I. Institutions and Conditions of Life Determining the Early Moral Type
The Roman family: ancestor worship and the patria potestas
The family in early Rome may more unreservedly be pronounced a seed plot of morals than in the case of any other ancient people save the Chinese. It was ancestor worship which made it such a nursery of morality, for the cult of ancestors made the family a group of co-worshipers about the domestic hearth. This worship purified and braced morality, since the tutelary spirits were believed to watch over the morals of the family and to punish wrongdoing. No impure act could be committed in the presence of the chaste hearth fire, and no one guilty of unexpiated crime dared to come into its presence.[522]
But it was in constituting the father the high priest of the family group that this domestic worship exercised its greatest influence upon early Roman morality. It gave a religious sanction to the father’s authority and made the patria potestas for many centuries a molding force in the moral life of the Roman people.[523] A little further on we shall see how, in the atmosphere of the home thus constituted, was fostered in the youth the virtues of submission to rightful authority, respect for law, and obedience to magistrates—virtues which were one secret of the strength and triumphs of early Rome.
The city state
Next after the family the state was the most important agency in the creation of the Roman type of virtue. We have to do here, as in Greece, with the city state. This was the chief sphere of duty of the Roman during his mature and active life. Consequently, just as it was the nature of the city state which in Greece determined in large measure what should constitute the supreme virtues and duties of the Greek ideal of character, so was it the constitution of Rome as a city state that, as we shall see a little later, determined what should be the leading virtues and duties entering into the Roman ideal of goodness. This made that ideal to be preëminently an ideal of civic duty. “Never since the fall of paganism have the civic virtues shone out so brilliantly.”[524]
The occupations of farming and war
Alongside domestic and political institutions stands, as we have seen, occupation as a creator and molder of the moral type of a people. The two occupations of the early Latins were farming and war, and thus it came about that in the primitive ethical type were united the sturdy moral qualities of the peasant farmer and the heroic virtues of the warrior. This blend produced one of the most admirable moral types of the ancient world.
The religion
Aside from the cult of ancestors, religion among the Romans exercised but little direct influence upon morality, for the reason that it was mainly a method of obtaining prosperity, of averting calamity, and of reading the future. There was in truth an almost complete separation of religion and morality. It was only in later times that the Roman philosophers sought in the moral character of the gods models for human imitation. But though religion had so little to do in creating the salient virtues of the moral type, it did reënforce the sentiment of patriotism, since the temple was a state institution, and in various other ways—as, for instance, in lending sanctity to oaths—quickened and strengthened the sense of obligation and duty.