The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen (highly recommended books TXT) 📖

18. III. III. Organization of the Provinces

19. III. III. Property

20. III. VII. The State of Culture in Spain

21. III. I. Comparison between Carthage and Rome

22. III. VI. Pressure of the War

23. There were in the treasury 17,410 Roman pounds of gold, 22,070 pounds of uncoined, and 18,230 pounds of coined, silver. The legal ratio of gold to silver was: 1 pound of gold = 4000 sesterces, or 1: 11.91.

24. On this was based the actionable character of contracts of buying, hiring, and partnership, and, in general, the whole system of non-formal actionable contracts.

25. The chief passage as to this point is the fragment of Cato in Gellius, xiv. 2. In the case of the -obligatio litteris- also, i. e. a claim based solely on the entry of a debt in the account-book of the creditor, this legal regard paid to the personal credibility of the party, even where his testimony in his own cause is concerned, affords the key of explanation; and hence it happened that in later times, when this mercantile repute had vanished from Roman life, the -obligatio litteris-, while not exactly abolished, fell of itself into desuetude.

26. In the remarkable model contract given by Cato (141) for the letting of the olive harvest, there is the following paragraph:—

"None [of the persons desirous to contract on the occasion of letting] shall withdraw, for the sake of causing the gathering and pressing of the olives to be let at a dearer rate; except when [the joint bidder] immediately names [the other bidder] as his partner. If this rule shall appear to have been infringed, all the partners [of the company with which the contract has been concluded] shall, if desired by the landlord or the overseer appointed by him, take an oath [that they have not conspired in this way to prevent competition]. If they do not take the oath, the stipulated price is not to be paid." It is tacitly assumed that the contract is taken by a company, not by an individual capitalist.

27. III. XIII. Religious Economy

28. Livy (xxi. 63; comp. Cic. Verr. v. 18, 45) mentions only the enactment as to the sea-going vessels; but Asconius (in Or. in toga cand. p. 94, Orell.) and Dio. (lv. 10, 5) state that the senator was also forbidden by law to undertake state-contracts (-redemptiones-); and, as according to Livy "all speculation was considered unseemly for a senator," the Claudian law probably reached further than he states.

29. Cato, like every other Roman, invested a part of his means in the breeding of cattle, and in commercial and other undertakings. But it was not his habit directly to violate the laws; he neither speculated in state-leases—which as a senator he was not allowed to do—nor practised usury. It is an injustice to charge him with a practice in the latter respect at variance with his theory; the -fenus nauticum-, in which he certainly engaged, was not a branch of usury prohibited by the law; it really formed an essential part of the business of chartering and freighting vessels.

Faith and Manners

Roman Austerity and Roman Pride

Life in the case of the Roman was spent under conditions of austere restraint, and, the nobler he was, the less he was a free man. All-powerful custom restricted him to a narrow range of thought and action; and to have led a serious and strict or, to use the characteristic Latin expressions, a sad and severe life, was his glory. No one had more and no one had less to do than to keep his household in good order and manfully bear his part of counsel and action in public affairs. But, while the individual had neither the wish nor the power to be aught else than a member of the community, the glory and the might of that community were felt by every individual burgess as a personal possession to be transmitted along with his name and his homestead to his posterity; and thus, as one generation after another was laid in the tomb and each in succession added its fresh contribution to the stock of ancient honours, the collective sense of dignity in the noble families of Rome swelled into that mighty civic pride, the like of which the earth has never seen again, and the traces of which, as strange as they are grand, seem to us, wherever we meet them, to belong as it were to another world. It was one of the characteristic peculiarities of this powerful sense of citizenship, that it was, while not suppressed, yet compelled by the rigid simplicity and equality that prevailed among the citizens to remain locked up within the breast during life, and was only allowed to find expression after death; but then it was displayed in the funeral rites of the man of distinction so conspicuously and intensely, that this ceremonial is better fitted than any other phenomenon of Roman life to give to us who live in later times a glimpse of that wonderful spirit of the Romans.

A Roman Funeral

It was a singular procession, at which the burgesses were invited to be present by the summons of the public crier: "Yonder warrior is dead; whoever can, let him come to escort Lucius Aemilius; he is borne forth from his house." It was opened by bands of wailing women, musicians, and dancers; one of the latter was dressed out and furnished with a mask after the likeness of the deceased, and by gesture doubtless and action recalled once more to the multitude the appearance of the well-known man. Then followed the grandest and most peculiar part of the solemnity—the procession of ancestors—before which all the rest of the pageant so faded in comparison, that men of rank of the true Roman type enjoined their heirs to restrict the funeral ceremony to that procession alone. We have already mentioned that the face-masks of those ancestors who had filled the curule aedileship or any higher ordinary magistracy, wrought in wax and painted—modelled as far as possible after life, but not wanting even for the earlier ages up to and beyond the time of the kings—were wont to be placed in wooden niches along the walls of the family hall, and were regarded as the chief ornament of the house. When a death occurred in the family, suitable persons, chiefly actors, were dressed up with these face-masks and the corresponding official costume to take part in the funeral ceremony, so that the ancestors—each in the principal dress worn by him in his lifetime, the triumphator in his gold-embroidered, the censor in his purple, and the consul in his purple-bordered, robe, with their lictors and the other insignia of office—all in chariots gave the final escort to the dead. On the bier overspread with massive purple and gold-embroidered coverlets and fine linen cloths lay the deceased himself, likewise in the full costume of the highest office which he had filled, and surrounded by the armour of the enemies whom he had slain and by the chaplets which in jest or earnest he had won. Behind the bier came the mourners, all dressed in black and without ornament, the sons of the deceased with their heads veiled, the daughters without veil, the relatives and clansmen, the friends, the clients and freedmen. Thus the procession passed on to the Forum. There the corpse was placed in an erect position; the ancestors descended from their chariots and seated themselves in the curule chairs; and the son or nearest gentile kinsman of the deceased ascended the rostra, in order to announce to the assembled multitude in simple recital the names and deeds of each of the men sitting in a circle around him and, last of all, those of him who had recently died.

This may be called a barbarous custom, and a nation of artistic feelings would certainly not have tolerated the continuance of this odd resurrection of the dead down to an epoch of fully-developed civilization; but even Greeks who were very dispassionate and but little disposed to reverence, such as Polybius, were greatly impressed by the naive pomp of this funeral ceremony. It was a conception essentially in keeping with the grave solemnity, the uniform movement, and the proud dignity of Roman life, that departed generations should continue to walk, as it were, corporeally among the living, and that, when a burgess weary of labours and of honours was gathered to his fathers, these fathers themselves should appear in the Forum to receive him among their number.

The New Hellenism

But the Romans had now reached a crisis of transition. Now that the power of Rome was no longer confined to Italy but had spread far and wide to the east and to the west, the days of the old home life of Italy were over, and a Hellenizing civilization came in its room. It is true that Italy had been subject to the influence of Greece, ever since it had a history at all. We have formerly shown how the youthful Greece and the youthful Italy—both of them with a certain measure of simplicity and originality—gave and received intellectual impulses; and how at a later period Rome endeavoured after a more external manner to appropriate to practical use the language and inventions of the Greeks. But the Hellenism of the Romans of the present period was, in its causes as well as its consequences, something essentially new. The Romans began to feel the need of a richer intellectual life, and to be startled as it were at their own utter want of mental culture; and, if even nations of artistic gifts, such as the English and Germans, have not disdained in the pauses of their own productiveness to avail themselves of the miserable French culture for filling up the gap, it need excite no surprise that the Italian nation now flung itself with fervid zeal on the glorious treasures as well as on the dissolute filth of the intellectual development of Hellas. But it was an impulse still more profound and deep-rooted, which carried the Romans irresistibly into the Hellenic vortex. Hellenic civilization still doubtless called itself by that name, but it was Hellenic no longer; it was, in fact, humanistic and cosmopolitan. It had solved the problem of moulding a mass of different nations into one whole completely in the field of intellect, and to a certain extent also in that of politics; and, now when the same task on a wider scale devolved on Rome, she took over Hellenism along with the rest of the inheritance of Alexander the Great. Hellenism therefore was no longer a mere stimulus or accessory influence; it penetrated the Italian nation to the very core. Of course, the vigorous home life of Italy strove against the foreign element. It was only after a most vehement struggle that the Italian farmer abandoned the field to the cosmopolite of the capital; and, as in Germany the French coat called forth the national Germanic frock, so the reaction against Hellenism aroused in Rome a tendency which opposed the influence of Greece on principle, in a fashion altogether foreign to the earlier centuries, and in doing so fell pretty frequently into downright follies and absurdities.

Hellenism in Politics

No department of human action or thought remained unaffected by this struggle between the old fashion and the new. Even political relations were largely influenced by it The whimsical project of emancipating the Hellenes, the well deserved failure of which has already been described, the kindred, likewise Hellenic, idea of a common interest of republics in opposition to kings, and the desire of propagating Hellenic polity at the expense of eastern despotism—the two principles that helped to regulate, for instance, the treatment of Macedonia—were fixed ideas of the new school, just as dread of the Carthaginians was the fixed idea of the old; and, if Cato pushed the latter to a ridiculous excess, Philhellenism now and then indulged in extravagances at least quite as foolish. For example, the conqueror of king Antiochus not only had a statue of him self in Greek costume erected on the Capitol, but also, instead of calling himself in good Latin -Asiaticus-, assumed the unmeaning and anomalous, but yet magnificent and almost Greek, surname of —Asiagenus—.(1) A more important consequence of this attitude of the ruling nation towards Hellenism was, that the process of Latinizing gained ground everywhere in Italy except where it encountered the Hellenes. The cities of the Greeks in Italy, so far as the war had not destroyed them, remained Greek. Apulia, about which, it is true, the Romans gave themselves little concern, appears at this very epoch