It may be said, that in all the departments of science we possess clearer and more correct notions; that, upon the whole, our manners are more polished, and our code of morals is preferable to that of the ancients. It is further asserted, as the principal proof of our superiority, that we have better defined, juster and more tolerant ideas with regard to political liberty. Sanguine theorists are not wanting, who pretend that our discoveries in political science and our enlightened views of the rights of man will ultimately lead us to that universal happiness and harmony which the ancients in vain sought in the fabled garden of Hesperides.
These lofty pretensions will hardly bear the test of severe historical criticism.
If we surpass preceding generations in scientific knowledge, it is because we have added our share to the discoveries which they bequeathed to us. We are their heirs, their pupils, their continuators, just as future generations will be ours. We achieve great results by the application of the power of steam; we have solved many great problems in mechanics, and pressed the elements as submissive slaves into our service. But do these successes bring us any nearer to omniscience. At most, they may enable us ultimately to fathom all the secrets of the material world. And when we shall have achieved that grand conquest, for which so much requires still to be done that is not yet commenced, nor even anticipated; have we advanced a single step beyond the simple exposition of the laws which govern the material world? We may have learned to direct our course through the air, to approach the limits of the respirable atmosphere; we may discover and elucidate several interesting astronomical problems; we may have greater powers for controlling nature and compelling her to minister to our wants, but can all this knowledge make us better, happier beings? Suppose we had counted all the planetary systems and measured the immense regions of space, would we know more of the grand mystery of existence than those that came before us? Would this add one new faculty to the human mind, or ennoble human nature by the eradication of one bad passion?
Admitting that we are more enlightened upon some subjects, in how many other respects are we inferior to our more remote ancestors? Can it be doubted, for instance, that in Abraham's times much more was known of primordial traditions than the dubious beams which have come down to us? How many discoveries which we owe to mere accident, or which are the fruits of painful efforts, were the lost possessions of remote ages? How many more are not yet restored? What is there in the most splendid of our works that can compare with those wonders by which Egypt, India, Greece, and America still attest the grandeur and magnificence of so many edifices which the weight of centuries, much more than the impotent ravages of man, has caused to disappear? What are our works of art by the side of those of Athens; our thinkers by the side of those of Alexandria or India; our poets by the side of a Valmiki, Kalidasa, Homer, Pindar?
The truth is, we pursue a different direction from that of the human societies whose civilization preceded ours. We apply our mind to different purposes and different investigations; but while we clear and cultivate new lands, we are compelled to neglect and abandon to sterility those to which they devoted their attention. What we gain in one direction we lose in another. We cannot call ourselves superior to the ancients, unless we had preserved at least the principal acquisitions of preceding ages in all their integrity, and had succeeded in establishing by the side of these, the great results which they as well as we sought after. Our sciences and arts superadded to theirs have not enabled us to advance one step nearer the solution of the great problems of existence, the mysteries of life and death. "I seek, but find not," has always been, will ever be, the humiliating confession of science when endeavoring to penetrate into the secrets concealed by the veil that it is not given to mortal to lift. In criticism[174] we are, undoubtedly, much in advance of our predecessors; but criticism implies classification, not acquisition.
Nor can we justly pride ourselves upon any superiority in regard to political ideas. Political and social theories were as rife in Athens after the age of Pericles as they are in our days. To be convinced of this, it is necessary only to study Aristophanes, whose comedies Plato recommends to the perusal of whoever wishes to become acquainted with the public morals of the city of Minerva. It has been pretended that our present structure of society, and that of the ancients, admit of no comparison, owing to the institution of slavery which formed an element of the latter. But the only real difference is that demagogism had then an even more fertile soil in which to strike root. The slaves of those days find their precise counterpart in our working classes and proletarians.[175] The Athenian people propitiating their servile class after the battle of Arginuses, might be taken for a picture of the nineteenth century.
Look at Rome. Open Cicero's letters. What a specimen of the moderate Tory that great Roman orator was; what a similarity between his republic and our constitutional bodies politic, with regard to the language of parties and parliamentary debates! There, too, the background of the picture was occupied by degraded masses of a servile and prædial population, always eager for change, and ready to rise in actual rebellion.
Let us leave those dregs of the population, whose civil existence the law ignored, and who counted in politics but as the formidable tool of designing individuals of free birth. But does not the free population of Rome afford a perfect analogue to a modern body politic? There is the mob crying for bread, greedy of shows, flattery, gratuitous distributions, and amusements; the middle classes (bourgeoisie) monopolizing and dividing among themselves the public offices; the hereditary aristocracy, continually assailed at all points, continually losing ground, until driven in mere self-defence to abjure all superior claims and stipulate for equal rights to all. Are not these perfect resemblances?
Among the boundless variety of opinions that make themselves heard in our day, there is not one that had not advocates in Rome. I alluded a while ago to the letters written from the villa of Tusculum; they express the sentiments of the Roman conservative Progressist party. By the side of Sylla, Pompey and Cicero were Radicals.[176] Their notions were not sufficiently radical for Cæsar; too much so for Cato. At a later period we find in Pliny the younger a mild royalist, a friend of quiet, even at some cost. Apprehensive of too much liberty, yet jealous of power too absolute; very practical in his views, caring but little for the poetical splendor of the age of the Fabii, he preferred the more prosaic administration of Trajan. There were others not of his opinion, good people who feared an insurrection headed by some new Spartacus, and who, therefore, thought that the Emperor could not hold the reins too tight. Then there were others, from the provinces, who obstreperously demanded and obtained what would now be called "constitutional guaranties." Again, there were the socialists, and their views found no less an expounder than the Gallic Cæsar, C. Junius Posthumus, who exclaims: "Dives et pauper, inimici," the rich and the poor are enemies born.
Every man who had any pretensions to participate in the lights of the day, declaimed on the absolute equality of all men, their "inalienable rights," the manifest necessity and ultimate universality of the Greco-Latin civilization, its superiority, its mildness, its future progress, much greater even than that actually made, and above all its perpetuity. Nor were those ideas merely the pride and consolation of the pagans; they were the firm hopes and expectations of the earliest and most illustrious Fathers of the Church, whose sentiments found so eloquent an interpreter in Tertullian.