In Rome, a similar development came later, and in a less painful form. Rome was not conquered, as Greece was, but had, on the contrary, the stimulus of successful imperialism. Throughout the period of the civil wars, it was Romans who were responsible for the disorders. The Greeks had not secured peace and order by submitting to the Macedonians, whereas both Greeks and Romans secured both by submitting to Augustus. Augustus was a Roman, to whom most Romans submitted willingly, not only on account of his superior power; moreover he took pains to disguise the military origin of his government, and to base it upon decrees of the Senate. The adulation expressed by the Senate was, no doubt, largely insincere, but outside the senatorial class no one felt humiliated.
The mood of the Romans was like that of a jeune homme rangé in nineteenth-century France, who, after a life of amatory adventure,
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* History of the Ancient World, Vol. II, p. 255.
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settles down to a marriage of reason. This mood, though contented, is not creative. The great poets of the Augustan age had been formed in more troubled times; Horace fled at Philippi, and both he and Vergil lost their farms in confiscations for the benefit of victorious soldiers. Augustus, for the sake of stability, set to work, somewhat insincerely, to restore ancient piety, and was therefore necessarily rather hostile to free inquiry. The Roman world began to become stereotyped, and the process continued under later emperors.
The immediate successors of Augustus indulged in appalling cruelties towards Senators and towards possible competitors for the purple. To some extent, the misgovernment of this period extended to the provinces; but in the main the administrative machine created by Augustus continued to function fairly well.
A better period began with the accession of Trajan in A.D. 98, and continued until the death of Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 180. During this time, the government of the Empire was as good as any despotic government can be. The third century, on the contrary, was one of appalling disaster. The army realized its power, made and unmade emperors in return for cash and the promise of a life without warfare, and ceased, in consequence, to be an effective fighting force. The barbarians, from north and east, invaded and plundered Roman territory. The army, preoccupied with private gain and civil discord, was incompetent in defence. The whole fiscal system broke down, since there was an immense diminution of resources and, at the same time, a vast increase of expenditure in unsuccessful war and in bribery of the army. Pestilence, in addition to war, greatly diminished the population. It seemed as if the Empire was about to fall.
This result was averted by two energetic men, Diocletian ( A.D. 286-305) and Constantine, whose undisputed reign lasted from A.D. 312 to 337. By then the Empire was divided into an eastern and a western half, corresponding, approximately, to the division between the Greek and Latin languages. By Constantine the capital of the eastern half was established at Byzantium, to which he gave the new name of Constantinople. Diocletian curbed the army, for a while, by altering its character; from his time onwards, the most effective fighting forces were composed of barbarians, chiefly German, to whom all the highest commands were open. This was obviously a dangerous expedient, and early in the fifth century it bore its natural
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fruit. The barbarians decided that it was more profitable to fight for themselves than for a Roman master. Nevertheless it served its purpose for over a century. Diocletian’s administrative reforms were equally successful for a time, and equally disastrous in the long run. The Roman system was to allow local self-government to the towns, and to leave their officials to collect the taxes, of which only the total amount due from any one town was fixed by the central authorities. This system had worked well enough in prosperous times, but now, in the exhausted state of the empire, the revenue demanded was more than could be borne without excessive hardship. The municipal authorities were personally responsible for the taxes, and fled to escape payment. Diocletian compelled well-to-do citizens to accept municipal office, and made flight illegal. From similar motives he turned the rural population into serfs, tied to the soil and forbidden to migrate. This system was kept on by later emperors.
Constantine’s most important innovation was the adoption of Christianity as the State religion, apparently because a large proportion of the soldiers were Christian. * The result of this was that when, during the fifth century, the Germans destroyed the Western Empire, its prestige caused them to adopt the Christian religion, thereby preserving for western Europe so much of ancient civilization as had been absorbed by the Church.
The development of the territory assigned to the eastern half of the Empire was different. The Eastern Empire, though continually diminishing in extent (except for the transient conquests of Justinian in the sixth century), survived until 1453, when Constantinople was conquered by the Turks. But most of what had been Roman provinces in the east, including also Africa and Spain in the west, became Mohammedan. The Arabs, unlike the Germans, rejected the religion, but adopted the civilization, of those whom they had conquered. The Eastern Empire was Greek, not Latin, in its civilization; accordingly, from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, it was the Arabs who preserved Greek literature and whatever survived of Greek, as opposed to Latin, civilization. From the eleventh century onward, at first through Moorish influences, the west gradually recovered what it had lost of the Grecian heritage.
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* See Rostovtseff, History of the Ancient World, Vol. II, p. 332.
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I come now to the four ways in which the Roman Empire affected the history of culture.
I. The direct effect of Rome on Greek thought. This begins in the second century B.C., with two men, the historian Polybius, and the Stoic philosopher Panaetius. The natural attitude of the Greek to the Roman was one of contempt mingled with fear; the Greek felt himself more civilized, but politically less powerful. If the Romans were more successful in politics, that only showed that politics is an ignoble pursuit. The average Greek of the second century B.C. was pleasure-loving, quick-witted, clever in business, and unscrupulous in all things. There were, however, still men of philosophic capacity. Some of these—notably the sceptics, such as Carneades-had allowed cleverness to destroy seriousness. Some, like the Epicureans and a section of the Stoics, had withdrawn wholly into a quiet private life. But a few, with more insight than had been shown by Aristotle in relation to Alexander, realized that the greatness of Rome was due to certain merits which were lacking among the Greeks.
The historian Polybius, born in Arcadia about 200 B.C., was sent to Rome as a prisoner, and there had the good fortune to become the friend of the younger Scipio, whom he accompanied on many of his campaigns. It was uncommon for a Greek to know Latin, though most educated Romans knew Greek; the circumstances of Polybius, however, led him to a thorough familiarity with Latin. He wrote, for the benefit of the Greeks, the history of the Punic Wars, which had enabled Rome to conquer the world. His admiration of the Roman constitution was becoming out of date while he wrote, but until his time it had compared very favorably, in stability and efficiency, with the continually changing constitutions of most Greek cities. The Romans naturally read his history with pleasure; whether the Greeks did so is more doubtful.
Panaetius the Stoic has been already considered in the preceding chapter. He was a friend of Polybius, and, like him, a protégé of the younger Scipio. While Scipio lived, he was frequently in Rome, but after Scipio’s death in 129 B.C. he stayed in Athens as head of the Stoic school. Rome still had, what Greece had lost, the hopefulness connected with the opportunity for political activity. Accordingly the doctrines of Panaetius were more political, and less akin to those
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of the Cynics, than were those of earlier Stoics. Probably the admiration of Plato felt by cultivated Romans influenced him in abandoning the dogmatic narrowness of his Stoic predecessors. In the broader form given to it by him and by his successor Posidonius, Stoicism strongly appealed to the more serious among the Romans.
At a later date, Epictetus, though a Greek, lived most of his life in Rome. Rome supplied him with most of his illustrations; he is always exhorting the wise man not to tremble in the presence of the Emperor. We know the influence of Epictetus on Marcus Aurelius, but his influence on the Greeks is hard to trace.
Plutarch (ca. A.D. 46-120), in his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, traced a parallelism between the most eminent men of the two countries. He spent a considerable time in Rome, and was honoured by the Emperors Hadrian and Trajan. In addition to his Lives, he wrote numerous works on philosophy, religion, natural history, and morals. His Lives are obviously concerned to reconcile Greece and Rome in man’s thoughts.
On the whole, apart from such exceptional men, Rome acted as a blight on the Greek-speaking part of the Empire. Thought and art alike declined. Until the end of the second century A.D., life, for the well-to-do, was pleasant and easy-going; there was no incentive to strenuousness, and little opportunity for great achievement. The recognized schools of philosophy—the Academy, the
