![The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/4/4/1/0/the-historians-history-of-the-world-06-the-early-roman-empire-download.jpg)
The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]». Краткое содержание книги:
In a word, then as now the statesman succeeded the general, the prince of peace the warrior prince, nor did the former despise military glory; only he preferred to decorate himself with the laurels plucked from his uncle’s wreath. Augustus, no less than Napoleon III, reckoned it as of the very essence of the services he did to the world that he had put an end to the period of warfare at home and abroad. Just as Napoleon III, in the character of saviour of society, pronounced the dictum,“L’Empire c’est la paix,” so Augustus caused himself to be celebrated as the restorer of order and liberty, whose privilege it was thrice to shut the doors of Janus and to inaugurate a new era of things.
Neither was a man of genius, both were practical and astute to no common degree; they were cool political calculators who had early learned to conduct their own policies and to judge all circumstances from the practical point of view. If they sought an end they did not shrink from the means to accomplish it; as a parallel to the misdeeds of the triumvirs we have every right to quote the measures under Napoleon III by which the president was raised to an emperor. Later in their career both avoided acts of violence as far as possible, and in the face of outspoken public opinion, the symptoms of which they studied zealously, both made concessions even in the teeth of their own better convictions, for they were astute enough to know that their supremacy could not depend on might alone.
Possessed as they were of power they sought also to conciliate and fortify the conservative elements of the state. Those who bore old and famous names were treated with just such a preference in the bestowal of external honours by Augustus as in later times by Napoleon, whose endeavour was to adorn his new imperial nobility with the fairest names of old feudal France.
As he succeeded in reconciling the old nobility to some extent with the new order of things, so Napoleon understood how to conclude peace with the church, a peace which he bought and preserved at considerable cost. In a similar way Augustus, who took upon himself the dignity of a high priest, attempted to reanimate national traditions and the religion of the past and to reorganise the priesthoods.
The similarity of the two rulers is obvious and has been frequently referred to. That it should until now have been less recognised than it ought, is, perhaps, due to the fact that the characters of the two were after all fundamentally different. One might almost say the similarity lay in the circumstances of the times, the dissimilarity in the characters of the persons; and the more we harp on the former the clearer appears the latter. Napoleon remained all his life what Augustus never was, a dreamer and a conspirator. According to the version of De Tocqueville, Napoleon knew no hard and fast boundary between dreaming and thinking; this may have been the result of his moping youth with its conspiracies, his imprisonment, and his fantastic designs which never were realised but by the most extraordinary strokes of luck. Augustus, on the other hand, never had time to devote to dreamy imaginings. When he was still almost a boy, he had thrown himself on his own initiative into the struggle of parties, and from the beginning he had to summon all the powers of his mind to aid him in the struggle against opponents maturer than himself; so it is that later when power was his he never dreamed but always thought. Moreover, Augustus was never a conspirator. He obtained power early and wielded it recklessly. He both loathed and found superfluous that covert toying with designs and intrigues which shunned the public eye until they suddenly burst into publicity with éclat, such as Napoleon loved.
Augustus enjoyed the great advantage of still being teachable when he came into the actual possession of power, and of being formed into a statesman by the circumstances themselves; Napoleon, on the other hand, was much older when he came to the throne; in his best years he was forging schemes to attain an apparently unattainable goal. He was laughed at as a nurser of fancies until he became emperor; small wonder then that the emperor’s plans remained fanciful and singular and that, as a ruler, he lacked the gift which distinguished Augustus in so high a degree—the gift of judging soberly what was attainable, or what was necessary. As emperor, Napoleon could never quite forget the adventurous designs of his youth. Place at the disposal of such a man the whole machinery of power in modern France, and perhaps he will be able to carry out plans that a careful observer would pronounce to be impossible of execution, but the reaction is bound to come, and it did not fail to do so here.
It is true that there were greater difficulties in reorganising France than Augustus encountered, so that the position of Augustus was more favourable and more secure. In spite of his confident address Napoleon felt his weakness, and upon him lay the burden of justifying himself by success that was externally visible; his object was to surprise and to dazzle his people, or at the very least to keep them occupied, and he was thus misled into taking many a false and many a critical step which a true statesman, like Augustus, would have at once condemned.
But all his internal mistakes and difficulties were not enough to upset the second empire. The catastrophe was brought about by Napoleon having an enemy from outside, an enemy far more formidable than those outside enemies who might have declared war upon Augustus. Napoleon fully realised the danger that threatened him from this quarter; yet he was helplessly engulfed in the whirlpool that was destined to swallow him and his work with him.
From the point of view of the world’s history, then, Augustus appears as a far greater figure than Napoleon III. Antiquity spoke, we speak yet to-day, of the Age of Augustus with reason, and this is an honour that weighs more than the name of Great; a man gives his name to his time only when he has really stamped that time with his image, opening up new roads, not only to his own nation but to the history of his time. Such an honour then implies permanent achievement in the widest sense; no impartial historian, then, will ever speak of the Age of Napoleon III.
The French Empire was shattered while its founder was yet alive, and when it fell, its inner hollowness, its rotten foundations, lay exposed, so that the whole appeared no more than an adventurous episode in the history of France. The work of Augustus, on the other hand, was indispensable to the world’s history; it outlived its founder, and lasted with some modification to the end of antiquity. Succeeding generations saw in Augustus the ideal prince, and hailed each newly chosen emperor with the invocation: “Be thou happier than Augustus, better than Trajan.”
THE ROMAN EMPIRE COMPARED WITH MODERN ENGLAND
Of all the empires of later times Great Britain is the only one that can really be compared with the Roman Empire, for its constitution has been developed in quite a different way from that of continental states, and has preserved a much greater diversity by reason of that conservative spirit which the English share with the Romans. True, in our own century much has changed; for the old aristocratic England has become democratised; many a resemblance of England to the Roman Empire, which even to-day may be detected, appears in a much clearer light if we cast our glance back to the conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This is the case, for instance, with the position of parliament. As the ancient state recognised in theory a diarchia of the emperor and the senate, so, too, the English parliament at the close of the seventeenth century ranged itself, at least for all practical purposes, on the side of the sovereign power; and it was only a jealous watchfulness lest the power of the chief ruler might become too great, that saved the English parliament from the fate of the Roman senate. The critical battle between the two constitutional powers was fought at the end of the seventeenth century, when William of Orange, like Augustus in ancient Rome before him, made an attempt to dovetail a standing army into the frame of the constitution. But the English parliament resisted every attempt in this direction with stubborn obstinacy. Moreover the powerful nobility at home, and the energetic merchants and officials spread all over the world, correspond in the England of to-day to the aristocrats, the merchants and the officials of ancient Rome, just as great wealth on the one side is conditional with great poverty on the other.