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The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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But herein lies the difficulty, we might perhaps say the impossibility, of giving a distinct portrait of Cæsar. As the artist can paint anything save perfect beauty, so also the historian, where once in a thousand years he encounters perfection, can only be silent before it. For the rule may indeed be laid down, but we have only a negative idea of the absence of defect; nature’s secret, of uniting the normal and the individual in their fullest manifestations, cannot be expressed. Nothing is left us but to duly appreciate those who saw this perfection and to obtain a dim idea of the imperishable reflection which rests on the works created by this great nature. It is true that these also show the mark of his age. The Roman himself might be compared with his young Greek predecessor not merely as an equal but as a superior; but the world had grown old since then and its youthful lustre had grown dim. Cæsar’s work was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous effort to advance towards the immeasurable distance; he was engaged in construction, and that from ruins, and was satisfied to work as profitably and securely as possible in the wide but defined sphere already indicated. The fine poetic sense of the nations is therefore justified in paying no heed to the unpoetic Roman, while it has surrounded the son of Philip with all the golden splendour of poetry and all the rainbow colours of legend. But with equal justice the political life of nations has for thousands of years returned again and again to the lines which Cæsar traced, and if the peoples to whom the world belongs still apply his name to the chiefest of their monarchs, there is in this a profound warning and one, unfortunately, also calculated to rouse feelings of shame.
MOMMSEN’S ESTIMATE OF CÆSAR’S WORK
Cæsar had been a leader of the popular party from a very early period and as it were by hereditary right, and for thirty years he had upheld its shield without ever changing or even hiding his colours; even as monarch he was still a democrat. As he entered into the entire inheritance of his party, of course with the exception of the wrong-headed notions of Catiline and Clodius, cherished the bitterest and even a personal hatred towards the aristocracy and the true aristocrats, and retained unaltered the principal watchwords of the Roman democracy—namely, the amelioration of the position of debtors, foreign colonization, the gradual abolition of the existing differences of privilege between the various classes in the state and the emancipation of the executive power from the senate; so his monarchy also was so little in conflict with the democracy that, on the contrary, it was through it that the latter first attained completion and fulfilment. For this monarchy was no oriental despotism by the grace of God, but a monarchy such as Caius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded—the representation of the people by the man who possessed its supreme and unlimited trust. Thus the ideas which underlie Cæsar’s work were not exactly new; but their development, in the last instance always the main thing, belongs to him, and to him the grandeur of the realisation which might have surprised even the originating genius could he have seen it, and which has inspired and will ever inspire all who have encountered it in actual operation or in the mirror of history, whatever the historical period or political complexion to which they may belong, with deeper and deeper emotion and wonder according to the measure of their capacity for comprehending human and historical greatness.
This is perhaps the right place to expressly declare what the historian always tacitly assumes and to enter a protest against the custom common alike to simplicity and dishonesty, the custom of employing the praise and blame of history independent of the special conditions, as phrases of general application, in this case of transforming the verdict on Cæsar into a judgment on so-called Cæsarism. In truth the history of past centuries should be the teacher of that in progress, but not in the common sense, as though men could read the junctures of the present in the records of the past and in those on the art of political diagnosis and prescriptions could read up the symptoms and their remedies; but history is only instructive in so far as the study of ancient civilisations reveals the general organic conditions of civilisation itself, with those primary forces which are everywhere the same and those combinations which are everywhere different, and in so far as, instead of producing unthinking imitation, it guides and inspires independent creations on old lines. In this sense the history of Cæsar and the Roman Cæsarship, with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master workman and all the historical necessity of the work, is verily a keener criticism of modern autocracy than the hand of man could write.
By the same law of nature in accordance with which the most insignificant organism is infinitely superior to the most cunning machine, any constitution, however defective, which allows free play for the spontaneous action of a majority of citizens is infinitely superior to absolutism, even though conducted with the greatest amount of humanity and genius; for the former is capable of development, and is therefore living, the latter remains what it is, that is it is dead. This law of nature also asserted itself in the case of the absolute military monarchy of Rome, and only the more completely because under the inspired guidance of its creator and in the absence of any real complications with foreign countries the development of that monarchy was less hampered and limited than any similar government. From the time of Cæsar, as Gibbon long ago pointed out, the Roman Empire had only an external cohesion and was only extended in mechanical fashion, whilst inwardly it wholly withered and expired with himself. If at the commencement of the autocracy and especially in Cæsar’s own mind there still prevailed a sanguine hope of a union of free popular development with absolute rule, even the government of the highly gifted emperors of the Julian line soon taught in terrible fashion how far it is possible to mingle fire and water in one vessel.
Cæsar’s work was necessary and beneficial, not because it did or could of itself bring blessing, but because an absolute military monarchy was the least of evils and the logical and necessary conclusion determined by the ancient organisation, founded as it was on slavery and entirely alien to republican and constitutional representation, and by the legal constitution of the city, which in the course of five hundred years had ripened into an oligarchical absolutism. But history will not consent to diminish the honour of the true Cæsar because where there are spurious Cæsars a similar device may bewilder simplicity and furnish evil with an opportunity for lying and fraud. History too is a bible, and if it no more than the latter can defend itself from being misunderstood by the fool or quoted by the devil, it too will be in a position to endure and render his due to each.d
FOOTNOTES
[129] The latus clavus was a broad stripe of purple, in the form of a ribbon, sewed to the tunic on the fore part. There were properly two such; and it was broad, to distinguish it from that of the equites, who wore a narrow one.
[130] [This interesting extract contains, of course, much unfounded gossip. In general we should set down as historical those acts and sayings only which could be known to the public or which were immediately recorded.]