A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution

by Cora May Williams

The conquest of Greece is alleged to have bettered somewhat the position of Roman slaves, since it involved the introduction of many slaves who were the intellectual superiors of their masters. But whatever good this may have effected seems to have been counteracted by the increase in number of the slaves and the consequent diminution in value of the individual slave as a piece of property. On the whole, the position of the slaves of North America, before the war of emancipation, bad as it was in some cases, seems to have been, on the average, quite paradisiacal when compared with that of their Roman forerunners. It has already been mentioned that Cato urged his compatriots to sell their aged slaves. Old and infirm slaves were constantly exposed to perish on an island in the Tiber. It was also customary, in case of the murder of the master, to put all the slaves of the household to death who were not in chains or helpless at the time of the murder. The testimony of the slave was generally received only under torture; he might be tortured in the attempt to compel evidence against his master; but, if he, of his own free will, accused his master of any crime, except treason, he was condemned to the arena. There were different punishments for slaves and for men of rank. "Numerous acts of the most odious barbarity were committed. The well-known anecdotes of Flaminius ordering a slave to be killed to gratify, by the spectacle, the curiosity of a guest; of Vedius Pollio feeding his fish on the flesh of slaves; and of Augustus sentencing a slave who had killed and eaten a favorite quail, to crucifixion, are the extreme examples that are recorded; for we need [!] not regard as an historical fact the famous picture in Juvenal of a Roman lady in a moment of caprice, ordering her unoffending servant to be crucified. We have, however, many other very horrible glimpses of slave life at the close of the Republic and in the early days of the Empire. The marriage of slaves was entirely unrecognized by law, and, in their case, the words adultery, incest, or polygamy had no legal meaning.... When executed for a crime, their deaths were of a most hideous kind. The ergastula, or private prisons of the masters, were frequently their only sleeping places.... We read of slaves chained as porters to the doors, and cultivating the fields in chains. Ovid and Juvenal describe the fierce Roman ladies tearing their servants' faces, and thrusting the long pins of their brooches into their flesh. The master, at the close of the Republic, had full power to sell his slave as a gladiator or as a combatant with wild beasts."[224]

Lecky admonishes us that we should not judge the whole institution of Roman slavery by this one side of the picture. He calls attention to the respect in which learned Greek slaves were often held, as showing a better phase of the system; but it is quite possible that certain slaves or classes of slaves should be held in respect and that the rest of the slaves should be treated, nevertheless, with anything but respect or kindness. The great wonder to the modern mind is that the Romans felt at liberty to hold learned Greeks slaves at all. Lecky points out that slaves were emancipated in great numbers; but we must remember, first, that slaves were very plentiful, further, that freedmen and their descendants remained bound, by a sort of feudal tie, to their former masters until the third generation, and moreover that it was considered an honor to have many freedmen in one's following; so that the advantage of manumission was often, as Lecky himself says, on the side of the master. Slaves were sometimes emancipated to prevent their revealing crimes of their masters under torture, and many slaves were given their liberty especially in order that they might make a show in the funeral train. Augustus, indeed, found it necessary to restrict emancipation by will to one hundred slaves.[225] Seneca mentions that masters who ill-treated their slaves were the object of public odium; but then it may occur to us to inquire what the Romans considered ill-treatment; some of the laws which Lecky cites in evidence of the improvement of the slave's position in the third or last of the periods under which he considers this position may appear to his readers as much evidence against, as in favor of, kindness on the part of the masters. "The Petronian law," he says, "which was issued by Augustus, or more probably by Nero, forbade the master to condemn his slave to combat with wild beasts without a sentence from a judge." We may inquire as to how difficult it was to obtain such a sentence. "Under Claudius some citizens exposed their sick slaves on the island of Æsculapius in the Tiber to avoid the trouble of tending them, and the emperor decreed that if [!] the slave so exposed recovered from his sickness, he should become free, and also that masters who killed their slaves instead of exposing them should be punished as murderers.... Under Nero, a judge was appointed to hear their complaints, and was instructed to punish masters who treated them with barbarity, made them the instruments of lust, or withheld from them a sufficient quantity of the necessaries of life.... Domitian made a law, which was afterwards reiterated, forbidding the Oriental custom of mutilating slaves for sensual purposes, and the reforms were renewed with great energy in the period of the Antonines.[226] Hadrian and his two successors formally deprived masters of the right of killing their slaves; forbade them to sell slaves to the lanistæ or speculators in gladiators; destroyed the ergastula or private prisons; ordered that, when a master was murdered, those slaves only should be tortured who were within hearing; appointed officers through all the provinces to hear the complaints of slaves; enjoined that no master should treat slaves with excessive [?] severity; and commanded that, when such severity was proved, the master should be compelled to sell the slave he had ill-treated."[227] The humanity of the last law is open to dispute. Moreover, Lecky does not notice, here, that Constantine nevertheless felt it necessary to limit the punishment of slaves by prohibiting its administration with a cudgel, though not with the lash, and forbidding poison, mortal wounds, various kinds of torture, stoning, hanging, mutilation, or throwing from a height.[228] But he mentions two facts which indicate some degree of humanity in certain directions, and namely: that, though the law did not recognize the marriage of a slave, "it appears not to have been common to separate his family;" also, that the private property of slaves was recognized by their masters, though part or all of it usually reverted to the master on the death of the slave. The great mass of evidence goes to show, however, that what the Romans termed humanity to slaves would have been, in the eyes of modern "civilized" peoples, extreme barbarity.

Women, among the Romans, were, like their children, under the control of the head of the family—father or husband. "The father disposed absolutely of the hand of his daughter and sometimes even possessed the power of breaking off marriages that had been actually contracted. In the forms of marriage, however, which were usual in the earlier periods of Rome, the absolute power passed into the hands of the husband, and he had the right, in some cases, of putting her to death." "The power appears to have become quite obsolete during the Empire; but the first legal act (which was rather of the nature of an exhortation than of a command) against it was issued by Antoninus Pius, and it was only definitely abolished under Diocletian."[229] Roman women had, at first, no share by law in the heritage of their fathers; but public opinion revolted, in some cases, from the law, and gradually this was considerably altered. When marriage became, under the Empire, a mere matter of mutual consent, divorce a mere matter of repudiation, the daughter, though married, often remained in her father's house, having full control over her own property. Practically, if not always legally, the position of women among the Romans seems to have been considerably better than among the Greeks; Roman wives became, gradually, far more nearly the equals of their husbands than Greek wives ever were, and appear to have received a proportionately greater degree of love. Their position, however, falls far behind that of even German women at the present day, and certainly much behind that of every other civilized nation.

After recording the use of animals in the public games, there is little need of considering the subject of their treatment specially; there can be no doubt as to its probable nature; though certain famous Romans had their brute favorites.

It is sometimes argued that, though we are morally superior to the Greeks and Romans in some respects, we fall short of their standard in other respects. Doubtless new forms of evil may arise in later periods, which were impossible under old forms of government and the social relations of earlier peoples. Each period and nation will, according to its circumstances, have its own peculiar forms of vice and misery. But the question which we are considering is not whether or not we have some forms of evil which the ancients did not possess, but whether the particular forms which prevail among us are or are not worse than those which prevailed in Greece and Rome, and, in general, whether the average of sympathy and altruistic action in modern times and among the foremost peoples is greater than the average among the Greeks and Romans. And it must be recollected, moreover, in considering the question, that while the evil in our midst is brought very vividly before our eyes through the medium of our many methods of news-carrying and of wide personal observation,—through our railways, our telegraphs, our many newspapers and periodicals,—we have, in reality, when all is told, very scanty knowledge of the daily life of the common people, of the ordinary, every-day miseries and sufferings, among the Greeks and Romans. But there are some features of these facts that tell in favor of modern times; for the ancients were but little impressed by the miseries of the poorer classes; and just the spirit that notes and makes much of our modern inhumanity is evidence of a broader sympathy peculiar to our later times.

Of Europe as a whole in the centuries after Rome's decline and its loss of power, it is not necessary to say much, in order to prove the moral superiority of modern times. We are all acquainted with the fierce contests between Christianity and its opponents, with the mutual persecutions, the martyrdoms of Christians and the retaliation of Christians upon "heretics," with the license and bigotry of the clergy, the robbery and oppression of the poor and dependent by these as well as by the titled castle-owners, the burning of "witches," the general intellectual and moral darkness which spread and covered even the lands of former comparative civilization and was lifted only as Europe as a whole advanced to a higher stage.

But without entering into any extended discussion of this complicated process of development as a whole, after the disturbance of the old equilibrium, it may not be undesirable to note the general course of events in some one country as typical, not in its special features, but in its general moral import, of the course of development in the other countries of Europe also.

The manner of the growth of state and social recompense for evil out of individual and tribal vengeance has already been touched upon. The enemy within, and the enemy without the tribe, the foe of the battle-field and the criminal were regarded, at many stages, with much the same feeling of animosity, the advantage being rather in favor of the criminal. To the Greek all those who were not Greeks were barbarians, against whom but little justice or mercy was necessary; and, as we have seen, the Romans condemned to the arena their war-captives equally with their criminals, together with slaves who were also, originally, war-captives. Crime is, in ruder societies, hardly distinguished from other forms of aggression that are, later, not included under this head. The definition of crime differs greatly in different periods of a people's history, changing as the conceptions of morality as duty to society as a whole emerge from the crude conceptions of individual and tribal constraint through revenge. It is for this reason that the history of criminal law and the administration of "justice" constitute, in reality, a history of moral evolution. There is nothing that is a clearer index of the moral status of a people than its treatment of those considered to be malefactors.

Cæsar and Tacitus both mention human sacrifices as taking place in England before the Roman conquest; but little is known certainly on the subject. The Romans, of course, introduced their own laws and customs, which existed side by side with many ancient ones not wholly abolished. The torture and burning of slaves for various offences was customary. These penalties were gradually mitigated. But the invasion of the Teutonic tribes seems to have introduced many new barbarities. In the first half of the tenth century, for instance, appears a law which condemned to the stake female slaves who had stolen from any but their masters, the wood to be piled about them by eighty other slaves of their own sex; this last office being designed, doubtless, to impress the lesson upon the minds of the eighty attendants. Later, many heretics were burned, and the writ for the burning of heretics was not abolished until the reign of Charles II., though it was practically annulled by the laws of 1648. However, in 1649, a number of women were burned for witchcraft in Berwickshire, and burning continued to be practised, much later, in cases of heresy and witchcraft; still later in cases of high and petty treason, and up to the time of George III., for murder. In the thirtieth year of the latter's reign, a statute was passed substituting hanging for burning. In 1784, a woman was burnt at Portsmouth for the murder of her husband. During the last years, however, in which the sentence was carried out, it seems to have been customary for the executioner to wring the malefactor's neck before the burning. But comparatively trivial offences, among these false coining, were classed as treason, and it is noticeable also that the stake seems to have been a favorite punishment in the case of women-offenders, even in later days.[230] In the year 1530, two persons of the household of the Bishop of Rochester having died from poison thrown into some porridge by the cook, an "Act of Poisoning" was passed, according to which offenders coming under its definition were to be boiled to death. The statute was shortly afterwards repealed, but the bishop's cook was publicly executed in accordance with its provision.[231]