Caesar and Christ (Story of Civilization, #3)

by Will Durant

On the latifundia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, generation after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master’s vice.

In the city the lot of the slave was mitigated by humanizing contacts with his master and by hope of emancipation; but on the large farms no human relation interfered with exploitation. There the slave was no longer a member of the household, as in Greece or early Rome; he seldom saw his owner; and the rewards of the overseer depended upon squeezing every possible profit from the chattels entrusted to his lash. The wages of the slave on the great estates were as much food and clothing as would enable him to toil from sunrise to sunset every day—barring occasional holidays—until senility.

Marius resorted to a new form of military enrollment, which revolutionized first the army and then the state. He invited the enlistment of any citizen, property owner or not; offered attractive pay, and promised to release volunteers, and give them lands, after a completed campaign. The army now formed was composed chiefly of the city proletariat; its sentiments were hostile to the patrician Republic; it fought not for its country, but for its general and for booty; in this way, probably without knowing it, Marius laid the military basis of the Caesarian revolution.

His life was an unforgivable indictment of theirs; they wished he would sin a little, if only out of a decent respect for the habits of mankind.

He scorned the business classes and defended aristocracy, or rule by birth, as the only alternative to plutocracy, or rule by wealth.

breath of liberation from supernatural terrors seemed to come out of Epicurus’ garden, revealing the omnipresence of law, the self-ruled independence of nature, the forgivable naturalness of death.

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum— “to so many evils religion has persuaded men.”

Life is given us not in freehold but on loan, and for so long as we can make use of it. When we have exhausted our powers we should leave the table of life as graciously as a grateful guest rising from a feast. Death itself is not terrible; only our fears of the hereafter make it so. But there is no hereafter. Hell is here in the suffering that comes from ignorance, passion, pugnacity, and greed; heaven is here in the sapientum templa serena—“the serene temples of the wise.”17

Men begin by seeking happiness and are content at last with peace.

he had praised the study of literature as “nourishing our adolescence, adorning our prosperity, and delighting our old age.”

Roman morals, society, and government were bound up with the old religion and could not safely let it die. (The emperors would reason so in persecuting Christianity.)

Without checks and balances monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship.

Devotion to study may make one “unaware of the stealthy approach of old age.”72 Age as well as youth has its glories—a tolerant wisdom, the respectful affection of children, desire and ambition’s fever cooled. Age may fear death, but not if the mind has been formed by philosophy. Beyond the grave there will be, at the best, a new and happier life; and at the worst there will be peace.

he did not scruple to carry on liaisons in the fashion of his time; but in such number and with such ambigendered diversity that Curio (father of his later general) called him omnium mulierum vir et omnium virorum mulier—“the husband of every woman and the wife of every man.”

Democracy had fallen by Plato’s formula: liberty had become license, and chaos begged an end to liberty.

She was an able ruler and administrator, effectively promoted Egyptian commerce and industry, and was a competent financier even when making love. With these qualities went an Oriental sensuality, an impetuous brutality that dealt out suffering and death, and a political ambition that dreamed of empire and honored no code but success.

When Caesar came he mourned that he had no chance to pardon Cato; he could only pardon the son. The Uticans gave the dead Stoic a magnificent funeral, as if knowing that they were burying a republic almost five centuries old.

Like other dictators he sought to base his power upon popularity with the people.

Men who have been deprived of wonted power cannot be mollified by pardoning their resistance; it is as difficult to forgive forgiveness as it is to forgive those whom we have injured.

The Republic died at Pharsalus; the revolution ended at Actium. Rome had completed the fatal cycle known to Plato and to us: monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchic exploitation, democracy, revolutionary chaos, dictatorship. Once more, in the great systole and diastole of history, an age of freedom ended and an age of discipline began.

Morals, which had been loosened by riches and luxury, had not been improved by destitution and chaos, for few conditions are more demoralizing than poverty that comes after wealth.

Once a virile Senate would have faced these dangers, raised sturdy legions, found for them able captains, and guided them with far-seeing statesmanship. But the Senate was now only a name. The great families that had been its strength had died out in conflict or sterility, and the traditions of statecraft had not been transmitted to the businessmen, soldiers, and provincials who had succeeded them. The new Senate gratefully yielded its major powers to one who would plan, take responsibility, and lead.

in their judgment all governments were oligarchies, the problem could not present itself to them as a choice among monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; they had to decide whether, under the given conditions of space and time, oligarchy was to be preferred in a monarchical form based upon an army, or an aristocratic form rooted in heredity, or a democratic form resting on the wealth of the business class. Octavian combined them all in a “principate” that mingled the theories of Cicero, the precedents of Pompey, and the policies of Caesar.

The people accepted his solution philosophically. They were no longer enamored of freedom, but wearily wished for security and order; any man might rule them who guaranteed them games and bread.

When Rome ceased to be a city-state, empire drove it inexorably toward the imitation of Egypt, Persia, and Macedon. Out of the collapse of freedom into individualism and chaos a new government had to be created to forge a new order for a widened realm.

Caesar’s dream of a commonwealth with equal rights had been replaced by a quiet return to the privileges of the master race.

the citizens could forget, while they went through all the forms of the dead Republic, that they were living under a military monarchy in which force was hidden so long as phrases could rule.

Octavian was one of those cautious men who believe that honesty is the best policy, but that it must be practiced with discrimination.

The power of wealth checked the pride and privilege of birth, and an hereditary aristocracy checked the abuses and irresponsibility of wealth.

The judicial and executive functions of the Senate now outweighed its lawmaking. It served as a supreme court, governed Italy through commissions, and directed the performance of various public works. It ruled those provinces which required no extensive military control, but foreign relations were now controlled by the Prince.

Augustus felt that he had sufficiently earned his title of “the increasing god.” At his death the Empire covered 3,340,000 square miles, more than the mainland of the United States, and over a hundred times the area of Rome before the Punic Wars.

Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship; few rulers have dared to attempt it; most rulers have left it to hypocrites and saints.

The decay of the ancient faith among the upper classes had washed away the supernatural supports of marriage, fidelity, and parentage; the passage from farm to city had made children less of an asset, more of a liability and a toy; women wished to be sexually rather than maternally beautiful; in general the desire for individual freedom seemed to be running counter to the needs of the race.

In the end Augustus, skeptic and realist, became convinced that moral reform awaited a religious renaissance. The agnostic generation of Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar had run its course, and its children had discovered that the fear of the gods is the youth of wisdom. Even the cynical Ovid would soon write, Voltaireanly: expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus: “it is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist.”

The ancients were not in these cases such simpletons as their modern counterparts would like to believe. They knew well enough that Augustus was human; in deifying his genius, or that of others, they used deus or theos as equivalent to our “canonized saint”; indeed, canonization is a descendant of Roman deification; and to pray to such a deified human being seemed no more absurd then than prayer to a saint seems now.

Life’s final tragedy is unwilling continuance—to outlive one’s self and be forbidden to die.

The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people. No one wanted to enlist in the army, or recognize the inexorable periodicity of war. Luxury had taken the place of simplicity, sexual license was replacing parentage; by its own exhausted will the great race was beginning to die.

Dido is a living woman, gracious, subtle, passionate; Turnus is a simple and honest warrior, betrayed by Latinus, and doomed to an unmerited death by ridiculous gods. After ten cantos of cant we resent the “piety” of Aeneas, which leaves him no will of his own, excuses his treachery, and brings him success only by supernatural intervention. We do not enjoy the windy speeches with which he kills good men, adding a rhetorical boredom to that competitive perforation which is humanity’s final test of truth.

He reminds the laudator temporis acti—the “praiser of times past”—that “if some god were for taking you back to those days you would refuse every time”;31 the chief charm of the past is that we know we need not live it again.

The skeptic who found it difficult to believe anything bent his hoary head before the ancient altars, acknowledged that without a myth the people perish, and lent his pen graciously to the ailing gods.

Since a philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian, Horace, old at forty-five, was ripe to discuss God and man, morals and literature and art.

Sapere aude: dare to know.

Of all these epicureans, light of heart and head, who spent their lives climbing and descending the mount of Venus, Publius Ovidius Naso was the happy model and poet laureate.

The only political power now left to the common man was the right of electing the emperor by assassination. After Tiberius democracy passed from the assemblies to the army, and voted with the sword.

A quiet life of responsible labor might have steadied him, but the poison of power made him mad. Sanity, like government, needs checks and balances; no mortal can be omnipotent and sane.

Nor could religious belief encourage Nero to morality; a smattering of philosophy had liberated his intellect without maturing his judgment.

They went under because they were above the law; they became less than men because power had made them gods.

when, through a philosopher’s love, idiocy would again reach the throne, the armies would run riot, chaos would break through the fragile film of order, and civil war would join hands with the waiting barbarians to topple down the noble and precarious structure of government that the genius of Augustus had built.

Tradition is the voice of time, and time is the medium of selection; a cautious mind will respect their verdict, for only youth knows better than twenty centuries.

The speech of the common man re-entered literature, diminishing inflections, relaxing syntax, and dropping final consonants with Gallic impertinence. About the middle of the first century the Latin V (which had been pronounced like our W) and B (between vowels) were both softened into a sound like the English V; so habere, to have, became in sound havere, and prepared for Italian avere and French avoir; while vinum, wine, began to approximate, by lazy slurring of the changing final consonant, the Italian vino and the French vin. The Latin language was preparing to mother Italian, Spanish, and French.