The definitive establishment of the Empire and the passing of the liberal institutions of the Republic changed wholly the atmosphere in which had been nourished the virtues of Republican Rome. Political liberty was dead, and all true civic activity, which had been the very breath of life to the citizen of the ancient city, had come to an end. In the new world that was forming there was no room for the exercise of those patriotic virtues which had made the early history of Rome so great, and had given her the rule of the world.[545]
One wholly fresh cause of moral debasement was the personal character of several of the occupants of the imperial throne during the first century of the Empire. The Oriental extravagancies and coarse debaucheries which disgraced the court of a Claudius, a Caligula, or a Nero, communicated their virus to every part of the social body. Never did the proverb, “As court, so people,” have such justification. At the same time the tyranny which marked the rule of more than one of the emperors instituted a demoralizing terror like that of the proscriptions of the Civil Wars. Under the influence of the frightful persecutions of their order, the senatorial aristocracy, with moral fiber now relaxed and corroded by effeminate luxury, lost seemingly all those virtues which earlier had characterized their class, and was transformed into a body at times sycophantic, cringing, and base almost beyond belief. But it is doubtful if any other aristocracy which history has known would have stood the test any better. The French nobility of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, excluded from participation in political affairs by the divine-right monarchy, and made servile dependents of the court, exhibited almost as depressing a spectacle of moral degeneracy as did the higher Roman classes under the more frightful tyranny of the early Cæsars.
The old and the new
But we may here profitably call to mind the words of Wedgwood to the effect that the phenomenon of moral decay, although the most striking, is not the most significant fact in the moral history of a race or of an age. “The fact that an old ideal is perishing,” remarks this writer, “must always be a stronger or at least a more obvious moral influence than the fact that a new one is coming into life.... A death is more impressive than a birth.”[546]
What in this reflection claims our attention here is the implied truth that the passing of the old means the coming of the new. At the base of the falling leaf there is always a new-forming bud. It is not otherwise in the moral world. Unless the forces of the moral life have become fatally impaired, the decay of an old ideal of excellence is ever accompanied by the growth of a new and better one. And it was so in the Rome of the early Cæsars. The Roman ancestral ideal of character, with its attractive civic and heroic virtues, was indeed falling into decay and passing away, but a new and better ideal of goodness was slowly forming and winning the allegiance of the select spirits of the age.
The three periods in the moral history of Rome
Lecky distinguishes in the moral history of pagan Rome three periods characterized “by the successive ascendancy of the Roman, the Greek, and the Egyptian spirit.” Up to near the end of the Republic the moral ideal was essentially Roman; during the first and second centuries of the Empire it was characterized by the dominance of the humanitarian and cosmopolitan spirit of Greece; while in the third and last century of the pagan Empire it was marked by the ascendency of the Egyptian spirit of religious reverence.[547] In the immediately following pages we shall consider the second of these periods.
Modifying influence on the Roman ideal of the Greek spirit
Already at the time of the establishment of the Empire the two great civilizations of classical antiquity had been in close contact for a hundred years and more. The elements of Greek culture which reacted most powerfully upon Roman society were the purely intellectual and the ethical. History has fully recognized the debt of Rome to Greek intellectualism, but it has not so fully recognized her ethical debt to Hellenism. Yet it was the contribution made by Greece to the new-forming moral ideal of the Roman world which was probably the most historically important element of the Hellenic bequest. This ethical inheritance of Rome from Greece was second only to her ethical heritage from Judea.
It was largely through the medium of Greek literature and Greek philosophy, particularly the Platonic and the Stoic, that the ethical Greek spirit, characterized by its humanitarian and cosmopolitan sympathies, exerted its modifying influence upon the Roman moral consciousness and gradually changed it into something very different from what it was at first. This influence can best be traced in Roman literature and the imperial legislation.