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by
Will Durant
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November 18 - December 4, 2019
The method of these volumes is synthetic history, which studies all the major phases of a people’s life, work, and culture in their simultaneous operation. Analytic history, which is equally necessary and a scholarly prerequisite, studies some separate phase of man’s activity—politics, economics, morals, religion, science, philosophy, literature, art—in one civilization or in all.
Errors of detail are inevitable; but only in this way can a mind enchanted by philosophy—the quest for understanding through perspective—
We may seek perspective through science by studying the relations of things in space, or through history by studying the relations of events in time. We shall learn more of the nature of man by watching his behavior through sixty centuries than by reading Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant. “All philosophy,” said Nietzsche, “has now fallen forfeit to history.”I
in the struggle of Roman civilization against barbarism within and without, is our own struggle; through Rome’s problems of biological and moral decadence signposts rise on our road today; the class war of the Gracchi against the Senate, of Marius against Sulla, of Caesar against Pompey, of Antony against Octavian, is the war that consumes our interludes of peace; and the desperate effort of the Mediterranean soul to maintain some freedom against a despotic state is an augury of our coming task. De nobis fabula narratur: of ourselves this Roman story is told.
If we may judge from the gay pictures of the sepulchers, the life of the Etruscans, like that of the Cretans, was hardened with combat, softened with luxury, and brightened with feasts and games.
the Etruscans, like the Romans, thought it dangerous to let civilization get too far from the brute.
The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
Contentment is as rare among men as it is natural among animals, and no form of government has ever satisfied its subjects.
it was the first written form of that legal structure which was to be Rome’s most signal achievement and her greatest contribution to civilization.
By a pleasant custom the members brought their sons with them to attend in silence, and to learn statesmanship and chicanery at first hand.
The Senate was at its worst in victory, at its best in defeat. It could carry forward policies that spanned generations and centuries; it could begin a war in 264 and end it in 146 B.C.
A legion was a mixed brigade of some 4200 infantry, 300 cavalry, and various auxiliary groups;22 two legions made a consul’s army. Each legion was subdivided into centuries—originally of one hundred, later of two hundred, men—commanded by centurions.
the legion was rearranged, about 366 B.C., into maniples IV of two centuries each; free room was left between each maniple and its neighbors, and the maniples of each succeeding line stood behind these open spaces. This formation made possible a rapid reinforcement of one line by the next, and a quick veering of one or more maniples to face a flank attack; and it gave free play to that individual combat for which the Roman soldier was especially trained.
Food in camp was simple: bread or porridge, some vegetables, sour wine, rarely flesh; the Roman army conquered the world on a vegetarian diet; Caesar’s troops complained when corn ran out and they had to eat meat.
the discipline of obedience developed the capacity to command. The army of the Republic lost battles, but it never lost a war.
Essentially it was an aristocracy, in which old and rich families, through ability and privilege, held office for hundreds of years, and gave to Roman policy a tenacious continuity that was the secret of its accomplishments.
Devotion to the state marked the zenith of the Republic, as unparalleled political corruption marked its fall. Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.
The Second Punic War changed the face of the western Mediterranean. It gave Spain and all its wealth to Rome, providing the funds for the Roman conquest of Greece. It reunited Italy under Rome’s unquestioned mastery and threw open all routes and markets to Roman ships and goods. But it was the most costly of all ancient wars. It ravaged or injured half the farms of Italy, destroyed 400 towns, killed 300,000 men;31 southern Italy has never quite recovered from it to this day. It weakened democracy by showing that a popular assembly cannot wisely choose generals or direct a war. It began the
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Through such means, and occasional deputations to the oracle at Delphi, the aristocracy could influence the people in any direction to almost any end.
The multitude of votive offerings found in Roman remains suggests that the religion of the people was warm and tender with piety and gratitude, a feeling of kinship with the hidden forces in nature, and an anxious desire to be in harmony with them all. By contrast the state religion was uncomfortably formal, a kind of legal and contractual relation between the government and the gods.
On May 11-13 Roman families commemorated with awe the feast of the Lemures, or dead souls; the father spat black beans from his mouth, and cried: “With these beans I redeem myself and mine. . . . Shades of my ancestors, depart!”
Did this religion help Roman morals? In some ways it was immoral: its stress on ritual suggested that the gods rewarded not goodness but gifts and formulas; and its prayers were nearly always for material goods or martial victory. Ceremonies gave drama to the life of man and the soil, but they multiplied as if they, and not the devotion of the part to the whole, were the proper essence of religion. The gods were, with some exceptions, awesome spirits without moral aspect or nobility.
Before the child could learn to doubt, faith molded its character into discipline, duty, and decency.
From beginning to end of Roman history the sexual morality of the common man remained essentially the same: coarse and free, but not incompatible with a successful family life.
What increases with civilization is not so much immorality of intent as opportunity of expression.
The Roman nose was like the Roman character—sharp and devious.
War and conquest molded morals and manners and left men often coarse and usually hard, prepared to kill without compunction and be killed without complaint. War captives were sold into slavery by the thousands, unless they were kings or generals; these were usually slaughtered at the victor’s triumph or allowed to starve leisurely to death.
a Greek, said the Greek, could not be prevented from embezzling, no matter how many clerks were set to watch him, while the Romans spent great sums of public money with only rare cases of ascertained dishonesty.
the typical educated Roman of this age was orderly, conservative, loyal, sober, reverent, tenacious, severe, practical. He enjoyed discipline, and would have no nonsense about liberty. He obeyed as a training for command. He took it for granted that the government had a right to inquire into his morals as well as his income, and to value him purely according to his services to the state. He distrusted individuality and genius. He had none of the charm, vivacity, and unstable fluency of the Attic Greek.
He could with some effort love beauty, but he could seldom create it. He had no use for pure science, and was suspicious of philosophy as a devilish dissolvent of ancient beliefs and ways. He could not, for the life of him, understand Plato, or Archimedes, or Christ. He could only rule the world.
Heine remarked that “the Romans would not have had much time left for conquering the world if they had first had to learn Latin”;40 but they too had to conjugate irregular Latin verbs, and soon would be put to Greek.
The language, like the people, was practical and economical, martially sharp and brief; its sentences and clauses marched in disciplined subordination to a determined goal. A thousand similarities allied it, within the Indo-European family, with Sanskrit and Greek and the Celtic tongues of ancient Gaul, Wales, and Ireland. Latin was poorer than Greek in imagery, flexibility, and ready formation of compounds;
The melodious Romance languages—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Rumanian—evolved from the crude popular Latin brought to the provinces, not by poets and grammarians, but by soldiers, merchants, and adventurers. So the words for horse in the Romance languages—caballo, cavallo, cheval, cal—were taken from the spoken Latin caballus, not from the written equus. In popular Latin ille (he) was one syllable, like French and Italian il; and final -s and -m were, as in those languages, dropped or not pronounced. The best came from a corruption of the worst: corruptio pessimi optima.
When public discontent became acute, some cause could be found for a war that would provide universal employment, spread depreciated money, and turn the wrath of the people against a foreign foe whose lands would feed the Roman people victorious, or receive them defeated and dead.
man’s vanity yields only to hunger and love.
the Roman patriciate and upper middle class passed with impressive speed from stoic simplicity to reckless luxury; the lifetime of Cato (234-149) saw the transformation almost completed.
The new generation, having inherited world mastery, had no time or inclination to defend it; that readiness for war which had characterized the Roman landowner disappeared now that ownership was being concentrated in a few families and a proletariat without stake in the country filled the slums of Rome.
It became a common thing for magistrates to embezzle public funds and an uncommon thing to see them prosecuted; for who could punish robbery among his fellows when half the members of the Senate had joined in violating treaties, robbing allies, and despoiling provinces? “He who steals from a citizen,” said Cato, “ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who steals from the community ends them in purple and gold.”
The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other. War demands superior intelligence and courage, quick decisions, united action, immediate obedience; the frequency of war doomed democracy.
Even Cato, so anxious to preserve old forms, marveled at the ability of two augurs to keep from laughing when they met face to face.21 Too long these takers of auspices had been suborned to political trickery; prodigies and portents had been concocted to mold public opinion, the vote of the people had been annulled by pious humbuggery, and religion had consented to turn exploitation into a sacrament.
every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, it must be held in by invisible terrors and religious pageantry.
The Greek conquest of Rome took the form of sending Greek religion and comedy to the Roman plebs; Greek morals, philosophy, and art to the upper classes.
The conquest reached its climax in Roman philosophy, from the stoic Epicureanism of Lucretius to the epicurean Stoicism of Seneca. In Christian theology Greek metaphysics overcame the gods of Italy.
Stoicism became the inspiration of Scipio, the ambition of Cicero, the better self of Seneca, the guide of Trajan, the consolation of Aurelius, and the conscience of Rome.
He was in love with Euripides, flirted like him with radical ideas, and plagued the pious with such Epicurean quips as, “I grant you there are gods, but they don’t care what men do; else it would go well with the good and ill with the bad—which rarely happens”;
Cato fought corruption recklessly, and seldom let the sun set without having made new enemies. Few loved him, for his scar-covered face and wild red hair disconcerted them, his big teeth threatened them, his asceticism shamed them, his industry left them lagging, his green eyes looked through their words into their selfishness.
From the moral standpoint, which is always a window dressing in international politics, the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 must rank among the most brutal conquests in history; from the standpoint of empire—of security and wealth—it laid simultaneously the two cornerstones of Rome’s commercial and naval supremacy. From that moment the political history of the Mediterranean flowed through Rome.
every new conquest made Rome richer, more rotten, more merciless. She had won every war but the class war; and the destruction of Carthage removed the last check to civil division and strife. Now through a hundred bitter years of revolution Rome would pay the penalty of gaining the world.
The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in the towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land.
Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery.
