The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Training of Youth
Sciences of General Culture at This Period
The training of youth followed, as may naturally be supposed,
the course of bilingual humane culture chalked out in the previous epoch,
and the general culture also of the Roman world conformed
more and more to the forms established for that purpose by the Greeks.
Even the bodily exercises advanced from ball-playing, running,
and fencing to the more artistically-developed Greek gymnastic contests;
though there were not yet any public institutions for gymnastics,
in the principal country-houses the palaestra was already to be found
by the side of the bath-rooms. The manner in which the cycle
of general culture had changed in the Roman world during the course
of a century, is shown by a comparison of the encyclopaedia of Cato(2)
with the similar treatise of Varro "concerning the school-sciences."
As constituent elements of non-professional culture, there appear in Cato
the art of oratory, the sciences of agriculture, of law, of war,
and of medicine; in Varro--according to probable conjecture--grammar,
logic or dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
music, medicine, and architecture. Consequently in the course
of the seventh century the sciences of war, jurisprudence,
and agriculture had been converted from general into professional
studies. On the other hand in Varro the Hellenic training of youth
appears already in all its completeness: by the side of the course
of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, which had been introduced
at an earlier period into Italy, we now find the course which had
longer remained distinctively Hellenic, of geometry, arithmetic,
astronomy, and music.(3) That astronomy more especially,
which ministered, in the nomenclature of the stars, to the thoughtless
erudite dilettantism of the age and, in its relations to astrology,
to the prevailing religious delusions, was regularly and zealously
studied by the youth in Italy, can be proved also otherwise;
the astronomical didactic poems of Aratus, among all the works
of Alexandrian literature, found earliest admittance into the instruction
of Roman youth. To this Hellenic course there was added the study
of medicine, which was retained from the older Roman instruction,
and lastly that of architecture--indispensable to the genteel Roman
of this period, who instead of cultivatingthe ground built
houses and villas.
Greek Instruction
Alexandrinism
In comparison with the previous epoch the Greek as well as
the Latin training improved in extent and in scholastic strictness
quite as much as it declined in purity and in refinement.
The increasing eagerness after Greek lore gave to instruction
of itself an erudite character. To explain Homer or Euripides
was after all no art; teachers and scholars found their account better
in handling the Alexandrian poems, which, besides, were in their spirit
far more congenial to the Roman world of that day than the genuine Greek
national poetry, and which, if they were not quite so venerable
as the Iliad, possessed at any rate an age sufficiently respectable
to pass as classics with schoolmasters. The love-poems of Euphorion,
the "Causes" of Callimachus and his "Ibis," the comically obscure
"Alexandra" of Lycophron contained in rich abundance rare vocables
(-glossae-) suitable for being extracted and interpreted,
sentences laboriously involved and difficult of analysis,
prolix digressions full of mystic combinations of antiquated myths,
and generally a store of cumbersome erudition of all sorts.
Instruction needed exercises more and more difficult; these productions,
in great part model efforts of schoolmasters, were excellently
adapted to be lessons for model scholars. Thus the Alexandrian poems
took a permanent place in Italian scholastic instruction,
especially as trial-themes, and certainly promoted knowledge,
although at the expense of taste and of discretion. The same unhealthy
appetite for culture moreover impelled the Roman youths to derive
their Hellenism as much as possible from the fountain-head. The courses
of the Greek masters in Rome sufficed only for a first start;
every one who wished to be able to converse heard lectures
on Greek philosophy at Athens, and on Greek rhetoric at Rhodes,
and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor,
where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still
to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts
had been continued, although after a mechanical fashion;
whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat
of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men
desirous of culture directed their travels.
Latin Instruction
The advance in Latin instruction was similar to that of Greek.
This in part resulted from the mere reflex influence of the Greek,
from which it in fact essentially borrowed its methods
and its stimulants. Moreover, the relations of politics, the impulse
to mount the orators' platform in the Forum which was imparted
by the democratic doings to an ever-widening circle, contributed
not a little to the diffusion and enhancement of oratorical exercises;
"wherever one casts his eyes," says Cicero, "every place is full
of rhetoricians." Besides, the writings of the sixth century,
the farther they receded into the past, began to be more decidedly
regarded as classical texts of the golden age of Latin literature,
and thereby gave a greater preponderance to the instruction
which was essentially concentrated upon them. Lastly the immigration
and spreading of barbarian elements from many quarters
and the incipient Latinizing of extensive Celtic and Spanish districts,
naturally gave to Latin grammar and Latin instruction a higher importance
than they could have had, so long as Latium only spoke Latin;
the teacher of Latin literature had from the outset a different
position in Comum and Narbo than he had in Praeneste and Ardea.
Taken as a whole, culture was more on the wane than on the advance.
The ruin of the Italian country towns, the extensive intrusion of foreign
elements, the political, economic, and moral deterioration of the nation,
above all, the distracting civil wars inflicted more injury
on the language than all the schoolmasters of the world could repair.
The closer contact with the Hellenic culture of the present,
the more decided influence of the talkative Athenian wisdom
and of the rhetoric of Rhodes and Asia Minor, supplied
to the Roman youth just the very elements that were most pernicious
in Hellenism. The propagandist mission which Latium undertook
among the Celts, Iberians, and Libyans--proud as the task was--
could not but have the like consequences for the Latin language
as the Hellenizing of the east had had for the Hellenic.
The fact that the Roman public of this period applauded
the well arranged and rhythmically balanced periods of the orator,
and any offence in language or metre cost the actor dear, doubtless
shows that the insight into the mother tongue which was the reflection
of scholastic training was becoming the common possession of an ever-
widening circle. But at the same time contemporaries capable
of judging complain that the Hellenic culture in Italy about 690
was at a far lower level than it had been a generation before;
that opportunities of hearing pure and good Latin were but rare,
and these chiefly from the mouth of elderly cultivated ladies;
that the tradition of genuine culture, the good old Latin mother wit,
the Lucilian polish, the cultivated circle of readers
of the Scipionic age were gradually disappearing. The circumstance
that the term -urbanitas-, and the idea of a polished national culture
which it expressed, arose during this period, proves, not that
it was prevalent, but that it was on the wane, and that people
were keenly alive to the absence of this -urbanitas- in the language
and the habits of the Latinized barbarians or barbarized Latins.
Where we still meet with the urbane tone of conversation, as in Varro's
Satires and Cicero's Letters, it is an echo of the old fashion
which was not yet so obsolete in Reate and Arpinum as in Rome.
Germs of State Training-Schools
Thus the previous culture of youth remained substantially unchanged,
except that--not so much from its own deterioration as
from the general decline of the nation--it was productive of less good
and more evil than in the preceding epoch. Caesar initiated
a revolution also in this department. While the Roman senate
had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture,
the government of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence
in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it
after the Hellenic fashion. If Caesar conferred the Roman franchise
on all teachers of the liberal sciences and all the physicians
of the capital, we may discover in this step a paving of the way
in some degree for those institutions in which subsequently
the higher bilingual culture of the youth of the empire
was provided for on the part of the state, and which form
the most significant expression of the new state of -humanitas-;
and if Caesar had further resolved on the establishment
of a public Greek and Latin library in the capital and had already
nominated the most learned Roman of the age, Marcus Varro,
as principal librarian, this implied unmistakeably the design
of connecting the cosmopolitan monarchy with cosmopolitan literature.
Language
The Vulgarism of Asia Minor
The development of the language during this period turned
on the distinction between the classical Latin of cultivated society
and the vulgar language of common life. The former itself
was a product of the distinctively Italian culture; even in the Scipionic
circle "pure Latin" had become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken,
no longer in entire naivete, but in conscious contradistinction
to the language of the great multitude. This epoch opens
with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which had hitherto
exclusively prevailed in the higher language of conversation
and accordingly also in literature--a reaction which had
inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction
of a similar nature in the language of Greece. Just about this time
the rhetor and romance-writer Hegesias of Magnesia and the numerous
rhetors and literati of Asia Minor who attached themselves to him
began to rebel against the orthodox Atticism. They demanded
full recognition for the language of life, without distinction,
whether the word or the phrase originated in Attica or in Caria
and Phrygia; they themselves spoke and wrote not for the taste
of learned cliques, but for that of the great public. There could not
be much objection to the principle; only, it is true, the result
could not be better than was the public of Asia Minor of that day,
which had totally lost the taste for chasteness and purity
of production, and longed only after the showy and brilliant.
To say nothing of the spurious forms of art that sprang
out of this tendency--especially the romance and the history assuming
the form of romance--the very style of these Asiatics was,
as may readily be conceived, abrupt and without modulation and finish,
minced and effeminate, full of tinsel and bombast, thoroughly vulgar
and affected; "any one who knows Hegesias," says Cicero,
"knows what silliness is."
Roman Vulgarism
Hortensius
Reaction
The Rhodian School
Yet this new style found its way also into the Latin world.
When the Hellenic fashionable rhetoric, after having at the close
of the previous epoch obtruded into the Latin instruction of youth,(4)
took at the beginning of the present period the final step and mounted
the Roman orators' platform in the person of Quintus Hortensius
(640-704), the most celebrated pleader of the Sullan age,
it adhered closely even in the Latin idiom to the bad Greek taste
of the time; and the Roman public, no longer having the pure
and chaste culture of the Scipionic age, naturally applauded
with zeal the innovator who knew how to give to vulgarism
the semblance of an artistic performance. This was of great importance.
As in Greece the battles of language were always waged at first
in the schools of the rhetoricians, so in Rome the forensic oration
to a certain extent even more than literature set the standard of style,
and accordingly there was combined, as it were of right,
with the leadership of the bar the prerogative of giving the tone
to the fashionable mode of speaking and writing. The Asiatic vulgarism
of Hortensius thus dislodged classicism from the Roman platform
and partly also from literature. But the fashion soon changed
once more in Greece and in Rome. In the former it was the Rhodian school
of rhetoricians, which, without reverting to all the chaste severity
of the Attic style, attempted to strike out a middle course between it
and the modern fashion: if the Rhodian masters were not too particular
as to the internal correctness of their thinking and speaking,
they at least insisted on purity of language and style, on the careful
selection of words and phrases, and the giving thorough effect
to the modulation of sentences.
Ciceronianism
In Italy it was Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who, after having
in his early youth gone along with the Hortensian manner,
was brought by hearing the Rhodian masters and by his own
more matured taste to better paths, and thenceforth addicted himself
to strict purity of language and the thorough periodic arrangement
and modulation of his discourse. The models of language, which,
in this respect he followed, he found especially in those circles
of the higher Roman society which had suffered but little or not at all
from vulgarism; and, as was already said, there were still such,
although they were beginning to disappear. The earlier Latin
and the good Greek literature, however considerable was the influence
of the latter more especially on the rhythm of his oratory,
were in this matter only of secondary moment: this purifying
of the language was by no means a reaction of the language of books
against that of conversation, but a reaction of the language
of the really cultivated against the jargon of spurious
and partial culture. Caesar, in the department of language
also the greatest master of his time, expressed the fundamental idea
of Roman classicism, when he enjoined that in speech and writing
every foreign word should be avoided, as rocks are avoided
by the mariner; the poetical and the obsolete word of the older
literature was rejected as well as the rustic phrase or that borrowed
from the language of common life, and more especially the Greek words
and phrases which, as the letters of this period show,
had to a very great extent found their way into conversational language.
Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism
of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance
to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon
to the model French of Moliere and Boileau; while the former classicism
had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were
caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing
beyond recovery. Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself.
With the leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste
passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious
authorship of the latter gave to this classicism--what it had
hitherto lacked--extensive prose texts. Thus Cicero became
the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism
attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist;
it was to the stylist Cicero, not to the author, still less
to the statesman, that the panegyrics--extravagant yet not made up
wholly of verbiage--applied, with which the most gifted representatives
of classicism, such as Caesar and Catullus, loaded him.
The New Roman Poetry
They soon went farther. What Cicero did in prose, was carried out
in poetry towards the end of the epoch by the new Roman school
of poets, which modelled itself on the Greek fashionable poetry,
and in which the man of most considerable talent was Catullus.
Here too the higher language of conversation dislodged the archaic
reminiscences which hitherto to a large extent prevailed
in this domain, and as Latin prose submitted to the Attic rhythm,
so Latin poetry submitted gradually to the strict or rather painful
metrical laws of the Alexandrines; e. g. from the time of Catullus,
it is no longer allowable at once to begin a verse and to close
a sentence begun in the verse preceding with a monosyllabic word
or a dissyllabic one not specially weighty.
Grammatical Science
At length science stepped in, fixed the law of language,
and developed its rule, which was no longer determined on the basis
of experience, but made the claim to determine experience.
The endings of declension, which hitherto had in part been variable,
were now to be once for all fixed; e. g. of the genitive and dative
forms hitherto current side by side in the so-called fourth declension
(-senatuis- and -senatus-, -senatui-, and -senatu-) Caesar recognized
exclusively as valid the contracted forms (-us and -u).
In orthography various changes were made, to bring the written
more fully into correspondence with the spoken language;
thus the -u in the middle of words like -maxumus- was replaced
after Caesar's precedent by -i; and of the two letters
which had become superfluous, -k and -q, the removal of the first
was effected, and that of the second was at least proposed.
The language was, if not yet stereotyped, in the course of becoming so;
it was not yet indeed unthinkingly dominated by rule, but it had already
become conscious of it. That this action in the department
of Latin grammar derived generally its spirit and method
from the Greek, and not only so, but that the Latin language was also
directly rectified in accordance with Greek precedent, is shown,
for example, by the treatment of the final -s, which till
towards the close of this epoch had at pleasure passed sometimes
as a consonant, sometimes not as one, but was treated by the new-
fashioned poets throughout, as in Greek, as a consonantal
termination. This regulation of language is the proper domain
of Roman classicism; in the most various ways, and for that very reason
all the more significantly, the rule is inculcated and the offence
against it rebuked by the coryphaei of classicism, by Cicero,
by Caesar, even in the poems of Catullus; whereas the older generation
expresses itself with natural keenness of feeling respecting
the revolution which had affected the field of language
as remorselessly as the field of politics.(5) But while the new
classicism--that is to say, the standard Latin governed by rule
and as far as possible placed on a parity with the standard Greek--
which arose out of a conscious reaction against the vulgarism
intruding into higher society and even into literature,
acquired literary fixity and systematic shape, the latter by no means
evacuated the field. Not only do we find it naively employed
in the works of secondary personages who have drifted into the ranks
of authors merely by accident, as in the account of Caesar's second
Spanish war, but we shall meet it also with an impress more or less
distinct in literature proper, in the mime, in the semi-romance,
in the aesthetic writings of Varro; and it is a significant
circumstance, that it maintains itself precisely in the most national
departments of literature, and that truly conservative men,
like Varro, take it into protection. Classicism was based
on the death of the Italian language as monarchy on the decline
of the Italian nation; it was completely consistent that the men,
in whom the republic was still living, should continue to give
to the living language its rights, and for the sake of its comparative
vitality and nationality should tolerate its aesthetic defects.
Thus then the linguistic opinions and tendencies of this epoch
are everywhere divergent; by the side of the old-fashioned poetry
of Lucretius appears the thoroughly modern poetry of Catullus,
by the side of Cicero's well-modulated period stands the sentence
of Varro intentionally disdaining all subdivision. In this field
likewise is mirrored the distraction of the age.
Literary Effort
Greek Literati in Rome
In the literature of this period we are first of all struck
by the outward increase, as compared with the former epoch,
of literary effort in Rome. It was long since the literary activity
of the Greeks flourished no more in the free atmosphere
of civic independence, but only in the scientific institutions
of the larger cities and especially of the courts. Left to depend
on the favour and protection of the great, and dislodged
from the former seats of the Muses(6) by the extinction
of the dynasties of Pergamus (621), Cyrene (658), Bithynia (679),
and Syria (690) and by the waning splendour of the court
of the Lagids--moreover, since the death of Alexander the Great,
necessarily cosmopolitan and at least quite as much strangers
among the Egyptians and Syrians as among the Latins--
the Hellenic literati began more and more to turn their eyes
towards Rome. Among the host of Greek attendants with which
the Roman of quality at this time surrounded himself, the philosopher,
the poet, and the memoir-writer played conspicuous parts
by the side of the cook, the boy-favourite, and the jester.
We meet already literati of note in such positions; the Epicurean
Philodemus, for instance, was installed as domestic philosopher
with Lucius Piso consul in 696, and occasionally edified the initiated
with his clever epigrams on the coarse-grained Epicureanism
of his patron. From all sides the most notable representatives
of Greek art and science migrated in daily-increasing numbers to Rome
where literary gains were now more abundant than anywhere else.
Among those thus mentioned as settled in Rome we find the physician
Asclepiades whom king Mithradates vainly endeavoured to draw away from it
into his service; the universalist in learning, Alexander of Miletus,
termed Polyhistor; the poet Parthenius from Nicaea in Bithynia;
Posidonius of Apamea in Syria equally celebrated as a traveller,
teacher, and author, who at a great age migrated in 703 from Rhodes
to Rome; and various others. A house like that of Lucius Lucullus
was a seat of Hellenic culture and a rendezvous for Hellenic literati
almost like the Alexandrian Museum; Roman resources and Hellenic
connoisseurship had gathered in these halls of wealth and science
an incomparable collection of statues and paintings of earlier
and contemporary masters, as well as a library as carefully selected
as it was magnificently fitted up, and every person of culture
and especially every Greek was welcome there--the master of the house
himself was often seen walking up and down the beautiful colonnade
in philological or philosophical conversation with one of his
learned guests. No doubt these Greeks brought along with their
rich treasures of culture their preposterousness and servility
to Italy; one of these learned wanderers for instance, the author
of the "Art of Flattery," Aristodemus of Nysa (about 700)
recommended himself to his masters by demonstrating that Homer
was a native of Rome!
Extent of the Literary Pursuits of the Romans
In the same measure as the pursuits of the Greek literati prospered
in Rome, literary activity and literary interest increased among
the Romans themselves. Even Greek composition, which the stricter
taste of the Scipionic age had totally set aside, now revived.
The Greek language was now universally current, and a Greek treatise
found a quite different public from a Latin one; therefore Romans
of rank, such as Lucius Lucullus, Marcus Cicero, Titus Atticus,
Quintus Scaevola (tribune of the people in 700), like the kings
of Armenia and Mauretania, published occasionally Greek prose
and even Greek verses. Such Greek authorship however by native Romans
remained a secondary matter and almost an amusement; the literary
as well as the political parties of Italy all coincided in adhering
to their Italian nationality, only more or less pervaded
by Hellenism. Nor could there be any complaint at least as to want
of activity in the field of Latin authorship. There was a flood
of books and pamphlets of all sorts, and above all of poems, in Rome.
Poets swarmed there, as they did only in Tarsus or Alexandria;
poetical publications had become the standing juvenile sin
of livelier natures, and even then the writer was reckoned fortunate
whose youthful poems compassionate oblivion withdrew from criticism.
Any one who understood the art, wrote without difficulty
at a sitting his five hundred hexameters in which no schoolmaster
found anything to censure, but no reader discovered anything to praise.
The female world also took a lively part in these literary pursuits;
the ladies did not confine themselves to dancing and music,
but by their spirit and wit ruled conversation and talked excellently
on Greek and Latin literature; and, when poetry laid siege
to a maiden's heart, the beleaguered fortress not seldom surrendered
likewise in graceful verses. Rhythms became more and more
the fashionable plaything of the big children of both sexes;
poetical epistles, joint poetical exercises and competitions
among good friends, were of common occurrence, and towards the end
of this epoch institutions were already opened in the capital,
at which unfledged Latin poets might learn verse-making for money.
In consequence of the large consumption of books the machinery
for the manufacture of copies was substantially perfected,
and publication was effected with comparative rapidity and cheapness;
bookselling became a respectable and lucrative trade, and the bookseller's
shop a usual meeting-place of men of culture. Reading had become
a fashion, nay a mania; at table, where coarser pastimes had not
already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one
who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library.
The superior officer was seen in the camp-tent with the obscene
Greek romance, the statesman in the senate with the philosophical
treatise, in his hands. Matters accordingly stood in the Roman state
as they have stood and will stand in every state where the citizens
read "from the threshold to the closet." The Parthian vizier
was not far wrong, when he pointed out to the citizens of Seleucia
the romances found in the camp of Crassus and asked them whether
they still regarded the readers of such books as formidable opponents.