The end is not far off. The story of Persia, of Egypt, and of Greece is the story equally of Rome. Avarice and injustice, luxury and profusion do their sure work. The Roman civilization is more than a thousand years old. Asiatic wealth, the luxury and false philosophy of Greece, and a vicious system of education, promoting selfishness, have united to sap its foundations. Society is divided into three classes—an aristocracy based solely upon wealth, cruel and profligate, a mob of free citizens, otherwise paupers, who live by beggary and the sale of their votes, and laborers who are slaves.
On the occasion of the presentation of spectacles, among a variety of presents slaves (laborers) are thrown into the arena to be scrambled for by the free citizens! But men are cheap. In Asia they sell for sixpence apiece, and Rome has only to send an army there to get them for nothing. To this class, to these slaves, however, the Roman people are indebted for all the arts which make life agreeable. They construct all the great public works. They build the splendid roads over which the Roman legions follow their generals in triumph home to Rome. They make the aqueducts, dig the canals, and construct the buildings, public and private, whose remains still attest their magnificence—the Forum, the amphitheatres, and the golden house of the Cæsars. They build the villas overlooking the Bay of Naples, in which the nobles live in riot and wantonness; they cook the dinners given in those villas; they make the clothes the nobles wear, and the jewels that adorn their persons. They cultivate the fields, follow the plough, train and trim the vine, and gather in the harvest. They raise the corn that is distributed by the nobles among the soldiery, and given as a bribe to the diseased and debauched free citizens for their votes. They feel deeply the injustice of their lot, and, like men, strike for liberty. But the Roman legions are set on them like blood-hounds, and hundreds of thousands of them are slaughtered and made food for birds of prey, and other thousands are thrown into the arena to be torn by wild beasts, and still others are bestowed as gifts upon the populace at the games.
The contest between the rich and the poor is at an end; the rich are millionaires, the poor are beggars. It is the story of Dives and Lazarus over again. The rich are clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day; the poor are full of sores, and live upon the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. Rome topples to her fall. The Gothic invader is at her gates, and there is no army to defend them. The barbarian demands a ransom. To obtain it the statues are despoiled of their ornaments and precious stones, and the gods of gold and silver are melted in the fire. The ransom is given, and Alaric retires. But he returns, and this time to pillage. The city is sacked; rich and poor, bond and free, are whelmed in one common ruin. At last the diabolic wish of the infamous Caligula is realized. The Roman people have but one neck, and the Goth puts his foot upon it. Rome falls, the victim of her own crimes, strangled by her own gluttony. Thus ends the first period of the world’s manhood—ends in exhaustion, and a syncope which is destined to last a thousand years.
Long before the fall of the republic Rome had become the seat of all the world’s learning. In robbing conquered countries she not only took their gold and silver, a share of their people for slaves, and their works of art, but their libraries, their philosophy, and their literature. But neither the Greek nor the Roman philosophy contributed in the least to a solution of the pressing social problems of the time. The wise men of Rome were powerless to help either themselves or their fellow-men, because their philosophy was false. It was purely speculative; it had no body of facts to rest upon.
The Roman educators and philosophers were almost as ignorant of physiology as Plato was hundreds of years before, hence they were unable to study the mind in the sole way in which it is intelligently approachable, namely, through its bodily manifestations. In studying the mind as an independent entity there could be no general rules of investigation. The metaphysical philosopher did not study the mind of man; he explored his own mind merely—consulted his own inner consciousness. Hence there were, in Rome, as many systems of philosophy, more or less clearly defined and distinct, as there were philosophers. But they were merely metaphysical speculations, dreams, dependent upon purely subjective processes; and those processes were in turn dependent upon the ever-changing states of mind of each philosopher.
It is obvious that these systems of philosophy could exert no influence upon the community at large, for the community formed no part of the subject matter of their speculations. But they did exert an influence, and a very pernicious one, upon the philosophers themselves, and indeed upon all the cultured men of Rome; for they were thereby made thoroughly selfish, and so rendered incapable of forming a just judgment of public affairs. In considering the mind apart from the body, the body naturally fell into utter contempt. This was the great crime of speculative philosophy; for in engendering a feeling of contempt for the human body it furnished an excuse for slavery. And this contempt logically included manual labor, for the only manual laborer was a slave; and it also extended to the useful arts, for all those arts were the work of slaves. Hence the laborer, being a slave, was placed lower in the social scale than the pauper who sold his vote for a glass of wine. And thus it came about that a factitious right—the right of suffrage—was more highly esteemed by the public than the cardinal virtue of industry, upon which alone the perpetuity of the social compact depends.
And, again, the wretched state of public morals may be inferred from the fact that the right of suffrage, through which the idle, leprous pauper was elevated above the industrious laborer and above the useful arts, was notoriously the subject of open traffic in the streets of Rome on every election day. Thus Roman philosophy landed the Roman people in the last ditch, for it led to the deification of abstract ideas and to scorn of things. That this utter perversion of the truth and wreck of justice was the cause of the decline of the Roman Empire there is no doubt.
It is equally plain that the noted men of Rome were utterly ignorant of the cause of the disorders which afflicted the body politic. There is no evidence, either in their lives or their works, that they brought to the consideration of the great social problems of the time any practical philosophy whatever. Suetonius, with a graphic pen, portrays the cruelties of the Cæsars, but hints at no cause therefor inherent in the social system. Cicero forecasts the doom of the republic, but has no remedy to propose except that of the elevation of Pompey rather than Cæsar. Livy and Tacitus deplore the decay of public and private virtue, but are silent on the subject of the infamy of slavery and on the shame of degrading labor. The moral sentiments of Seneca and Aurelius are of the most elevated character, but the fact that they ignore slavery, the slave, the laborer, and the useful arts, shows either that they never thought upon those fundamental social questions, or that their thoughts ran in the popular channel; in a word, that their philosophy was so shallow as to render them callous to the great crimes upon which the Roman State rested.
That the subjective philosophy and the defective educational system of the Romans rendered them selfish, and hence corrupt, there is abundant evidence. Cicero professed the most lofty patriotism, but he was without moral courage. It was he who congratulated the public men of Rome, after the usurpation of Cæsar, upon the privilege of remaining “totally silent!” He regarded Pompey as “the greatest man the world had ever produced,” but deserted him in his extremity, which was equally the extremity of his country. He denounced Cæsar as the cause of the culminating misfortunes of Rome, but went down upon his knees to him, and rose to his feet only to exhaust all the resources of his matchless eloquence in fulsome adulation of the destroyer of the Republic.
Seneca’s moral precepts are sublime, but his political maxims are atrocious. Witness this pretence of an all-embracing love for man—“Whenever thou seest a fellow-creature in distress know that thou seest a human being.” Contrast with this exalted sentiment of the great stoic his political maxim—“Terror is the safeguard of a kingdom”—and reflect that he lived under the reigns of Claudius and Nero. The millions of slaves in the Roman dominions were “human beings,” but Seneca had no practical regard for them as “fellow-creatures in distress.” His beautiful humanitarian sentiment was a barren ideality—it bore no fruit; but his brutal political maxim caused him to thrive. Under the favor of Claudius he amassed a vast fortune. His palace in the city was sumptuously furnished, his country-seats were splendidly appointed, and he possessed abundance of ready money. “There can be no happiness without virtue,” exclaims this prosperous Roman citizen. But while he pens this lofty sentiment he is accused of avarice, usury, and extortion, charged with complicity in the Piso conspiracy, and banished for the crime of adultery.