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

by P. V. N. Myers

The influence of religion upon Roman morality was never great; still, as we have seen, the Roman’s sense of duty was in some degree strengthened by his belief in the gods and in their general watch over the conduct of men. Hence that growth of philosophic doubt among the learned class which characterized the later period of the Republic, and the transformation of religion into gross superstition among the debased population of the cities, contributed to hasten and render more decisive the moral decline we are tracing.

(h) Extremes of wealth and poverty

The apparent teaching of history is that there is an antithesis between wealth and morality. It is a commonplace of the records of civilization that as a community has advanced in material prosperity and waxed rich it has gone backward in morals. The growth in great riches of a people has usually been the prelude to their moral degeneracy and loss of place in the competition of races and cultures.

There ought certainly to be no antithesis between riches and morality, any more than between intellectual culture and morality. To suppose that there is any natural and necessary incompatibility between these two elements of civilization is to suppose that there exists a fatal antinomy at the very heart of the cosmic evolution.

That moral degeneracy should be the common accompaniment of a community’s growth in wealth, springs not from the mere possession of wealth, but in the main from its inequitable distribution. Thus far in history, as a society has grown in riches it has become divided into two sharply contrasted classes, the very rich and the very poor. Now each of these extremes is unfavorable to morality. Excessive fortune gives birth to luxury, to gross, extravagant, and unethical uses of wealth. Particularly is this likely to be true if the elevation to affluence has been sudden and from comparative poverty. The reason of this is, as was long ago pointed out, that men before they have learned self-control have placed in their hands means for the unlimited satisfaction of every appetite and desire, and generally the desire of such men is for indulgence in gross sensuous and sensual forms of pleasure. On the other hand, extreme poverty is equally disastrous to morals; for poverty means almost inevitably undue nutrition of body and soul, and generally squalid and insanitary conditions of life that destroy at once physical and moral health, and breed in the young and old alike the most repellent and contagious forms of vice.

Now while at every period of Roman history we find two classes, the rich and the poor, the extremes of wealth and poverty do not appear until about a century before the establishment of the Empire.[542] And unfortunately all the conditions which tend to render such inequality of fortune especially pernicious to morals were existent at this time in Roman society. The men into whose control came the great fortunes of the period were generally men of servile origin, because law and public sentiment prevented the senatorial order from engaging in trade or commerce. These men, who had not yet outgrown the grossness and vices of the slave class from which they had sprung, with unlimited wealth at their command, and “without the restraint of traditions or ideals,” were naturally prone to indulge in vulgar luxury, in ostentatious extravagance, and in orgies of sensuality.

At the same time at the other end of the social scale were the very poor, subjected to the debasing influences of idleness, of a grossly immoral stage, and of the brutalizing spectacles of the amphitheater. The relations of the large number of propertyless clients to their wealthy patrons bred in this class the hateful vices of servility and hypocrisy.[543]

Thus the division of Roman society into two classes, the overrich and the very poor,—a division which is always the sign and register of social maladjustment and injustice,—became one of the most potent causes of that moral degeneracy which relaxed the fiber of the Roman race and preluded the downfall of the Republic.

(i) Demoralizing influence of Eastern luxury and vice

After the conquest of the East the national character of the Romans was subjected to a great variety of influences from Greece and the half-Hellenized countries of the Orient. Many of these influences, as we shall notice a little later, had a strengthening and uplifting effect upon Roman life, especially in the upper circles of society, but in general the new elements now imported into Roman civilization from the Hellenistic East were hurtful to morals. Rome “sucked poison from the Attic bloom decayed.”