CHAPTER III
ROMAN CIVILISATION
Such empire as Hellas achieved was succeeded by the Roman Empire. The earlier, as we have seen, was an empire loosely founded on kinship of race, ideals, and character, and on common interests of commerce. It was an empire of individualism; preserving the individuality of cities and their individual states, producing a few men of rare individuality and, as it spread throughout the Mediterranean, planting colonies which maintained their independence both against the Motherland of Hellas and the people in their immediate surroundings. It was, from the first, an empire of the spirit and, as such, survived its physical dissolution and has maintained its dominion over the human mind even to the present time.
On the contrary, the Roman Empire, in so far as it succeeded, was an empire of constructive organisation. It grew, cell by cell, each added cell becoming gradually impregnated with the life-principle of the earliest one, so that every part of the unwieldy body was an organic part of the whole. Thus, in time, each independent city and its adjoining community, alien races and huge slices of foreign territory, became gradually absorbed into the practical system of government that originated with the little settlement of Latins which first occupied the Palatine Hill and then extended its authority over the seven hills of Rome. Part after part became absorbed into the system of the Lex Romana and enjoyed the benefits of the Pax Romana. The Roman citizenship, judiciously extended over the whole empire, carried with it substantial rights and equally substantial duties. The provinces of the empire contributed men of learning, generals, and statesmen to the central government. In time some of the provinces, notably those of Spain and Southern France, became more characteristically Roman than Rome herself. They had absorbed her system and her culture, and, far removed from the petty intrigues which convulsed the capital, reached a degree of civilisation that represented the finest product of the Roman ideal; an ideal that included individual uprightness, a sense of service and self-sacrifice for the common weal, and a high regard for order. It was a practical ideal, little concerned with abstractions, not devoted to excessive refinement, but centred on the effectual accomplishment of the individual and collective requirements of everyday life.
It is true that this ideal was never fully achieved. This is only to say that the ideal was truly human and therefore at the mercy of human chances and weaknesses. Moreover, that it was really an ideal; a principle of life, that is to say, which by reason of its bigness was only possible of partial achievement. And if the Romans failed in achieving theirs, they failed nobly, and with sufficient success to have left behind them a legacy of law and order and constructive principles of government that, like the cultural ideals of the Hellenes, survive to the present time.
And the Roman Empire played a part in the progress of the world, more immediately necessary than that of Hellas. The latter’s Empire of Spirit was in advance of its age. The world outside of the scattered outposts of Hellas was too rude, too backward in the very necessaries of life, to accept its message of beauty. Recognising this, the Hellenes called all other races and nations barbarians and held aloof from them. The Romans, on the contrary, absorbed the aliens, instilled into them the rudiments of their own civilisation, while taking advantage of any good trait in the people themselves, so that they helped them to rise out of themselves to a higher plane of living. In a lawless world they became the great exponents of order, the upbuilders and engineers of a system of organised society, and so firmly did they lay the foundations and so strongly did they build that, although subsequent hordes of barbarians overthrew the dominion of the empire of Rome and laid waste many of the visible signs of her building, the destroyers were gradually absorbed into her system and became its continuers.
Therefore, when we consider the Romans specifically in relation to architecture, we look back to them as tireless and prodigious builders, constructors, and engineers, whose sense of beauty in architecture, as well as their aspirations in all branches of higher culture, were derived from the Hellenes. Their respect for the latter was such that so long as possible they tried to treat them as an independent power, with whom they could pursue the mutual advantages of commerce. Gradually, however, the tangle of politics made absorption necessary, and after a series of invasions Hellas herself became a province of the Roman Empire.
War, in those days, as for centuries after, involved the barbarous practice of looting, and the Romans, with their shrewd instinct for acquiring what they most needed for their own development, bore back home in increasing quantity the treasures of architectural and sculptural art. Later, as the power of Hellas dwindled, Rome became the centre to which Hellenic artists and scholars flocked.
The conquest of Hellas and gradual absorption of a part of her culture occupied the second century before the Christian era and the earlier years of the first. By this time, however, Rome herself had become a prey to the rivalries of political factions, beginning with the conspiracy of Sulla and ending with the civil war that followed upon the assassination of Julius Cæsar. The latter’s great-nephew, Octavianus, in conjunction with Marc Antony, conquered Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in Macedonia and Octavianus assumed authority over the West, while Antony established himself as ruler in the East. But his infatuation for Cleopatra raised the suspicion in Rome that he intended to marry her and make himself despot of an Oriental empire with Alexandria as its capital. War was declared against him as a national enemy and he was defeated at Actium, B.C. 31. The authority of Octavianus was now supreme. Republicanism, as a practical form of government, was dead. Conditions demanded one-man rule and Octavianus, in B.C. 27, resigned his office as Triumvir and received from the Senate the title of Augustus, which hitherto had been reserved for the gods.
During this period of struggle the Hellenic influence had been rapidly growing. The sons of the ruling class had Greek tutors; many studied in the schools of Athens and Rhodes, and Roman writers began to emulate the Greek authors. Cæsar published his Commentaries on the Gallic War and on the Civil War; Sallust wrote on the Conspiracy of Catiline and the Jugurthine War and Cornelius Nepos compiled biographies of eminent men. Cicero published under the name of “Philippics” the speeches which he made against Antony in the Senate, as well as “Letters” to various friends on the topics of the times, while Lucretius composed in verse a treatise on the “Nature of the World” and Varro was the author of an encyclopædic work relating to the history, geography, agriculture, law, literature, philology, philosophy, and religion of the Romans. To Varro also had been assigned by Julius Cæsar the collection of a public Library of Greek and Roman writers.
The enthusiasm for literature was encouraged by Augustus and his minister, Mycæenas, who saw in it a means of allaying the bitterness of party strife. To this, the “Augustan” or “Golden Age,” as the writers called it in flattery of their patron, belong Horace, Livy, and Virgil.