In other countries the natural family, established on the basis of a common origin, is ruled by the affections; but the Roman family, absolutely civil, founded on a community of obedience and of rites, is only the chattel and the property of the father, governed according to his will, subordinate to the state, ever bequeathed by law in the presence of the state, a kind of province in the hands of the father which supplies soldiers for the public benefit.
Made up of different races, united by violence, the work of force and will, and not of relationship and nature, the Roman state contained two organised bodies, struggling regularly and legally, not through passion, but through interest, and united under the best devised and organised constitution that has ever been known. By the state’s systematic and methodical mode of conquest for the sole object of preserving and exploiting, military art was carried to the highest possible point, and political skill and administrative talent united to bring together by force the whole of the then known world into an empire organised by one dominant city.
Roman policy consisted in turning the conquered nations into Roman soldiers, and foreign princes and magistrates into Roman ministers, thus strengthening the controlling power at the least possible expense. Military art consisted in subjecting the bravest and strongest soldiers to the strictest obedience, that is to say, in obtaining the greatest amount of strength from the vast forces at command. All her wisdom was exerted to increase her power and to spare herself. An institution of will, a machine for conquest, a matter of organisation, the state occupied all thought, absorbed all love, and claimed submission in every act and institution.
The sway of personal interest and national egoism produces a contempt for humanity. The human species, when unconquered, is looked upon as material for conquest, conquered it is a prey to be made use of and abused. Slaves are trampled upon with atrocious cruelty, entire nations are destroyed, vanquished kings are led in triumph and put to death.
The gods are abstractions, and utterly without poetry, such as calm reflection discerns in the humblest agricultural or domestic operations, scourges adored through fear, foreign gods received into the temple through interested motives as vanquished foes were received into the city, and subject to the Jupiter of the Capitol as nations were to Rome. The priests were laymen divided into classes, and officiated only under the authority of the senate, which regulated all expiatory ceremonies and alone, with the people, could make innovations. Worship consisted of minute ceremonies, scrupulously observed because all poetical and philosophical spirit which is the interpreter of symbols, was wanting; dull, unilluminated reason attaching itself only to the letter. The senate used religion as a political machine, and like all else it was but an instrument of government.
In the world of art we find nothing indigenous, except family memoirs, written in the interests of a race, dry chronicles drawn up for public use, rituals, account books, collections of laws, books of moral sayings, memoranda of political satires—in short, government documents, maxims of conduct, and political essays.
Everything else is foreign, imported, or conquered. The theatre originating in Etruria and in Greece was simply imitated and then forsaken for bear fights which later became processions, magnificent in weapons and ornaments, parades of triumph and war. Monuments of art were pillaged in Greece, and in Cicero’s time were still despised; while in poetry, there was no original fiction, no invention of characters. The only things in which the national genius rivals the imitation of foreign models are oratory,—the arm of the forum,—satire,—versified pleading and instruction in morals,—and history, the record of political facts, which, however, is at Rome only a collection of memoirs or an exercise in oratory; and all these things are concerned with the practical and with government. If Rome possessed poets, it was solely when her particular genius gave way before a new movement. The only entertainments she invented were triumphs and games in the circus, where victory was continued by the humiliation and death of the vanquished, where the spectator was the conqueror and assassin.
All scientific writings were translations. There were compilers such as Varro and Pliny, imitators such as Cicero and Lucretius; some small advance was made in agriculture, rhetoric, medicine, and architecture—all applied sciences. In the place of metaphysics, the clumsy physics of Epicurus and of the stoics were copied. The practical side of philosophy was alone studied, moral philosophy, and that with a purely practical object. The only strictly Roman science is jurisprudence, and that is altogether practical and political. It is, moreover, so long as it remains Roman, but a collection of dry formulæ, a mere manual for lawyers and not a branch of science.
From the character of Roman genius springs its history. The family and religion being subordinate to the state, art and science being null, or entirely practical, and the state having no other object than to conquer and to organise what it had conquered, Roman history is the history of conquest and its effects.
The middle class was either ruined, or perished during the progress of this great war. From the time of the Gracchi, besides a population of poor people and freed slaves, there remained only a wealthy class, wielding great power by reason of their immense riches, their command of great armies, their control of taxation, and of the destinies of the commonwealth in general. At first united but afterwards divided, at the end of a century’s struggle one of these classes emerged victorious. Thus power, founded by sheer force, passed to the armies, the embodiment of force. In the meanwhile, the universe, depopulated and ruined by conquest, by civil wars, by the pillage of the proconsuls, by the demands of the imperial treasury, supplied no more soldiers. With the fall of militarism, an oriental despotism, characterised by a cunning administration, was founded. Through war and its results, conquerors and conquered, nations and liberties, had all perished. Nothing remained in force but a system of effete institutions under the caprice of a ruler who was often hardly a man.