, the ideal of a united world, seemed so entirely a dream.
Notwithstanding this broadening movement in the moral domain, the last century of the Republic was marked by a great lowering of the earlier high moral standard and by a loss of some of the chief virtues of the primitive Roman type. There were many causes contributing to this moral degeneracy. Among these was the decay of institutions that had created or fostered the primitive moral type, and the growth of others, such as slavery and the gladiatorial games, which exercised a pernicious influence upon morality. Besides causes of this nature there were others which were the natural outcome of the career of conquest the Romans had led. The conquest of the world had imported into the Roman political and social system many alien elements unfavorable to morality, and had brought Roman civilization, on one side, into hurtful contact with the older and morally corrupt cultures of the Orient. In what follows we shall speak in some detail of the more important of these agencies, which in the later preimperial period undermined the originally sound morality of the Roman people.
A first cause of the moral deterioration was the decay of the city constitution. We have seen that the free city state was the chief nursery of those patriotic virtues which constituted the cardinal moral qualities of the Roman ideal of character. But by the beginning of the last century preceding the Christian era various causes, chiefly, however, the mere widening of the Roman territory through conquest, had undermined the political institutions of Rome and had converted into mobs of the proletariat the public assemblies of citizens. The original constitution of the city had become an empty form, and the way had been paved for the setting up of monarchical government.
With the passing of the city state those civic patriotic virtues which the discipline of the democratic city constitution had trained and developed, disappeared.533 As the Christian Church, which was destined in the fullness of time to take the place of the city in the minds and hearts of men and become the object and inspirer of moral enthusiasm, had not yet come in with its new ideal of virtue, there ensued a sort of moral interregnum, such as usually marks transition periods in the history of states and races.
A second cause of the moral decline is to be found in the decay of the Italian peasantry. This economic revolution had its real starting point in the Hannibalic War. That protracted struggle, carried on largely in Italy itself, practically ruined the peasant class in many districts, and their little farms were absorbed by the growing estates of the great landholders—those latifundia which Pliny later declared to have been the ruin of Italy.
The practical disappearance of the Italian peasant farmer meant the disappearance of those simple robust virtues, bred in thousands of homes of the countryside, like the little Sabine farm of the Elder Cato, which had contributed so largely to determine the type of Roman character.
The decay of the Italian peasantry was accompanied by the development of the slave system, so that at the same time that the peasant home, a nursery of sterling if crude virtues, was being destroyed, the slave estate with its chain gangs and its ergastula, a very hotbed of degrading vices, was being created. Of all the institutions that contributed to the moral degradation of the later Republic, slavery as it developed here must be assigned the first place of evil preëminence. Its effects were equally debasing upon the master, the slave, and the poor farmer. It tended to render more callous and cruel the spirit of the master,534 to destroy the moral character of the slave, to undermine family morals,535 and, by placing a stigma upon labor, to degrade the free laborer. Thus did the institution tend to develop in different classes of the population feelings, sentiments, and a disposition of mind wholly unfavorable to the existence or the development of a sound moral life in society at large.
In placing a stigma upon labor, slavery did not create a new prejudice, but merely intensified and made more inclusive a prejudice already existing. As we have seen, there existed in classical antiquity a deep-rooted feeling against manual labor as morally unworthy of a freeman. Agriculture was the only occupation which escaped this general condemnation, and which was regarded as becoming a gentleman.536 Cicero declares all mechanical laborers to be by virtue of their profession mean, the gains of hired workmen to be ungenteel, and says that all retailers of merchandise should be despised.537 Even buying and selling on a large scale did not entirely escape the taint of retail merchandizing; it was merely a little less despicable.
This general contempt for the occupations of the artisan and merchant rendered impossible the development of industrial virtues in the Roman masses. Torn from the soil and swept into the cities by the movement cityward in this period, the free poor, too proud to engage in occupations which were looked upon as degrading, were stranded in idleness and exposed to all the demoralizing influences of city life. Crowds of them became the dependents of the rich and formed that despicable client class of the later Republic and the early Empire whose abominable vices roused the anger and provoked the scorn of the satirists and moralists of the time.
A direct outgrowth of the presence in Rome of this great multitude of the idle free poor was the evil of the corn laws. The indiscriminate public free distribution of corn to the poorer citizens—prompted, for the most part, not by genuine humanitarian feelings but by unworthy political and personal motives—had a most debauching effect upon morals. It intensified the very evil it was supposed to ameliorate. It attracted still greater crowds of the idle to the capital, depressed to a still greater degree agriculture in Italy,—grain for distribution being imported in the main from Egypt and North Africa,—and checked every tendency toward the formation of habits of industry, self-reliance, and thrift in the lower classes. The evil attained its climax when the largesses became an undisguised bid by the corrupt demagogue for popular favor—the naked price paid by rich plotters against the commonwealth for the support of the morally debauched and fickle proletariat.
The idle population of Rome had not only to be fed but to be amused. The same motives that had led to the enormous increase in the largesses of grain to the free poor contributed also to the multiplication of the spectacles of the circus and the amphitheater, particularly of the gladiatorial games, which, introduced at Rome in the third century B.C., had now become the favorite amusement of the Roman populace. “That not only men, but women in an advanced period of civilization,—men and women who not only professed but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals,—should have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for centuries, with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts in moral history.”538
But this fact is by no means an isolated or unique one in the ethical history of mankind. The student of the history of morals is often brought face to face with similar facts in the annals of every race and of every age. The fact with which the moralist is here confronted is hardly more startling than the hideously barbarous treatment of their enemies by the deeply pious Jews; the heartless massacre at times of their prisoners by the naturally humane Greeks; the savage severity of the medieval inquisitors toward heretics, while in general showing the greatest compassion and sympathy for those in pain and distress; the atrocious cruelty of the punishments meted out to offenders against society by the Christian governments of Europe down almost to the last century; the callous insensibility, until just now, of modern society to “the bitter cry of the children” of its city slums; and, above all, the glorification of war by the professed followers of Him whose most distinctive title is the Prince of Peace.
But just as all these startling inconsistencies and aberrations in moral conduct may be explained, in part at least, by reference to the effect upon the moral sympathies of tribal religion, of political rancor and fanaticism, of false theological dogmas, and of bad bequests of practices and conventions unreflectingly adopted by an advanced civilization from ages of barbarism and savagery, so is it possible in the same way to explain and render in a measure comprehensible to ourselves the existence without protest among the comparatively cultured Romans of such an institution as that of the gladiatorial combats. The system was fostered by slavery and the Romans’ occupation of war. The Roman people were originally stern and just; slavery and war tended to make them hard and callous. Slavery created a sort of caste morality, which excluded from the moral sphere large classes as completely as though they belonged to the dumb-animal creation. It was these pariah classes that contributed a large portion of the victims of the cruel sport. The enormous quantities of human flesh and blood required to nourish the system could have been found in no society except in one where a considerable part of the population had been degraded to a mere animal plane of existence and thus put practically beyond the range and reach of the moral feelings.
Like slavery, the constant wars in which the Romans were engaged tended to indurate their feelings and to destroy all sense of the sanctity of human life. In what way the military life of the Romans reacted upon their feelings and sentiments and molded even their ethical theories is shown by the fact that the Roman moral philosophers in general defended and approved the combats of the amphitheater on the ground that they inured the soldier to the sight of blood and taught him contempt of death.539
The effect of these inhuman spectacles upon morality was most lamentable. They hindered the growth of humane feelings in the men, deadened every tender sensibility of the women, habituated the young to scenes of cruelty,540 and developed finally the normal impassiveness of the Roman temperament into a fierce delight in human suffering.541
The influence of religion upon Roman morality was never great; still, as we have seen, the Roman’s sense of duty was in some degree strengthened by his belief in the gods and in their general watch over the conduct of men. Hence that growth of philosophic doubt among the learned class which characterized the later period of the Republic, and the transformation of religion into gross superstition among the debased population of the cities, contributed to hasten and render more decisive the moral decline we are tracing.
The apparent teaching of history is that there is an antithesis between wealth and morality. It is a commonplace of the records of civilization that as a community has advanced in material prosperity and waxed rich it has gone backward in morals. The growth in great riches of a people has usually been the prelude to their moral degeneracy and loss of place in the competition of races and cultures.
There ought certainly to be no antithesis between riches and morality, any more than between intellectual culture and morality. To suppose that there is any natural and necessary incompatibility between these two elements of civilization is to suppose that there exists a fatal antinomy at the very heart of the cosmic evolution.
That moral degeneracy should be the common accompaniment of a community’s growth in wealth, springs not from the mere possession of wealth, but in the main from its inequitable distribution. Thus far in history, as a society has grown in riches it has become divided into two sharply contrasted classes, the very rich and the very poor. Now each of these extremes is unfavorable to morality. Excessive fortune gives birth to luxury, to gross, extravagant, and unethical uses of wealth. Particularly is this likely to be true if the elevation to affluence has been sudden and from comparative poverty. The reason of this is, as was long ago pointed out, that men before they have learned self-control have placed in their hands means for the unlimited satisfaction of every appetite and desire, and generally the desire of such men is for indulgence in gross sensuous and sensual forms of pleasure. On the other hand, extreme poverty is equally disastrous to morals; for poverty means almost inevitably undue nutrition of body and soul, and generally squalid and insanitary conditions of life that destroy at once physical and moral health, and breed in the young and old alike the most repellent and contagious forms of vice.
Now while at every period of Roman history we find two classes, the rich and the poor, the extremes of wealth and poverty do not appear until about a century before the establishment of the Empire.542 And unfortunately all the conditions which tend to render such inequality of fortune especially pernicious to morals were existent at this time in Roman society. The men into whose control came the great fortunes of the period were generally men of servile origin, because law and public sentiment prevented the senatorial order from engaging in trade or commerce. These men, who had not yet outgrown the grossness and vices of the slave class from which they had sprung, with unlimited wealth at their command, and “without the restraint of traditions or ideals,” were naturally prone to indulge in vulgar luxury, in ostentatious extravagance, and in orgies of sensuality.
At the same time at the other end of the social scale were the very poor, subjected to the debasing influences of idleness, of a grossly immoral stage, and of the brutalizing spectacles of the amphitheater. The relations of the large number of propertyless clients to their wealthy patrons bred in this class the hateful vices of servility and hypocrisy.543
Thus the division of Roman society into two classes, the overrich and the very poor,—a division which is always the sign and register of social maladjustment and injustice,—became one of the most potent causes of that moral degeneracy which relaxed the fiber of the Roman race and preluded the downfall of the Republic.
After the conquest of the East the national character of the Romans was subjected to a great variety of influences from Greece and the half-Hellenized countries of the Orient. Many of these influences, as we shall notice a little later, had a strengthening and uplifting effect upon Roman life, especially in the upper circles of society, but in general the new elements now imported into Roman civilization from the Hellenistic East were hurtful to morals. Rome “sucked poison from the Attic bloom decayed.”
It is a commonplace of history that at the time of the Roman conquest of the East the great semi-Hellenized cities of the Orient were sinks of moral corruption. Brought into close contact with these morally debased communities, Roman civilization was at once infected with the fatal virus. Streams of impurity overflowed every country of the once moral West. The Orontes emptied into the Tiber. Oriental vices and luxury came in as a flood. The primitive Roman virtues of frugality and simplicity disappeared. Greek cooks, we are told, brought a higher price than Greek philosophers.
Almost every element of the Greco-Oriental culture seemed to bear within it the seeds of moral deterioration and decay. Greek philosophy, pervaded in general by a spirit of skepticism, tended to unsettle still more positively the already shaken faith of the Romans in their ancestral gods. Roman morality, in so far as it was supported by religious belief, was thus fatally impaired. The Epicurean philosophy, if not—as taught by most of the Sophists—a direct incentive to vice, afforded at least a ready apology for indulgence in coarse and gluttonous pleasures.
The plays presented on the Roman comic stage were mostly pieces of the Greek drama, which, in the process of adaptation to a Roman audience, had been made coarse and dissolute. Thus the theater became one of the most effective agencies of social corruption. In the words of Mommsen, it was “the great school at once of Hellenism and of vice.”544
A much more important fact in the moral history of the later Republic than this lowering of the standard of conduct is the change which was being effected in the moral ideal itself. While certain causes were at work depressing the moral standard to the lowest point, perhaps, that it ever touched in the long history of Rome, there were other causes in operation which were slowly modifying the old Roman type of character and creating a new type made up largely of new virtues. We speak of this change in the ideal as a fact of greater significance than that of moral degeneracy, for the reason that a decline in actual morality, the failure of a people to live up to the best they know, is always a superficial and transient phenomenon compared with the changes effected by different influences in the moral type itself, since these changes constitute the very essence of the ethical evolution.
The causes at work modifying the old Roman ideal of character were various; but more vital than all other influences were those that came through the contact of Rome with Greek culture and the civilizations of the Orient. At the heart of these ancient cultures were ethical elements of inestimable value. Among these were the Greek humanitarian spirit and the various intellectual virtues which characterized the Greek type of excellence; and, in the Oriental theosophic cultures, a deeply religious spirit and the religious virtues which marked the moral ideals of the Eastern nations, particularly the Egyptian, the Persian, and the Hebrew. We recognize the supreme importance for the later moral history of Rome, as well as for that of the whole Western world, of the ethical products of the religious culture of Judea, but we do not recognize as fully the importance of the ethical elements of the secular culture of Greece and of the theosophic civilizations of Egypt and Persia. But Rome’s ethical debt to these older cultures was also indisputably great.
But since these Greco-Oriental influences which were at work modifying the old Roman type of character had not wrought their full effects before the close of the third century of the imperial period, we shall reserve further comment on them, and on the new composite type they were contributing to create, for the next division of this chapter, in which we shall follow the trend of the moral evolution under the pagan Empire.
Roman society throughout the first century of the pagan Empire, as mirrored in the literature of the period, presents a picture of frightful moral degeneracy. This state of things was largely an inheritance from the Republic. It was the continuation of that moral decline which began in the second century B.C., and some of the contributing causes of which, such as slavery, the spectacles of the amphitheater, the free distribution of corn, together with contact with the dissolute civilizations of the Orient, were considered briefly in the preceding pages. Since all these causes of moral degradation were still at work in the society of the early Empire, and as fresh agencies of malign influence were added to them, it was inevitable that the moral anarchy should not only continue but should grow worse.
The definitive establishment of the Empire and the passing of the liberal institutions of the Republic changed wholly the atmosphere in which had been nourished the virtues of Republican Rome. Political liberty was dead, and all true civic activity, which had been the very breath of life to the citizen of the ancient city, had come to an end. In the new world that was forming there was no room for the exercise of those patriotic virtues which had made the early history of Rome so great, and had given her the rule of the world.545
One wholly fresh cause of moral debasement was the personal character of several of the occupants of the imperial throne during the first century of the Empire. The Oriental extravagancies and coarse debaucheries which disgraced the court of a Claudius, a Caligula, or a Nero, communicated their virus to every part of the social body. Never did the proverb, “As court, so people,” have such justification. At the same time the tyranny which marked the rule of more than one of the emperors instituted a demoralizing terror like that of the proscriptions of the Civil Wars. Under the influence of the frightful persecutions of their order, the senatorial aristocracy, with moral fiber now relaxed and corroded by effeminate luxury, lost seemingly all those virtues which earlier had characterized their class, and was transformed into a body at times sycophantic, cringing, and base almost beyond belief. But it is doubtful if any other aristocracy which history has known would have stood the test any better. The French nobility of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, excluded from participation in political affairs by the divine-right monarchy, and made servile dependents of the court, exhibited almost as depressing a spectacle of moral degeneracy as did the higher Roman classes under the more frightful tyranny of the early Cæsars.
But we may here profitably call to mind the words of Wedgwood to the effect that the phenomenon of moral decay, although the most striking, is not the most significant fact in the moral history of a race or of an age. “The fact that an old ideal is perishing,” remarks this writer, “must always be a stronger or at least a more obvious moral influence than the fact that a new one is coming into life.... A death is more impressive than a birth.”546
What in this reflection claims our attention here is the implied truth that the passing of the old means the coming of the new. At the base of the falling leaf there is always a new-forming bud. It is not otherwise in the moral world. Unless the forces of the moral life have become fatally impaired, the decay of an old ideal of excellence is ever accompanied by the growth of a new and better one. And it was so in the Rome of the early Cæsars. The Roman ancestral ideal of character, with its attractive civic and heroic virtues, was indeed falling into decay and passing away, but a new and better ideal of goodness was slowly forming and winning the allegiance of the select spirits of the age.
Lecky distinguishes in the moral history of pagan Rome three periods characterized “by the successive ascendancy of the Roman, the Greek, and the Egyptian spirit.” Up to near the end of the Republic the moral ideal was essentially Roman; during the first and second centuries of the Empire it was characterized by the dominance of the humanitarian and cosmopolitan spirit of Greece; while in the third and last century of the pagan Empire it was marked by the ascendency of the Egyptian spirit of religious reverence.547 In the immediately following pages we shall consider the second of these periods.