They had a divinity of peace, to urge them on to war; they had divinities of plague, hunger, fever, mildew, and death. In their practical spirit they went even so far as to have a ‘Dea Cloacina.’
What subjects to paint or sculpture!
A pale-yellow woman with dishevelled hair, protruding ghastly eyes, wasted lips, fleshless and emaciated limbs, may represent the goddess of hunger; another woman deliberately and slowly tearing the limbs of helpless creatures from their bodies with diabolical delight, may be a goddess of plague; another, placidly playing with human skulls in a field surrounded by dying men, women, and children, may be the goddess of death.
In the illustration of a Dante or a Milton, a knowledge of the Roman mythology may prove full of suggestive power.
The Greeks had a principle in their anthropomorphic worship; the Romans had no aim. Roman high-priests were spiritual butchers, who tried to appease the angry gods with the smoke of burning bullocks, to nourish them with fat, with which they literally besmeared the statues, and to quench their thirst with blood which they poured over the altars. When already educated enough to consider all these divinities with a cold and sceptic indifference; when the augurs could no longer meet without laughing and sneering at each other and their sacred office, then the Roman mind became eager for a more concrete god than these stone figures, and they found a corresponding living divinity in the person of their Emperors. Earth certainly could offer nothing more divine in the form of visible majesty, recognised and obeyed, as soon as clothed in the imperial purple and crowned with the imperial diadem, than the irresponsible ‘god-man,’ who sat on the throne of the Cæsars. The creative force of the Universe, and the phenomena of nature, were moulded in visible forms; and now for the first time a political abstraction had become incarnate in the Emperor pro tem. The hordes of courtiers, courtezans, flatterers, poets, philosophers, historians, juris consults, orators, prætors, and consuls, supported by the thoughtless mass of the people, rendered divine honours to a mortal, in whom, however, the immortal principle of theocratic authority was concentrated. Not even the Egyptians, crouching in grateful admiration before the crocodiles of the Nile, outraged humanity to such a degree as these polite Romans, rendering divine honour to an Emperor, like Aurelius Commodus, who fought 735 times as a common gladiator in the arena before his enervated people. The Roman religion was, in fact, a cosmopolitan mixture of all the atrocious superstitions of the world.
The Romans also instituted public games in imitation of the Greeks, on the degrading ‘panis et circenses’ principle. In Greece, Apollo with his nine muses presided over the public games. The Romans had specially-trained gladiators, wrestlers, dancers, and prize-fighters. The competitors at the Greek games were free and independent citizens; with the Romans they were either criminals, runaway slaves, or men condemned to death. Bears, lions, tigers, and elephants were starved, and set against one another, to delight the spectators with their savage brutality. Soon an improvement was effected, and men were arrayed against men with deadly weapons, to amuse men and women, boys and girls, with their skill in murdering; and at last, as a further progressive development in taste, men were pitted against wild beasts. In the Greek tragedy, the ideal sufferings of humanity, struggling in an unequal combat with omnipotent and inexorable fate, were prominently set forth to purify men from their passions by showing the consequences of even unconscious guilt. The Greek tragedy was the national moral conscience brought into the most perfect poetical form. The Romans instituted a cruel reality of bodily suffering; real blood streaming from real limbs; the real rattle in the throat, which signals death; and the real last gasp of an expiring man, afforded them amusement.
Like their religion and public games, their literature, with the exception of their satires and law-codes, was matter of fact and imitative. The generation of the Roman products of poetry and prose was the following: Homer engendered Virgil, Hesiod—Lucretius; Pindar—Horace; Æsop—Phædrus; Euripides—Terence; Aristophanes—Plautus; Xenophon—Sallust; Thukydides—Titus Livy; Demosthenes—Cicero. Ovid and Tacitus were the only really original writers; the first faithfully depicted the hollowness of Roman ethics; and the other, in unsurpassed language, drew a historical sketch of the Teutons, mercilessly exposing the contrast between noble simplicity, grandeur and honesty, and the demoralised state of his own country.
If art is the outgrowth of the intellectual and moral condition of a people, what kind of art could the Romans have produced? None. And this was the case. Roman art is altogether a misnomer; it is in fact Etruskan, Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian art, dressed in an eclectic Roman garb by foreign artists. Art with the Romans was never the glorious emanation of the poet’s sacred ideal of the gods, or the irresistible civilising power of beauty; it was merely the handmaid of power, wealth, pomp, and vanity. Art was with them a slave, well fed, well clad, well housed, well paid, to make power more powerful, to dazzle the people, to proclaim the universal dominion of Rome over the world. The Roman character was dry and geometrical, and therefore in its artistic taste architectural and monumental. Anything that could serve, by means of technical perfection, to promote art, was encouraged, adopted, and supported by the Romans.
We have given a drastic picture of the evils of the Roman spirit; we must be just to the great mission which it fulfilled unconsciously and against its will. The centralisation in language, customs, and manners produced a cosmopolitan spirit. Greek artists and philosophers spread taste and learning. Distant nations were brought into closer connection. The roads constructed to facilitate the march of legions, bent on devastating a province, served as means of communication; so did their aqueducts and bridges. The wants of an increasing population forced the Romans to improve agriculture, and commerce was found necessary. Corn had to be brought from one quarter, textile fabrics from another; Greece and Egypt were pillaged of their innumerable works of art, and Rome may be said to have been at that period the greatest museum of the universe. The superstition and credulity which existed among the people, by degrees disappeared. Africa had been considered a land of monsters, with serpents large enough to entangle a whole army and to crush it; other regions of the accessible world had been thought inhabited by men without heads. Giants, kyklops, and enchantresses had been said to perform incredible feats, but were found to be without supernatural power; the golden apples of Spain turned out to be mere oranges, and graced the tables of the wealthier, and in time even of the poorer classes. The mouth of hell had been placed on the shores of the Euxine (Black Sea), but when those regions were occupied by Roman soldiers, the mouth of hell had to be removed elsewhere. East and west, south and north, were united under one great Roman vault, the four quarters of the globe were over-arched, and the broad cupola of universalism set over them. Man was made a common slave to one grand and common abstraction, typically foreshadowing the time when men would be brought as free agents under one great dome of universal brotherhood.
For this grand and really majestic soldering of humanity into one total, the Romans found the spiritual as well as the material form in