CHAPTER III. Rome

ROME

The culture conditions of Rome seem to cause no perplexity even to those who find Greek civilisation a mystery. They are certainly obvious enough. By reason of the primary natural direction of Roman life to plunder and conquest, with a minimum of commerce and peaceful contacts, Roman culture was as backward as that of Greece was forward. The early Etruscan culture having been relegated to the status of archaeology, however respectfully treated, and the popular language having become that of all classes, the republican period had to begin again at the beginning. Latin literature practically commenced in the third century B.C., when that of Greece was past its meridian; and the fact that Lucius Andronicus and Naevius, the early playwrights, were men of Greek culture, and that Ennius translated the Greek rationalist Evemeros (Euhemeros), point to the Hellenic origins of Rome's intellectual life. Her first art, on the other hand, was substantially derived from the Etruscans, who also laid the simple beginnings of the Roman drama, later built upon under Greek influence. But even with the Etruscan stimulus--itself a case of arrested development--the art went no great way before the conquest of Greece; and even under Greek stimulus the literature was progressive for only two centuries, beginning to decline as soon as the Empire was firmly established.

Of the relative poverty of early Roman art, the cause is seen even by Mommsen to lie partly in the religious environment, religion being the only incentive which at that culture stage could have operated (and this only with economic fostering); but the nature of the religious environment he implicitly sets down as usual to the character of the race, as contrasted with the character of the Greeks. Obviously it is necessary to seek a reason for the religious conditions to begin with; and this is to be found in the absence from early Rome of exactly those natural and political conditions which made Greece so manifold in its culture. We have seen how, where Greece was divided into a score of physically "self-contained" states, no one of which could readily overrun the others, Rome was placed on a natural career of conquest; and this at a culture stage much lower than that of Ionic Greece of the same period. Manifold and important culture contacts there must have been for Hellenes before the Homeric poems were possible; but Rome at the beginning of the republican period was in contact only with the other Italic tribes, the Phoenicians, the Grecian cities, and the Etruscans; and with these her relations were hostile. In early Ionia, again, Greek poetry flourished as a species of luxury under a feudal system constituted by a caste of rich nobles who had acquired wealth by conquest of an old and rich civilisation. Roman militarism began in agricultural poverty; and the absorption of the whole energies of the group in warfare involved the relegation of the arts of song and poetry to the care of the women and boys, as something beneath adult male notice. Roman religion in the same way was left as a species of archaeology to a small group of priests and priestly aristocrats, charged to observe the ancient usages. It would thus inevitably remain primitive--that is, it would remain at a stage which the Greeks had mostly passed at the Homeric period; and when wealth and leisure came, Greek culture was there to over-shadow it. To say that the Latins racially lacked the mythopoeic faculty is to fall back on the old plan of explaining phenomena in terms of themselves. As a matter of fact, the mere number of deities, of personified forces, in the Roman mythology is very large, only there is lacking the embroidery of concrete fiction which gives vividness to the mythology of the Greeks. The Romans relatively failed to develop the mythopoeic faculty because their conditions caused them to energise more in other ways.

There is, however, obvious reason to believe that among the Italian peoples there was at one time a great deal more of myth than has survived. What is preserved is mainly fragments of the mythology of one set of tribes, and that in only a slightly developed form. All the other Italic peoples had been subdued by the Romans before any of them had come into the general use of letters; and instead of being put in a position to develop their own myths and cults, or to co-ordinate the former in the Greek fashion, they were absorbed in the Roman system, which took their Gods to its pantheon, and at the same time imposed on them those of Rome. Much of their mythic lore would thus perish, for the literate Romans had not been concerned to cultivate even their own. Early Roman life being divided between war and agriculture, and there being no free literary class to concern itself with the embellishment of the myths, there subsisted only the simple myths and rituals of agriculture and folklore, the numerous list of personified functions connected with all the phases of life, and the customary ceremonial of augury and invocation in war. The augurs and pontifices were the public men and statesmen, and they made religion a State function. What occult lore there was they made a class monopoly--an effectual preventive in itself of a Hellenic development of myth. Apart from the special sets or colleges of priests there were specially appointed colleges of religio-archaeological specialists--first, the six augurs and the five pontifices, then the duoviri sacris faciundis, afterwards increased to ten and to fifteen, who collected Greek oracles and saw to the Sibylline books; later the twenty fetiales or heralds, and so on. "These colleges have been often, but erroneously, confounded with the priesthoods. The priesthoods were charged with the worship of a specific divinity; the skilled colleges, on the other hand, were charged with the preservation of traditional rules regarding the more general religious observances.... These close corporations supplying their own vacancies, of course from the ranks of the burgesses, became in this way the depositaries of skilled arts and sciences."

Religion being thus for centuries so peculiarly an official matter of settled tradition, no unauthorised myth-maker could get a hearing. Even what was known would be kept as far as possible a corporation secret, as indeed were some of the mystery practices in Egypt and Greece. But whereas in Greece the art of sculpture, once introduced, was stimulated by and reacted on mythology in every temple in every town, the rigid limitation of early Roman public life to the business of war would on that side have closed the door on sculpture, even if it could otherwise have found entrance. The check laid on the efflorescence of the religious instinct was a double check on the efflorescence of art. The net result is described with some exaggeration by an eminent mythologist, in a passage which reduces to something like unity of idea the tissues of contradiction spun by Mommsen:--

For the Latins their Gods, although their name was legion, remained mysterious beings without forms, feelings, or passions; and they influenced human affairs without sharing or having any sympathy with human hopes, fears, or joys. Neither had they, like the Greek deities, any society among themselves. There was for them no Olympos where they might gather and take counsel with the father of Gods and men. They had no parentage, no marriage, no offspring. They thus became a mere multitude of oppressive beings, living beyond the circle of human interests, yet constantly interfering with it; and their worship was thus as terrible a bondage as any under which the world has yet suffered. Not being associated with any definite bodily shapes, they could not, like the beautiful creations of the Greek mind, promote the growth of the highest art of the sculptor, the painter, and the poet.

It is necessary here to make some corrections and one expansion. The statement as to parentage, marriage, and offspring is clearly wrong. Cox here follows Keightley, whose pre-scientific view is still common. Keightley admits that the early Latin Gods and Goddesses occur in pairs, as Saturn and Ops, Janus and Jana; and that they were called Patres and Matres. To assert after this that they were never thought of as generating offspring, merely because the bulk of the old folk-mythology is lost, is to ascribe uncritically to the Latins an abstention from the most universal forms of primitive myth-making. The proposition as to "terrible bondage," again, cannot stand historically; for, to say nothing of the religions of Mexico and Palestine, and some of those of India, the Roman life was certainly much less darkened by creed than has been that of many Christian countries, for instance Protestant Scotland and Catholic Spain.

As regards, again, the failure of the early Latin pantheon to stimulate sculpture and poetry, it has to be noticed that sculpture and poetry tended to make as well as to be made by mythology in Greece. The argument against the Latin pantheon is in fact an argument in a circle. If the Latin Gods were not "associated with any definite bodily shapes" (parentage, marriage, and offspring they certainly had), it could only be when and because they were not yet sculptured. Greek Gods before they were sculptured would be conceived just as variably. Were they then thought of as formless? The proposition is strictly inconceivable. Latin Gods must have been imagined very much as were and are those of other barbarous races, who are notoriously thought of as having sex, form, and passions. Greek mythology simply reached the art stage sooner. The cults of Hellas did not start with a mythology full-blown, thereby creating the arts; the mythology grew step by step with and in the arts, in a continuous mutual reaction; many Greek myths being really tales framed to explain the art-figures of other mythologies, Egyptian and Asiatic. Thus the primitive bareness of the Latin mythology signifies not a natural saplessness which could give no increase to art, but (1) loss of lore and (2) a lack of the artistic and literary factors which record and stimulate higher mythologic growth.

Thus limited in their native culture, the Roman upper class were inevitably much affected by higher foreign cultures when they met these under conditions of wealth and leisure. Long before that stage, indeed, they consulted Greek oracles and collected responses; and they had informally assimilated before the conquest a whole series of Greek Gods without giving them public worship. The very Goddess of the early Latin League, the Aventine Diana, was imaged by a copy of Artemis of Ephesus, the Goddess of the Ionian League. As time went on the more psychologically developed cults of the East were bound to attract the Romans of all classes. What of religious emotion there was in the early days must have played in large part around the worship which the State left free to the citizens as individuals--the worship of the Lares and Penates, the cults of the hearth and the family; and in this connection the primitive mythopoeic instinct must have evolved a great deal of private mythology which never found its way into literature. But as the very possession of Lares and Penates, ancestral and domestic spirits, was originally a class privilege, not shared by the landless and the homeless, these had step by step to be made free of public institutions of a similar species--the Lares Praestites of the whole city, festally worshipped on the first day of May, and other Lares Publici, Rurales, Compitales, Viales, and so on--just as they were helped to bread. Even these concessions, however, failed to make the old system suffice for the transforming State; and individual foreign worships with a specific attraction were one by one inevitably introduced--that of AEsculapius in the year 291 B.C., in a panic about pestilence; that of Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, in 205: both by formal decision of the Senate. The manner of the latter importation is instructive. Beginning the Hannibalic war in a spirit of religious patriotism, the Senate decreed the destruction of the temples of the alien Isis and Serapis. But as the war went on, and the devotion shown to the native Gods was seen to be unrewarded, the Senate themselves, yielding to the general perturbation which showed itself in constant resort to foreign rites by the women, prescribed resort to the Greek sacrificial rites of Apollo. Later they called in the cult of Cybele from Phrygia; and other cults informally, but none the less irresistibly, followed.

In all such steps two forces were at work--the readiness of the plebeians to welcome a foreign religion in which the patricians had, as it were, no vested rights; and the tendency of the more plastic patricians themselves, especially the women, to turn to a worship with emotional attractions. When the plebeians sought admission for their class to the higher offices of State, they were told with unaffected seriousness that their men had not the religious qualifications--they lacked the hereditary gift of reading auspices, the lore of things sacred. So, when they did force entrance, their alleged blunders in these matters were exclaimed against as going far to ruin the republic. This was not a way to make the populace revere the national religion; and as the population of foreign race steadily increased by conquest and enslavement, alien cults found more and more hold. "It was always in the popular quarters of the city that these movements began."

The first great unofficial importation seems to have been the orgiastic worship of Dionysos, who specially bore for the Romans his epithet of Bacchus, and was identified with their probably aboriginal Liber. This worship, carried on in secret assemblies, was held by the conservatives to be a hotbed of vice and crime, and was, according to Livy, bloodily punished (B.C. 186). So essentially absurd, however, is Livy's childish narrative that it is impossible to take anything in it for certain save the bare fact that the worship was put under restrictions, as tending to promote secret conspiracies. But from this time forward, roughly speaking, Rome may be said to have entered into the mythological heritage of Greece, even as she did into her positive treasure of art work and of oriental gold. Every cult of the conquered Mediterranean world found a footing in the capital, the mere craving for new sensations among the upper class being sufficient to overcome their political bias to the old system. It is clear that when Augustus found scores of Roman temples in disrepair after the long storms of the civil wars, it was not that "religion" was out of vogue, but that it was superseded by what the Romans called "superstition"--something extraneous, something over and above the public system of rites and ceremonies. In point of fact, the people of Rome were in the mass no longer of Roman stock, but a collection of many alien races, indifferent to the indigenous cults. The emperor's restorations could but give a subsidised continuity to the official services: what vitally flourished were the cults which ministered to the new psychological needs of a population more and more divorced from great public interests, and increasingly alien in its heredity--the stimulant and hysterical worships of Adonis, of Attis, of the Lover Goddess coupled with the first, or the Mourning Mother Goddess with the second, of Isis and Osiris and their child--rituals of alternate lamentation and rejoicing, of initiations, austerities, confessions, penances, self-abasement, and the promise of immortality. On the general soil of devotion thus formed, there finally grew up side by side Mithraism and Christianity, the rival religions of the decadence, of which the second triumphed in virtue of having by far the larger number of adaptations to its environment.

But while Rome was thus at length fully possessed by the spirit of religious imagination which had so fruitfully stirred the art of Greece, there ensued no new birth of faculty. It was with the arts as with literature: the stimulus from Greece was received by a society rapidly on the way to that social state which in Greece had choked the springs of progress. In the last generations of the Republic the literary development was markedly rapid. In the century which saw Rome, after a terrific struggle, victorious over Carthage and prepared for the grapple with Macedon, the first practitioners of literature were playwrights, or slaves, or clients of great men, or teachers like Ennius, who could find in the now leisured and in part intelligent or at least inquisitive upper class a sufficient encouragement to a literary career. That class did not want recitals of the crude folklore of their fathers, so completely eclipsed by that of Greece, which was further associated with the literary form of drama, virtually new to the Romans. Drama, always the form of literature which can best support itself, is the form most cultivated down till the period of popular abasement and civil convulsion, though of a dozen dramatists we have only Plautus and Terence left in anything like completeness; and while the tragedy of Pacuvius and Attius was unquestionably an imitation of the Greek, it may have had in its kind as much merit as the comedies that have been preserved. Even more rapid than the development, however, is the social gangrene that kills the popular taste; for when we reach the time of Augustus there is no longer a literary drama, save perhaps for the small audiences of the wooden theatres, and the private performances of amateurs; parades and pantomimes alone can attract the mindless multitude; and the era of autocrats begins on well-laid foundations of ignorance and artificial incivilisation.

As with the literature of the people, so with that of the lettered class. In the last generation of freedom, we have in Lucretius and Catullus two of the great poets of all antiquity, compared with whose forceful inspiration Virgil and Horace already begin to seem sicklied o'er with the pale cast of decline. Thenceforth the glory begins to die away; and though the red blade of Juvenal is brandished with a hand of power, and Lucan clangs forth a stern memorial note, and Petronius sparkles with a sinister brilliancy, there is no mistaking the downward course of things under Caesarism. It is true we find Juvenal complaining that only the emperor does anything for literature:--

Et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum. Solus enim tristes hac tempestate Camoenas Respexit.

It is the one word of praise he ever gives to the autocrat, be it Domitian or another; and the commentators decide that only at the beginning of Domitian's reign would it apply. In effect, the satire is a description of the Roman upper class as grown indifferent to poetry, or to any but their own. But it is not on the economic side that the autocracy and the aristocracy of the Empire are to be specially indicted. The economic difficulty was very much the same under the Republic, when only by play-writing could literary men as such make a living. As Juvenal goes on to say, Horace when he cried Evohe was well fed, and if Virgil had lacked slave and lodging the serpents would have been lacking to the fury's hair, and the tongueless trumpet have sounded nothing great. Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil were all inheritors of a patrimony; and Horace needed first an official post and later a patron's munificence to enable him to live as a poet. The mere sale of their books could not possibly have supported any one of them, so low were prices kept by the small demand. What was true of the poets was still truer of the historians. Thus in the Republic as in the Empire, the men of letters, apart from the playwrights, tended to be drawn solely from the small class with inherited incomes. The curse of the Empire was that even when the sanest emperors, as the Antonines, sought to endow studies, they could not buy moral or intellectual energy. The senate of poltroons who crouched before the Neros and Caligulas were the upper-class version of the population which lived by bread and the circus; and in that air neither great art nor great thought could breathe. Roman sculpture is but enslaved Greek sculpture taken into pay; Latin literature ceases to be Roman with Tacitus. The noble apparition of Marcus Aurelius shines out of the darkening ages like some unearthly incarnation, collecting in one life and in one book all the light and healing left in the waning civilisations; beside the babble of Fronto his speech is as that of one of the wise Gods of the ancient fantasy. Henceforth we have but ancillary history, and, in imaginative literature, be it of Apuleius or of Claudian, the portents of another age. Roma fuit.

The last stages of the transition from the pagan to the Middle Ages can best be traced in the history of the northern province of Gaul. Subjected to regular imperial administration within a generation of its conquest by Caesar, Gaul for some centuries actually gained in civilisation, the imperial regimen being relatively more favourable to nearly every species of material progress than that of the old chiefs. The emperors even in the fourth century are found maintaining there the professorships of rhetoric, language, law, philosophy and medicine first founded by Marcus Antoninus; and until finance began to fail and the barbarians to invade, the material conditions were not retrograde. But the general intellectual life was merely imitative and retrospective; and the middle and upper classes, for which the higher schools existed, were already decaying in Gaul as elsewhere. The old trouble, besides, the official veto on all vital political discussion--if indeed any appetite for such discussion survived--drove literature either into mere erudition or into triviality. On the other hand, the growing Church offered a field of ostensibly free intellectual activity, and so was for a time highly productive, in point of sheer quantity of writing; a circumstance naturally placed by later inquirers to the credit of its creed. The phenomenon was of course simply one of the passage of energy by the line of least resistance. Within the Church, to which they turned as did thoughtful Greeks to philosophy after the rise of Alexander's Empire, men of mental tastes and moderate culture found both shelter and support; and the first Gaulish monasteries, unlike those of Egypt and the East, were, as M. Guizot has noted, places for conference rather than for solitary life. There, for men who believed the creed, which was as credible as the older doctrines, there was a constant exercise for the mind on interests that were relatively real, albeit profoundly divided from the interests of the community. Thus, at a time when the community needed all its mental energy to meet its political need, that mental energy was spent in the discussion of insoluble and insane problems, of predestination and freewill, of faith and works, of fasts, celibacy, the Trinity, immortality, and the worship of saints. Men such as Ambrose and Jerome in Italy, Paulinus, Cassian, Hilary, and Salvian in Gaul, Chrysostom in the East, and Augustine in the South, represent as it were the last vibrations of the civilised intelligence; their energy, vainly spent on what they felt to be great issues, hints of the amount of force that was still running to waste throughout the Empire.

Soon, however, and even before the barbarian tide had overflowed the intellectual world, the fatal principle at the core of the new creed began to paralyse even the life that centred around that. In a world of political tyranny, an established church claiming to stand for the whole of supernatural truth must needs resort to tyranny as soon as it could wield the weapons. The civil strifes which broke out alike in the Eastern and the Western Empire in the third and fourth centuries, and the multitude of sects which rapidly honeycombed the Church, wore so many more forces of social disintegration; and churchmen, reasoning that difference of dogma was the ground of civil warfare as well as of war in the Church, must needs take the course that had before been taken in politics.

After the original Arian battle had raged itself out in Egypt, Gregory of Nazianzun at Constantinople, Ambrose at Milan, and Martin at Tours, fought it over again. One point secured, others were settled in turn; and as soon as the influence of Augustine set up a prevailing system of thought, theology was as much a matter of rule and precedent as government. As we read Augustine's City of God, with its strenuous demonstration that the calamities which men ascribe to the new religion are the fruit of their own misdeeds, we realise to the full the dissolution of antiquity. All that is valid in his polemic is the exposure of the absurdity of the old faiths, long before detected by the reason of the few, but maintained by believers and unbelievers alike for reasons of State. The due Nemesis came in the rise of a faith which first flourished on and promoted an utter disregard of State concerns, then helped directly to rob the State of the mental energy it most needed, and finally wrought for the paralysis of what mental energy itself had attracted. Of constructive truth, of the thought whereby a State could live, the polemist had much less than was once possessed by the men who framed or credited the fables he derided. He could destroy, but could not build up. And so it was with the Church, as regarded the commonweal. "Of all the various systems of government that have been attempted on this earth, theocracy, or more properly hierocracy, is undoubtedly one of the very worst."

But one thing the Church could construct and conserve--the fabric of her own wealth and power. Hence it came about that the Church, in itself a State within the State, was one of the three or four concrete survivals of antiquity round which modern civilisation nucleated. Of the four, the Church, often treated as the most valuable, was really the least so, inasmuch as it wrought always more for the hindrance of progress and the sundering of communities than for advance and unification. The truly civilising forces were the other three: the first being the body of Roman law, the product of Roman experience and Greek thought in combination; and the second, the literature of antiquity, in large part lost till the time we call the New Birth, when its recovery impregnated and inspired, though it perhaps also overburdened and lamed, the unformed intelligence of modern Europe. The third was the heritage of the arts of life and of beauty, preserved in part by the populations of the western towns which survived and propagated their species through the ages of dominant barbarism; in part by the cohering society of Byzantium. From these ancient germs placed in new soil is modern civilisation derived.

FOOTNOTES:

EPILOGUE

A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE

We are now, perhaps, in a position to contemplate the wood without being distracted by the trees, and without forgetting, on the other hand, that it is an aggregate of trees individually conditioned by aggregation.

The record of Graeco-Roman, as of all other ancient civilisation, with the partial exception of that of China, is one of a complete decadence--in this case a twofold decadence: a passing from collective energy and achievement to collective decrepitude and mental impotence, from intellectual freedom and force to the dogmatic arrest of thought, from artistic splendour to the very negation of the finest forms of art. However we may dispute about the nature of progress, we all agree that this was decadence. Not even the Christian Greek, the least freethinking of educated moderns, supposes that the life of his race went upwards from the time of Constantine. The Italian to this day aspires--by way of Tripoli, among other things--to bear some comparison with the Roman, whose "greatness" he envies. Decadence, then, is confessed. It concerns us, if we would have a historical philosophy at all, to think it all in terms of general causation.

At the outset, we shall do well to realise that in the long transmutation there was no day, save those of sudden and dire disaster, on which the human elements of the State organisms concerned were collectively conscious of any great change in their way of life. And days of dire disaster had occurred in the times to which we look back as those of energetic expansion. Early Rome had been actually captured by Etruscans, by Gauls; "she" had ostensibly come to the verge of overthrow by Hannibal a whole era before she was sacked by the Goths; Athens had been sacked by the Persians long before the Roman invasion. What was the determining difference in the consciousness of the citizens at the two epochs? Clearly that between the minds of men wont to "fend for themselves" collectively and of men wont to be ruled and prescribed for by a master--a difference, therefore, in power of resistance and of recovery. And this difference had itself been wrought by long mutations--from the day of Sulla to the day of Tiberius in Rome, from the day of Alexander to that of Sulla in Greece. No one generation had been born in full "freedom," to pass away in complete subordination to an autocrat. The earlier generations, like the later, had been habituated to slave-owning, superstition, and the thought of war. The substantial and fatal change was in the degree of simple average manhood among the free. National decadence, in a word, is loss of manhood--a thing not easily lost.

A Conservative statesman of our day, wont to apply analytic criticism chiefly for partisan purposes, has attempted a comparatively disinterested analysis of the problem before us, in a short but not inconsiderate survey of the decadence of the old world. At the outset he rightly notes the inconsistency with which men still tend to hold by the old idea of an inevitable ageing and ultimate decrepitude of States and civilisations, while holding no less confidently to the modern notion, practically unattained by the ancients, of an inevitable progress. "Why," he asks, "should civilisations thus wear out and great communities decay? and what evidence is there that in fact they do?" It may or may not be by reason of political bias that the questioner--who indeed avows that he is pursuing one of "those wandering trains of thought where we allow ourselves the luxury of putting wide-ranging questions, to which our ignorance forbids any confident reply"--propounds no clear answer to either query, contenting himself with suggesting that modern civilisation, in virtue of its strengthening hold on physical science, stands a chance of escaping the doom that fell on the old. But such a curtailed answer moves us afresh to seek a more complete one.

Our questioner, contemplating the "fall" of Rome, argues that the cause cannot have been even so serious an evil as slavery, which had been in operation from the beginning. He overlooks the fact that it had greatly increased in the period of far-reaching conquest, and so misses an element in the solution. Passing over this, he recognises one proximate "cause," diminution of population; and he in effect seems to trace to this source the secondary factor of fiscal collapse--the breaking down of the tax-paying classes everywhere under the ever-increasing burden of State exaction. The final fiscal process he oddly describes as "a crude experiment in socialism." Putting the decay of population and the increase of burdens together, he pronounces that "they absolutely require themselves to be explained by causes more general and more remote"; and his answer--confessedly a mere restatement of the problem--is just the word "Decadence." The process is simply formulated, once more, in terms of its name. The questioner does not even take the further analytical step of asking how the Eastern Empire came to endure a thousand years longer than the Western; and why the decadence did not similarly operate there.

If anything has been made out in the foregoing survey, we have got further than this; and indeed from any point of view the arrest of the analysis is surprising. Supposing failure of population to be the central phenomenon, we have obviously to ask: What were the political differentia of the progressive and the ostensibly declining states of population? How were the peoples ruled when they were strong, expansive, and collectively equal to their burdens? Surely the answer is obvious. Republican Greece and Republican Rome were self-governing communities, or aggregates of such, supporting themselves by individualist production of all kinds, breeding beyond and not under the apparent limit of food-production. When Romanised Italy ceased to produce a sufficiency of men, she had ceased to produce a sufficiency of things; and this latter failure, entailing the other, can be shown to have been a direct result of the exaction of all manner of subsistence from conquered territories. So far, there is no mystery.

Our querist, however, affirms a diminution of population not only in Italy but throughout the Empire. Here we must first question the assertion. Pestilences, such as that of 166 A.C., doubtless visited most parts of the Empire; but pestilences belong also to the pre-imperial period, and need not here be specially considered. As to Greece, the facts have been already given. The depopulation of that, after Alexander, was primarily a matter of exodus to the richer conquered lands, where a new Hellenistic civilisation arose under purely monarchic rule, and therefore unaccompanied by the all-round, self-developing mental energy which had marked the life of "free" Greece. In Byzantium, of course, the mental stagnation, under Christian autocracy, was no less complete. But there is no evidence whatever that after Constantine the principle of population failed in the Eastern Empire, especially when that was restricted by the amputation of the tributary territories.

Did population then fail in Gaul and Spain and Africa? If so, when? As to Gaul, there is evidence that after the conquest population and productivity increased, though the latter had not previously been low--witness the loot taken by Caesar at Toulouse. Gaul was certainly taxed exorbitantly; but Julian, as we saw, prudently lessened the drain; and Mommsen describes both Gaul and Spain as flourishing in their Romanised period. They continued, in fact, to be, with North Africa, the main sources of the revenue of the Western Empire down to its collapse. Materially, they in some respects went forward, notably in the case of the region of old Carthage. The element wherein they were decadent was precisely that of free manhood, everywhere eviscerated by autocratic and bureaucratic rule. Therefore it was that, like Britain--similarly productive of revenue in the imperial period--they were unable to defend themselves against the final barbarian inroads. Had Honorius carried out his scheme for a measure of Home Rule in Gaul, and followed it up by a similar scheme for Spain, Italy indeed might all the sooner have lost her hold on them as milch kine, but both provinces might conceivably have developed a new life centuries before they historically did.

The Conservative statesman has in fact, and very naturally, excluded from consideration the central political factor. Echoing the Gibbon-Mommsen-Renan thesis as to the excellence of the Antonine government of the Mediterranean world, he ignores as those writers did the vital problem: Wherein lies the felicity of a world wholly at the mercy of the chance of the election of a good emperor by a mercenary soldiery? To fall back on phrases about the Empire "respecting local feelings, encouraging local government," and being "accepted by the conquered as the natural organisation of the world," is merely to burke the real issue as to the political viability of communities satisfied with such a system, content to rest the social pyramid forever on its apex. To say that the conditions of the Empire under the Antonines were "getting better" is merely to close the eyes to the frightful hazard of imperial succession. A world absolutely dependent for its betterment--nay, even for its safe continuance--on the chance of a good succession of despots is a world doomed by the mere law of variation.

If we will but gauge moral and economic forces in human affairs as we gauge physical forces in that toil of science of which the Conservative statesman has learned to recognise the efficacy, we shall deliver ourselves from the mystery-mongering which he is fain to substitute for the old shibboleth of "the divine will." To trace causation in a known civilisation is not to pretend either to understand all social sequences in all ages or to predict the destinate future: it is but to recognise the real reactions of human proclivities and procedures which habit and prejudice have been wont to contemplate uncritically. The late Sir John Seeley, who at times hardly advances on Kingsley as an interpreter of history, grappled in his day with our problem; and he too specified the Antonine age as a notably hopeful period, from which he dates the decadence:--

"A century of unparalleled tranquillity and virtuous government is followed immediately by a period of hopeless ruin and dissolution. A century of rest is followed not by renewed vigour, but by incurable exhaustion. Some principle of decay must have been at work; but what principle? We answer: it was a period of sterility or barrenness in human beings; the human harvest was bad. And among the causes of this barrenness we find, in the more barbarous nations, the enfeeblement produced by the too abrupt introduction of civilisation and universally the absence of industrial habits, and the disposition to listlessness which belongs to the military character."

One is tempted to apply the theory of human crops to the case of the chair of history at Cambridge. Prof. Seeley's theory is an edifying variant on that of Mr. Balfour. Where one thesis finds the key to all in the emperor, the other sees failure of the human harvest the moment the imperial succession goes wrong. And while the Professor offers the semblance of a reason for the alleged failure in the human breed, it is really too nugatory for discussion. If the "barbarous nations" alluded to were Gaul and Spain, they had suffered the "abrupt introduction of civilisation" more than two hundred years before. Egypt and Syria and Greece and North Africa had older civilisations than the Roman. Germany was not decadent. The decay of industrial life in Italy had begun long before the Empire. As well might we say that a bad human crop there had preceded the Etruscan conquest, the invasion by Hannibal, and the civil wars. To cite, as does Prof. Seeley, the pestilence of the year 166 as a beginning of depopulation, is to ignore the problem of three hundred years of previous depopulation in Italy, and to set up a misconception as to the rest of the Empire. According to Gibbon, the long pestilence of the years 250-265 was the worst of all.

More plausibly, Prof. Seeley goes on to argue that "what the plague had been to the population, that the fiscus was to industry. It broke the bruised reed; it converted feebleness into utter and incurable debility. Roman finance had no conception of the impolicy of laying taxation so as to depress enterprise and trade. The fiscus destroyed capital in the Roman Empire. The desire of accumulation languished where the Government lay in wait for all savings--locupletissimus quisque in praedam correptus. All the intricate combinations by which man is connected to man in a progressive society disappeared." But this is a finally excessive description of a process which had been in full swing in the time of Cicero, and which subsisted for three hundred years after Marcus Aurelius in the West. A generation after Marcus came the powerful Severus, whose son Caracalla could find millions of money to build his immense baths at Rome, still monstrous in their ruins; and seventy years after Caracalla, Diocletian, wielding the Empire at its utmost extension, could build still vaster baths for the imperial city at which he had ceased to dwell. With a debased silver coinage, the emperors of that day seemed to feel no fatal lack of real revenue, and maintained, at great cost, huge armies for the control and defence of their enormous realm.

It is impossible to see why the age of the Antonines should be taken as a turning point in the Empire's history rather than the age of Diocletian. That great organiser seems to have partly provoked the insurrection of the Bagaudae in Gaul by taxation; but the Bagaudae were a jacquerie oppressed by the nobles, as their fathers had been before Caesar, and as their posterity was long afterwards; and their wrongs may as well have been at the hands of their lords as at those of the autocrat. However that might be, Roman rule in Gaul survived the revolt of the Bagaudae, yielding a great revenue to Constantine; and at the time of the fall of Rome Gaul was much more productive than Italy. All this is beside the case. To say that "the downfall of the Empire is accounted for" by the fiscus is to raise the question whether the Empire, as such, could have been run by any other method. The Professor himself pronounces that "Government in its helplessness was driven" to fiscal oppression. Then fiscal oppression belonged to the nature of the Empire. Once more we return to the true line of sequence and explanation. Every step and stage in decadence belonged to the process of conquest, of confiscation, of subjection of foreign races, who were made to pay for the vast machinery that kept them subject till they were unfit for self-defence.

There is a danger that, in insisting on the primarily moral causation of the process of social disease and decay, we may on the one hand relapse into a delusive sense of moral superiority, and on the other hand fail to realise how the subjective moral divagation becomes politically effectual in structural and economic change. It is the understood process of causation that is alone truly instructive. But the instruction is deepened in the ratio of our realisation of the decay. Though it is clear that before Rome many a civilisation had gone to violent wreck, there is in recorded history no more overwhelming memory of long triumph and long downfall than that "from the far-distant morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the tragic hour in which the sun of Graeco-Latin civilisation set over the deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and brutalised peoples of Latin Europe." And this whole tremendous arc of triumph and decline is to be understood as the historic expression of the specially conditioned bias of conquest in one people.

The decline is the due sequence of the "rise": everything roots in the wrong relation of communities throughout the Empire. The extension of such a social disease as slavery is one of the symptoms, one of the sequelae, of the central malady. A totally progressive State eliminates or minimises slavery; a declining one fails to do so. The economic malady involved affects primarily the dominant or parasitic State or central part, its condition of parasitism being more deadly than its draining effect on the others. Their malady lay in their state of subjugation, which was an impoverishment of character and political faculty; and thus it came about that the collapse of the centre of organisation meant the fall of the entire civilisation of Western Europe before the new barbarism.

Rome had so visibly ruined all that we are apt to forget how the process of moral and political retrogression had begun in the Greek world long before. There, however, the Roman conquest was but a consummation; and the economic and political continuance of the Eastern Empire was concurrent with a moral and intellectual contraction which was never recovered from. In a word, varying conditions determined the differences of continuance and evolution in the two spheres. But the causation is none the less clear throughout.

It might be supposed that this reverberating lesson could have been read in only one way--as a warning to the nations against taking the Roman road of conquest and dominion. And yet it is doubtful whether modern States have been at all guided by that lesson, as compared with the extent to which they have been overruled by the sheer difficulty of repeating the evolution. The problem has been faced by Lord Cromer, a ripe ruler, in his very scholarly essay on Ancient and Modern Imperialism. The experienced administrator is quite alive to the analogy between the part played of old by Rome around the Mediterranean and in Europe, and that played to-day by England in India and, in some measure, in Egypt. Raised in some degree above the ordinary hallucination of mere dominion, the confused pride of the average man in his country's rule over large portions of the earth, the veteran governor notes that, whereas there was a general acquiescence of the subject peoples in the imperial rule of Rome, no imperium to-day has won any such cordial acceptance. Neither France in Algeria and Tunis nor Britain in India and Egypt is an assimilating and unifying power. We may note the proximate explanation, which he does not at first give--to wit, the sundering force of crystallised religious systems. As he later puts it, following Sir Alfred Lyall, religions make nations, where the Romans had to deal with tribes. But that need not greatly affect our view of the political problem, which would remain if the religious factor were eliminated; and it is over the political problem that Lord Cromer most significantly balances.

Falling back on the method of fatalism, he pronounces, like others before him, "that Rome, equally with the modern expansive Powers, more especially Great Britain and Russia, was impelled onwards by the imperious and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensible frontiers; that the public opinion of the world scoffed 2,000 years ago, as it does now, at the alleged necessity; and that each onward move was attributed to an insatiable lust for extended dominion." As in all fatalistic reasoning, we are here faced by radical self-contradiction. The "public opinion of the world," which Lord Cromer allows to include a large part of Roman opinion, could not scoff at an "irresistible necessity": it knew that it was no more irresistibly necessary for A to conquer B than for B to conquer A; and in ascribing to Rome an "insatiable lust for extended dominion" it merely credited Rome with an appetite known to inhere in all States. Rome succeeded in her aim; others failed. Pisa, overborne by Florence, had in her day overborne other communities. Lord Cromer has begged the vital question, which is: Can States, or can they not, live neighbourly? To say that Rome could not because of the ambitions or menaces of others is idle: the menace was reciprocal.

For practical purposes, of course, the thesis is sometimes adequate all round, as when France and Britain, face to face in North America and in India, strove each to oust the other. But at times the plea becomes visibly farcical, as in the recent case of Russia in the Far East, and the earlier case of Britain with regard to Afghanistan. We can all remember the temporary growth of the doctrine of "a scientific frontier." First you want a river; then you need the territory beyond the river; then you need the line of hills commanding that territory; then the territory behind the hills becomes a sine qua non. In this case the doctrine has disappeared with the policy, and that disappeared simply because it failed. The event has proved that the doctrine was a chimera. And nobody to-day probably will maintain that Russia lay under an imperious and irresistible necessity to go and be defeated by the Japanese in Manchuria; or that she could not conceivably have stopped short of that extremity.

The use sometimes made of the word "cupidity" is apt to obscure the problem. There is cupidity of power and conquest as well as of territory, revenue, plunder. Roman cupidity was of all kinds. But so was that of "the" Greeks. Lord Cromer employs the old false dichotomy--above discussed--that marks the Greeks as "individualistic" and the Romans as somehow unitary. As we have seen, the original Roman City-State was just the same kind of thing as the Greek: it was opportunity that made "the Romans" expand, whereas "the Greeks," down to Alexander, remained segregated in their States. What was common and fatal to both, what led Greece to dissolution and Rome to downfall, was the primary impulse to combat, the inability to refrain from jealousy, hate, and war. And for the moderns, seeing this, the problem is, Can they refrain?

Either we are thus to learn from history, or all history is as a novel without a purpose. And Lord Cromer, as a man of action, cannot in effect take this attitude, though he recoils from any clear statement of the lesson. On the one hand, he makes the most of the differentia between ancient and modern Imperialism. English rulers in India, he admits, originally aimed at home revenue, and did for a time practise sheer plunder; the British rule no longer does either: which is in effect an admission that one "imperious and irresistible necessity" of the Roman rule has been successfully resisted--shall we say, by modern enlightenment? But he will not frankly take the further step and say that for the ideal of dominion over backward races we should substitute the ideal of their education and purposive evolution. Rather he makes the most of the difficulties, enlarging in the familiar fashion on the dividedness and differentiation of the Indian peoples and the relative stationariness of Islam: two undeniable propositions, of which the first is nothing to the purpose, since we are discussing the lines of progressive policy; while the second merely incurs the rejoinder that Christendom was long as stationary as Islam, and that Christian Abyssinia is so still.

As was, indeed, to be expected, Lord Cromer will rather homologate the whole Roman process, decadence and collapse and all, than pronounce it what it was, a vast divagation in human progress. Ultimately he does not even blench at the proposition that the whole ruin "had to" take place by way of preparing for the civilisation that was to follow, even as he argues that "the" Romans "had to" undertake fresh wars where they (on the urging, as he admits, of their wisest men) had sought to evade further conquest by recognising "buffer States"--as who should say that whatever course a majority or a Government do take "had to" be taken. The answer to such reasoning is the mention of the fact, which he admits, that it was "a supreme principle of the Roman Government to acknowledge no frontier Power with equal rights." Can it be still a question whether that principle is to be transcended?

On the final issue as to what the ruling nations "have to" do to-day as regards the subject peoples, the disinterested student can hardly hesitate, however the ex-administrator may feel bound to balance. "The Englishman," Lord Cromer tells us, truly enough as regards the average citizen, "would be puzzled to give any definite answer" to the question Quo vadis? in matters imperial. He may well be, when Lord Cromer visibly is, despite the ostensible emphasis with which he exhorts his countrymen to keep "the animus manendi strong within them." The danger is that, noting the formal conclusion rather than the implicit lesson of Lord Cromer's very able survey, "the Englishman" may turn from his puzzle to some new insanity of imperialism. Not many years have passed since English wiseacres were speculating on a "break-up" of China, and a dominion of some other State over her huge area and multitudinous millions. He would be a bad sample of modernity who should now regret that China is apparently on the way, like Japan, to build up a new progressive civilisation in the "unchanging East." But it is perhaps as much to the sheer impracticability of further great conquests as to any alert and conscious reading of the lesson of history that we owe the growing disposition of modern States to seek their good in their own development. If so, provided that the ideal be changed, "it is well, if not so well."

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