A	»	B	»	C	»	D	»	E
F	»	G	»	H	»	I	»	J
K	»	L	»	M	»	N	»	O
P	»		R	»	S	»		T
U	»		V	»	W	»		Z

Thomas Bull, M.D. - "The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease."

Francois Rabelais - "Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book V."

Anonymous - "The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete"

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) - "Roughing It, Part 1."

Warning: file_get_contents(http://www.publishersnewswire.com/RSS/news2.xml) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found in /home/farmy/public_html/topbookz.com/inc/rss.php on line 8

The History of Rome (Volumes 1 5) - Theodor Mommsen

T >> Theodor Mommsen >> The History of Rome (Volumes 1 5)

Building--
Impulse Given to It

In respect to buildings the regal period, particularly the epoch of
the great conquests, probably accomplished more than the first two
centuries of the republic. Structures like the temples on the Capitol
and on the Aventine and the great Circus were probably as obnoxious to
the frugal fathers of the city as to the burgesses who gave their
task-work; and it is remarkable that perhaps the most considerable
building of the republican period before the Samnite wars, the temple
of Ceres in the Circus, was a work of Spurius Cassius (261) who in
more than one respect, sought to lead the commonwealth back to the
traditions of the kings. The governing aristocracy moreover repressed
private luxury with a rigour such as the rule of the kings, if
prolonged, would certainly not have displayed. But at length even
the senate was no longer able to resist the superior force of
circumstances. It was Appius Claudius who in his epoch-making
censorship (442) threw aside the antiquated rustic system of
parsimonious hoarding, and taught his fellow-citizens to make a worthy
use of the public resources. He began that noble system of public
works of general utility, which justifies, if anything can justify,
the military successes of Rome even from the point of view of the
welfare of the nations, and which even now in its ruins furnishes some
idea of the greatness of Rome to thousands on thousands who have never
read a page of her history. To him the Roman state was indebted for
its great military road, and the city of Rome for its first aqueduct.
Following in the steps of Claudius, the Roman senate wove around Italy
that network of roads and fortresses, the formation of which has
already been described,(39) and without which, as the history of all
military states from the Achaemenidae down to the creator of the road
over the Simplon shows, no military hegemony can subsist. Following in
the steps of Claudius, Manius Curius built from the proceeds of the
Pyrrhic spoil a second aqueduct for the capital (482); and some years
previously (464) with the gains of the Sabine war he opened up for the
Velino, at the point above Terni where it falls into the Nera, that
broader channel in which the stream still flows, with a view to drain
the beautiful valley of Rieti and thereby to gain space for a large
burgess settlement along with a modest farm for himself. Such works,
in the eyes of persons of intelligence, threw into the shade the
aimless magnificence of the Hellenic temples.

Embellishment of the City

The style of living also among the citizens now was altered. About
the time of Pyrrhus silver plate began to make its appearance on Roman
tables, and the chroniclers date the disappearance of shingle roofs in
Rome from 470.(40) The new capital of Italy gradually laid aside its
village-like aspect, and now began to embellish itself. It was not yet
indeed customary to strip the temples in conquered towns of their
ornaments for the decoration of Rome; but the beaks of the galleys of
Antium were displayed at the orator's platform in the Forum(41) and
on public festival days the gold-mounted shields brought home from
the battle-fields of Samnium were exhibited along the stalls of the
market.(42) The proceeds of fines were specially applied to the paving
of the highways in and near the city, or to the erection and
embellishment of public buildings. The wooden booths of the butchers,
which stretched along the Forum on both sides, gave way, first on the
Palatine side, then on that also which faced the Carinae, to the stone
stalls of the money-changers; so that this place became the Exchange
of Rome. Statues of the famous men of the past, of the kings, priests,
and heroes of the legendary period, and of the Grecian -hospes- who
was said to have interpreted to the decemvirs the laws of Solon;
honorary columns and monuments dedicated to the great burgomasters who
had conquered the Veientes, the Latins, the Samnites, to state envoys
who had perished while executing their instructions, to rich women
who had bequeathed their property to public objects, nay even to
celebrated Greek philosophers and heroes such as Pythagoras and
Alcibiades, were erected on the Capitol or in the Forum. Thus, now
that the Roman community had become a great power, Rome itself
became a great city.

Silver Standard of Value

Lastly Rome, as head of the Romano-Italian confederacy, not only
entered into the Hellenistic state-system, but also conformed to the
Hellenic system of moneys and coins. Up to this time the different
communities of northern and central Italy, with few exceptions, had
struck only a copper currency; the south Italian towns again
universally had a currency of silver; and there were as many legal
standards and systems of coinage as there were sovereign communities
in Italy. In 485 all these local mints were restricted to the issuing
of small coin; a general standard of currency applicable to all Italy
was introduced, and the coining of the currency was centralized in
Rome; Capua alone continued to retain its own silver coinage struck in
the name of Rome, but after a different standard. The new monetary
system was based on the legal ratio subsisting between the two metals,
as it had long been fixed.(43) The common monetary unit was the piece
of ten -asses- (which were no longer of a pound, but reduced to the
third of a pound), the -denarius-, which weighed in copper 3 1/3 and
in silver 1/72, of a Roman pound, a trifle more than the Attic
--drachma--. At first copper money still predominated in the coinage;
and it is probable that the earliest silver -denarius- was coined
chiefly for Lower Italy and for intercourse with other lands. As the
victory of the Romans over Pyrrhus and Tarentum and the Roman embassy
to Alexandria could not but engage the thoughts of the contemporary
Greek statesman, so the sagacious Greek merchant might well ponder as
he looked on these new Roman drachmae. Their flat, unartistic, and
monotonous stamping appeared poor and insignificant by the side of
the marvellously beautiful contemporary coins of Pyrrhus and the
Siceliots; nevertheless they were by no means, like the barbarian
coins of antiquity, slavishly imitated and unequal in weight and
alloy, but, on the contrary, worthy from the first by their
independent and conscientious execution to be placed on a level
with any Greek coin.

Extension of the Latin Nationality

Thus, when the eye turns from the development of constitutions and
from the national struggles for dominion and for freedom which
agitated Italy, and Rome in particular, from the banishment of the
Tarquinian house to the subjugation of the Samnites and the Italian
Greeks, and rests on those calmer spheres of human existence which
history nevertheless rules and pervades, it everywhere encounters the
reflex influence of the great events, by which the Roman burgesses
burst the bonds of patrician sway, and the rich variety of the
national cultures of Italy gradually perished to enrich a single
people. While the historian may not attempt to follow out the great
course of events into the infinite multiplicity of individual detail,
he does not overstep his province when, laying hold of detached
fragments of scattered tradition, he indicates the most important
changes which during this epoch took place in the national life of
Italy. That in such an inquiry the life of Rome becomes still more
prominent than in the earlier epoch, is not merely the result of the
accidental blanks of our tradition; it was an essential consequence
of the change in the political position of Rome, that the Latin
nationality should more and more cast the other nationalities of Italy
into the shade. We have already pointed to the fact, that at this
epoch the neighbouring lands--southern Etruria, Sabina, the land of
the Volscians, --began to become Romanized, as is attested by the
almost total absence of monuments of the old native dialects, and by
the occurrence of very ancient Roman inscriptions in those regions;
the admission of the Sabines to full burgess-rights at the end of this
period(44) betokens that the Latinizing of Central Italy was already
at that time the conscious aim of Roman policy. The numerous
individual assignations and colonial establishments scattered
throughout Italy were, not only in a military but also in a linguistic
and national point of view, the advanced posts of the Latin stock. The
Latinizing of the Italians was scarcely at this time generally aimed
at; on the contrary, the Roman senate seems to have intentionally
upheld the distinction between the Latin and the other nationalities,
and they did not yet, for example, allow the introduction of Latin
into official use among the half-burgess communities of Campania. The
force of circumstances, however, is stronger than even the strongest
government: the language and customs of the Latin people immediately
shared its predominance in Italy, and already began to undermine
the other Italian nationalities.

Progress of Hellenism in Italy--
Adoption of Greek Habits at the Table

These nationalities were at the same time assailed from another
quarter and by an ascendency resting on another basis--by Hellenism.
This was the period when Hellenism began to become conscious of its
intellectual superiority to the other nations, and to diffuse itself
on every side. Italy did not remain unaffected by it. The most
remarkable phenomenon of this sort is presented by Apulia, which after
the fifth century of Rome gradually laid aside its barbarian dialect
and silently became Hellenized. This change was brought about, as in
Macedonia and Epirus, not by colonization, but by civilization, which
seems to have gone hand in hand with the land commerce of Tarentum; at
least that hypothesis is favoured by the facts, that the districts
of the Poediculi and Daunii who were on friendly terms with the
Tarentines carried out their Hellenization more completely than the
Sallentines who lived nearer to Tarentum but were constantly at feud
with it, and that the towns that were soonest Graecized, such as Arpi,
were not situated on the coast. The stronger influence exerted by
Hellenism over Apulia than over any other Italian region is explained
partly by its position, partly by the slight development of any
national culture of its own, and partly also perhaps by its
nationality presenting a character less alien to the Greek stock than
that of the rest of Italy.(45) We have already called attention(46) to
the fact that the southern Sabellian stocks, although at the outset in
concert with the tyrants of Syracuse they crushed and destroyed the
Hellenism of Magna Graecia, were at the same time affected by contact
and mingling with the Greeks, so that some of them, such as the
Bruttians and Nolans, adopted the Greek language by the side of their
native tongue, and others, such as the Lucanians and a part of the
Campanians, adopted at least Greek writing and Greek manners. Etruria
likewise showed tendencies towards a kindred development in the
remarkable vases which have been discovered(47) belonging to this
period, rivalling those of Campania and Lucania; and though Latium and
Samnium remained more strangers to Hellenism, there were not wanting
there also traces of an incipient and ever-growing influence of Greek
culture. In all branches of the development of Rome during this epoch,
in legislation and coinage, in religion, in the formation of national
legend, we encounter traces of the Greeks; and from the commencement
of the fifth century in particular, in other words, after the conquest
of Campania, the Greek influence on Roman life appears rapidly and
constantly on the increase. In the fourth century occurred the
erection of the "-Graecostasis-"--remarkable in the very form of the
word--a platform in the Roman Forum for eminent Greek strangers and
primarily for the Massiliots.(48) In the following century the annals
began to exhibit Romans of quality with Greek surnames, such as
Philipus or in Roman form Pilipus, Philo, Sophus, Hypsaeus. Greek
customs gained ground: such as the non-Italian practice of placing
inscriptions in honour of the dead on the tomb--of which the epitaph
of Lucius Scipio (consul in 456) is the oldest example known to us;
the fashion, also foreign to the Italians, of erecting without any
decree of the state honorary monuments to ancestors in public places
--a system begun by the great innovator Appius Claudius, when he
caused bronze shields with images and eulogies of his ancestors to be
suspended in the new temple of Bellona (442); the distribution of
branches of palms to the competitors, introduced at the Roman national
festival in 461; above all, the Greek manners and habits at table.
The custom not of sitting as formerly on benches, but of reclining
on sofas, at table; the postponement of the chief meal from noon to
between two and three o'clock in the afternoon according to our mode
of reckoning; the institution of masters of the revels at banquets,
who were appointed from among the guests present, generally by
throwing the dice, and who then prescribed to the company what, how,
and when they should drink; the table-chants sung in succession by the
guests, which, however, in Rome were not -scolia-, but lays in praise
of ancestors--all these were not primitive customs in Rome, but were
borrowed from the Greeks at a very early period, for in Cato's time
these usages were already common and had in fact partly fallen into
disuse again. We must therefore place their introduction in this
period at the latest. A characteristic feature also was the erection
of statues to "the wisest and the bravest Greek" in the Roman Forum,
which took place by command of the Pythian Apollo during the Samnite
wars. The selection fell--evidently under Sicilian or Campanian
influence--on Pythagoras and Alcibiades, the saviour and the Hannibal
of the western Hellenes. The extent to which an acquaintance with
Greek was already diffused in the fifth century among Romans of
quality is shown by the embassies of the Romans to Tarentum--when
their mouthpiece spoke, if not in the purest Greek, at any rate
without an interpreter--and of Cineas to Rome. It scarcely admits
of a doubt that from the fifth century the young Romans who devoted
themselves to state affairs universally acquired a knowledge of what
was then the general language of the world and of diplomacy.

Thus in the intellectual sphere Hellenism made advances quite as
incessant as the efforts of the Romans to subject the earth to their
sway; and the secondary nationalities, such as the Samnite, Celt, and
Etruscan, hard pressed on both sides, were ever losing their inward
vigour as well as narrowing their outward bounds.

Rome and the Romans of This Epoch

When the two great nations, both arrived at the height of their
development, began to mingle in hostile or in friendly contact, their
antagonism of character was at the same time prominently and fully
brought out--the total want of individuality in the Italian and
especially in the Roman character, as contrasted with the boundless
variety, lineal, local, and personal, of Hellenism. There was no epoch
of mightier vigour in the history of Rome than the epoch from the
institution of the republic to the subjugation of Italy. That epoch
laid the foundations of the commonwealth both within and without; it
created a united Italy; it gave birth to the traditional groundwork of
the national law and of the national history; it originated the
-pilum- and the maniple, the construction of roads and of aqueducts,
the farming of estates and the monetary system; it moulded the
she-wolf of the Capitol and designed the Ficoroni casket. But the
individuals, who contributed the several stones to this gigantic
structure and cemented them together, have disappeared without leaving
a trace, and the nations of Italy did not merge into that of Rome more
completely than the single Roman burgess merged in the Roman
community. As the grave closes alike over all whether important or
insignificant, so in the roll of the Roman burgomasters the empty
scion of nobility stands undistinguishable by the side of the great
statesman. Of the few records that have reached us from this period
none is more venerable, and none at the same time more characteristic,
than the epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio, who was consul in 456,
and three years afterwards took part in the decisive battle of
Sentinum.(49) On the beautiful sarcophagus, in noble Doric style,
which eighty years ago still enclosed the dust of the conqueror of the
Samnites, the following sentence is inscribed:--

-Cornelius Lucius--Scipio Barbatus,
Gnaivod patre prognatus, --fortis vir sapiensque,
Quoius forma virtu--tei parisuma fuit,
Consol censor aidilis--quei fuit apud vos,
Taurasia Cisauna--Samnio cepit,
Subigit omne Loucanum--opsidesque abdoucit.-

_-'_-'_-'_||-'_-'_-'_

Innumerable others who had been at the head of the Roman commonwealth,
as well as this Roman statesman and warrior, might be commemorated as
having been of noble birth and of manly beauty, valiant and wise; but
there was no more to record regarding them. It is doubtless not the
mere fault of tradition that no one of these Cornelii, Fabii, Papirii,
or whatever they were called, confronts us in a distinct individual
figure. The senator was supposed to be no worse and no better than
other senators, nor at all to differ from them. It was not necessary
and not desirable that any burgess should surpass the rest, whether by
showy silver plate and Hellenic culture, or by uncommon wisdom and
excellence. Excesses of the former kind were punished by the censor,
and for the latter the constitution gave no scope. The Rome of this
period belonged to no individual; it was necessary for all the
burgesses to be alike, that each of them might be like a king.

Appius Claudius

No doubt, even now Hellenic individual development asserted its claims
by the side of that levelling system; and the genius and force which
it exhibited bear, no less than the tendency to which it opposed
itself, the full stamp of that great age. We can name but a single man
in connection with it; but he was, as it were, the incarnation of the
idea of progress. Appius Claudius (censor 442; consul 447, 458), the
great-great-grandson of the decemvir, was a man of the old nobility
and proud of the long line of his ancestors; but yet it was he who
set aside the restriction which confined the full franchise of the
state to the freeholders,(50) and who broke up the old system of
finance.(51) From Appius Claudius date not only the Roman aqueducts
and highways, but also Roman jurisprudence, eloquence, poetry, and
grammar. The publication of a table of the -legis actiones-, speeches
committed to writing and Pythagorean sentences, and even innovations
in orthography, are attributed to him. We may not on this account call
him absolutely a democrat or include him in that opposition party
which found its champion in Manius Curius;(52) in him on the contrary
the spirit of the ancient and modern patrician kings predominated
--the spirit of the Tarquins and the Caesars, between whom he forms
a connecting link in that five hundred years' interregnum of
extraordinary deeds and ordinary men. So long as Appius Claudius took
an active part in public life, in his official conduct as well as his
general carriage he disregarded laws and customs on all hands with the
hardihood and sauciness of an Athenian; till, after having long
retired from the political stage, the blind old man, returning as it
were from the tomb at the decisive Moment, overcame king Pyrrhus in
the senate, and first formally and solemnly proclaimed the complete
sovereignty of Rome over Italy.(53) But the gifted man came too early
or too late; the gods made him blind on account of his untimely
wisdom. It was not individual genius that ruled in Rome and through
Rome in Italy; it was the one immoveable idea of a policy--propagated
from generation to generation in the senate--with the leading maxims
of which the sons of the senators became already imbued, when in the
company of their fathers they went to the council and there at the
door of the hall listened to the wisdom of the men whose seats they
were destined at some future time to fill. Immense successes were
thus obtained at an immense price; for Nike too is followed by her
Nemesis. In the Roman commonwealth there was no special dependence
on any one man, either on soldier or on general, and under the
rigid discipline of its moral police all the idiosyncrasies of human
character were extinguished. Rome reached a greatness such as no other
state of antiquity attained; but she dearly purchased her greatness at
the sacrifice of the graceful variety, of the easy abandon and of
the inward freedom of Hellenic life.




Notes for Book II Chapter VIII


1. I. XI. Punishment of Offenses against Order

2. II. I. Right of Appeal

3. II. III. The Senate, Its Composition

4. II. I. Law and Edict

5. II. III. Censorship, the Magistrates, Partition and Weakening of
the Consular Powers

6. II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes

7. I. VI. Class of --Metoeci-- Subsisting by the Side of the Community

8. I. V. The Housefather and His Household, note

9. II. III. Praetorship

10. II. III. Praetorship, II. V. Revision of the Municipal
Constitutions, Police Judges

11. The view formerly adopted, that these -tres viri- belonged to the
earliest period, is erroneous, for colleges of magistrates with odd
numbers are foreign to the oldest state-arrangements (Chronol. p. 15,
note 12). Probably the well-accredited account, that they were first
nominated in 465 (Liv. Ep. 11), should simply be retained, and the
otherwise suspicious inference of the falsifier Licinius Macer (in
Liv. vii. 46), which makes mention of them before 450, should be
simply rejected. At first undoubtedly the -tres viri- were nominated
by the superior magistrates, as was the case with most of the later
-magistratus minores-; the Papirian -plebiscitum-, which transferred
the nomination of them to the community (Festus, -v. sacramentum-,
p. 344, Niall.), was at any rate not issued till after the institution
of the office of -praetor peregrinus-, or at the earliest towards the
middle of the sixth century, for it names the praetor -qui inter jus
cives ius dicit-.

12. II. VII. Subject Communities

13. This inference is suggested by what Livy says (ix. 20) as to the
reorganization of the colony of Antium twenty years after it was
founded; and it is self-evident that, while the Romans might very
well impose on the inhabitant of Ostia the duty of settling all his
lawsuits in Rome, the same course could not be followed with townships
like Antium and Sena.

14. II. I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers

15. People are in the habit of praising the Romans as a nation
specially privileged in respect to jurisprudence, and of gazing with
wonder on their admirable law as a mystical gift of heaven; presumably
by way of specially excusing themselves for the worthlessness of
their own legal system. A glance at the singularly fluctuating and
undeveloped criminal law of the Romans might show the untenableness
of ideas so confused even to those who may think the proposition too
simple, that a sound people has a sound law, and a morbid people an
unsound. Apart from the more general political conditions on which
jurisprudence also, and indeed jurisprudence especially, depends, the
causes of the excellence of the Roman civil law lie mainly in two
features: first, that the plaintiff and defendant were specially
obliged to explain and embody in due and binding form the grounds of
the demand and of the objection to comply with it; and secondly, that
the Romans appointed a permanent machinery for the edictal development
of their law, and associated it immediately with practice. By the
former the Romans precluded the pettifogging practices of advocates,
by the latter they obviated incapable law-making, so far as such
things can be prevented at all; and by means of both in conjunction
they satisfied, as far as is possible, the two conflicting
requirements, that law shall constantly be fixed, and that it
shall constantly be in accordance with the spirit of the age.

16. II. II. Relation of the Tribune to the Consul

17. V. V. The Hegemony of Rome over Latium Shaken and Re-established

18. Venus probably first appears in the later sense as Aphrodite on
occasion of the dedication of the temple consecrated in this year
(Liv. x. 31; Becker, Topographie, p. 472).

19. II. III. Intrigues of the Nobility

20. I. VI. Organization of the Army

21. II. III. Increasing Powers of the Burgesses

22. I. VI. the Five Classes

23. According to Roman tradition the Romans originally carried
quadrangular shields, after which they borrowed from the Etruscans the
round hoplite shield (-clupeus-, --aspis--), and from the Samnites the
later square shield (-scutum-, --thureos--), and the javelin (-veru-)
(Diodor. Vat. Fr. p. 54; Sallust, Cat. 51, 38; Virgil, Aen. vii. 665;
Festus, Ep. v. Samnites, p. 327, Mull.; and the authorities cited in
Marquardt, Handb. iii. 2, 241). But it may be regarded as certain that
the hoplite shield or, in other words, the tactics of the Doric
phalanx were imitated not from the Etruscans, but directly from the
Hellenes, As to the -scutum-, that large, cylindrical, convex leather
shield must certainly have taken the place of the flat copper
-clupeus-, when the phalanx was broken up into maniples; but the
undoubted derivation of the word from the Greek casts suspicion on the
derivation of the thing itself from the Samnites. From the Greeks the
Romans derived also the sling (-funda- from --sphendone--). (like
-fides- from --sphion--),(I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences).
The pilum was considered by the ancients as quite a Roman invention.