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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 although much wealth must thus have been brought into Rome, it is another question how widely it was distributed. Was foreign trade open to every Roman, or was it confined to the patricians and their clients, and in a still larger proportion to the king? The king had large domains of his own, partly arable, partly pasture, and partly planted with vines and olives; hence he was in a condition to traffic with foreign countries, and much of the Roman commerce was probably carried on by the government for its own direct benefit, as was the case in Judea in the reign of Solomon. The patricians also, we may be sure, exported, like the Russian nobility, the skins and wool of the numerous herds and flocks which they fed upon their public land, and were the owners of trading ships, as it was not till three centuries afterwards that a law was passed with the avowed object of restraining senators, a term then become equivalent with patricians, from possessing ships of large burden.
All these classes then might, and probably did, become wealthy; but it may be doubted whether the plebeian landholders had the same opportunities open to them. Agriculture was to them the business of their lives; if their estates were ill cultivated, they were liable to be degraded from their order.
Beyond this we have scarcely the means of proceeding. Setting aside the tyranny ascribed to Tarquinius, and remembering that it was his policy to deprive the commons of their lately acquired citizenship, and to treat them like subjects rather than members of the state, the picture given of the wealth and greatness of Judea under Solomon may convey some idea of the state of Rome under its later kings. Powerful amongst surrounding nations, exposed to no hostile invasions, with a flourishing agriculture and an active commerce, the country was great and prosperous; and the king was enabled to execute public works of the highest magnificence, and to invest himself with a splendour unknown in the earlier times of the monarchy. The last Tarquinius was guilty of individual acts of oppression, we may be sure, towards the patricians no less than the plebeians; but it was these last whom he laboured on system to depress and degrade, and whom he employed, as Solomon did the Canaanites, in all the servile and laborious part of his undertakings. Still the citizens or patricians themselves found that the splendour of his government had its burdens for them also; as the great majority of the Israelites, amid all the peace and prosperity of Solomon’s reign, and although exempted from all servile labour, and serving only in honourable offices, yet complained that they had endured a grievous yoke, and took the first opportunity to relieve themselves from it by banishing the house of Solomon from among them forever.b
ROMAN EDUCATION
The aim of education in the family and in public life was to repress the freedom of the individual in the interest of the state, to make a nation of brave warriors and of dutiful citizens. The highest results of this stern training were reached in the Samnite wars,—a period known thereafter as the golden age of virtue and of heroism. A citizen of this time was, in the highest degree, obedient to authority, pious, frugal, and generally honest. But though he was willing to sacrifice his life for the good of the state, he was equally ready to enrich himself at the expense of his neighbours; the wealthy did not hesitate to sell the poor into slavery for debt, till they were forbidden to do so by law. Their hard, stern souls knew neither generosity nor mercy. Severe toward the members of their family, cruel in the treatment of slaves, and in their business transactions shrewd and grasping, the Romans of the time, however admirable for their heroic virtues, were narrow, harsh, and unlovable. Greed was one of their strongest motives for conquest. Not for glory,—much less for the good of their neighbours,—did they extend their power over Italy; it was rather that more of the peasants might be supplied with farms and that the nobles might be given larger tracts of the public land and a greater number of places of honour and of profit to use and to enjoy.
As long as they remained poor and under strict discipline, they were moral. In the following period they were to gain greater freedom from the control of their magistrates and, at the same time, power and wealth. These new conditions were to put their virtue and even their government to the severest test.i
MORALS AND POLITICS OF THE AGE
It is difficult to form a clear idea of the moral character of the Roman people under its kings, because we cannot be sure that the pictures handed down to us of that period were not copied from the manners of a later time, and thus represent in fact the state of the Commonwealth rather than that of the Monarchy. Thus the simple habits of Lucretia seem copied from the matrons of the republic in the time of its early poverty, and cannot safely be ascribed to the princesses of the magnificent house of the Tarquinii. Again, we can scarcely tell how far we may carry back the origin of those characteristic points in the later Roman manners, the absolute authority possessed by the head of a family over his wife and children. But it is probable that they are of great antiquity; for the absolute power of a father over his sons extended only to those who were born in that peculiar form of marriage called connubium, a connection which anciently could only subsist between persons of the same order, and which was solemnised by a peculiar ceremony called confarreatio; a ceremony so sacred, that a marriage thus contracted could only be dissolved by certain unwonted and horrible rites, purposely ordered as it seems to discourage the practice of divorce.
Roman Youth
(From a statue)
All these usages point to a very great antiquity, and indicate the early severity of the Roman domestic manners, and the habits of obedience which every citizen learned under his father’s roof. This severity, however, did not imply an equal purity; connubium could only be contracted with one wife, but the practice of concubinage was tolerated, although the condition of a concubine is marked as disreputable by a law so old as to be ascribed to Numa. And the indecency of some parts of the ancient religious worship, and the licence allowed at particular festivals, at marriages, and in the festal meetings of men amongst themselves, belong so much to an agricultural people, as well as to human nature in general, that these too may be safely presumed to be co-eval with the very origin of the Roman nation.
But the most striking point in the character of the Romans, and that which has so permanently influenced the condition of mankind, was their love of institutions and of order, their reverence for law, their habit of considering the individual as living only for that society of which he was a member. This character, the very opposite to that of the barbarian and the savage, belongs apparently to that race to which the Greeks and Romans both belong, by whatever name, Pelasgian, Tyrrhenian, or Sicelian, we choose to distinguish it. It has indeed marked the Teutonic race, but in a less degree: the Celts have been strangers to it, nor do we find it developed amongst the nations of Asia: but it strongly characterises the Dorians in Greece, and the Romans; nor is it wanting among the Ionians, although in these last it was modified by that individual freedom which arose naturally from the surpassing vigour of their intellect, the destined well-spring of wisdom to the whole world. But in Rome, as at Lacedæmon, as there was much less activity of reason, so the tendency to regulate and to organise was much more predominant.