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The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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In one respect, however, their lot was different. The fortunes of the people of the English Alfred, after a brief and distant period of obscuration, have ever increased in power and brightness, like the sun ascending to its meridian. The decline of which Aurelius was the melancholy witness was irremediable and final, and his pale solitary star was the last apparent in the Roman firmament.l
GIBBON’S ESTIMATE OF MARCUS AURELIUS, AND OF THE AGE OF THE ANTONINES
[161-180 A.D.]
The virtue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was of a severe and laborious kind. It was the well-earned harvest of many a learned conference, of many a patient lecture, and many a midnight lucubration. At the age of twelve years he embraced the rigid system of the stoics, which taught him to submit his body to his mind, his passions to reason; to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all things external as things indifferent. His meditations, composed in the tumult of a camp, are still extant; and he even condescended to give lessons of philosophy, in a more public manner than was perhaps consistent with the modesty of a sage or the dignity of an emperor. But his life was the noblest commentary on the precepts of Zeno. He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted that Avidius Cassius, who excited a rebellion in Syria, had disappointed him by a voluntary death of the pleasure of converting an enemy into a friend; and he justified the sincerity of that sentiment by moderating the zeal of the senate against the adherents of the traitor. War he detested, as the disgrace and calamity of human nature; but when the necessity of a just defence called upon him to take up arms, he readily exposed his person to eight winter campaigns on the frozen banks of the Danube, the severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his constitution. His memory was revered by a grateful posterity; and, above a century after his death, many persons preserved the image of Marcus Antoninus among those of their household gods.
If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which lapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.[33] The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws. Such princes deserved the honour of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their day been capable of enjoying a rational freedom.
The labours of these monarchs were overpaid by the immense reward that inseparably waited on their success; by the honest pride of virtue, and by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors. A just but melancholy reflection embittered, however, the noblest of human enjoyments. They must often have recollected the instability of a happiness which depended on the character of a single man. The fatal moment was perhaps approaching when some licentious youth, or some jealous tyrant, would abuse, to the destruction, that absolute power which they had exerted for the benefit of their people. The ideal restraints of the senate and the laws might serve to display the virtues, but could never correct the vices, of the emperor. The military force was a blind and irresistible instrument of oppression; and the corruption of Roman manners would always supply flatterers eager to applaud, and ministers prepared to serve, the fear or the avarice, the lust or the cruelty, of their masters.e
FOOTNOTES
[28] [There are other accounts; some claiming that Trajan “loved Hadrian as his son.”]
[29] [Simon’s real name was Bar Kosiba from the town Kosiba. “Son of lies” was the interpretation given to his name after his failure.]
[30] [Nearly all the ancient historians of Rome were partisans of the senate, as against the emperors. This circumstance chiefly accounts for the unfavourable report of Hadrian’s last years which has come down to us.]
[31] [Hadrian’s villa hardly deserves such sarcasm. It was a sort of miniature, natural and architectural, of the Roman world,—a pleasant artistic retreat for the emperor during his weary illness, and a monument to his cosmopolitan character.]
[32] [Bury’sn estimate is different. He says: “Antoninus was hardly a great statesman. The rest which the empire enjoyed under his auspices had been rendered possible through Hadrian’s activity, and was not due to his own exertions; on the other hand, he carried the policy of peace at any price too far, and so entailed calamities on the state after his death.”]
[33] [This famous estimate of Gibbon’s has been seriously questioned. About half of the inhabitants of the empire were slaves, and it is scarcely in doubt that a great majority of the freemen were materially, intellectually, and morally inferior to the average civilised man of to-day. It must be recalled, however, that the condition of the masses has greatly improved since the time of Gibbon.]
Bull prepared for Sacrifice
CHAPTER XXXVII. THE PAGAN CREEDS AND THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY
If Marcus Aurelius could not save the world, who shall save it?—Renan.
To whoever knows anything of human intelligence it is evident that a revolution of consciences is outside and above the duties and the power of a government. In their quality of high priest, the Cæsars desired two contradictory things—to maintain the national cult, and to make Rome the city of the gods, or a kind of universal pantheon. This was the only reform and the only religious unity of which they could conceive. Thus, little by little, all the gods of the conquered nations came to be honoured at the Capitol. In spite of their distrust of Asiatic cults, which were always connected with confraternities that gave them offence, the Cæsars had their hands forced by popular superstitions, and all the divinities of Asia and of Egypt took their places side by side with the Greek and Roman gods.
This was certainly the unity the genius of Rome sought in everything; but it was a coarse, factitious, material unity, whose least defect was that all the polytheistic religions were disfigured and neutralised by one another, without satisfying the religious sentiment of the people or the intellect of the higher classes from henceforth too enlightened to accept a too evident polytheism. Where was the faith, the sincerity of adoration, and the life of the soul in this patched-up religion? And did this, the worst kind of unity that Roman policy voluntarily admitted, put an end to the fatal separation between philosophers and people, between the head and the heart of society? Strange blindness of those who give all to politics! The emperors, without knowing it and without wishing it, ended by discrediting the ancient national belief by this confusion of all religions, and yet what efforts did they not make to animate and purify it?
We hardly believe in the faith of the cæsars; but we can understand that they wished to preserve the ancient worship as a part of public order. Thus we see Augustus (although he amused himself, in the most scandalous orgies, by making a mock of the twelve great gods) devoutly rebuilding the temples, celebrating religion and piety by the agency of Horace the epicurean, honouring the vestals and the priests, burning thousands of apocryphal sibylline books, and severely repressing the usurpations of the Judaic and Egyptian worships, which were forbidden the city of Rome. Tiberius amused the senate during long sittings by the examination and consecration of the privileges of the ancient sanctuaries. Claudius complained bitterly that the arts of Etruria had fallen into disuse owing to the indifference of the patricians, and endeavoured to revive superannuated studies for which he had a historian’s and an archæologist’s passion. Domitian complied with the cruel requirements of the old faith by burying unfortunate vestals alive. All showed themselves zealous defenders of the gods and the empire, and there was reason to be thankful when, recalling the words of Tiberius, that it is for the gods alone to avenge their injuries, they refrained from sacrificing those they feared to the sacrosanct majesty of their deified predecessors; or abstained from making themselves persecutors of the new faith, which embodied the principle of the moral and religious unity they vainly sought for.