In the family there prevailed a form of ancestor worship almost as primitive as we found among the Chinese. All other nations, according to De Coulanges, had ancestor-worship at one time. It would seem that a more spiritual faith superseded it in other nations quite early. The special circumstances of Rome and China encouraged the preservation of family traditions. In China the entire state government is patriarchal, and thus wholly conservative of the principle of the family. In Rome on the other hand the state separates, as public affair, from the family, as a private affair, and carefully defines the limits between itself and the family so as to preserve the latter in the primitive form. Each family worshiped with stated ceremony the male ancestors of the family, the oldest son acting as the priest after the death of his father.
This principle of non-interference with the family customs and a careful guarding of the sacred privacy of the family developed a very noble type of woman. The Roman matrons were sublime examples of heroism, dignity and purity. The mother had much more influence in the education of the Roman youth, than in the education of youth in any other of the ancient nations. On the ninth day the Roman child was enrolled on the citizen’s register. But up to his fifteenth year his education was chiefly at home under the supervision of the mother. He studied reading, writing, and arithmetic, much the same as the boy of other nations. But he committed to memory the laws of the Twelve Tables as carefully as the Hebrew child learned the Ten Commandments. The Roman child was educated to be a soldier, to fight for Rome and to be a supporter of the laws. In his sixteenth year he studied Roman law with some jurist. One may read in Plutarch, or in Shakspere’s Coriolanus, how powerful was the influence of the mother over her son, and how devoted was the mother to Rome. Roman education prepared the world for Christianity, by breaking down national idiosyncrasies and leading up to the idea of the human race—genus humanum.
The system practiced by the Romans after the conquest of a country was to conscript the young men into the army and send their legions to a distant frontier. The young men from Britain might be sent to Spain or Egypt, and those from Illyria and the Danube, to Britain. In the presence of a hostile people, speaking a foreign tongue, the raw conscript found his only safe course to be a faithful adherence to the Roman eagles. He could not revolt with any hope of success. In a few years he had become attached to the Roman cause and cherished it as his second nature; while his relatives and countrymen afar away had also been obliged to obey Roman laws until their customs and usages had also changed to Roman. Thus each conquered nation became a means in turn of subduing every other nation and converting them into Romans.
The Persians had conquered nations and held them in subjection, but they had not attempted to mould the character and institutions of the conquered people, but had left them untrammeled, only requiring them to acknowledge supremacy and pay tribute. After a people recovered independence from Persia, little evidence remained of Persian influence. The Roman institutions, on the other hand, became so firmly rooted among a conquered people that they remained ever after substantially Roman in character.
The Greeks, we saw, were a cheerful people. They made games a religious ceremonial, celebrating the physical beauty of the gods by becoming beautiful themselves. Beautiful bodies and graceful movements seemed to them divine. The gods and goddesses fell in love with beautiful mortals. The Romans on the contrary, were sober and serious, and would not exercise for the sake of developing personal beauty, but only to become good soldiers for Rome. It was shameful in the estimation of the Roman to expose the naked body. Even within the family the utmost care was taken to develop and foster the sense of shame and of decency in the care of the person. The Roman was a haughty spectator at the games, but would not himself condescend to appear as a contestant. He bought slaves or forced his prisoners taken in battle to exhibit their skill in the arena. He delighted in spectacles where death-contests of beasts and men took place, because he felt its symbolic expression of the struggle within his own character, and his sacrifice of self for the state, and of his arbitrary will for the general abstract law. The Roman was sober and thoughtful because his life was occupied in self-restraint. He perpetually watched himself lest he should go beyond the limits fixed between the private and the public spheres of duty.
The result of mingling all nations in the Roman armies brought about a feeling of brotherhood among the soldiers and then among the people. There arose conviction that peculiarities of nation and even of race are accidents that do not affect the substance of a common humanity. The objects of affection for the individual—his native land, his country’s gods, his ties of kindred and friendship, were all ruthlessly broken by the irresistible might of the Roman empire, and for these objects of the heart were substituted only the abstract devotion to the state and devotion to the private right of property. There resulted a deep heart-hunger for a spiritual faith that would give to all an object commensurate with this new idea of the human race. This want was supplied by Christianity.
[RENUNCIATION.]
By A. C. M.