The spectacle of the dissolution of the Greek civilization is not a pleasant one. 'The glory that was Greece' fades out of the world and leaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was also decay and degeneracy and corruption. To dwell upon it is as the sin of Ham. Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towards barbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form of civilization which had done its work by another form less attractive, but more sound and solid. The Romans have the airs of grown and grave men beside the perpetual youth of Greece, (the Greeks were 'always children') but they are well aware of how much they learned and had to learn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world. So much is this so that in many departments of civilized life they look upon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas. In this they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world of art they continued to create; and certainly in literature they produced works not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models. Especially they created a prose style, which without ceasing to be artistic served the sober and serious purposes of political oratory and historic record. But their peculiar genius showed itself most in the applied arts which pressed Greek science into the ministry of life in architecture and engineering. Their roads and bridges and aqueducts still stand to bear witness of them. It would be a great error to deny to them fertile advance in the sciences, because their discoveries are so immediately put to the proof in practice and so little disengage themselves into express theory from their applications.
But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to European civilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only too easily from an accident of our education. It is the custom in England to concentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome, ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the other the later Imperial. There is thus lost to our imaginations those figures and their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare most characteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration those achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latter is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of Imperial Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most informative. Under the Empire Rome worked as a master, no longer as an apprentice or a journeyman. The theatre of her civilizing activities was here little less than the whole world then known, and the boast is not unjustified that she made into a city what had formerly been but a world, as we might say, merely a geographical expression. The record of that progress reads to us too much as a narrative of incessant warfare, and we are accustomed to think of her empire as a gigantic military power, but in reality it was in aim and result essentially pacific, and so appeared to those who lived under her sway. To them the name of her empire was the 'Roman peace'. It was as such that the memory of it haunted the minds of men when it too broke down from internal economic disorders and external pressure, and a distracted and divided Europe looked back to it as the pattern for a restored civilization.
The aim and result of the Roman Empire was peace, a world-wide peace. It is true that this end was not very articulately defined by those who pursued it, but (perhaps just because of that) the means to it were more practically designed and more effectively executed. The civilized world was one and to be treated as one; it was still Rome under a single government and a single head. There arose then the idea of a supreme sovereignty one and indivisible, that was the absolutely indispensable condition of a world peace. But the necessity of organization was equally grasped, insisted upon, realized. The civilized world was covered with a network of institutions through which the will of the Emperor flowed and circulated throughout the Empire. Peace through system and order—that was the secret of the Roman success. But two other ideas must be added to complete the explanation. The one was the idea or ideal of Justice; no system and no order could work unless it was, and commended itself to its subjects as being, scrupulously and exactly just. The second idea was that in order to be this it must be a legal system, based upon a known body of legal rights and duties, determining and controlling the whole conduct of the subjects to the sovereign and to one another. The notion which the Romans, not so much by their thought or speech, but by their acts, added to the world's stock was that of a peace secured and maintained by the just operation throughout the civilized world of a system of law the same for all, issuing from and enforced by a single central power.
The notion is at least grandiose, and so stated seems almost too high and difficult for human nature to realize. Yet for centuries it was applied, and applied with marvellous success. Nor in spite of its apparent failure in the end has the idea of it ceased to dominate men's minds. I do not speak here of the transitory imitation of it by the Carolingians or of the attempt at the restitution or copy of it in the spiritual sphere of the Church, or again of its phantom survival in the ghostly form of the Holy Roman Empire. But I would point to the way in which it still—in thought—controls us when without essential alteration of the idea we transfer its application to the nation and still look for the secret of its peace and strength in an organization of all its activities under a law proceeding from and enforced by a sovereign will resident somewhere within its structure, a law demanding and receiving obedience from all loyal subjects. Nor is the hope extinct that the way to a wider or world-wide peace lies through the restoration of a similar system in its application to international relations. Though I am unable to share this hope (or indeed the desire that its realization should be endeavoured after), I find it impossible to judge that it has yet lost its hold on men's minds or is without elements of importance in view of our present problem and perplexity.
It is perhaps more profitable to ask what we have to learn from the history both of its success and its failure. Of its success for a time and long time in the history of Europe there can be no doubt, and on its permanent effects rests much of what is most sound and stable in the civilization of modern Europe. Peace there was because of it, and again because of it and what it accomplished Europe resisted and survived internal disorder and barbarian invasion so that, as I said above, what still exists as a united or allied Europe is the Roman or Romanized world. Roman ideas and ideals still hold it together, although the Roman Empire has declined and fallen, and no other Empire has risen or, I trust, may rise, upon its ruins. It is not my business to analyse the causes of that decline and fall, though a few words on them may not be out of place. In the first place it declined and fell because those who administered ignored its economic substructure, paying no attention to the causes which were undermining its very material basis, or the enormous suffering which the neglect and consequent disorganization of that entailed. In the second, and partly because of that neglect, they did not sufficiently strengthen its defences against external attack; I do not so much mean in the way of remissness in military preparation as by a surcease of the former policy of bringing their barbarous or semi-civilized neighbours into the higher system, and so extending the range of civilization. It is perhaps fanciful to suggest that we are now suffering the penalty of the failure of Rome to Romanize, that is to say, to civilize their Teutonic neighbours. In the third place, they erred by not recognizing and taking account of new forces which in the way of ideas were entering into the conception of civilized life, the ideas which we mass together under the head of feudalism, the idea of nationality. Under the influence of the one and the other the ideal of a single world State, with a uniform or rigid system of laws resting upon a sovereign will, one and indivisible, dissolved, or at least entered upon dissolution, approving itself unadapted or unadaptable to the needs of a novel and immensely more complex situation of the world. No mere tinkering at it did or could suffice to save it; and the organization of Europe based upon it collapsed.
The Revolution of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries was in many ways the last attempt to reinstate it, and failure to do so pronounced its doom. We cannot now look forward to the reorganization of civilized Europe on the model of the Roman Empire or of an Empire at all, and the more definitely formulated hope of salvation by the erection or re-erection of an international system of law in any real sense seems to me an unsubstantial dream—the administration of a belated nostrum for our disease, not a panacea. Not that way do the lessons of history point. The Roman ideal must be transformed, must be reborn, if it is not to lead our anticipations and our actions wholly astray. No more in the political or secular sphere than in the spiritual or ecclesiastical is 'Romanism' a possible guide to the reconstruction of modern European civilization. For that far too much water (and blood) has run under the bridge. Yet the spirit which gave it life and efficacy is immortal, and the study of the secret of its vitality and power is a necessity for us. In the work of reconstruction we must learn from the Romans the value of System and Order, of Justice and Law, as from Greece we have ever afresh to learn the love of Freedom and Truth.
The Greeks have given us the idea of a life worth living which civilization renders possible, but does not directly produce. This life in its essential features they rightly conceived, but its content they failed to articulate, and whether because of that or not, they failed to realize its indispensable conditions, material, economic, political, &c. The Romans did more effectively realize this, but they lost sight of the ends in the means, securing a peace, a comfort, an ease, a leisure of which they made no particularly valuable use. It has been said that at no time in the world's history were civilized men so happy as under the Roman Empire. It might be said with greater truth that at no time were civilized men so unhappy, for the happiness that was theirs was empty, mere dead-sea fruit, dust and ashes in the mouth; a very Death in Life. Life was without savour, and they turned away from it in weariness and disgust and despair, seeking and finding in Philosophy—the fruits of reflection upon life—nothing better than consolation for the wounds and disillusions of life. Thus those who gave their lives to Rome lost heart, and retreating into themselves found nothing there but solitude and emptiness. Civilization was but the husk of a life that had fled.
Nevertheless, as it is necessary for the living body to deposit a bony skeleton and for the living soul to harden its impulses into habits and stiffen its aspirations into rules and plans of action, so civilization as a whole must create within and around it a structure of ordered and systematic thought and action within which the higher forces now recognized and disengaged may be all the more free to do their work. Without such a mechanical or apparently unspiritual basis these forces can only work fugitively, erratically, and so ineffectively, as they did in the Greek world. To the prosaic business of creating or recreating and maintaining in being such a structure a large part of our energies must be devoted, and in all this from the Romans we have still much to learn. If we decline to learn and digest this lesson, turning from such concernment in disgust or disdain, our lives will be lost in vain dreams, in idle longings and empty regrets; and the kingdom of Freedom and Truth will be taken from us and given to others who have known how to grow up and to face like men the hardships and hazards without which it cannot be won or held. From the inspiring visions of these ideals we must turn as we did when we and our world were Roman, to the serious and sober task of creating a political and legal structure on which the eternal spirit of European civilization can resume its work of extending, deepening, enriching, the common life of Humanity.
It seems as if we—the heirs of their experience—bound to face a more appalling problem, are bankrupt, even of hopes, having lost both the ideal of a life worth living on this earth and that of some large and complex organization rendering this life possible. But this is not so, for the forces which in Antiquity created and for long maintained a civilization at first desirable and then strong, are not spent. Still they make the Greco-Roman civilization which is ours a thing worth living and dying for; still they hold us together in a unity and concord deeper than ever plummet can sound, obscured but not destroyed by the present noise and confusion of battle. Still at heart we care—and not we only but also our enemies and all neutrals benevolent or malevolent—for the ends for which civilization exists, for the peace and order and justice which are their necessary conditions: we still have minds to devise and wills to execute whatever is necessary to its progress. Still we are willing to learn of history and resolved to better its instruction, to know ourselves and our world and adjust our ideas and our acts to the situation in which we find ourselves. The civilized world has not lost heart or hope; and will not, so long as the dreams of its immortal youth and the plans of its immortal manhood are not lost to its memory or passed beyond its retrospective reflection.
Note. The doctrine that all History is contemporary History has been best set forth by Benedetto Croce, of Naples, from whose works several expressions have here been borrowed, with a profound acknowledgement of indebtedness to him.