History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

The maintenance of the standard in early times

The four essential facts in the moral life of Rome as a republic are: first, the high standard maintained in the early period; second, the gradual widening of the moral sympathies through the influence of conquest and advance in civilization; third, the general decline in morals during the two centuries preceding the establishment of the Empire; and fourth, the modification of the moral type through contact with Greece and the Orient.

Through the legendary haze which envelops all the earlier centuries of Rome, the one fact which stands out with comparative clearness is the Spartan-like loyalty of the old Roman to the ideal of character which he had conceived as the noblest and best. The legends of this period, invented or repeated by the men of a later age, celebrate qualities of character which we may believe really marked early Roman life and thought. Among these virtues were patriotic altruism, absolute self-abnegation for the common good, as illustrated by such tales as those of the self-devotion for the Roman people of Curtius and of the Elder and Younger Publius Decius Mus; reverence for law, as shown by the consul Lucius Junius Brutus in the condemnation of his sons to death for taking part in a conspiracy; and incorruptible integrity, as illustrated by the tales of Fabricius.

Even though all these stories of the heroic age of Rome be the invention of a later time, they at least show what at this later (though still comparatively early) period were highly esteemed qualities of character, just as the stories celebrating the filial piety of Chinese heroes of the olden time show how high a place this moral trait held in the ideal of the age that invented or repeated these tales with a didactic purpose.

The widening of the moral sympathies

The gradual broadening of the moral sympathies was a very important phase of the moral evolution in Roman society up to the end of the Republic. These sympathies embraced at first hardly more than the patrician class, which formed the nucleus of the early Roman community. The enlarging of the area covered by the ethical feelings was simply one phase, and, from the viewpoint of the student of morals, the most important phase of that political evolution which in the course of centuries brought within the sacred pale of Roman citizenship first the Plebeians, then the Latins, next the Italians, and finally all the freemen of the extended Roman dominions. That is to say, this central fact in Roman history, the expansion of the city into the world state, was in its deepest significance, in its remote consequences, as much a moral as a political movement. Conquest, it is true, prepared the way for the revolution, and the concessions made by the ruling class to the demands of the disfranchised classes and peoples were motived in the main by political prudence and expediency. But it is equally true that ethical sentiment worked with these other causes in determining the course and progress of the revolution, and that one of its most important results was the imparting of a great impulse to the widening moral movement going on in the ancient world, and the bringing to recognition of the principles of the moral equality and brotherhood of men.

This great all-embracing movement in the Roman world can, we believe, best be understood in its significance for the moral evolution of mankind only when translated into terms of the similar movement in modern times. We recognize the moral character, in a final analysis, of the revolution which, during the past century, has by successive enfranchisements admitted to a share in government and to the enjoyment of political rights the masses in modern civilized states. The movement has been largely ethical in its causes and still more largely ethical in its effects. The struggle of the people has had for aim to do away with unjust privilege and to establish equality and justice. The most important permanent effects of the revolution are indisputably to be looked for in the moral sphere. The incoming of democracy, meaning as it does the investing of the individual with dignity and worth, means the ennobling of the moral life of the world. It is this that constitutes the real significance of the democratic revolution and which gives it its important place in the moral history of humanity.[532]

The same is true of that phase of the modern movement which looks toward the formation of the world state. The forces at work here are admittedly varied and complex, but prominent among these agencies are the ethical. It is the broadening of the moral sympathies, the development of a true cosmopolitanism, a deepening consciousness of the brotherhood of men, the growth of a new social and international conscience—it is this slow evolution in the moral realm that has laid or is laying the true basis of the future world union. The universal state, once created,—this need not be argued,—would inevitably react powerfully and favorably upon the moral feelings and sympathies of men.

It was the same in the ancient world. The admission to full Roman citizenship, through successive enfranchisements, of all the freemen of the Roman dominions was at once the sign and the cause of a vast moral development. As fellow citizens with equal rights and privileges, men came to know and feel their ethical kinship. Likewise the establishment of the world state registered a great moral advance and supplied the conditions of a still greater progress. Had not the moral forces worked with the Roman legions, the world union could never have been formed, or, at least, if once formed, could never have been maintained for the long period that it was. It is probably true that the bringing by Rome of such a wide reach of lands under her rule did as much to awaken the sense of the brotherhood of man as did the teachings of Hebrew prophet or the culture and philosophy of Greece. It was certainly the political union of the civilized world that helped to awaken in Cicero and in the later philosophers of the Empire the conviction that the reach of the moral sympathies should be as extended as the human race. Thus the wide empire created by Rome was a potent influence making for ethical universalism. Never since the unification of the ancient world by Rome have the moral feelings of men been quite so narrow as before; never since has the conception of human brotherhood, the ideal of a united world, seemed so entirely a dream.

Causes of the decline in morals under the later Republic: (a) the passing of the city state