Rome

by W. Warde Fowler

Now this group, or rather the human part of it, lived under a very simple and effective form of government. It was under the absolute control of a head, the father and husband; or, if more than one family lived together, the oldest living father and husband. Over wife and children he had a father’s power (patria potestas), and they were said to be in his hand; over the slaves he had a master’s power (dominium): to his clients he was patronus, or quasi-father. His power over wife and children was absolute, but it was kept from being arbitrary by a wholesome custom, of immense importance in all its results throughout Roman history, of seeking the advice of a council of relations before taking any extreme step in the way of punishment for serious offences. This was an obligation, a duty, on his part, enforced by no law, but by what may be well called an even more powerful sovereign than law—the custom of the ancestors (mos majorum). His power over his client, or his freed slave if he had any such, was restrained by customs of mutual obligation, which eventually found their way into law. His power over his slaves was, however, not only absolute but arbitrary, and so continued down to the latest period of Roman history; yet the slave, we must not forget, was really a member of the familia, and as such was probably treated as a human being, necessary to the life of the group, and even partaking to some extent in its religious worship.

Let us see how this system of government would work out in the practical life of a familia settled on the land, as all such groups were during at least a great part of the period we have been tracing: for the city itself was mainly used as a fortress, into which the farming families would come in time of peril, and in which they would in course of time possess a town dwelling as well as a farm, like the leading families of our English shires in the Middle Ages. The paterfamilias directed all the operations of the farm, no one disputing his authority: and he decided all quarrels among his subjects and punished all offences. The necessary work of the house, the cooking, and the spinning of wool for the garments of the members (which were then entirely woollen), he left to his wife and daughters: and thus the wife came to exercise a kind of authority of her own, which raised her far above the position of a “squaw,” and gave her in course of time a great influence, though an indirect one, in social life. And not only had all the members their work to do, under this strict control, in keeping themselves alive and clothed, but they all had their duties to the divine members, on whom they believed themselves dependent for their health and wealth. There were simple acts of worship every day and at every meal, in which the children joined; we may almost think of the Head as a priest and of the children as his acolytes. And at certain days, fixed in ancient times by a council of Heads, and later in the city by a calendar, the families of a district (pagus) would join together in religious festivities, after harvest, for example, or after the autumn sowing, to honour and propitiate the spirit of the harvested grain or of the sown seed. These were often accompanied by games and races, and so the life was saved from becoming too sombre and monotonous. But though discipline was not allowed to destroy freedom and enjoyment, the life was on the whole a routine of command and obedience, of discipline and duty.

What of the education which should perpetuate these habits? Unluckily we have no contemporary record of it for these early times, and must guess at it chiefly from what we know of the bringing up of his son by the elder Cato, a strenuous believer in the old methods, in the second century B.C. As we might expect, it seems to have been an education in the active practical life of the farm, and in reverence, obedience, and modesty of demeanour. Cato taught his boy not only to work, to ride, to box, and to swim, but to shun all indecency; and was himself “as careful not to utter an indecent word before his son, as he would have been in the presence of the Vestal virgins.” He wrote histories for his son in large letters, so that he might learn something of the illustrious deeds of the ancient Romans, and of their customs. In his time an education of the mind was beginning to come into vogue, as well as one of the will; but in the period we have been surveying this must have been of the most meagre kind. Yet it is possible that the idea of active duty to the State and its deities, as well as to the family and its presiding spirits, was all the more vividly kept up in the absence of intellectual interests. As life in the city became more usual, the boys of good families had more opportunity of learning what was meant by duty to the State; they accompanied their fathers to hear funeral orations on eminent citizens, and were even admitted to meetings of the Senate. In this way they must have developed a shrewdness and practical sagacity invaluable to them in after life.

There is a story of a Roman boy, preserved by Cato, which so well illustrates this and other features of that early Roman life, that I shall insert it here, whether or no it be strictly true. A boy who had been with his father to the Senate was asked by an inquisitive mother what the Fathers of the Senate had been discussing. The boy answered that he was strictly forbidden to tell, which only excited his mother’s curiosity the more, and made her press him hard. At last he invented what Cato calls a shrewd and witty falsehood: he said that the Senate had been discussing whether it were better for the State that one man should have two wives, or one wife two husbands. Much alarmed, she went and told other matrons, and next day they crowded weeping to the Senate House, to petition that one wife might have two husbands rather than one husband two wives. The astonishment of the senators was dispelled by the boy, who stood out in the midst and told his tale; and from that time no boy was allowed to be present at debate save this one, who was thus rewarded for his honesty and shrewdness.

This good old Roman story may aptly bring us to the second part of my subject in this chapter, the training of the citizen in the service of the State. But let us pause here for a moment to consider what was the Roman idea of the State and its function.

In Italy, as in Greece, the State took the form of a city, with more or less of territory on which to subsist; in the heart of the city was the life of the State. And it is true of Italy as of Greece that the process of rising to the city from the life of farm or village was one of immense importance for humanity, enabling man to advance from the idea of a bare material subsistence to that of moral and intellectual progress. This is the advance to what Aristotle called “good life” as distinguished from life simply. He meant that in the lower stage man has not time or stimulus to develop art, literature, law, philosophy: all his strength is spent in struggle and endeavour—struggle partly with Nature, partly with human enemies whom he is ill able to resist. The city-state supplied him not only with opportunity for a higher life, but with nutriment to maintain it.

But the Italians never drew from this new form of social life the same amount, the same quality of nutriment, as did the Greeks. Rome did indeed draw enough to fertilise the germs of much that was most valuable in her own character, and to educate herself for the practical work she was to do in the world. But the last chapter will have shown that, unlike most Greek city-states, she was forced by circumstances to continue for centuries a life of struggle and endeavour. She had constant difficulty in keeping herself alive and free, and as we shall see, she was hardly ever without internal as well as external perils. In Greece many States found leisure to rest and enjoy the exercise of their higher instincts—enjoyment which led to the production of works of art and literature: leisure, too, to reflect and inquire about Nature in man and outside him, and so to develop philosophy and science for the eternal benefit of mankind. But all the strength of Rome was used in the struggle for existence, which gradually led her on to conquest and dominion. As we left her at the end of the last chapter, the leading city of Italy, she might indeed have passed from struggle to leisure, and so to thought and inquiry, turning to account the gifts of the various peoples of Italy, Etruscans, Gauls, Greeks, as well as her own kin. But the long and terrible struggle with Carthage, to be told in the next chapter, effectually destroyed this chance. Her strength was spent when it was over, and when her chance came to sit down (so to speak), and think, she could not do it. Still, her long training in practical endeavour had its due result; and the ideas of duty and discipline, of law and order, which had carried her through so many perils, never wholly vanished from the Roman mind. Let us turn to trace the progress of those ideas in the life of the city-state of Rome.

When we first begin to see clearly into the working of the Roman State, what chiefly strikes us is the unlimited power of the magistrate in all the departments of government. Just as the head of the family had an absolute power over its members, so had the king (rex) an unlimited power over the citizens. In the family the word for this power was potestas, but in the State it was called imperium—one of the greatest words ever coined, surviving to the present day in many familiar forms. For the Roman it expressed more strikingly than any other the idea of discipline in the State: it stamped on his mind the inherited conviction that lawful authority must be implicitly obeyed. Not unlawful authority, ill gotten by fraud or violence; for such power the word imperium could never be used: but authority entrusted to an individual by the human members of the State, and sanctioned by the consent of its divine members. For the imperium must be conferred upon its holder by an act of the people, and the gods must give their consent by favourable omens; both processes, the passing of the law, and the obtaining of the auspicia, must be gone through according to certain traditional methods, and the slightest flaw in these would make the choice of the magistrate invalid. But once legally in his hands, the imperium was irresistible; its outward symbols, the rods and axes of the lictors, accompanied its holder wherever he went, to remind the Roman that the first duty of a citizen was obedience to constituted authority.

This word imperium stood for three different kinds of power. First, the king was supreme in matters of religion, for he was responsible for the good relations between the human and divine inhabitants of the city, for “the peace of the gods” as it was called. If this peace, or covenant, were not kept up, it was believed that the State could not prosper—the very life of the State depended on it.

But now let us note a point of the utmost importance in the development of Roman public life. The king could not perform this duty entirely by himself; no single man could have the necessary knowledge of all the details of ancient religious custom. So he was assisted by a small board of skilled experts called pontifices, perhaps also by another board of augurs, skilled in the methods of discovering the divine will by omens. Thus the imperium in religious matters, though still legally unlimited, was saved from becoming arbitrary and violating ancestral custom: the king is entrusted with power which he uses in accordance with the advice of sages.