The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

Moles Hadriani: restored

In domestic building the Romans had almost as little regard as the Greeks for the exterior elevation of their villas and palaces. The Roman gentleman still made it his favourite hobby to collect villas, and Pliny had almost as many as Cicero. But the main idea of the villa was comfort, and the main idea of Roman comfort was coolness, quiet, and beautiful scenery. Thus the wealthy man’s house consisted of a series of marble courts and cloisters spread over the ground regardless of space. Landscape and landscape-gardening were the most charming features. The Roman appreciated the scenery of Como or Sirmione, Tivoli or Naples quite as keenly as the tourist of to-day. He thought much of fresh air and good water. Nearly all Roman gentlemen were agreed in considering Rome itself, with its smells, its noise, and its perils by fire, as a pestilent place of abode, and they gladly fled to their country estates at Præneste or Baiæ. Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli[85] included reproductions of many famous buildings which he had seen and admired on his travels. The decoration of these villas encouraged two minor arts which figure prominently among their remains. The floors were commonly adorned with marble mosaic, of which we still have some charming examples.[86] The interior walls were incrusted either with marble, in the wealthier houses, or stuccoed and painted. Hence, it results that the Art of Painting is represented to us almost solely by mosaics, wall-frescoes,[87] and a few portraits on Egyptian mummy-cases. Nothing remains of the great masters of antiquity, Polygnotus, Zeuxis, and Apelles. But there may be faint echoes of their work on the frescoes of Pompeii executed by unnamed decorators. Even so there is great charm in much of this work. Professor Mau, the great authority on Pompeii, has distinguished four successive phases of painting in that city. At first the aim was to imitate the marble slabs used to cover the walls of the rich man’s house. Then growing bolder the painter imitates various forms of architectural treatment dividing up his wall space into panels and portraying cornices, columns, pilasters, and so forth. This is roughly the style of the first century B.C., and it is found in the so-called house of Livia on the Palatine Hill at Rome.[88] The third style, which Mau terms the “ornate,” was prevalent until about A.D. 50.

Plate LXXXVIII. FRESCO OF THE SACRIFICE OF IPHIGENIA

The architectural features now make no pretence at illusion. The columns have become mere bands of colour, and there is profuse ornament everywhere. The colours are somewhat cold. The fourth or “intricate” style once more emphasises the architectural character of the decoration, but the patterns are too intricate to present any appearance of reality. The whole wall space shows a riot of fantastic ornament often extremely graceful and effective. Flying goddesses and cupids impart a sense of airy lightness, and floral forms festoon themselves in charming curves. The pictures are smaller and the spaces wider. No more pleasing treatment of the interior walls of a house has ever been devised, at any rate for warm climates. The destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79 brings the history of ancient painting to a premature close.[89] The subjects of the pictures are almost exclusively mythological.

The minor arts of the jeweller, the gem-engraver, the goldsmith reach a high state of technical perfection, but they do not improve in spirit or artistic feeling with the progress of the ages. Much of the furniture found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, especially the bronze-work,[90] exhibits most graceful forms, always Greek in inspiration.

Law

The greatest intellectual achievement of the Roman people was in the domain of law. The spiritual endowment of the typical Roman included all the qualities of the lawyer—a sense of equity that was quite devoid of sentimentalism, an instinct for order, discipline, and business, a language of great clarity and precision, and above all, a devotion to ceremonies and formulæ which sternly rejected abstract casuistry. Their law took its rise in a series of religious formulæ known only to priests and to the king as chief priest. The Twelve Tables put some of the most ancient principles into words, and partly from their use as a text-book of education, were regarded almost with as much veneration as the Two Tables of Moses. They were, in fact, sometimes considered as the sole fountain of jurisprudence, or at any rate as the sole code of written law. The legislative enactments of the State were on a far lower plane and no ancient people ever considered its legislature capable of turning out a daily quota of legislation as modern parliaments are supposed to do. In the main the fabric of Roman jurisprudence consisted of “case law” made by the judges on the tribunals. The Prætor Urbanus made the Civil Law of Rome, and this became permanent by means of the system of Perpetual Edicts. Religion continued to control the international law of the Roman world, an affair of ceremonies in the hands of the priestly college of heralds—the jus fetiale. But, meanwhile, the prætor peregrinus who had to decide cases between non-citizens was gradually accumulating a body of law, wrongly termed international, in the jus gentium. It was observed that there was a great deal in common between the various codes of the Italian and other Mediterranean States, and this was put together in the foreign prætor’s edict. The more philosophical jurists, inspired with the Stoic doctrines about following nature, evolved the theory that this common element of various nations was nothing but the Natural Law, jus naturæ. It was a fruitful error, and it lies at the base of much of the modern “international law” as expounded by Grotius and other seventeenth-century jurists.

The Civil Law of Rome was in the main, then, a series of precedents handed down by prætor to prætor from times beyond record. To it was added a large body of “counsel’s opinions” which drew their validity largely from the eminence of their authors. It was Hadrian who set about the systematisation of these. He organised the jurisprudentes into a regular profession. He appointed his “counsellors” from the leading barristers of the day, and he gave to the whole body of responsa prudentium, “the opinions of the learned,” the validity of statutory law. The justice and precision of the civil law was the most attractive feature of Roman civilisation to the barbarian world. Gallic and British communities made haste to learn Latin in order that they might gain the “Latin right” which admitted them to the privilege of enjoying Roman law. In A.D. 212, Caracalla, who did little else to deserve the gratitude of posterity, uttered a single edict called the “Antonine Constitution” which admitted the whole empire to the privileges of Roman citizenship. Now a single code ran throughout the whole Western world. Hadrian had set his most distinguished lawyers, under the leadership of Salvius Julianus, to codify the “perpetual edict” of the prætors. It was under the Antonines that some citizen from the East, who is only known to us by the common prænomen of Gaius, wrote those learned “Institutes of Roman Law” which are still the nursery of our lawyers. But it was the great Eastern emperor Justinian (A.D. 527-565) who codified the whole body of civil law in a series of immense documents. Roman law had already conquered its barbarian conquerors, the Goths, and almost every European legal system except our own is based upon that ancient law which arose from the Twelve Tables and the prætor’s edict. The canon law of the Church was Roman law in its essence.