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

in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, how often wheat had been dear, and when the sun or moon had been eclipsed;" and so he devoted the second and third books of his historical work to accounts of the origin of the other Italian communities and of their admission to the Roman confederacy. He thus got rid of the fetters of chronicle, which reports events year by year under the heading of the magistrates for the time being; the statement in particular, that Cato's historical work narrated events "sectionally," must refer to this feature of his method. This attention bestowed on the other Italian communities, which surprises us in a Roman work, had a bearing on the political position of the author, who leaned throughout on the support of the municipal Italy in his opposition to the doings of the capital; while it furnished a sort of substitute for the missing history of Rome from the expulsion of king Tarquinius down to the Pyrrhic war, by presenting in its own way the main result of that history—the union of Italy under the hegemony of Rome.

Contemporary History

Contemporary history, again, was treated in a connected and detailed manner. Naevius described the first, and Fabius the second, war with Carthage from their own knowledge; Ennius devoted at least thirteen out of the eighteen books of his Annals to the epoch from Pyrrhus down to the Istrian war;(62) Cato narrated in the fourth and fifth books of his historical work the wars from the first Punic war down to that with Perseus, and in the two last books, which probably were planned on a different and ampler scale, he related the events of the last twenty years of his life. For the Pyrrhic war Ennius may have employed Timaeus or other Greek authorities; but on the whole the accounts given were based, partly on personal observation or communications of eye-witnesses, partly on each other.

Speeches and Letters

Contemporaneously with historical literature, and in some sense as an appendage to it, arose the literature of speeches and letters. This in like manner was commenced by Cato; for the Romans possessed nothing of an earlier age except some funeral orations, most of which probably were only brought to light at a later period from family archives, such as that which the veteran Quintus Fabius, the opponent of Hannibal, delivered when an old man over his son who had died in his prime. Cato on the other hand committed to writing in his old age such of the numerous orations which he had delivered during his long and active public career as were historically important, as a sort of political memoirs, and published them partly in his historical work, partly, it would seem, as independent supplements to it. There also existed a collection of his letters.

History of Other Nations

With non-Roman history the Romans concerned themselves so far, that a certain knowledge of it was deemed indispensable for the cultivated Roman; even old Fabius is said to have been familiar not merely with the Roman, but also with foreign, wars, and it is distinctly testified that Cato diligently read Thucydides and the Greek historians in general. But, if we leave out of view the collection of anecdotes and maxims which Cato compiled for himself as the fruits of this reading, no trace is discernible of any literary activity in this field.

Uncritical Treatment of History

These first essays in historical literature were all of them, as a matter of course, pervaded by an easy, uncritical spirit; neither authors nor readers readily took offence at inward or outward inconsistencies. King Tarquinius the Second, although he was already grown up at the time of his father's death and did not begin to reign till thirty-nine years afterwards, is nevertheless still a young man when he ascends the throne. Pythagoras, who came to Italy about a generation before the expulsion of the kings, is nevertheless set down by the Roman historians as a friend of the wise Numa. The state- envoys sent to Syracuse in the year 262 transact business with Dionysius the elder, who ascended the throne eighty-six years afterwards (348). This naive uncritical spirit is especially apparent in the treatment of Roman chronology. Since according to the Roman reckoning—the outlines of which were probably fixed in the previous epoch—the foundation of Rome took place 240 years before the consecration of the Capitoline temple(63) and 360 years before the burning of the city by the Gauls,(64) and the latter event, which is mentioned also in Greek historical works, fell according to these in the year of the Athenian archon Pyrgion 388 B. C. Ol. 98, i, the building of Rome accordingly fell on Ol. 8, i. This was, according to the chronology of Eratosthenes which was already recognized as canonical, the year 436 after the fall of Troy; nevertheless the common story retained as the founder of Rome the grandson of the Trojan Aeneas. Cato, who like a good financier checked the calculation, no doubt drew attention in this instance to the incongruity; but he does not appear to have proposed any mode of getting over the difficulty—the list of the Alban kings, which was afterwards inserted with this view, certainly did not proceed from him.

The same uncritical spirit, which prevailed in the early history, prevailed also to a certain extent in the representation of historical times. The accounts certainly without exception bore that strong party colouring, for which the Fabian narrative of the commencement of the second war with Carthage is censured by Polybius with the calm severity characteristic of him. Mistrust, however, is more appropriate in such circumstances than reproach. It is somewhat ridiculous to expect from the Roman contemporaries of Hannibal a just judgment on their opponents; but no conscious misrepresentation of the facts, except such as a simple-minded patriotism of itself involves, has been proved against the fathers of Roman history.

Science

The beginnings of scientific culture, and even of authorship relating to it, also fall within this epoch. The instruction hitherto given had been substantially confined to reading and writing and a knowledge of the law of the land.(65) But a closer contact with the Greeks gradually suggested to the Romans the idea of a more general culture; and stimulated the endeavour, if not directly to transplant this Greek culture to Rome, at any rate to modify the Roman culture to some extent after its model.

Grammar

First of all, the knowledge of the mother-tongue began to shape itself into Latin grammar; Greek philology transferred its methods to the kindred idiom of Italy. The active study of grammar began nearly at the same time with Roman authorship. About 520 Spurius Carvilius, a teacher of writing, appears to have regulated the Latin alphabet, and to have given to the letter -g, which was not previously included in it,(66) the place of the -z which could be dispensed with—the place which it still holds in the modern Occidental alphabets. The Roman school-masters must have been constantly working at the settlement of orthography; the Latin Muses too never disowned their scholastic Hippocrene, and at all times applied themselves to orthography side by side with poetry. Ennius especially—resembling Klopstock in this respect also—not only practised an etymological play on assonance quite after the Alexandrian style,(67) but also introduced, in place of the simple signs for the double consonants that had hitherto been usual, the more accurate Greek double writing. Of Naevius and Plautus, it is true, nothing of the kind is known; the popular poets in Rome must have treated orthography and etymology with the indifference which is usual with poets.

Rhetoric and Philosophy

The Romans of this epoch still remained strangers to rhetoric and philosophy. The speech in their case lay too decidedly at the very heart of public life to be accessible to the handling of the foreign schoolmaster; the genuine orator Cato poured forth all the vials of his indignant ridicule over the silly Isocratean fashion of ever learning, and yet never being able, to speak. The Greek philosophy, although it acquired a certain influence over the Romans through the medium of didactic and especially of tragic poetry, was nevertheless viewed with an apprehension compounded of boorish ignorance and of instinctive misgiving. Cato bluntly called Socrates a talker and a revolutionist, who was justly put to death as an offender against the faith and the laws of his country; and the opinion, which even Romans addicted to philosophy entertained regarding it, may well be expressed in the words of Ennius:

-Philosophari est mihi necesse, at paucis, nam omnino haut placet.
Degustandum ex ea, non in eam ingurgitandum censeo.-

Nevertheless the poem on Morals and the instructions in Oratory, which were found among the writings of Cato, may be regarded as the Roman quintessence or, if the expression be preferred, the Roman -caput mortuum- of Greek philosophy and rhetoric. The immediate sources whence Cato drew were, in the case of the poem on Morals, presumably the Pythagorean writings on morals (along with, as a matter of course, due commendation of the simple ancestral habits), and, in the case of the book on Oratory, the speeches in Thucydides and more especially the orations of Demosthenes, all of which Cato zealously studied. Of the spirit of these manuals we may form some idea from the golden oratorical rule, oftener quoted than followed by posterity, "to think of the matter and leave the words to follow from it."(68)

Medicine

Similar manuals of a general elementary character were composed by Cato on the Art of Healing, the Science of War, Agriculture, and Jurisprudence—all of which studies were likewise more or less under Greek influence. Physics and mathematics were not much studied in Rome; but the applied sciences connected with them received a certain measure of attention. This was most of all true of medicine. In 535 the first Greek physician, the Peloponnesian Archagathus, settled in Rome and there acquired such repute by his surgical operations, that a residence was assigned to him on the part of the state and he received the freedom of the city; and thereafter his colleagues flocked in crowds to Italy. Cato no doubt not only reviled the foreign medical practitioners with a zeal worthy of a better cause, but attempted, by means of his medical manual compiled from his own experience and probably in part also from the medical literature of the Greeks, to revive the good old fashion under which the father of the family was at the same time the family physician. The physicians and the public gave themselves, as was reasonable, but little concern about his obstinate invectives: at any rate the profession, one of the most lucrative which existed in Rome, continued a monopoly in the hands of the foreigners, and for centuries there were none but Greek physicians in Rome.

Mathematics

Hitherto the measurement of time had been treated in Rome with barbarous indifference, but matters were now at least in some degree improved. With the erection of the first sundial in the Roman Forum in 491 the Greek hour (—ora—, -hora-) began to come into use at Rome: it happened, however, that the Romans erected a sundial which had been prepared for Catana situated four degrees farther to the south, and were guided by this for a whole century. Towards the end of this epoch we find several persons of quality taking an interest in mathematical studies. Manius Acilius Glabrio (consul in 563) attempted to check the confusion of the calendar by a law, which allowed the pontifical college to insert or omit intercalary months at discretion: if the measure failed in its object and in fact aggravated the evil, the failure was probably owing more to the unscrupulousness than to the want of intelligence of the Roman theologians. Marcus Fulvius Nobilior (consul in 565), a man of Greek culture, endeavoured at least to make the Roman calendar more generally known. Gaius Sulpicius Gallus (consul in 588), who not only predicted the eclipse of the moon in 586 but also calculated the distance of the moon from the earth, and who appears to have come forward even as an astronomical writer, was regarded on this account by his contemporaries as a prodigy of diligence and acuteness.

Agriculture and the Art of War

Agriculture and the art of war were, of course, primarily regulated by the standard of traditional and personal experience, as is very distinctly apparent in that one of the two treatises of Cato on Agriculture which has reached our time. But the results of Graeco- Latin, and even of Phoenician, culture were brought to bear on these subordinate fields just as on the higher provinces of intellectual activity, and for that reason the foreign literature relating to them cannot but have attracted some