The ancient institution of the family disappeared under the influence of Grecian ideas and oriental customs. The judicial dicta of lawyers and prætors conflicted with the authority of the husband and father; civil family ties became dissolved in excess of pleasures and love of conquest. In spite of the laws of Augustus, marriages decreased, and were only excuses for adultery and divorce. Mysticism, poverty, the discouragement of the curials, added despair to the effects of debauchery and created a contempt for life.
By these changes in domestic life and under the influence of foreign philosophers, the Roman idea of property changed. First of all in the hands of the father (mancipium), possessions next became a family inheritance (dominium), and ended by belonging entirely to the individual (proprietas). Though benefited in theory, in practice property ceased to exist, because according to the law the emperor was master over it, because the treasury took its fruits, because taxation, tyranny, ignorance, and a growing depopulation rendered it sterile or reduced it to nought.
The ancient religion assimilated with the religions of Greece and the East, disappeared in the pantheon of the gods enlarged by dead emperors, and there remained of it only official pomp and an excuse for persecutions. The jealousy of despots, the degradation of servitude, the loss of all interests and of all hope, the abuse of pleasures, the downfall of Greece and of the East, extinguished all that was yet known of art and science. The jurisconsults alone laid down a code of laws, the last result of the spirit of organisation.
Thus, conquest, the fruit of Roman genius, destroyed both the genius of peoples, and the peoples themselves; leaving behind it because it was a system, a system of institutions on a dead foundation. But in this debasement of every force and of every earthly hope, man took refuge within himself. Helped by oriental mysticism, he discovered in a new religion a new world.
This is what the modern philosophers have added to Livy. The criticism commenced by him, renewed by Beaufort, nearly perfected by Niebuhr, and the philosophy hidden under his eloquence, which was turned by Machiavelli into a practical channel and is still imperfect in Montesquieu, become each day more exact and more profound. The corrections thus made honour those by whom they are made without lowering those who suffer them. The first authors are the fathers of science, and Livy alone has done more for Roman history than all those who have desired to set him right.[i]
FOOTNOTES
[4] Niebuhr’s[h] remarks on the dates of Livy’s history (Rom. Hist. iv.) may be compared with the more common view given in Smith’s Dictionary and elsewhere. I think the beginning of the work must be placed in 29-24 B.C.; but adopting the idea that it was originally divided into decades, the fact now demonstrated, that it reached to a hundred and forty-second book, seems to show that it was not left complete according to the author’s intentions. It is also well remarked that the death of Drusus does not furnish a point of sufficient importance for the termination of the great epic of Roman history. This view is supported by the interesting statement of Pliny, that in one of his latter books Livy had declared: Satis jam sibi gloriæ quæsitum; et potuisse se desinere, nisi animus inquies pasceretur opere. (Plin. Hist. Nat. præf.) A period of more than forty years thus devoted to the elaboration of a single work is not unparalleled. Froissart was engaged forty years upon his Chronicles.
Roman Compass
(In the British Museum)