Characters and Events of Roman History | Page 8

considered the Wright brothers crazy.
Who, save some man of erudition, has knowledge to-day of sumptuary laws? We should
laugh them all down with one Homeric guffaw, if to-day it entered somebody's head to
propose a law that forbade fair ladies to spend more than a certain sum on their clothes,
or numbered the hats they might wear; or that regulated dinners of ceremony, fixing the
number of courses, the variety of wines, and the total expense; or that prohibited
labouring men and women from wearing certain stuffs or certain objects that were wont
to be found only upon the persons of people of wealth and leisure. And yet laws of this
tenor were compiled, published, observed, up to two centuries ago, without any one's
finding it absurd. The historic force that, as riches increase, impels the new generations to
desire new satisfactions, new pleasures, operated then as to-day; only then men were
inclined to consider it as a new kind of ominous disease that needed checking. To-day
men regard that constant transformation either as beneficent, or at least as such a matter
of course that almost no one heeds it; just as no one notices the alternations of day and
night, or the change of seasons. On the contrary, we have little by little become so
confident of the goodness of this force that drives the coming generation on into the
unknown future, that society, European, American, among other liberties has won in the

nineteenth century, full and entire, a liberty that the ancients did not know--freedom in
vice.
To the Romans it appeared most natural that the state should survey private habits, should
spy out what a citizen, particularly a citizen belonging to the ruling classes, did within
domestic walls--should see whether he became intoxicated, whether he were a gourmand,
whether he contracted debts, spending much or little, whether he betrayed his wife. The
age of Augustus was cultured, civilised, liberal, and in many things resembled our own;
yet on this point the dominating ideas were so different from ours, that at one time
Augustus was forced by public opinion to propose a law on adultery by which all Roman
citizens of both sexes guilty of this crime were condemned to exile and the confiscation
of half their substance, and there was given to any citizen the right to accuse the guilty.
Could you imagine it possible to-day, even for a few weeks, to establish this regime of
terror in the kingdom of Amor? But the ancients were always inclined to consider as
exceedingly dangerous for the upper classes that relaxing of customs which always
follows periods of rapid enrichment, of great gain in comforts; behind his own walls
to-day, every one is free to indulge himself as he will, to the confines of crime.
How can we explain this important difference in judging one of the essential phenomena
of historic life? Has this phenomenon changed nature, and from bad, by some miracle,
become good? Or are we wiser than our forefathers, judging with experience what they
could hardly comprehend? There is no doubt that the Latin writers, particularly Horace
and Livy, were so severe in condemning this progressive movement of wants because of
unconscious political solicitude, because intellectual men expressed the opinions,
sentiments, and also the prejudices of historic aristocracy, and this detested the progress
of ambitio, avaritia, luxuria, because they undermined the dominance of its class. On the
other hand, it is certain that in the modern world every increase of consumption, every
waste, every vice, seems permissible, indeed almost meritorious, because men of industry
and trade, the employees in industries--that is, all the people that gain by the diffusion of
luxuries, by the spread of vices or new wants--have acquired, thanks above all to
democratic institutions, and to the progress of cities, an immense political power that in
times past they lacked. If, for example, in Europe the beer-makers and distillers of
alcohol were not more powerful in the electoral field than the philosophers and
academicians, governments would more easily recognise that the masses should not be
allowed to poison themselves or future generations by chronic drunkenness.
Between these two extremes of exaggeration, inspired by a self-interest easy to discover,
is there not a true middle way that we can deduce from the study of Roman history and
from the observation of contemporary life?
In the pessimism with which the ancients regarded progress as corruption, there was a
basis of truth, just as there is a principle of error in the too serene optimism with which
we consider corruption as progress. This force that pushes the new generations on to the
future, at once creates and destroys; its destructive energy is specially felt in ages like
Cæsar's in ancient Rome and ours in the modern world,