[1a.] [1b.] Spencer: Principles of Ethics, vol. i.; New York, 1893..
[2a.] [2b.] Maine: Early History of Institutions; New York, 1869.
[3.] Tennent: Natural History of Ceylon; London, 1861.
IV. The Ethics of the Ancient.
But the doctrine that each petty tribe is the centre of the world and the only real and important people in the universe, and that all others are mere nobodies, is not peculiar to primitive peoples. Ethnocentric ethics—the ethics of amity toward their own tribe or state, their own clique or kind, and the ethics of enmity toward outsiders—has been manifested to a greater or less extent by the peoples of all times and of all degrees of enlightenment. Every people that has ever existed has had its own particular point of view, its own bias, its own knot-hole, large or small, through which it has looked at life and the world. This is inevitable. It arises as a necessary sequence out of the fact that all peoples above savages are the descendants of savages, and as such have inherited the limitations, mental and environmental, of those from whom they have evolved.
Aliens had no legal rights in ancient times—none whatever. International cooperation, such as exists among the political societies of Europe and America to-day, was absolutely unknown. International relations were everywhere those of hostility. States and races looked upon each other as foes, as objects of plunder and victimisation, not as friends.
Caesar says of the ancient Germans that depredations committed beyond the boundaries of each state bore no infamy, and that stealing from aliens was even encouraged as a means of teaching their young men adroitness.
The ancient Jews are an excellent illustration of a narrow and self-centred people. Notwithstanding their insignificance, politically and intellectually, as compared with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Persians, the Jews believed themselves to be the only people of the first class inhabiting the earth. They conceived that they had been selected as favourites by the gods themselves, and that around their little district in half-arid Palestine revolved the interests of the entire world. Their chief city was supposed to be the sacred and central city of the world, and heaven itself only a new and idealised edition of their metropolis. Every Jew was bound to every other Jew by high-wrought ceremony and obligation. But all non-Jews were ‘Gentiles,’ chaff-like ‘pagans,’ who possessed no rights which a ‘child of Abraham’ was bound to respect. Their tribal god is said to have been so indulgent toward them as his ‘chosen people’ that he allowed them to exact usury from foreigners, to sell them diseased meats, and to borrow jewels from them and afterwards run away with them. He even permitted them to make war upon weak peoples and dispossess them of their lands. ‘Whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess’ (Judg. xi. 24).
The kings of the ancient Assyrians were so accustomed to cruelties upon non-Assyrians, and were so proud of these cruelties, that they recorded them in stone as a claim to immortality among men. Assurbanipal, in speaking of the conquered, says: ‘I pulled out their tongues and cut off their limbs, and caused them to be eaten by dogs, bears, eagles, vultures, birds of heaven.’ Assur-natsir-pal, another wonderful fellow, boasts similarly: ‘I flayed the nobles and covered the pyramid with their skins, and their young men and maidens I burned as a holocaust.’ ‘Their carcasses covered the valleys and the tops of the mountains,’ says Tiglath-Pileser in his account of the slain Muskayans; and Sennacherib informs us proudly that he drove his chariot over the dead bodies of his victims until ‘its wheels were clogged with flesh and blood.’ ‘Evidently’ remarks Spencer, in speaking of these monstrous inscriptions, ‘the expectation was that men of after-times would admire these merciless destructions; for we cannot assume that these Assyrian kings intentionally made themselves eternally infamous’.[1]
To the ancient Greeks there were two classes of human beings in the world: Greeks and ‘barbarians.’ The Greeks were the inhabitants of Hellas, which was believed to be the central region of the world, and the ‘barbarians’ were the godless denizens of the less-favoured and less centrally located remainder of the earth. The world was believed to be flat or shield-shaped, and in its exact centre stood Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly. This mountain, which is 9,700 feet high, was supposed to be the highest elevation on the earth, and was the awful abode of the gods. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes. According to their fabled genealogy, they were the descendants of Hellen, son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah. While they were often at war with each other, they spoke a common language, and always regarded themselves as members of a single family. All non-Greeks were ‘barbarians,’ including the Romans, who were called ‘barbarians’ down to the time of Augustus. While the Greeks themselves traced their ancestry back to the bright blood of the gods, the ‘barbarians’ were generally supposed to have originated from stones and trees. The ‘barbarians’ were looked upon and treated by the Greeks everywhere as a different order of beings from themselves. Those taken by them in war were regularly reduced to slavery. The slave population created in this way was increased by the slave traffic carried on with the East until the slave population of Greece was several times as great as the free population. The whole Hellenic world, in fact, even in the days of its greatest magnificence, was one vast pen of slaves. Almost every freeman of Attica was a slave-owner. Out of a population of about five hundred thousand, four hundred thousand were slaves. It was considered a real hardship by the Greeks to be compelled to get along with less than a half-dozen slaves. In Corinth and Aegina there were ten slaves to one freeman. In Sparta the slaves were the vanquished Helots, the original inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, whom the Spartans had conquered and reduced to chains in early times. Their lot was particularly horrible. They were the property of the state, and were distributed to the Spartan lords by lot. ‘They practically had no rights which their masters felt bound to respect. If one of their number displayed unusual powers of either body or mind, he was secretly assassinated, as it was deemed unsafe to allow such qualities to be fostered in the servile class. It is affirmed [by Thucydides] that, when the Helots grew too numerous for the supposed safety of the state, their numbers were thinned by deliberate massacre of the surplus population’.[2] The conception of human slavery entertained by the common mass of Greeks may be inferred from the fact that philosophers like Aristotle taught that ‘slaves were simply domestic animals possessed of intelligence.’ It is this fact, this utter lack of justice and humanity manifested by the Greeks in their treatment of non-Hellenic mankind, which gives to Greek ‘civilisation’ its seamy side. Greek society has been appropriately likened to a pyramid, its apex gleaming with light and splendour, while its base was sunk in darkness.
Non-Romans were called ‘barbarians’ also by the Romans, and were considered by the Romans to be an entirely different order of beings from themselves. Any splinter of a Roman was, according to the Romans, superior to the most illustrious ‘barbarian.’ Men were not treated nor estimated according to their intrinsic qualities, but wholly as to whether they were or were not ‘Roman citizens.’ To be a ‘Roman citizen’ was to be entitled to everything; to be a ‘barbarian’ was not to be entitled to anything necessarily, except to serve in some way the all-glorious Romans. The elaborate legal and ethical codes formulated by these masters of the Mediterranean were reserved religiously for themselves. The business of the ‘barbarians’ was to furnish fields for pillage and conquest, to impart magnitude to triumphal pageants, to act as slaves, and to die by ignominiously butchering each other for the amusement of their bloodthirsty masters. ‘Barbarian’ lands were looked upon simply as game-preserves where ambitious captains from the Tiber went to refresh their reputations by hunting and victimising the inhabitants. The history of Rome is the history of infamy on a colossal, almost world-wide, scale. There has never been displayed by any people pretending to be civilised such shameless savagery as that displayed by the Romans in their gladiatorial arenas, where men (generally the captives of war) were ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday.’ These tragedies, in their magnitude and atrocity, seem almost frightful when we read of them on the pages of history. They were generally celebrated by victorious captains and emperors at the close of some unusual outrage against the ‘barbarians,’ or upon the departure of Roman legions for the field of activity. The celebrations sometimes lasted weeks, or even months. The Emperor Trajan celebrated his victories over the Dacians with shows that lasted more than a hundred days. During this horrible festival ten thousand men fought upon the arena, and more than ten thousand wild animals were slain. The gladiators in these ancient combats fought in chariots, on horseback, on foot—in all the ways in which soldiers fought in actual battle. They fought with swords, lances, daggers, tridents, and every other manner of weapon. Some had nets and lassoes with which they entangled their adversaries, and then slew them. The life of a wounded gladiator was in the hands of the spectators, who showed their clemency or their lack of it by turning their thumbs respectively down or up. The thirst of the populace for blood was sometimes such that the dying were aroused and forced on to the fight by burning with a hot iron. The dead bodies were dragged from the arena with hooks, like the carcasses of animals, and the pools of blood soaked up with dry sand.[3a] There was an occasional Roman, like Seneca, sane enough to realise the real character of these performances, and brave enough to denounce them as crimes. But by the great mass of all classes of Romans, even by those who pretended to think, they were regarded with perfect moral indifference. The excuse offered by Pliny was generally concurred in by his countrymen, that these bloody shows were necessary for the cultivation of manliness and for keeping awake the strenuous and red-handed instincts in the young.
Scarce less revolting than the gladiatorial arena, in its violation of every principle of humanity, was the institution of human slavery. During the later republic and the earlier empire, one-half the population of the Roman state was slaves. The slave population was recruited chiefly, as in Greece, by war and by slave-hunting. Slave-traders and slave-markets flourished both in the capital itself and in all the great ports visited by Roman ships. Some of the outlying provinces of Asia and Africa were almost depopulated by the slave-hunters. Greek slaves were the highest-priced, because the most intelligent. Among the wealthy, who, like the illiterate rich of every age, dawdled their time in ostentation, there were slaves for each different function in the household. There were the cubicularii, who acted as housemaids; the triclinarii, who waited at table; the culinarii, who acted as kitchen drudges; and the balnearii, who looked after the baths. Then there were tonsores or barbers; criniflores, or hair-crimpers; calceatores, who took care of the feet; and lectores, whose business it was to read aloud to their masters at meals, in the bath, or in bed. The ostiarius, who was sometimes chained in the vestibule like a dog, was the porter; the invitator summoned the guests; and the servus ab hospitiis looked after their lodgment. There was the slave called the sandalio, whose sole duty was to care for his master’s sandals; and another, called the nomenclator, whose exclusive business it was to accompany his master when he went upon the street, and give him the names of such persons as he ought to recognise. The common punishment for a refractory slave was beating. If the runaway were caught, as he could hardly fail to be, since there were extremely heavy penalties for harbouring or assisting him, he was either branded or had an iron collar like a dog’s welded around his neck, or his legs were fettered, or, in exaggerated or repeated cases of offence, he was at once turned into the arena or otherwise put to death. If he attempted to take personal vengeance upon his master for any wrong whatsoever, his whole family shared his fate, and the regular form of capital punishment for a slave was crucifixion under the most ignominious and agonising circumstances.[4]