Characters and Events of Roman History | Page 3

our fathers; our
sons will cause us to be lamented." This is the dark philosophy that a sovereign spirit like
Horace derived from the incredible triumph of Rome in the world. At his side, Livy, the
great writer who was to teach all future generations the story of the city, puts the same
hopeless philosophy at the base of his wonderful work:
Rome was originally, when it was poor and small, a unique example of austere virtue;
then it corrupted, it spoiled, it rotted itself by all the vices; so, little by little, we have been
brought into the present condition in which we are able neither to tolerate the evils from
which we suffer, nor the remedies we need to cure them.
The same dark thought, expressed in a thousand forms, is found in almost every one of
the Latin writers.
This theory has misled and impeded my predecessors in different ways: some,
considering that the writers bewail the unavoidable dissolution of Roman society at the
very time when Rome was most powerful, most cultured, richest, have judged
conventional, rhetorical, literary, these invectives against corruption, these praises of
ancient simplicity, and therefore have held them of no value in the history of Rome. Such
critics have not reflected that this conception is found, not only in the literature, but also
in the politics and the legislation; that Roman history is full, not only of invectives in
prose and verse, but of laws and administrative provisions against luxuria, ambitio,
avaritia--a sign that these laments were not merely a foolishness of writers, or, as we say
to-day, stuff for newspaper articles. Other critics, instead, taking account of these laws
and administrative provisions, have accepted the ancient theory of Roman corruption
without reckoning that they were describing as undone by an irreparable dissolution, a
nation that not only had conquered, but was to govern for ages, an immense empire. In
this conception of corruption there is a contradiction that conceals a great universal
problem.
Stimulated by this contradiction, and by the desire of solving it, to study more attentively
the facts cited by the ancients as examples of corruption, I have looked about to see if in
the contemporary world I could not find some things that resembled it, and so make
myself understand it. The prospect seemed difficult, because modern men are persuaded
that they are models of all the virtues. Who could think to find in them even traces of the

famous Roman corruption? In the modern world to-day are the abominable orgies carried
on for which the Rome of the Cæsars was notorious? Are there to-day Neros and
Elagabaluses? He who studies the ancient sources, however, with but a little of the
critical spirit, is easily convinced that we have made for ourselves out of the much-famed
corruption and Roman luxury a notion highly romantic and exaggerated. We need not
delude ourselves: Rome, even in the times of its greatest splendour, was poor in
comparison with the modern world; even in the second century after Christ, when it stood
as metropolis at the head of an immense empire, Rome was smaller, less wealthy, less
imposing, than a great metropolis of Europe or of America. Some sumptuous public
edifices, beautiful private houses--that is all the splendour of the metropolis of the empire.
He who goes to the Palatine may to-day refigure for himself, from the so-called House of
Livia, the house of a rich Roman family of the time of Augustus, and convince himself
that a well-to-do middle-class family would hardly occupy such a house to-day.
Moreover, the palaces of the Cæsars on the Palatine are a grandiose ruin that stirs the
artist and makes the philosopher think; but if one sets himself to measure them, to
conjecture from the remains the proportions of the entire edifices, he does not conjure up
buildings that rival large modern constructions. The palace of Tiberius, for example, rose
above a street only two metres wide--less than seven feet,--an alley like those where
to-day in Italian cities live only the most miserable inhabitants. We have pictured to
ourselves the imperial banquets of ancient Rome as functions of unheard of splendour; if
Nero or Elagabalus could come to life and see the dining-room of a great hotel in Paris or
New York--resplendent with light, with crystal, with silver,--he would admire it as far
more beautiful than the halls in which he gave his imperial feasts. Think how poor were
the ancients in artificial light! They had few wines; they knew neither tea nor coffee nor
cocoa; neither tobacco, nor the innumerable liqueurs of which we make use; in face of
our habits, they were always Spartan, even when they wasted, because they lacked the
means to squander.
The ancient writers often lament the universal tendency to