Rome, like all other nations, was founded by stern, determined men, who believed in themselves and in their tribal gods. They conquered the peninsula of Italy, and built mighty cities, and a net-work of military roads, and aqueducts which endure even today. All that time their state was a republic; in fact, they made the word for us—res publicæ mean public affairs, and all Roman citizens took part in them, discussed and voted, passed laws and enforced the laws. They raised armies, and built fleets of ships, and conquered Carthage, and ultimately the whole Mediterranean world. But, according to the custom of the time, they enslaved their prisoners in war; and so, in the course of six or eight centuries, Rome provided the classic demonstration of what slavery does to civilization.
Emerson has said that wherever you find a chain fastened to the wrist of a slave, you find the other end fastened to the wrist of a master. It is possible for a slave-holder to be a virtuous man, but it is impossible for him to raise virtuous children. Slaves are tricky and dishonest, full of suppressions and secret vices; even where they mean well, they debauch the young by waiting upon them and depriving them of initiative. Why should a young aristocrat work, when he knows he will grow up to inherit papa’s money? In a few generations he is too effeminate even to fight. Why should he risk his precious life, when he can hire common soldiers?
Not only that, but slavery undermines free labor, and breaks down the farming class. Cheap food poured into Rome, and the farmers were ruined, and their sons drifted into the cities. The lands of Italy were mortgaged, and the money-lenders got them. Wealthy merchants and officials returning from the provinces became owners of vast estates, while the cities were crowded with a hungry mob, idle, dissolute—and victimized by the owners of slum tenements. You may see every bit of that reproduced in the United States today, for chattel slavery and wage slavery are in their economic effects the same. The only difference is that a process which took six or eight centuries in Rome is taking one century under the stimulus of machinery.
The Roman mob had the vote, and they used it to get something for themselves. There came class struggles, bitter and ferocious. Two young brothers of the aristocracy, Caius and Tiberius Gracchus, became champions of the common people—what we call “parlor Socialists.” They were assassinated, and the partisans of privilege, the “old gang,” proceeded to slaughter everybody in Italy who threatened their power. There followed two generations of civil strife, and then came a strong man, Julius Cæsar, who put an end to political democracy. In history books that are taught to our school children today you will read that Cæsar was a great and virtuous protector of law and order; because the class which is paying for school text-books in capitalist America is waiting hopefully for the arrival of exactly such a man to put an end to the threat of industrial democracy.
So Rome became in form what it was in fact, an empire, the most colossal machine for plundering that had ever been seen on earth. A little inside gang of rich men ran it, and kept the mob satisfied by bread and circuses and gladiatorial shows. The Roman emperors tried every form of debauchery and blood-thirsty cruelty, incest and unnatural vice, and crowned it by having themselves made into gods with their statues set up to be worshiped in the temples. Their heirs took to murdering and poisoning each other, and Rome was governed by palace revolutions. Then the army discovered that it could share the graft, and the troops took to revolting and setting up their leaders as emperors and gods. All the while the tribute continued to roll in—the wealth of the whole world squandered in one mad orgy—
“Look here,” says Mrs. Ogi; “you have got in a solid chapter of preaching—and we are trying to find out about art!”
“I’m all through now,” says her husband, humbly. “But no one could understand Roman art without understanding the economics of slavery.”
CHAPTER XXIII
DUMB PIOUS ÆNEAS
In the beginning the Romans didn’t bother very much with art. In their public buildings they were content to take over the Greek styles—but making them heavy and solid, so as to last to the end of time. The attitude of a Roman gentleman toward the fine arts reminds me of a wealthy Southern planter whose son wanted to become a violinist, and the father said, “I can hire all the fiddler-fellows I want.” The Roman gentleman bought people of that sort—musicians, dancers and poets with skill handed down from “the glory that was Greece.”
Until the republic was dead and the Emperor Augustus took the throne. Then came a time of peace, and a Roman scholar, the son of a country proprietor, looked about him, and seeing the perils of internal decay and outside barbarism looming over his world, he recalled the stern sobriety of the good old days, and yearned to bring back the governing class of Rome to reverence for their ancestors. There is a report that the Emperor Augustus himself suggested the task to the poet; anyhow, Mr. Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil, set himself with sober deliberation to the making of a piece of Roman national and religious propaganda.