This general contempt for the occupations of the artisan and merchant rendered impossible the development of industrial virtues in the Roman masses. Torn from the soil and swept into the cities by the movement cityward in this period, the free poor, too proud to engage in occupations which were looked upon as degrading, were stranded in idleness and exposed to all the demoralizing influences of city life. Crowds of them became the dependents of the rich and formed that despicable client class of the later Republic and the early Empire whose abominable vices roused the anger and provoked the scorn of the satirists and moralists of the time.
(e) Free distribution of corn
A direct outgrowth of the presence in Rome of this great multitude of the idle free poor was the evil of the corn laws. The indiscriminate public free distribution of corn to the poorer citizens—prompted, for the most part, not by genuine humanitarian feelings but by unworthy political and personal motives—had a most debauching effect upon morals. It intensified the very evil it was supposed to ameliorate. It attracted still greater crowds of the idle to the capital, depressed to a still greater degree agriculture in Italy,—grain for distribution being imported in the main from Egypt and North Africa,—and checked every tendency toward the formation of habits of industry, self-reliance, and thrift in the lower classes. The evil attained its climax when the largesses became an undisguised bid by the corrupt demagogue for popular favor—the naked price paid by rich plotters against the commonwealth for the support of the morally debauched and fickle proletariat.
(f) Gladiatorial games
The idle population of Rome had not only to be fed but to be amused. The same motives that had led to the enormous increase in the largesses of grain to the free poor contributed also to the multiplication of the spectacles of the circus and the amphitheater, particularly of the gladiatorial games, which, introduced at Rome in the third century B.C., had now become the favorite amusement of the Roman populace. “That not only men, but women in an advanced period of civilization,—men and women who not only professed but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals,—should have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for centuries, with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts in moral history.”[538]
But this fact is by no means an isolated or unique one in the ethical history of mankind. The student of the history of morals is often brought face to face with similar facts in the annals of every race and of every age. The fact with which the moralist is here confronted is hardly more startling than the hideously barbarous treatment of their enemies by the deeply pious Jews; the heartless massacre at times of their prisoners by the naturally humane Greeks; the savage severity of the medieval inquisitors toward heretics, while in general showing the greatest compassion and sympathy for those in pain and distress; the atrocious cruelty of the punishments meted out to offenders against society by the Christian governments of Europe down almost to the last century; the callous insensibility, until just now, of modern society to “the bitter cry of the children” of its city slums; and, above all, the glorification of war by the professed followers of Him whose most distinctive title is the Prince of Peace.
But just as all these startling inconsistencies and aberrations in moral conduct may be explained, in part at least, by reference to the effect upon the moral sympathies of tribal religion, of political rancor and fanaticism, of false theological dogmas, and of bad bequests of practices and conventions unreflectingly adopted by an advanced civilization from ages of barbarism and savagery, so is it possible in the same way to explain and render in a measure comprehensible to ourselves the existence without protest among the comparatively cultured Romans of such an institution as that of the gladiatorial combats. The system was fostered by slavery and the Romans’ occupation of war. The Roman people were originally stern and just; slavery and war tended to make them hard and callous. Slavery created a sort of caste morality, which excluded from the moral sphere large classes as completely as though they belonged to the dumb-animal creation. It was these pariah classes that contributed a large portion of the victims of the cruel sport. The enormous quantities of human flesh and blood required to nourish the system could have been found in no society except in one where a considerable part of the population had been degraded to a mere animal plane of existence and thus put practically beyond the range and reach of the moral feelings.
Like slavery, the constant wars in which the Romans were engaged tended to indurate their feelings and to destroy all sense of the sanctity of human life. In what way the military life of the Romans reacted upon their feelings and sentiments and molded even their ethical theories is shown by the fact that the Roman moral philosophers in general defended and approved the combats of the amphitheater on the ground that they inured the soldier to the sight of blood and taught him contempt of death.[539]
The effect of these inhuman spectacles upon morality was most lamentable. They hindered the growth of humane feelings in the men, deadened every tender sensibility of the women, habituated the young to scenes of cruelty,[540] and developed finally the normal impassiveness of the Roman temperament into a fierce delight in human suffering.[541]
(g) Decay of religious faith