They knew how to keep their heads. There were those two races among them,--races or orders;--and a mort of politics between the two. Greek cities, in like manner but generally less radically divided, knew no method but for one side to be perpetually banishing the other, turn and turn about, and wholesale; but these spare, tough Romans effect compromise after compromise, till Patricians and Plebs are molten down into one common type.
They are not very brilliant, even at their native game of war: given a good general, their enemies are pretty sure to trounce them. Pyrrhus, a fine tactician but no great strategist, does so several times;--and then they reply to his offers of peace, that they make no peace with enemies still camped on Italian soil.-- Comes next a real master-strategist, Hannibal; and senate and people, time after time, are forced (like Balbus in the poem)
"With a frankness that I"m sure will charm ye To own it is all over with the army."
He wipes them out in a most satisfactory and workmanlike manner.
Their leading citizens, _ipso facto_ their generals (amateur soldiers always cabbage-h.o.e.rs at heart) afford him a good deal of amus.e.m.e.nt; as if you should send out the mayor of Jonesville, Arkansaw, against a Foch or a Hindenburg. One of them, a fool of a fellow, blunders into a b.o.o.by-trap and loses the army which is almost the sole hope of Rome; and comes home, utterly defeated, --to be gravely thanked by the Senate for not committing suicide after his defeat: "for not despairing of the Republic." Ah, there is real Great Stuff in that; they are admirable peasant bandits after all! Most people would have straight court martialed and beheaded the man; as England hanged poor Admiral Byng _pour encourager les autres._ And all the while they have been having the sublime impudence to keep an army in Spain conquering there. How to account for this unsubduability? Well; there is Numa"s teaching; and what you might call a latent habit of _Caput-Mundi-ship:_ imperial seeds in the soil.
There is that indestructible G.o.d-side to everything; especially, behind and above this city on the seven hills, there is divine eternal ROME. So, after the Gaulish conquest, they rejected proffered and more desirable Etruscan sites, and came back and provided _Dea Roma_ with a new out-ward being; the imperial seeds, molds of empire, were on the Seven Hills, not at Veii.
So, when this still greater peril of Hannibal so nearly submerged them, they took final victory for granted,--could conceive of no other possibility,--and placidly went forward while being whipped in Italy with the adventure in Spain. There was one thing they could not imagine: ultimate defeat. It was a kind of stupidity with them. They were a stupid people. You might thrash them; you might give them their full deserts (which were bad), and fairly batter them to bits; all the world might think them dead; dozens of doctors might write death-certificates; you might have Rome coffined and nailed down, and be riding gaily to the funeral;--but you could not convince _her_ she was dead; and at the very graveside, sure enough, the "pesky critter" (as they say) would be bursting open the coffin lid; would finish the ceremony with you for the corpse, and then ride home smiling to enjoy her triumph, thank G.o.d for his mercies,--and get back to her hoe and her cabbages as quickly as might be.
It is this that to my mind makes it philosophically certain that she had had a vast antiquity as the seat of empire; I mean, before the Etruscan domination. _Dea Roma,_--the Idea of Rome,-- was an astral mold almost cast in higher than astral stuff: it was so firmly fixed, so unalterably there, that I cannot imagine a few centuries of peasant-bandits building it,--unimaginative tough creatures at the best. No; it was a heritage; it was built in thousands of years, and founded upon forgotten facts.
There was something in the ideal world, the deposit of long ages of thinking and imagining. How, pray, are nations brought into being?
By men thinking and willing and imagining them into being. Such men create an astral matrix; with walls faint and vague at first, but ever growing stronger as more and more men reinforce them with new thought and will and imagination. But in Rome we see from the first the astral mold so strong that the strongest party feelings, the differences of a conqueror and a conquered race, are shaped by it into compromise after compromise. And then, too, an instinct among those peasant-bandits for empire: an instinct that few European peoples have possessed; that it took the English, for example, a much longer time to learn than it took the Romans. For let us note that even in those early days it was not such a bad thing to come under Roman sway; if you took it quietly, and were misled by no patriotic notions.
That is, as a rule. Unmagnanimous always to men, Rome was not without justice, and even at times something quite like magnanimity, to cities and nations. She was no Athens, to exploit her subject peoples ruthlessly with never a troubling thought as to their rights. She had learned compromise and horse sense in her politics it home: if her citizens owed her a duty, --she a.s.sumed a responsibility towards them. It took her time to learn that; but she learned it. She went conquering on the same principle. Her plebeians had won their rights; in other towns, mostly, the plebeians had not.
Roman dominion meant usually a betterment of the conditions of the plebs in the towns annexed, and their entering in varying degrees upon the rights the plebs had won at Rome. She went forward taking things as they came, and making what arrangements seemed most feasible in each case. She made no plans in advance; but muddled trough like an Englishman. She had no Greek or French turn for thinking things out beforehand; her empire grew, in the main, like the British, upon a subconscious impulse to expand. She conquered Italy because she was strong; much stronger inwardly in spirit than outwardly in arms; and because (I do but repeat what Mr. Stobart says: the whole picture really is his) what should she do with her summer holidays, unless go on a campaign?--and because while she had still citizens without land to hoe cabbages in, she must look about and provide them with that prime necessity. All of which amounts to saying that she began with a habit of empire-winning,--which must have been created in the past. On her toughness the spirited Gaul broke as a wave, and fell away. On her narrow unmagnanimity the chivalrous mountain Samnite bore down, and like foam vanished.
She had none of the spiritual possibilities of the Gaul; but the Crest-Wave was coming, and the future was with Italy. She had none of the high-souled chivalry of the Samnite; but she was the heart of Italy, and the point from which Italy must expand. She was hard, tough, and based on the soil; and that soil, as it happened, the laya center,--a sort of fire-fountain from within and the unseen. You stood on the Seven Hills, and let heaven and h.e.l.l conspire together, you _could not_ be defeated. Gauls, Samnites, Latins,--all that ever attacked her,--were but taking a house-cloth to dry up a running spring. The Crest-Wave was coming to Italy; whose vital forces, all centrifugal before, must now be made to turn and flow towards the center. That was Rome; and as they would not flow to her of their own good will, out she must go and gather them in. Long afterwards, when the Caesars and Augusti of the West left her for Milan and Ravenna, it was because the Crest-Wave was departing, the forces turning centrifugal, and Italy breaking to pieces; long afterwards again, in the eighteen-seventies, when the Crest-Wave was returning, Italy must flow in centripetally to Rome; no Turin, no Florence would do.
So, by 264 B.C., she had conquered Italy. Then, still land-hungry, she stepped over into Sicily, invited by certain rascals in Messana, and light-heartedly challenged the Mistress of the Western Seas. At this point the stream is leaving Balbus"s fields and Ahen.o.barbus"s cattle, and coming to the broad waters, where the ships of the world ride in.
XVII. ROME PARVENUE *
The Punic War was not forced on Rome. She had no good motive for it; not even a decent excuse. It was simply that she was accustomed to do the next thing; and Carthage presented itself as the next thing to fight,--Sicily, the next thing to be conquered. The war lasted from 264 to 241; and at the end of it Rome found herself out of Italy; mistress of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. The Italian laya center had expanded; Italy had boiled over. It was just the time when Ts"in at the other end of the world was conquering China, and the Far Eastern Manvantara was beginning. Manvantaras do not begin or end anywhere, I imagine, without some cyclic event marking it in all other parts of the world.
--------- * This lecture, like the preceding one, is based on Mr. J. H.
Stobart"s, _The Grandeur that was Rome._ ---------
We have heard much talk of how disastrous the result would have been if Carthage, not Rome, had won. But Carthage was a far and belated outpost of West Asia and of a manvantara that had ended over a century before:--there was no question of her winning.
Though we see her only through Roman eyes, we may judge very well that no possibility of expansion was left in her. There was no expansive force. She threw out tentacles to suck in wealth and trade, but was already dead at heart. All the greatness of old West Asia was concentrated, in her, in two men: Hamilcar Barca and his son: they shed a certain light and romantic glory over her, but she was quite unworthy of them. Her prowess at any time was fitful: where money was to be made, she might fight like a demon to make it; but she was never a fighting power like Rome.
She won her successes at first because her seat was on the sea, and the war was naval, and sea-battles were won not by fighting but by seamanship. If Carthage had won, they say;--but Carthage could not have won, because the cycles were for Rome. You will note how that North African rim is tossed between European and West Asian control, according to which is in the ascendant. Now that Europe"s up, and West Asia down, France, Italy, and England hold it from Egypt to the Atlantic; and in a few centuries"
time, no doubt it will be quite Europeanized. But West Asia, early in its last manvantara, flowed out over it from Arabia, drove out all traces of Europeanism, and made it wholly Asiatic.
Before that, while a European manvantara was in being, it was European, no less Roman than Italy; and before that again, while the Crest-Wave was in West Asia, it was West Asian, under Egypt and Phoenician colonies. As for its own native races, they belong, I suppose, to the fourth, the Iberian Sub-race; and now in the days of our fifth Sub-race (the Aryan), seem out of the running for wielding empires of their own.
So if Carthage had won then, things would only have been delayed a little; the course of history would have been much the same.
Rome might have been destroyed by Hannibal; she would have been rebuilt when Hannibal had departed; then gone on with her expansion, perhaps in other directions,--and presently turned, and come on Carthage from elsewhere; or absorbed her quietly, and let her do the carrying trade of the Mediterranean "under the Roman flag" as you might say,--or something of that sort. Rome eradicated Carthage for the same reason that the Spaniards eradicated the Moors: because the West Asian tide, to which Moors and Carthaginians belonged, had ebbed or was ebbing, and the European tide was flowing high. Hamilcar indeed, and Hannibal, seem to have been touched by cyclic impulses, and to have felt that a Spanish Empire might have received the influx which a West Asian town in Africa could not. But Italy"s turn came before Spain"s; and all Hamilcar"s haughty heroism, and Hannibal"s magnanimous genius, went for nothing; and Rome, the admirable and unlovely, that had suffered the Caudine Forks, and then conquered Samnium and beheaded that n.o.ble generous Samnite Gaius Pontius, conquered in turn the conqueror at Cannae, and did for his reputation what she had done with the Samnite hero"s person: chopped its head off, and dubbed him in perfect sincerity "perfidus Hannibal." Over that corpse she stood, at the end of the third century B.C., mistress of Italy and the Italian islands; with proud Carthage at her feet; and the old cultured East, that had known of her existence since the time of Aristotle at least, now keenly aware of her as the strongest thing in the Mediterranean world.
Now while she had been a little provincial town in an Italy deep in pralaya, Numa"s religion, what remained of it, had been enough to keep her life from corruption. Each such impulse from the heaven-world"s, in its degree, an elixiral tincture to sweeten life and keep it wholesome; some, like Buddhism, being efficient for long ages and great empires; some only for tiny towns like early Rome. What we may call the exoteric basis of Numaism was a ritual of many ceremonies connected with home-life and agriculture, and designed to keep alive a feeling for the sacredness of these. It was calculated for its cycle: you could have given no high metaphysical system to peasant-bandits of that type;--you could not take the Upanishads to Afghans or Abyssinians today. But as soon as that cycle was ended, and Rome was called on to come out into the world, there was need of a new force and a new sanction.
Has it occurred to you to wonder why, in that epochal sixth century B.C., when in so many lands the Messengers of Truth were turning away from the official Mysteries, and preaching their Theosophy upon a new plan broadcast among the peoples, Pythagoras, after wandering the east and west to gather up the threads of wisdom, should have elected not to return to Greece, but to settle in Italy and found his Movement there? I suppose the reason was this: He knew in what direction the cycles should flow, and that the greatest need of the future ages would be for a redeemed Italy; he foresaw, or Those who sent him foresaw, that it was Italy should mold the common life of Europe for a couple of thousand years. Greece was rising then, chiefly on the planes of intellect and artistic creation; but Italy was to rise after a few centuries on planes much more material, and therefore with a force much more potent and immediate in its effects in this world. The Age of Greece was nearer to the Mysteries; which might be trusted to keep at least some knowledge of Truth alive; the Age of Italy, farther away and on a lower plane, would be in need of a Religion. So he chose Croton, a Greek city, because if he had gone straight to the barbarous Italians, he could have said nothing much at that time,--and hoped that from a living center there, the light might percolate up through the whole peninsula, and be ready for Rome when Rome was ready for it. He left Athens to take care of itself;--much as H. P. Blavatsky chose New York at first, and not immediately the then world-capitals Paris and London;--I suppose we may say that Magna Graecia stood to old Greece in his time as America did to western Europe forty years ago. Had his Movement succeeded; had it struck well up into the Italian lands; how different the whole after-history of Europe might have been! Might?--certainly would have been! But we know that a revolution at Croton destroyed, at the end of the sixth century, the Pythagorean School; after which the hope and messengers of the Movement-- Aeschylus, Plato--worked in Greece; and that although the Pythagorean individual Lucanians, Iapygians, and even Samnites-- that n.o.ble Gaius Pontius of the Caudin Forks was himself a Pythagorean and a pupil of the Pythagorean Archytas,--it was, in the Teacher"s own lifetime, practically broken up and driven out into Sicily, where those two great Athenians contacted it. We have seen that it was not effectless; and, what glimmer of it came down, through Plato, into the Middle Ages. But its main purpose: to supply nascent Italy with a saving World-Religion; had been defeated. Of all the Theosophical Movements of the time, this so far as we know was the only one that failed.
Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, each lasted on as a grand force for human upliftment; but Pythagoreanism, as an organized instrument of the Spirit, pa.s.sed. When Aeschylus made his protests in Athens, the Center of the Movement to which he belonged had already been smashed. Plato did marvels; but the cycle had gone by and gone down, and it was too late for him to attempt that which Pythagoras had failed to accomplish.
So Rome, when she needed it most, lacked divine guidance; so drifted out on to the high seas of history pilotless and rudderless;--so _Weltpolitik_ only corrupted and vulgarized her.
She had no Blue Pearl of Laotse to render her immortal; no Confucian Doctrine of the Mean to keep her sober and straight; and hence it came that, though later a new start was made, and great men arose, once, twice, three times, to do their best for her, she fell to pieces at last, a Humpty-Dumpty that all the king"s horses and all the king"s men could never reweld into one;--and the place she should have filled in history as Unifier of Europe was only filled perfunctorily and for a time; and her great duty was never rightly done. _Hinc lacrimae aetatum_--hence the darkness and miseries of the Christian Era!
Take your stand here, at the end of the Punic War, on the brink of the Age of Rome; and you feel at once how fearfully things have gone down since you stood, with Plato, looking back over the Age of Grecce. There is nothing left now of the high possibilities of artistic creation. Of the breath of spirituality that still remained in the world then, now you can find hardly a trace. A Cicero presently, for a Socrates of old; it is enough to tell you how the world has fallen. Some fall, I suppose, was implied in the cycles; still Rome might have gone to her more material duties with clean heart, mind, and hands; she might have built a structure, as Ts"in Shi Hw.a.n.gti and Han Wuti did, to endure. It would not be fair to compare the Age of Han with the Augustan; the morning glory of the East Asian, with the late afternoon of the European manvantara; and yet we cannot but see, if we look at both dispa.s.sionately and with a decent amount of knowledge, how beneficently, the Eastern Teachers had affected their peoples, and what a dire thing it was for Europe that the work of the Western Teacher had failed. Chow China and Republican Rome fell to pieces in much the same way: in a long orgy of wars and ruin;--but the rough barbarian who rebuilt China found bricks to his hand far better than he knew he was using,-- material with a true worth and vitality of its own,--a race with elements of redemption in its heredity; whereas the great statesman, the really Great Soul who rebuilt Rome, had to do it, if the truth should be told, of materials little better than stubble and rottenness. Roman life, when Augustus came to work with it for his medium, was fearfully infected with corruption; one would have said that no power human or divine could have saved it. That he did with it as much as he did, is one of the standing wonders of time.
But now back to the place where we left Rome: in 200 B.C., at the end of the Carthaginian War. No more now of Farmer Balbus"s fields; no more of the cows of Ahen.o.barbus; Dolabella"s rod and line, and his fish-stories, shall not serve us further. It is the navigable river now; on which we must sail down and out on to the sea.
Already the little Italian city is being courted by fabulously rich Egypt, the doyen of culture since Athens declined; and soon she is to be driven by forces outside her control into conquest of all the old seats of Mediterranean civilization;--and withal she is utterly unfitted for the task in any spiritual or cultural sense: she is still little more than the same narrow little provincial half-barbarous Rome she has always been. No grand conceptions have been nourished in her by a literature of her own with high lights couched in the Grand-Manner; no olden Homer has sung to her, with magnificent roll of hexameters to set the wings of her soul into magnificent motion. Beyond floating folk ballads she has had no literature at all; though latterly, she is trying to supply the place of one with a few slave-made translations from the Greek, and a few imitations of the decadent Greek comedy of Alexandria;--also there has been a poet Naevius, whom--she found altogether too independent to suit her tastes; and a Father Ennius,--uncouth old bone of her bone, (though he too Greek by race) who is struggling to mold her tough inflexible provincial dialect into Greek meter of sorts,--and thereby doing a real service for poets to come. And there is a Cato the Censor, writing prose; Cato, typical of Roman breadth of view; with, for the sum of a truly national political wisdom, yelping at Rome continually that fool"s jingo cry of his:--your finest market in the western seas, your richest potential commercial a.s.set, must be destroyed. There you have the high old Roman conception of _Weltpolitik;_ whereby we may understand how little fitted Rome was for _Weltpolitik_ at all; how hoeing cabbages and making summer campaigns,--as Mr. Stobart says, with a commissariat put up for each soldier in a lunch-bag by his wife,--were still her metier,--the Italian soil, whether in actual or only potential possession--held already, or by the grace of G.o.d soon to be stolen--still her inspiration. And this Italian soil she was now about to leave forever.
The forces that led her to world-conquest were twofold, inner and outer. The inner one was the summer campaign habit, formed during several centuries; and the fact that she could form no conception of life that did not include it: the impulse to material expansion was deep in her soul, and ineradicable. She might have followed it, perhaps, north and westward; finished with Spain; gone up into Gaul (though in Gaul she might have found, even at that time, possibly, an unmanageable strength); she might even have carried her own ultimite salvation up into Germany. But we have seen Darius flow victorious eastward towards India, but unsuccessful when he tried the pa.s.ses of the west; and Alexander follow him in the same path, and not turn westward at all. So you may say an eastward habit had been formed, and inner-channels were worn for conquest in that direction, but none in the other. Besides,--and this was the outer of the two forces,--the East was crying out to Rome. There were pirates on the other side of the Adriatic; and for the safety of her own eastern littoral she had been dealing with them, as with Spain, during and before the terrible Hannibalic time. To sit securely at home she must hold the Illyrian coast: and, she thought, or events proved it to her, to hold that coast safely, she must go conquering inland. Then again Egypt had courted her alliance, for regions. The Ptolemy of the time was a boy; and Philip of Macedon ind Antiochus of Syria had hatched a plan to carve up his juicy realm for their own most delectable feasting. It was the very year after peace--to call it that--had been forced on prostrate Carthage; and you might think an exhausted Rome would have welcomed a breathing time, even at the expense of losing her annual outing. And so indeed the people were inclined to do. But the summer was ic.u.men in; and what were consuls and Senate for? Should they be as these irresponsibles of the comitia? Should they fail to look about them and take thought?--As if someone should offer you a cottage (with all modern appointments) by the seaside, or farmhouse among the mountains, free of rent for July and August, here were all the respectabilities of the East cooingly inviting Rome to spend her summer with them; they to provide all accessories for a really enjoyable time.
In this way eastern politics a.s.sorted themselves,--thus was the Levant divided: on the one hand you had the traditional seats of militariasm; on the other, famous names--and the heirs to the glory (a good deal tarnished now) that once had been Greece. The former were Macedon and Syria, or Macedon with Syria in the background; what better could you ask that a good square se-to with these? Oh, one at a time; that was the fine old Roman way; _divide et impera;_ Mecedon now, and, a-grace of G.o.d, Syria--But let be; we are talking of this summer; for next, the Lord (painted bright vermilion) it may be hoped will provide. So for the present Philip of Mecedon figures as the desired enemy.--As to the other side, the famous names to be our allies, they are: Egypt, chief seat in recent centuries of culture and literature, and incidentally the Golconda of the time, endowed past dreaming of with commerce, wealth, and industries; and Rhodes, rich and republican, and learned too; and the sacred name of Athens; and Pergamum in Asia, cultured Attalus"s kingdom. Are we not to ally ourselves with the arts and humanities, with old fame, with the most precious of traditions?--For Rome, it must be said, was not all Catos: there was something in her by this time that could thrill to the name of Greece. And Philip had been in league with Hannibal, though truly he had left him shamefully unsupported.
_Philip had been in league with Hannibal--with Hannibal!_--Why, it was a glorious unsought fight, such as only fortune"s favored soldiers might attain. The comitia vote against it? They say Hannibal has made them somewhat tired?--Nonsense! let "em vote again! let "em vote again!--They do so; a.s.sured pithily that it is only a question whether we fight Philip in Macedon, or he us on our own Italian soil. Of course, if you put it that way, it is Hobson"s choice: the voting goes all right this time. So we are embarked on the great Eastern Adventure; and Flamininus sets out for Greece.
Now your simple savage is often a gentleman. I don"t mean your Congo Quashi or Borria Bungalee from the back-country blocks of New South Wales--our Roman bore no resemblance to them; but say your Morocco kaid, your desert chieftain from Tunis or Algiers.
Though for long generations he has lost his old-time civilized attainments, he retains in full his manners, his native dignity, his wild Saharan grace. But banish him to Paris, and see what happens. He buys up automobiles,--and poodles,--and astrolabes, --and patent-leather boots,--and a number of other things he were much better without. He exchanges his soul for a pa.s.s into the _demi-monde;_ and year by year sees him further sunk into depths of vulgarism. This is precisely what in a few generations happened to Rome.
But meanwhile she was at an apex; touched by some few luminous ideals here and there, and producing some few great gentlemen.
Unprovincial egos; like Scipio Africa.n.u.s had been edging their way into Roman incarnation; they were swallows of a still far-off summer; they stood for h.e.l.lenization, and the modification of Roman rudeness with a little imported culture. Rome had conquered Magna Graccia, and had seen something there; had felt a want in herself, and brought in slaves like Livius Andronicus to supply it. Flamininus himself was really a very great gentleman: a patrician, type of the best men there were in Rome.
He went to Greece thrilled with generous feelings, as to a sacred land. When he restored to the Greek cities their freedom,-- handed them back to their own uses and devices, after freeing them from Philip,--it was with an infinite pride and a high simplicity. We hear of him overcome in his speech to their representatives on that occasion, and stopping to control the lump in his throat: conqueror and master of the whole peninsula and the islands, he was filled with reverence, as a great simple-hearted gentleman might be, for the ancient fame and genius of the peoples at his feet. He and his officers were proud to be admitted to the Games and initiated at Eleusis. I think this is the finest chapter in early Roman history. There is the simplicity, pride, and generosity of the Roman gentleman, confronted with a culture he was able to admire, but conscious he did not possess;--and on the other hand the fine flow of Greek grat.i.tude to the liberator of Greece, in whom the Greeks recognised that of old time, and which had been so rare in their own life. At this moment Rome blossomed: a beautiful bloom, we may say.
But it was a fateful moment for her, too. The Greeks had long lost what capacity they had ever had for stable politics.
Flamininus might hand them back their liberties with the utmost genuineness of heart; but they were not in a condition to use the gift. Rome soon found that she had no choice but to annex them, one way or another. They were her proteges; and Antiochus attacked them;--so then Antiochus had to be fought and conquered.
That fool had great Hannibal with him, and resources with which Hannibal might have crushed Rome; but it did not suit Antiochus that the glory should be Hannibal"s. Then presently Attalus bequeathed Pergamum to the Senate; which involved Rome in Asia Minor. So step by step she was compelled to conquer the East.
Now there was a far greater disparity of civilization between Rome and this h.e.l.lenistic Orient and half-orientalized Greece, than appeared afterwards between the Romans and Spaniards and Gauls. Spain, very soon after Augustus completed its conquest, was producing most of the brightest minds in Latin literature: the influx of important egos had hardly pa.s.sed from Italy before it began to appear in Spain. Had not Rome become the world metropolis, capable of attracting to herself all elements of greatness from every part of the Mediterranean world, we should think of the first century A.D., as a great Spanish Age. Gaul, too, within a couple of generations of Ceasar"s devastating exploits there, had become another Egypt for wealth and industries. The grandson"s of the Vercingetorixes and Dumnorixes were living more splendidly, and as culturedly, in larger and better villas than the patricians of Italy; as Ferrero shows.
We may judge, too, that there was a like quick rise of manvantaric conditions in Britain after the Claudian conquest: we have news of Agricola"s speaking of the "labored studies of the Gauls," as if that people were then famed for learning,--to which, he said, he preferred the "quick wits and natural genius of the Britons." And here I may mention that, even before the conquest of Gaul, Caesar"s own tutor was a man of that nation, a master of Greek and Latin learning;--but try to imagine a Roman tutoring Epaminondas or Pelopidas! So we may gather that a touch from Italy--by that time highly cultured,--was enough to light up those Celtic countries at once; and infer from that that no such long pralayic conditions had obtained in them as had obtained in Italy during the centuries preceding the Punic Wars. Spain at thirteen decades before Scipio, Gaul at as much before Caesar, Britain at as much before Caesar or Claudius, may well have been strong and cultured countries: because you wake quickly after the thirteen decade period of rest, but slowly after the long pralayas.
Roman Italy woke very slowly at the touch of Greece; and woke, not like Spain and Gaul afterwards at Rome"s touch, to culture; not to learning or artistic fertility. What happened was what always does happen when a really inferior civilization comes in contact with a really superior one. Rome did not become civilized in any decent sense: she simply forwent Roman virtues and replaced them with Greek vices; and made of these, not the vices of a degenerate culture, but the piggishness of cultureless boors.--Behold her Gadarene stations, after Flamininus"s return:--
Millions of money, in indemnities, loot, and what not,--in bribes before very long,--are flowing in to her. Where not so long since she was doing all her business with stamped lumps of bronze or copper, a pound or so in weight, in lieu of coinage, nor feeling the need of anything more handy,--now she is receiving yearly, monthly, amounts to be reckoned in millions sterling; and has no more good notion what to do with them than ever she had of old. If the egos (of Crest-Wave standing) had come in as quickly as did the shekels, things might have gone manageably; but they did not by any means. Her great misfortune was to enter the world-currents only on the material plane; to find her poor little peasant-bandit-souled self mistress of the world and its money, and still provincial to the core and with no ideas of bigness that were not of the earth earthy; with nothing whatever that was both spiritual and Roman to thrill to life the higher side of her;--a multimillionaire that could hardly read or write, and knew no means of spending her money that was not essentially vulgar. She had given up her sole means of salvation--which was hoeing cabbages; her slaves did all that for her now;--and so was at a loss for employment; and Satan found plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do. There were huge all-day-long banquets, where you took your emetic from time to time to keep you going.
There were slaves,--armies of them; to have no more than a dozen personal attendants was poverty. There were slaves from the East to minister to your vices; some might cost as much as five thousand dollars; and there were dirt-cheap Sardinians and "barbarians" of all sorts to run your estates and farms. All the work of Italy was done by slave labor; and the city swarmed with an immense slave population; the country slaves with enough of manhood left in them to rise and butcher and torture their masters when they could; the city slaves, one would say, in no condition to keep the semblance of a soul in them at all,--living dead. For the most part both were shamefully treated; Cato,-- high old Republican Cato, type of the free and n.o.bly simple Roman--used to see personally to the scourging of his slaves daily after dinner, as a help to his digestion.--So the rich wasted their money and their lives. They bought estates galore, and built villas on them; Cicero had--was it eighteen?-- country-houses. They bought up Greek art-treasures, of which they had no appreciation whatever,--and which therefore only helped to vulgarize them. Such things were costly, and thought highly of in Greece; so Rome would have them for her money, and have them _en ma.s.se._ Mummius brought over a shipload; and solemnly warned his sailors that they would have to replace any they might break or lose. The originals, or such subst.i.tutes as the sailors might supply,--it was all one to him. As to literature,--well, we have seen how it began with translations made by a Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who put certain h.e.l.lenistic comedies and the Odyssey into Latin ballad meters; the kind of verse you would expect from a slave ordered promiscuously by his master to get busy and do it. Then came Father Ennius; and here I shall diverge a little to try to show you what (as I think) really happened to the soul of Rome.
It was a queer set-out, this job that Ennius attempted,--of making a real Roman poem, an epic of Roman history. Between old Latin and Greek there was the same kind of difference as between French and English: one fundamental in the rhythm of the languages. I am giving my own explanation of a very puzzling problem; and needless to say, it may be wrong. The ancient Roman ballads were in what is called Saturnian meter, which depends on stress and accent; it is not unlike the meter of the Scotch and English ballads. That means that old Latin was spoken like English is, with syllabic accent. But Greek was not. In that, what counted, what made the meters, was tone and quant.i.ty.
Now we have that in English too; but it is a subtler and more occult influence in poetry than accent is. In English, the rhythm of a line of verse depends on the stresses; but where there is more than rhythm,--where there is music,--quant.i.ty is a very important factor. For example, in the line
"That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,"
you can hear how the sound is held up on the word _take,_ because the _k_ is followed by the _t_ in _to;_ and what a wonderful musical effect is given thereby to the line. All the swing and lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were to denote the tones the syllables should be--shall I say _sung on?_ Now French is an example of a language without stresses; you know how each syllable falls evenly, all taking an unvarying amount of time to enounce. I imagine the basic principle of Greek was the same; only that you had to add to the syllables a length of sound where two consonants combining after a vowel r.e.t.a.r.ded the flow of tone, as in _take to_ in the line quoted just now.
Now if you try to write a hexameter in English on the Greek principle, you get something without the least likeness either to a Greek hexameter or to music; because the language is one of stresses, not, primarily, of tones.
"This is the forest pimeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks."
will not do at all; there is no Greek spondee in it but--_rest prime_--; and Longfellow would have been surprised if you had accused that of spondeeism. What you would get would be something like these--I forget who was responsible for them:
"Procession, complex melodies, pause, quant.i.ty, accent, After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order."
Lines like these could never be poetry; poetry could never be couched in lines like these;--simply because poetry is an arrangement of words upon a frame-work of music: the poet has to hear the music within before his words can drop naturally into the places in accordance with it. You could not imitate a French line in English, because each of the syllables would have to be equally stressed; you could not imitate an English line in French, because in that language there are none of the stresses on which an English line depends for its rhythm.
But when I read Chaucer I am forced to the conclusion that what he tried to do was precisely that: to imitate French music; to write English without regard to syllabic accent. The English lyrics of his time and earlier depend on the principle of accent:
Sum"--mer is"--i-c.u.m"--en in, Loud"--e sing"--cuccu";