Characters and Events of Roman History | Page 7

Italy and foment the growing extravagance. The debts pile up,
the political corruption overflows, scandals follow, the parties in Rome rend each other
madly, though hail-fellow-well-met in the provinces to plunder subjects and vassals. In
the midst of this vast disorder Cæsar, the man of destiny, rises, and with varying fortune
makes a way for himself until he beckons Italy to follow him, to find success and
treasures in regions new--not in the rich and fabulous East, but beyond the Alps, in
barbarous Gaul, bristling with fighters and forests.
But this insane effort to prey on every part of the Empire finally tires Italy; quarrels over
the division of spoils embitter friends; the immensity of the conquests, made in a few
years of reckless enthusiasm, is alarming. Finally a new civil war breaks out, terrible and
interminable, in which classes and families fall upon each other anew, to tear away in
turn the spoils taken together abroad. Out of the tremendous discord rises at last the
pacifier, Augustus, who is able gradually, by cleverness and infinite patience, to
re-establish peace and order in the troubled empire. How?--why? Because the
combination of events of the times allows him to use to ends of peace the same forces
with which the preceding generations had fomented so much disorder--desires for ease,
pleasure, culture, wealth growing with the generations making it. Thereupon begins in the
whole Empire universal progress in agriculture, industry, trade, which, on a small scale,
may be compared to what we to-day witness and share; a progress for which, then as now,
the chief condition was peace. As soon as men realised that peace gives that greater
wealth, those enjoyments more refined, that higher culture, which for a century they had
sought by war, Italy became quiet; revolutionists became guardians and guards of order;
there gathered about Augustus a coalition of social forces that tended to impose on the
Empire, alike on the parts that wished it and those that did not, the Pax Romana.
Now all this immense story that fills three centuries, that gathers within itself so many
revolutions, so many legislative reforms, so many great men, so many events, tragic and
glorious, this vast history that for so many centuries holds the interest of all cultured

nations, and that, considered as a whole, seems almost a prodigy, you can, on the track of
the old idea of "corruption," explain in its profoundest origins by one small fact, universal,
common, of the very simplest--something that every one may observe in the limited
circle of his own personal experience,--by that automatic increase of ambitions and
desires, with every new generation, which prevents the human world from crystallising in
one form, constrains it to continual changes in material make-up as well as in ideals and
moral appearance. In other words, every new generation must, in order to satisfy that part
of its aspirations which is peculiarly and entirely its own, alter, whether little or much, in
one way or another, the condition of the world it entered at birth. We can then, in our
personal experiences every day, verify the universal law of history--a law that can act
with greater or less intensity, more or less rapidity, according to times and places, but that
ceases to authenticate itself at no time and in no place.
The United States is subject to that law to-day, as is old Europe, as will be future
generations, and as past ages were. Moreover, to understand at bottom this phenomenon,
which appears to me to be the soul of all history, it is well to add this consideration: It is
evident that there is a capital difference between our judgment of this phenomenon and
that of the ancients; to them it was a malevolent force of dissolution to which should be
attributed all in Roman history that was sinister and dreadful, a sure sign of incurable
decay; that is why they called it "corruption of customs," and so lamented it. To-day, on
the contrary, it appears to us a universal beneficent process of transformation; so true is
this that we call "progress" many facts which the ancients attributed to "corruption." It
were useless to expand too much in examples; enough to cite a few. In the third ode of
the first book, in which he so tenderly salutes the departing Virgil, Horace covers with
invective, as an evil-doer and the corrupter of the human race, that impious being who
invented the ship, which causes man, created for the land, to walk across waters. Who
would to-day dare repeat those maledictions against the bold builders who construct the
magnificent trans-Atlantic liners on which, in a dozen days from Genoa, one lands in
Boston or New York? "Coelum ipsum petimus stultitia," exclaims Horace--that is to say,
in anticipation he