In this way eastern politics assorted themselves,—thus was the Levant divided: on the one hand you had the traditional seats of militariasm; on the other, famous names—and the heirs to the glory (a good deal tarnished now) that once had been Greece. The former were Macedon and Syria, or Macedon with Syria in the background; what better could you ask that a good square se-to with these? Oh, one at a time; that was the fine old Roman way; divide et impera; Mecedon now, and, a-grace of God, Syria—But let be; we are talking of this summer; for next, the Lord (painted bright vermilion) it may be hoped will provide. So for the present Philip of Mecedon figures as the desired enemy.—As to the other side, the famous names to be our allies, they are: Egypt, chief seat in recent centuries of culture and literature, and incidentally the Golconda of the time, endowed past dreaming of with commerce, wealth, and industries; and Rhodes, rich and republican, and learned too; and the sacred name of Athens; and Pergamum in Asia, cultured Attalus's kingdom. Are we not to ally ourselves with the arts and humanities, with old fame, with the most precious of traditions?—For Rome, it must be said, was not all Catos: there was something in her by this time that could thrill to the name of Greece. And Philip had been in league with Hannibal, though truly he had left him shamefully unsupported. Philip had been in league with Hannibal—with Hannibal!—Why, it was a glorious unsought fight, such as only fortune's favored soldiers might attain. The comitia vote against it? They say Hannibal has made them somewhat tired?—Nonsense! let 'em vote again! let 'em vote again!—They do so; assured pithily that it is only a question whether we fight Philip in Macedon, or he us on our own Italian soil. Of course, if you put it that way, it is Hobson's choice: the voting goes all right this time. So we are embarked on the great Eastern Adventure; and Flamininus sets out for Greece.
Now your simple savage is often a gentleman. I don't mean your Congo Quashi or Borria Bungalee from the back-country blocks of New South Wales—our Roman bore no resemblance to them; but say your Morocco kaid, your desert chieftain from Tunis or Algiers. Though for long generations he has lost his old-time civilized attainments, he retains in full his manners, his native dignity, his wild Saharan grace. But banish him to Paris, and see what happens. He buys up automobiles,—and poodles,—and astrolabes, —and patent-leather boots,—and a number of other things he were much better without. He exchanges his soul for a pass into the demi-monde; and year by year sees him further sunk into depths of vulgarism. This is precisely what in a few generations happened to Rome.
But meanwhile she was at an apex; touched by some few luminous ideals here and there, and producing some few great gentlemen. Unprovincial egos; like Scipio Africanus had been edging their way into Roman incarnation; they were swallows of a still far-off summer; they stood for Hellenization, and the modification of Roman rudeness with a little imported culture. Rome had conquered Magna Graccia, and had seen something there; had felt a want in herself, and brought in slaves like Livius Andronicus to supply it. Flamininus himself was really a very great gentleman: a patrician, type of the best men there were in Rome. He went to Greece thrilled with generous feelings, as to a sacred land. When he restored to the Greek cities their freedom,— handed them back to their own uses and devices, after freeing them from Philip,—it was with an infinite pride and a high simplicity. We hear of him overcome in his speech to their representatives on that occasion, and stopping to control the lump in his throat: conqueror and master of the whole peninsula and the islands, he was filled with reverence, as a great simple-hearted gentleman might be, for the ancient fame and genius of the peoples at his feet. He and his officers were proud to be admitted to the Games and initiated at Eleusis. I think this is the finest chapter in early Roman history. There is the simplicity, pride, and generosity of the Roman gentleman, confronted with a culture he was able to admire, but conscious he did not possess;—and on the other hand the fine flow of Greek gratitude to the liberator of Greece, in whom the Greeks recognised that of old time, and which had been so rare in their own life. At this moment Rome blossomed: a beautiful bloom, we may say.
But it was a fateful moment for her, too. The Greeks had long lost what capacity they had ever had for stable politics. Flamininus might hand them back their liberties with the utmost genuineness of heart; but they were not in a condition to use the gift. Rome soon found that she had no choice but to annex them, one way or another. They were her proteges; and Antiochus attacked them;—so then Antiochus had to be fought and conquered. That fool had great Hannibal with him, and resources with which Hannibal might have crushed Rome; but it did not suit Antiochus that the glory should be Hannibal's. Then presently Attalus bequeathed Pergamum to the Senate; which involved Rome in Asia Minor. So step by step she was compelled to conquer the East.
Now there was a far greater disparity of civilization between Rome and this Hellenistic Orient and half-orientalized Greece, than appeared afterwards between the Romans and Spaniards and Gauls. Spain, very soon after Augustus completed its conquest, was producing most of the brightest minds in Latin literature: the influx of important egos had hardly passed from Italy before it began to appear in Spain. Had not Rome become the world metropolis, capable of attracting to herself all elements of greatness from every part of the Mediterranean world, we should think of the first century A.D., as a great Spanish Age. Gaul, too, within a couple of generations of Ceasar's devastating exploits there, had become another Egypt for wealth and industries. The grandson's of the Vercingetorixes and Dumnorixes were living more splendidly, and as culturedly, in larger and better villas than the patricians of Italy; as Ferrero shows. We may judge, too, that there was a like quick rise of manvantaric conditions in Britain after the Claudian conquest: we have news of Agricola's speaking of the "labored studies of the Gauls," as if that people were then famed for learning,—to which, he said, he preferred the "quick wits and natural genius of the Britons." And here I may mention that, even before the conquest of Gaul, Caesar's own tutor was a man of that nation, a master of Greek and Latin learning;—but try to imagine a Roman tutoring Epaminondas or Pelopidas! So we may gather that a touch from Italy—by that time highly cultured,—was enough to light up those Celtic countries at once; and infer from that that no such long pralayic conditions had obtained in them as had obtained in Italy during the centuries preceding the Punic Wars. Spain at thirteen decades before Scipio, Gaul at as much before Caesar, Britain at as much before Caesar or Claudius, may well have been strong and cultured countries: because you wake quickly after the thirteen decade period of rest, but slowly after the long pralayas.
Roman Italy woke very slowly at the touch of Greece; and woke, not like Spain and Gaul afterwards at Rome's touch, to culture; not to learning or artistic fertility. What happened was what always does happen when a really inferior civilization comes in contact with a really superior one. Rome did not become civilized in any decent sense: she simply forwent Roman virtues and replaced them with Greek vices; and made of these, not the vices of a degenerate culture, but the piggishness of cultureless boors.—Behold her Gadarene stations, after Flamininus's return:—
Millions of money, in indemnities, loot, and what not,—in bribes before very long,—are flowing in to her. Where not so long since she was doing all her business with stamped lumps of bronze or copper, a pound or so in weight, in lieu of coinage, nor feeling the need of anything more handy,—now she is receiving yearly, monthly, amounts to be reckoned in millions sterling; and has no more good notion what to do with them than ever she had of old. If the egos (of Crest-Wave standing) had come in as quickly as did the shekels, things might have gone manageably; but they did not by any means. Her great misfortune was to enter the world-currents only on the material plane; to find her poor little peasant-bandit-souled self mistress of the world and its money, and still provincial to the core and with no ideas of bigness that were not of the earth earthy; with nothing whatever that was both spiritual and Roman to thrill to life the higher side of her;—a multimillionaire that could hardly read or write, and knew no means of spending her money that was not essentially vulgar. She had given up her sole means of salvation—which was hoeing cabbages; her slaves did all that for her now;—and so was at a loss for employment; and Satan found plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do. There were huge all-day-long banquets, where you took your emetic from time to time to keep you going. There were slaves,—armies of them; to have no more than a dozen personal attendants was poverty. There were slaves from the East to minister to your vices; some might cost as much as five thousand dollars; and there were dirt-cheap Sardinians and 'barbarians' of all sorts to run your estates and farms. All the work of Italy was done by slave labor; and the city swarmed with an immense slave population; the country slaves with enough of manhood left in them to rise and butcher and torture their masters when they could; the city slaves, one would say, in no condition to keep the semblance of a soul in them at all,—living dead. For the most part both were shamefully treated; Cato,— high old Republican Cato, type of the free and nobly simple Roman—used to see personally to the scourging of his slaves daily after dinner, as a help to his digestion.—So the rich wasted their money and their lives. They bought estates galore, and built villas on them; Cicero had—was it eighteen?— country-houses. They bought up Greek art-treasures, of which they had no appreciation whatever,—and which therefore only helped to vulgarize them. Such things were costly, and thought highly of in Greece; so Rome would have them for her money, and have them en masse. Mummius brought over a shipload; and solemnly warned his sailors that they would have to replace any they might break or lose. The originals, or such substitutes as the sailors might supply,—it was all one to him. As to literature,—well, we have seen how it began with translations made by a Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who put certain Hellenistic comedies and the Odyssey into Latin ballad meters; the kind of verse you would expect from a slave ordered promiscuously by his master to get busy and do it. Then came Father Ennius; and here I shall diverge a little to try to show you what (as I think) really happened to the soul of Rome.
It was a queer set-out, this job that Ennius attempted,—of making a real Roman poem, an epic of Roman history. Between old Latin and Greek there was the same kind of difference as between French and English: one fundamental in the rhythm of the languages. I am giving my own explanation of a very puzzling problem; and needless to say, it may be wrong. The ancient Roman ballads were in what is called Saturnian meter, which depends on stress and accent; it is not unlike the meter of the Scotch and English ballads. That means that old Latin was spoken like English is, with syllabic accent. But Greek was not. In that, what counted, what made the meters, was tone and quantity. Now we have that in English too; but it is a subtler and more occult influence in poetry than accent is. In English, the rhythm of a line of verse depends on the stresses; but where there is more than rhythm,—where there is music,—quantity is a very important factor. For example, in the line
"That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,"
you can hear how the sound is held up on the word take, because the k is followed by the t in to; and what a wonderful musical effect is given thereby to the line. All the swing and lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were to denote the tones the syllables should be—shall I say sung on? Now French is an example of a language without stresses; you know how each syllable falls evenly, all taking an unvarying amount of time to enounce. I imagine the basic principle of Greek was the same; only that you had to add to the syllables a length of sound where two consonants combining after a vowel retarded the flow of tone, as in take to in the line quoted just now.