Caesar and Christ (Story of Civilization, #3)

by Will Durant

Greek science and philosophy, Judeo-Greek Christianity, Greco-Roman democracy, Roman law—these are our supreme inheritance from the ancient world.

This chapter will be of no use to lawyers, and of no interest to others.

He was vain, like all human beings, but completely unassuming;

Imperaturus omnibus elegi debet ex omnibus, said Pliny: “He who is to command all should be elected by all.”

“he regarded nothing as his own,” said Pliny, “unless his friends possessed it”;

“It is better that the guilty should remain unpunished than that the innocent should be condemned.”

Probably we shall never know whether the most brilliant of the Roman emperors won his throne by amorous connivance or by Trajan’s conviction of his worth.

Vivia Sabina, as preserved in portrait busts that may have idealized her, was a woman of distinguished and conscious beauty, in whom Hadrian found no lasting happiness.

he answered that any man with thirty legions behind him must be right.18

“His memory was vast,” says Spartianus; “he wrote, dictated, listened, and conversed with his friends, all at the same time”19—though the frequency of this tale invites suspicion.

He preserved old forms, but he quietly poured new content into them according to the needs of the time.

he refused audience to a petitioning woman with the plea, “I haven’t time.” “Don’t be emperor, then,” she cried. He granted her a hearing.

“He loved,” says Fronto, “not only to govern, but to perambulate, the world.”23

A man of peace, he knew the arts of war and was resolved that his pacific temper should neither weaken his armies nor misguide his enemies.

At the same time he rewarded excellence, raised the legal and economic status of the legionaries, gave them better weapons and ample supplies, and relaxed the discipline of their free hours, merely insisting that their amusements should not unfit them for their tasks. The Roman army was never in better condition than in his reign.

It is worthy of note that he could leave his capital for five years and trust to his subordinates to carry on; like a good manager, he had organized and trained an almost automatic government.

But the lust for travel was in his blood, and so much of the world remained to rebuild!

He mingled with philosophers and artists, imitating the graces, without the follies, of Nero and Antony.

Si jeunesse savait et vieillesse pouvait was in him a riddle solved.

The ceiling of the portico was of bronze plates so thick that when they were removed by Pope Urban VIII they sufficed to cast 110 cannon and to form the baldachin over the high altar in St. Peter’s.

perhaps the Romans, like the Japanese, were tired of symmetry and pleased with the surprises of irregularity.

Of Antoninus there is no history, for he had almost no faults and committed no crimes.

He was the most fortunate man that ever wore a crown. We are told that he was tall and handsome, healthy and serene, gentle and resolute, modest and omnipotent, eloquent and a despiser of rhetoric, popular and immune to flattery.

“Do you not understand that we have now lost what we had before?”

“he was continually quoting the saying of Scipio, that he would rather save a single citizen than slay a thousand foes.”

Never had monarchy left men so free, or so respected the rights of its subjects.39 “The world’s ideal seemed to have been attained. Wisdom reigned, and for twenty-three years the world was governed by a father.”

“If,” said Gibbon, “a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius.

time struck a balance by giving him a questionable wife and a worthless son.

It is clear that the leading philosophers of the time were priests without religion rather than metaphysicians without life.

He was a Stoic before he became a man.

At the outset of his reign, as at the end, the philosopher erred through kindness. The division of rule was a bad precedent, which, in the heirs of Diocletian and Constantine, would divide and weaken the realm.

radicals do not grow up in palaces.

He had discovered that not all men wished to be saints; and he sadly reconciled himself to a world of corruption and wickedness.

It was his misfortune that his fame as a philosopher, and the long peace under Hadrian and Antoninus, encouraged rebels within and barbarians without.

gossip, which, like politics, has no bowels of mercy,

he made up in resolution what he lacked in strength.

Marcus was too good to be great enough to discipline him or renounce him;

Only a man schooled in the Roman and Stoic sense of duty could have transformed himself so completely from a mystic philosopher into a competent and successful general.

Pursuing the Sarmatians by day he could write with sympathy of them at night: “A spider, when it has caught a fly, thinks it has done a great deed. So does one who has run down a hare ... or who has captured Sarmatians. . . . Are they not all alike robbers?”

During his stay at Athens he endowed professorships in each of the great schools of doctrine—Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean.

his books were the afterthought of a full life, the product of a leisurely old age, and of a mature and profound mind.

The success of these essays induced Tacitus to illustrate the evils of tyranny by indicting the record of the despots in ruthless detail.

“The chief duty of the historian,” he thought, “is to judge the actions of men, so that the good may meet with the reward due to virtue, and pernicious citizens may be deterred by the condemnation that awaits evil deeds at the tribunal of posterity.”

It is a strange conception, which turns history into a Last Judgment and the historian into God.

So conceived, history is a sermon—ethics teaching by horrible examples—and falls, as Tacitus assumed, under the rubric of rhetoric. It is easy for indignation to be eloquent but hard fo...

those that remain make Tacitus a deceptive guide, who never lies but never reveals the truth.

he draws the most brilliant and unjust character portraits in history, but he has no conception of economic influences upon political events, no interest in the life and industry of the people, the stream of trade, the conditions of science, the status of woman, the vicissitudes of belief, the achievements of poetry, philosophy, or art.

We cannot condemn Tacitus for not succeeding in what he did not attempt; we can only regret the narrowness of his great purpose and the limitations of his powerful mind.

His imagination and art, like Shakespeare’s, were too creatively active to let him ponder quietly the meaning and possibilities of life.

He is cautiously ambiguous on matters of faith, and suggests9 that it is wiser to accept one’s native religion than to try to replace it with knowledge.