Chapter XXXI: The Age of Augustus--Aspects of Its Civilisation (3)

It was in the schools of rhetoric, we may believe, that Livy learned that indifference to historical accuracy, that sacrifice of the substance to the form of truth, which has cast so fatal a shade over the lustre of his immortal work. As a friend of the ancient oligarchy, and an aristocrat in prejudices and temper, it seems improbable that he would have carried his Roman history down to his own times, had he not submitted to throw a veil over his sentiments, and made his book such as Augustus himself might sanction for the perusal of his subjects. The emperor, indeed, is said to have called him a Pompeian, and to have complained of the colours in which he portrayed the men of the opposite side; but this could only have been in jest; the favour in which he was held by the courtiers of the empire, and his being suffered to assist the studies of the young prince, Claudius Germanicus, show that he was not seriously regarded as a disaffected politician. The scorn which Livy heaps on the tribunes and demagogues, and his ignorant contempt for the plebs, evince the leaning of his mind to the side of the nobility. But these are obviously the views of the rhetorician rather than of the historian; and Augustus, tribune and demagogue as he was, could distinguish between the hollow commonplaces of a perverted education and the stern judgment of a genuine conviction. The loss of all the latter portions of this extensive work must be deplored for the number of facts it has swept into oblivion; but the facts would have been valuable rather from the inferences which modern science might deduce from them, than from the light in which the author would himself have placed them. Livy, taking the pen in middle life, and continuing to pour forth his volumes in interminable succession, perhaps to the end of his long career,--for born in the year 59 B.C., he died in 17 A.D.,--left it still apparently unfinished, at the close of his hundred and forty-second book, and with the demise of Drusus Germanicus.[4] It may be conjectured that the latter portions of the work were overtaken by the garrulity of old age, and were suffered to fall into oblivion from their want of political or literary value.

It is in the earlier books, however, that the spirit of Livy found the sphere most congenial to it; the first and third decades, containing the early history of the kings and consuls, and again the grand epic of the war with Hannibal, have always retained their pre-eminence in general esteem as the noblest specimens of narration. The greatest minds of Rome at this period seemed to have kindled with inspiration from the genius of the founder of the empire; and of these Livy at least appears to have conceived unconsciously the idea of attaching his countrymen to the early records of their city, by encircling it with a halo of poetical associations. The imagination of the Romans of that age was inflamed by the conservative reaction which sought to throw a bridge over the chaos of the last century, and revive the sense of national continuity.

The thanks the race of Romulus owed to Livy, for making them acquainted with their ancestors and proud of their descent, were akin to those which Englishmen acknowledge to the historical dramas of Shakspeare. He took the dry chronicles, in which alone their first affairs were written, drew forth from them the poetic life of half-forgotten traditions, and clothed it again in forms of ideal beauty. His narrative, glowing in all the colours of imagination and fancy, is just as faithful to its authorities as the dramatised histories of the English bard to theirs; indeed, the myths of Romulus and Tarquin cannot lie farther from the truth of facts than the tragedies of Lear and Cymbeline; and when he begins to tread the domain of sober history, his painted Hannibals and Scipios approach as nearly to the men themselves as the Richards and Henrys of our own mighty master.

The charms of Livy’s style became the happy conjunction of circumstances under which he wrote, and combined with it to give him that pre-eminence among Roman historians which he never afterwards lost. Events and characters of deepest interest became immutably fixed in the lines in which he had represented them. Henceforth every Roman received from Livy his first youthful impressions of his country’s career, which thus became graven forever in the mind of the nation. It was in vain that the inaccuracy of these relations, and in many cases their direct falsehood, were pointed out by the votaries of truth, or by jealous and unsuccessful rivals; henceforth it was treason to the majesty of Rome to doubt that Porsenna was driven in confusion from her walls, or that the spoils of the Capitol were wrested again from the triumphant legions of Brennus.[g]

Such are the estimates placed upon the work of Livy by those who view him from the coldly analytical standpoint of the technical historian. But we must not leave the greatest writer of Latin prose without seeking a more sympathetic interpretation of his influence. Let us turn to the estimate of one who was himself an historian kindred in spirit to Livy--one who approached history from the standpoint of the artist and humanitarian,--M. Taine. Here is his estimate of

LIVY AS THE ARTISTIC LIMNER OF THE ROMAN PEOPLE

There are three ways of representing character [says Taine]: the author may stop to think and compose a portrait, in a philosophical style, as Thucydides does; one may paint people by their actions, a method followed by Tacitus and the poets; or he may portray them by exposing their opinions in speeches; this is Livy’s and the orator’s talent.

The finest of all his portraits is that of the Roman people. Each speech, each oratorical narrative revises and perfects it, and it is easily seen that Livy has not taken it from the ancient authors but that it is entirely his own. In the combat of Horatius Cocles, what pride and what vigour! It is not likely that the Romans in one year had become such unruly republicans. But how well the fable is hidden under a noble passion! Throwing towards the chiefs of the Etruscans savage and threatening glances, sometimes provoking them one after another, sometimes insulting them collectively.“Slaves of insolent kings, forgetting your own liberty, you come to attack that of others!” If this passage is theatrical, it is grand, and eloquence nobly adorns “the beginning of this liberty.”

Dionysius makes Mucius an ingenious Greek, who terrifies good Porsenna and saves himself by a stratagem with a double result. In Livy Mucius is a hero. “Seized by the guards and brought before the king’s court, even then, in the midst of such dangers, he was more to be feared than to be frightened. ‘I am a Roman citizen,’ he said, ‘I am called C. Mucius, enemy. I wished to kill an enemy, and I am as ready to die as to kill. A Roman can dare all and suffer all. I am but the first to bring against thee their courage; behind me is a long train of men who seek the same honour. Prepare thyself if thou wilt, for the struggle. At each hour, thou wilt fight for life and thou wilt have a dagger and an enemy in the vestibule of thy palace. We young men declare this kind of war against thee. Fear neither army nor combat, this affair is between each of us and thee alone.’

“The king, at the same time excited by anger and terrified by fear, ordered him to be surrounded by flames, if he did not at once explain these ambiguous threats of conspiracy. ‘Look,’ said Mucius, ‘in order to understand what a small thing the body is to those who behold a great glory.’ He put his hand in a brasier lighted for the sacrifice, and left it there, as if unconscious of the pain.” In Dionysius, Clœlia asks the guards permission to bathe, requests them to withdraw a little whilst she disrobes herself, and then quietly crosses the Tiber. In reading the inventions of clever poltroonery, one respects Livy for having written as a Roman.

It is pride and not interest which makes the Roman people revolt against a master. See in what manner Cincinnatus judges tyranny. Does Livy forget that he lived under Augustus? When Melius was stretched out on the market-place, “He has been justly killed,” says the dictator; “a man should not be treated as a citizen, who, born of a free people, in the centre of privileges and laws, conceived the hope of ruling, knowing that kings had been driven from that city; that the same year, the king’s nephews, sons of the consul who liberated the country, being denounced for having plotted to re-establish kings, had been beheaded with an axe by their father; and that the Consul Tarquinus Collatinus, in hatred of his very name, had been obliged to leave his magistracy to go into exile.”

All these arguments are derived from the dignity of the Roman people, issue of the gods, exultant master-elect of the world, whose high self-esteem is its dominating passion. This people kills a tyrant, not in the cause of justice, but in order that it may become a tyrant itself for love of empire. This need of commanding is so natural to the Romans that it seems to them to be a divine right. When the Latins, who for over two hundred years made up half of the army and achieved half the victories, claimed the equal rights they deserved, the Roman people were as indignant as if it were sacrilege. The consul frankly says that if the Roman senators were mad enough to obey a man of Setia, he would come, sword in hand, into the senate, and that he would kill every Latin he saw in the curia with his own hand. Then turning towards Jupiter’s statue, he cries: “Listen to these crimes, Jupiter, hear them, Right and Justice! Foreign consuls, a foreign senate, inaugurated in Jupiter’s temple, thyself captive and oppressed, that is what thou wouldst see.”

This sublime insolence proves that these men had souls worthy of kings. A government like a man has its own personality. One feels in the orations of Demosthenes the generous indignation and eloquent pain of an artistic and philosophical people, which appeals to the gods and to men against brutal strength, envelops itself in its own glory before falling. The decrees of the Roman senate are the verdicts of a judge who overwhelms the heart by his imperious hardness before crushing the enemy with his armies.

When Popilius, tracing a circle around the king of Syria, ordered him to answer him before stepping over it, he did nothing very extraordinary. All the Romans treated foreigners as subjects.

From this public and private pride, born with the foundation of Rome, nourished by a succession of victories and by habitual domination, there resulted a particular kind of courage. The Romans do not fight through an outburst of bravery and of imagination, as the Athenians, or for the need of action and activity like the barbarians, but by maxims of pride and obstinacy. Their defeats are admirable. At Lake Trasimenus, battalions of soldiers charge through the victorious army by which they are surrounded. At Cannæ, ranged in a circle, fifty thousand men die to the last man, those in front ceaselessly falling and those behind taking their place.

The Romans fight for honour and duty, incapable of yielding, because the heart of men revolts against the slightest approach and appearance of pardon, because humiliation is worse than ruin, because it is better to lose everything than to yield an inch. That is why Rome becomes prouder in reverse and only consents to treat in order to pardon, why she will only suffer around her protégés, suppliants, and subjects, and “carries her empire as far as the earth and her courage as high as the sky.” Pride renders one calm. The man who aims at being worthy remains serious, and the Romans without emotion or enthusiasm accomplished the greatest results. Pride sanctifies the fatherland because the citizen gets from it glory and ascendency, without which he cannot exist. Pride sacrifices the family because it considers as weakness the affections on which it is founded.

Livy shows in his speeches how simple, quiet, and deliberate self-sacrifice is in Rome. Q. Fabius presided over the comitia; the first hundred nominate his nephew Otacilius consul. He stops the voting and coldly says, “We have tried thee, Otacilius, in lesser posts, and thou certainly hast done nothing which justifies us giving thee more important ones. For three reasons did we equip the fleet you commanded this year; in order to lay the African coast, in order to protect the shores of Italy, and above all that no reinforcements, food, or money be sent through from Carthage to Hannibal. Name Otacilius consul, if he has rendered to the state--I don’t say all these services, but a single one. It matters more to thee, Otacilius, than to any one else that a burden under which you would be crushed be not laid on your shoulders. Herald, recall to the vote the century of the young men of Anio.” As Otacilius cries out with rage that Fabius himself wishes to remain in the consulship and throws himself upon him, the consul orders the lictors to approach, and he informs Otacilius that, not having entered the city, his arms and arrows have been carried on in advance. Fabius is so sure of his disinterestedness that he does not fear appearing ambitious and tyrannical, and the people judging the same, at once elect him consul.

The son of Manlius has fought against his father’s orders. He appears with his spoil. Without saying a word to him, the father turns away and orders the army to be assembled, and at once the following sentence, “Since without respect for consular authority or paternal majesty, T. Manlius, thou hast against orders, outside the ranks, fought the enemy, and destroyed, as far as was in thy power, military discipline, upon which until to-day Roman deeds have always stood; since thou hast forced me to forget either the republic or myself and mine, let us rather bear the penalty of the crime ourselves than that the republic pay so heavily for our fault. We shall be a sad but salutary example to coming generations. Without doubt, a father’s natural love and that proof of courage deceived by empty glory move me in thy favour. But since it is necessary by thy death to sanction the orders of the consuls or by thy pardon forever to nullify them, I do not think if there runs a drop of our blood in thy veins, that thou willst refuse to restore by thy punishment military discipline, which has been overthrown by thy error. Go, lictor, tie him to the stake.”

This argument, which ends like a thunderbolt, is terrible because it is so sudden. Judge by this example to what an extent Roman zeal was carried. In the soul of the magistrate there seemed to exist a permanent tribunal which was ever ready to deliver judgment. They had no need to raise themselves above their own level in order to attain self-denial; it came naturally to them. In the same way the savages of America tranquilly offered up their limbs for torture and by education, temperament, habit, and nature mocked at what the martyrs with all their exaltation dared hardly face.

The soothsayer having declared that the victorious army must lose its general, Manlius and his brother general without any signs of emotion, summon their officers on the eve of battle and agree that there, where they saw the army give way, one or the other should sacrifice himself.

By pride of citizenship, Livy brings out the fine sides of this character; by precision of oratory, he reveals the characteristic features, for he is obliged to arrange his subject to suit his audience and to touch Roman passions by Roman arguments. Consider in Camillus’ discourse, that religion which is really but a doctrine, so minutely and carefully following the consecrated form, so attached to outward rites, observing not the spirit but the letter which alone prevents the people from emigrating to Veii. As it is political and local it attaches the government and the citizen to the soil. “We have a town founded according to omens and augurs in which there is not a corner where the gods and their worship are not to be found. Our solemn sacrifices take place on certain days. Will you forsake, Romans, all these private and public gods? How little your actions resemble that of the young M. C. Fabius whom the enemy watched with as much admiration as you, when, amongst the Gallic javelins, coming down from the citadel he offered up on the Quirinal the solemn sacrifice of the house of Fabia. The vestals can only have one abode, one from which nothing can eject them except the surrender of the town. Jupiter’s flamen cannot spend one night outside Rome without crime. Would you make these Roman priests Veientine priests, and would you abandon vestal virgins? Oh, Vesta! And the flamen living in another country, shall he every night commit an impious act which the republic must atone for with him? Here is the Capitol, where a human head was once found, when the soothsayers said that here would be the head of the world and the seat of the empire. Here are Vesta’s sacred fire, the shields fallen from heaven, and, if you stay here, the gods all-merciful.”

One sees that the love of country is as much religious as it is political; the gods live on the soil and are Romans; what must be the strength of this sentiment which unites all others! In our days they are separate. The town we live in, the religion we follow, and the country to which we belong make up three distinct worlds, often unfriendly to each other. Amongst the ancients, there was but one, the city. The family was sacrificed to it; it made one with religion; the soul and thought of man were absorbed in his country; and from every point of view, the citizen alone was visible.

THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES

Let us try in a few words to sum up the philosophy of the epoch as it is given by our contemporaries. We are not leaving Livy behind us by showing how his work has been perfected. “Great queen,” said Bossuet, before Henrietta Maria’s tomb, “I gratify your tenderest desires in praising this great monarch, and your heart, dust though it is, awakes to hear me.” Livy would not listen with indifference to the modern philosophers who explain, perfect, and complete the history of his country. To act with a personal interest in view, and consequently to organise the means of so doing is the dominant trait in the history and genius of Rome. Therefore its spirit is that of calculating reflection rather than of poetical invention and philosophical speculation, and its character consists of a reasoned will, not of feelings or affections.

From this arises that never-ending struggle with the unfruitfulness of a naturally sterile land, that contempt for him who loses his patrimony, the fame of him who increases it, economy, frugality, greed, avarice, the spirit of chicanery, all the virtues and all the vices which generate and preserve wealth, the tendency to regard property as a sacred trust, and the boundary of a field as a limitation of divine origin, the protection of lands and credit by severe laws, legal deeds drawn up in minute and inviolable forms--in a word, every institution calculated for the protection of acquired property.

In other countries the natural family, established on the basis of a common origin, is ruled by the affections; but the Roman family, absolutely civil, founded on a community of obedience and of rites, is only the chattel and the property of the father, governed according to his will, subordinate to the state, ever bequeathed by law in the presence of the state, a kind of province in the hands of the father which supplies soldiers for the public benefit.

Made up of different races, united by violence, the work of force and will, and not of relationship and nature, the Roman state contained two organised bodies, struggling regularly and legally, not through passion, but through interest, and united under the best devised and organised constitution that has ever been known. By the state’s systematic and methodical mode of conquest for the sole object of preserving and exploiting, military art was carried to the highest possible point, and political skill and administrative talent united to bring together by force the whole of the then known world into an empire organised by one dominant city.

Roman policy consisted in turning the conquered nations into Roman soldiers, and foreign princes and magistrates into Roman ministers, thus strengthening the controlling power at the least possible expense. Military art consisted in subjecting the bravest and strongest soldiers to the strictest obedience, that is to say, in obtaining the greatest amount of strength from the vast forces at command. All her wisdom was exerted to increase her power and to spare herself. An institution of will, a machine for conquest, a matter of organisation, the state occupied all thought, absorbed all love, and claimed submission in every act and institution.

The sway of personal interest and national egoism produces a contempt for humanity. The human species, when unconquered, is looked upon as material for conquest, conquered it is a prey to be made use of and abused. Slaves are trampled upon with atrocious cruelty, entire nations are destroyed, vanquished kings are led in triumph and put to death.

The gods are abstractions, and utterly without poetry, such as calm reflection discerns in the humblest agricultural or domestic operations, scourges adored through fear, foreign gods received into the temple through interested motives as vanquished foes were received into the city, and subject to the Jupiter of the Capitol as nations were to Rome. The priests were laymen divided into classes, and officiated only under the authority of the senate, which regulated all expiatory ceremonies and alone, with the people, could make innovations. Worship consisted of minute ceremonies, scrupulously observed because all poetical and philosophical spirit which is the interpreter of symbols, was wanting; dull, unilluminated reason attaching itself only to the letter. The senate used religion as a political machine, and like all else it was but an instrument of government.

In the world of art we find nothing indigenous, except family memoirs, written in the interests of a race, dry chronicles drawn up for public use, rituals, account books, collections of laws, books of moral sayings, memoranda of political satires--in short, government documents, maxims of conduct, and political essays.

Everything else is foreign, imported, or conquered. The theatre originating in Etruria and in Greece was simply imitated and then forsaken for bear fights which later became processions, magnificent in weapons and ornaments, parades of triumph and war. Monuments of art were pillaged in Greece, and in Cicero’s time were still despised; while in poetry, there was no original fiction, no invention of characters. The only things in which the national genius rivals the imitation of foreign models are oratory,--the arm of the forum,--satire,--versified pleading and instruction in morals,--and history, the record of political facts, which, however, is at Rome only a collection of memoirs or an exercise in oratory; and all these things are concerned with the practical and with government. If Rome possessed poets, it was solely when her particular genius gave way before a new movement. The only entertainments she invented were triumphs and games in the circus, where victory was continued by the humiliation and death of the vanquished, where the spectator was the conqueror and assassin.

All scientific writings were translations. There were compilers such as Varro and Pliny, imitators such as Cicero and Lucretius; some small advance was made in agriculture, rhetoric, medicine, and architecture--all applied sciences. In the place of metaphysics, the clumsy physics of Epicurus and of the stoics were copied. The practical side of philosophy was alone studied, moral philosophy, and that with a purely practical object. The only strictly Roman science is jurisprudence, and that is altogether practical and political. It is, moreover, so long as it remains Roman, but a collection of dry formulæ, a mere manual for lawyers and not a branch of science.

From the character of Roman genius springs its history. The family and religion being subordinate to the state, art and science being null, or entirely practical, and the state having no other object than to conquer and to organise what it had conquered, Roman history is the history of conquest and its effects.

The middle class was either ruined, or perished during the progress of this great war. From the time of the Gracchi, besides a population of poor people and freed slaves, there remained only a wealthy class, wielding great power by reason of their immense riches, their command of great armies, their control of taxation, and of the destinies of the commonwealth in general. At first united but afterwards divided, at the end of a century’s struggle one of these classes emerged victorious. Thus power, founded by sheer force, passed to the armies, the embodiment of force. In the meanwhile, the universe, depopulated and ruined by conquest, by civil wars, by the pillage of the proconsuls, by the demands of the imperial treasury, supplied no more soldiers. With the fall of militarism, an oriental despotism, characterised by a cunning administration, was founded. Through war and its results, conquerors and conquered, nations and liberties, had all perished. Nothing remained in force but a system of effete institutions under the caprice of a ruler who was often hardly a man.

The ancient institution of the family disappeared under the influence of Grecian ideas and oriental customs. The judicial dicta of lawyers and prætors conflicted with the authority of the husband and father; civil family ties became dissolved in excess of pleasures and love of conquest. In spite of the laws of Augustus, marriages decreased, and were only excuses for adultery and divorce. Mysticism, poverty, the discouragement of the curials, added despair to the effects of debauchery and created a contempt for life.

By these changes in domestic life and under the influence of foreign philosophers, the Roman idea of property changed. First of all in the hands of the father (mancipium), possessions next became a family inheritance (dominium), and ended by belonging entirely to the individual (proprietas). Though benefited in theory, in practice property ceased to exist, because according to the law the emperor was master over it, because the treasury took its fruits, because taxation, tyranny, ignorance, and a growing depopulation rendered it sterile or reduced it to nought.

The ancient religion assimilated with the religions of Greece and the East, disappeared in the pantheon of the gods enlarged by dead emperors, and there remained of it only official pomp and an excuse for persecutions. The jealousy of despots, the degradation of servitude, the loss of all interests and of all hope, the abuse of pleasures, the downfall of Greece and of the East, extinguished all that was yet known of art and science. The jurisconsults alone laid down a code of laws, the last result of the spirit of organisation.

Thus, conquest, the fruit of Roman genius, destroyed both the genius of peoples, and the peoples themselves; leaving behind it because it was a system, a system of institutions on a dead foundation. But in this debasement of every force and of every earthly hope, man took refuge within himself. Helped by oriental mysticism, he discovered in a new religion a new world.

This is what the modern philosophers have added to Livy. The criticism commenced by him, renewed by Beaufort, nearly perfected by Niebuhr, and the philosophy hidden under his eloquence, which was turned by Machiavelli into a practical channel and is still imperfect in Montesquieu, become each day more exact and more profound. The corrections thus made honour those by whom they are made without lowering those who suffer them. The first authors are the fathers of science, and Livy alone has done more for Roman history than all those who have desired to set him right.[i]

FOOTNOTES

[4] Niebuhr’s[h] remarks on the dates of Livy’s history (_Rom. Hist._ iv.) may be compared with the more common view given in Smith’s Dictionary and elsewhere. I think the beginning of the work must be placed in 29-24 B.C.; but adopting the idea that it was originally divided into decades, the fact now demonstrated, that it reached to a hundred and forty-second book, seems to show that it was not left complete according to the author’s intentions. It is also well remarked that the death of Drusus does not furnish a point of sufficient importance for the termination of the great epic of Roman history. This view is supported by the interesting statement of Pliny, that in one of his latter books Livy had declared: Satis jam sibi gloriæ quæsitum; et potuisse se desinere, nisi animus inquies pasceretur opere. (Plin. _Hist. Nat._ præf.) A period of more than forty years thus devoted to the elaboration of a single work is not unparalleled. Froissart was engaged forty years upon his _Chronicles_.

(In the British Museum)]