Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

There can be no doubt that we are braver than the ancients. Our control of fire has obliged us to be continually making calls upon our bravery. The formidable machines which we set in motion; the explosives which we use so largely; the murderous forces of nature, like electricity, which we have brought into subservience; the thousand dangerous exploits on the sea, in the bowels of the earth, and in the giddy heights of the air in which thousands, nay millions, of engineers and workmen daily risk their lives, have steeled our temperaments to quell that blind and instinctive fear which lies deep down in human nature.

War is the supreme test of this increased courage. War has become rarer, it is true, than it was in the ancient world; but how much more terrible and awe-inspiring has it become, both by land and by sea, since fire replaced steel as the principal weapon! The only forms of fire known to the ancients as useful in war were boiling oil, which was often used in sieges, and the so-called Greek fire, which was employed in naval battles—a mysterious compound, into which one suspects, petroleum entered, for it was much used by the nations and cities of the Black Sea. But both of these were but children’s toys compared with the guns, shrapnel, and torpedoes of modern warfare. We are justified, therefore, in asserting that the men who took part in the battles of Marathon, Cannæ, and Zama did not need to have hearts so stout or courage so intrepid as the men who faced each other in the great battles of the Napoleonic era, in the American Civil War, in the battles between the Russians and Japanese, or in the recent Balkan War.

But if we are more courageous, we are at the same time less cruel, a fact which throws our superior courage into greater relief. One of the characteristic differences between contemporary civilisation and those which preceded it, up to the French Revolution, is the total suppression of the bloody spectacles which, under so many aspects and forms, were one of the most sinister delights of our ancestors. We find the greatest difficulty in understanding how so highly civilised a people as the Romans, with so many thoughts and feelings in common with ourselves, could have been roused to such a pitch of intoxication by the games of gladiators and the baiting of wild beasts. And yet the popular passion for these bloody games was such that even the emperors, in whom they inspired feelings of horror and repulsion, like Augustus, were compelled to attend the gory spectacles, so as not to appear, by their absence, to rebuke those who supported them and to run counter to the absorbing passion of the masses for them.

On the other hand, if an ancient Roman came back to the world, and saw an American stadium packed with people from top to bottom, he would be not a little puzzled to explain what could have induced so many thousands of persons to have flocked together from afar merely to watch a football match,—to collect in such crowds, endure such a long journey, and such discomfort, just to get a distant view of some youths kicking their legs in the air! It would seem to them a truly insipid and tiresome spectacle. Their tastes ran to a gory struggle, reminiscent of war, to fights between men and animals, blood in bucketfuls.

Christianity initiated that education of men’s feelings which has made us gradually turn away our eyes in horror from these atrocious diversions. But how slow and difficult this education has been! It can safely be said not to have reached its climax until after the Revolution. Only the nineteenth century, intent on mitigating and humanising the penal law in every direction, has finally succeeded in abolishing the last of these cruel spectacles, capital punishment. Right up to the end of the eighteenth century, condemned prisoners were executed throughout Europe with much pomp and in the full light of day, in the central squares of the cities, at times and places at which everybody could attend, as if at a public festival. Indeed, executions were invariably attended by an immense public, attracted by cruel curiosity to see a man going to his death. By diminishing the number of death sentences, and by executing culprits in prison yards in the presence of a handful of witnesses, or, as is still done in France, in public, but at dawn, with the public kept at as great a distance as possible, the nineteenth century has put the crown on one of the most far-reaching and wonderful moral transformations of the human mind, a transformation which owes its birth to the words of Christ uttered twenty centuries ago, and has given modern civilisation one notable reason for boasting itself superior to the ancient.

But if we are more courageous and more humane, we are, on the other hand, in no way more sober or more temperate. As far as these virtues are concerned, the ancient world cuts a much better figure in history than does the modern. We have deteriorated. The modern world eats and drinks to excess. It indulges to excess in alcoholic drinks and stimulants. The only intoxicating drinks known to the ancients were wine and beer, and wine they always drank mixed with water. They did not know alcohol, nor consequently, liqueurs, now so numerous and so highly appreciated; they did not know tea, coffee, or tobacco. We can assert positively that drunkenness was the rarest of vices in the ancient world, while frugality was the commonest of virtues. We need not take too seriously those orgies of the wealthy to which ancient writers—especially Latin writers—so often allude, or the banquets at which dishes of parrots’ tongues were served, or pearls dissolved in vinegar were drunk. These stories bear a strong family likeness to the legends current in Europe about “the corrupt state of American society,” and are due to the same tendency. They are the exaggerated and violent reaction of an ancient puritanism against the natural advances of luxury and against that kind of moral slackening which always accompanies the increase of wealth. Just as the dispassionate and unprejudiced European, when he examines at close-quarters the so-called “corrupt state of American society,” readily recognises that the high-sounding expression only indicates certain defects and weaknesses which certainly are reprehensible, but which are common to the whole of modern civilisation and not peculiar to America, so the famous Roman orgies and the banquets, which have made so much stir, would seem to us, if a miracle allowed us to attend them, very modest and unassuming affairs compared to our ostentatious displays.

As far, then, as sobriety and temperance are concerned, we cannot confront our ancestors with too haughty a mien. And what shall we say about the purity of our customs? That is a much more difficult problem, perhaps an absolutely insoluble one. At least I, for my part, do not feel myself competent to solve it. To judge from Greco-Latin literature and art, one would say that in the ancient world, with the exception of a few countries and certain epochs, such as the centuries during which Rome was controlled by a puritan aristocracy, the customs of both men and women were very free and easy. But literature and art often afford untrustworthy evidence on which to base a judgment as to the customs of an epoch. For vice, wrong, and crime, though they may shock the moral sense, are more interesting subjects for art than are virtue and honesty. In short, literature and art always seek to describe what is rare, exceptional, and dramatic. Therefore, if we wish to judge the moral state of an epoch from its literature and art, we must know how far and in what degree the faults and vices described or chosen for artistic representation are common, what is the rule, and how many are the exceptions. And how are we to find this out? We shall have to know the moral state of the epoch, and literature will not help us to this knowledge.

Anybody who judged Paris from the novels or dramas which deal with Parisian life would be forced to conclude that the French metropolis spends the whole of its time in amorous adventures. But anyone who knows Paris is aware, what is after all an a priori supposition, that love occupies in its life a very much less prominent place than in its literature; and that the writers of dramas and novels go to love for their subject by preference, because love admits of more attractive treatment than do struggles for money or the rivalries of political ambitions and the crosses of the intellectual life. For the rest, when we wish to judge the customs of an epoch or of a people, we must not forget that it is not always the epochs or the nations which lament most loudly the depravity of customs that are the most corrupt. Far from it! Often the epochs which bewail their own vices most bitterly are those in which the moral conscience is still lively and robust and, therefore, protests against the evil. The epochs which are dumb, and seem most virtuous, have often reached such a pitch of depravity, that they have become indifferent to the evil.

A striking instance of this curious phenomenon is to be found in the history of Rome. Horrible stories are told of the first period of the Empire,—extending from Augustus to Nero,—during which the family of the Julio-Claudii were at the helm of the State. History and literature are full of scandals, and of laments over the depravity of the times. In the second period, on the other hand,—that of the Flavii and Antonines,—the scandals and protests cease. The depravity of the preceding century seems suddenly to have mysteriously disappeared. The Roman world has, by a kind of miraculous conversion, in a few years turned virtuous. In fact, not a few historians have thought that this miracle did come about, and have credited it to the virtuous emperors of the second century. After so many bad emperors, Rome at last got some good ones; and the trick was done! But anybody who studies the facts with a little patience will have no hesitation in concluding that the times of the Antonines were at least as corrupt as those of the Julio-Claudii; but that, while in the first century of the Christian era the ancient Puritan spirit of Rome was still alive and vigorous, and therefore protested against the deterioration of customs with such energy that its protests have reached even to our ears, in the epoch of the Antonines, on the other hand, this spirit was spent. Consequently, everybody resigned himself to the evil, either despairing of being able to cure it, or not giving it a thought. And so, of the two epochs, that which was painted in the blacker colours was, perhaps, really the better.

It is impossible, then, to decide whether our customs are better or worse than those of the ancients. It is certain, on the other hand, that we are much more human than they. For with us, a sentiment, which with the ancients was very weak, if not non-existent, is lively and profound, the sentiment of the moral equality of every individual. The ancients simply refused to recognise in the slave and in the free man, in the nobleman and in the plebeian, in the citizen and in the foreigner, human creatures made of the same clay and animated by the same spirit, whom the mysterious accidents of fortune had placed in different situations, and all of whom had certain sacred and inviolable rights in the supreme domain of justice. A few philosophers dared just to hint at such doctrines, but without laying too much stress upon them. And theirs were voices crying in the wilderness. The free man, the patrician, and the citizen felt themselves creatures of another species and of a higher nature than slaves, plebeians, and foreigners, towards whom the former group might have capricious bursts of benevolence, but to whom they never regarded themselves as bound by any obligation. Hence came that asperity which appears in all the social relations of ancient peoples,—in their laws, their customs, their wars, their political quarrels,—and which often seems to us in so striking a contrast with the lofty and noble culture which adorned the ancient states.