It is easier to explain Rome’s fall than to account for her long survival. This is the essential accomplishment of Rome—that having won the Mediterranean world she adopted its culture, gave it order, prosperity, and peace for 200 years, held back the tide of barbarism for two centuries more, and transmitted the classic heritage to the West before she died.
Rome has had no rival in the art of government. The Roman state committed a thousand political crimes; it built its edifice upon a selfish oligarchy and an obscurantist priesthood; it achieved a democracy of freemen, and then destroyed it with corruption and violence; it exploited its conquests to support a parasitic Italy, which, when it could no longer exploit, collapsed. Here and there, in East and West, it created a desert and called it peace. But amid all this evil it formed a majestic system of law which through nearly all Europe gave security to life and property, incentive and continuity to industry, from the Decemvirs to Napoleon. It molded a government of separated legislative and executive powers whose checks and balances inspired the makers of constitutions as late as revolutionary America and France. For a time it united monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy so successfully as to win the applause of philosophers, historians, subjects, and enemies. It gave municipal institutions, and for a long period municipal freedom, to half a thousand cities. It administered its Empire at first with greed and cruelty, then with such tolerance and essential justice that the great realm has never again known a like content. It made the desert blossom with civilization, and atoned for its sins with the miracle of a lasting peace. Today our highest labors seek to revive the Pax Romana for a disordered world.
Within that unsurpassed framework Rome built a culture Greek in origin, Roman in application and result. She was too engrossed in government to create as bountifully in the realms of the mind as Greece had done; but she absorbed with appreciation, and preserved with tenacity, the technical, intellectual, and artistic heritage that she had received from Carthage and Egypt, Greece and the East. She made no advance in science, and no mechanical improvements in industry, but she enriched the world with a commerce moving over secure seas, and a network of enduring roads that became the arteries of a lusty life. Along those roads, and over a thousand handsome bridges, there passed to the medieval and modern worlds the ancient techniques of tillage, handicraft, and art, the science of monumental building, the processes of banking and investment, the organization of medicine and military hospitals, the sanitation of cities, and many varieties of fruit and nut trees, of agricultural or ornamental plants, brought from the East to take new root in the West. Even the secret of central heating came from the warm south to the cold north. The south has created the civilizations, the north has conquered and destroyed or borrowed them.
Rome did not invent education, but she developed it on a scale unknown before, gave it state support, and formed the curriculum that persisted till our harassed youth. She did not invent the arch, the vault, or the dome, but she used them with such audacity and magnificence that in some fields her architecture has remained unequaled; and all the elements of the medieval cathedral were prepared in her basilicas. She did not invent the sculptural portrait, but she gave it a realistic power rarely reached by the idealizing Greeks. She did not invent philosophy, but it was in Lucretius and Seneca that Epicureanism and Stoicism found their most finished form. She did not invent the types of literature, not even the satire; but who could adequately record the influence of Cicero on oratory, the essay, and prose style, of Virgil on Dante, Tasso, Milton, … of Livy and Tacitus on the writing of history, of Horace and Juvenal on Dryden, Swift, and Pope?
Her language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man’s world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the eighteenth century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the Romance languages (regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thousand times a day.
When Christianity conquered Rome the ecclesiastical structure of the pagan church, the title and vestments of the pontifex maximus, the worship of the Great Mother and a multitude of comforting divinities, the sense of supersensible presences everywhere, the joy or solemnity of old festivals, and the pageantry of immemorial ceremony, passed like maternal blood into the new religion, and captive Rome captured her conqueror. The reins and skills of government were handed down by a dying empire to a virile papacy; the lost power of the broken sword was rewon by the magic of the consoling word; the armies of the state were replaced by the missionaries of the Church moving in all directions along the Roman roads; and the revolted provinces, accepting Christianity, again acknowledged the sovereignty of Rome. Through the long struggles of the Age of Faith the authority of the ancient capital persisted and grew, until in the Renaissance the classic culture seemed to rise from the grave, and the immortal city became once more the center and summit of the world’s life and wealth and art. When, in 1936, Rome celebrated the 2689th anniversary of her foundation, she could look back upon the most impressive continuity of government and civilization in the history of mankind. May she rise again.
THANK YOU, PATIENT READER.
FIG. 1—Caesar (black basalt) Altes Museum, Berlin
FIG. 2—An Etruscan Tomb at Cervetri
FIG. 3—Head of a Woman From an Etruscan tomb at Corneto
FIG. 4—Apollo of Veii Villa di Papa Giulio, Rome
FIG. 5—The Orator Museo Archeologico, Florence
FIG. 6—Pompey Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
FIG. 7—Caesar Museo Nazionale, Naples
FIG. 8—The Young Augustus Vatican, Rome
FIG. 9—Augustus Imperator, from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta Vatican, Rome
FIG. 10—Vespasian Museo Nazionale, Naples
FIG. 11—Relief from the Arch of Titus
FIG. 12—The Roman Forum
FIG. 13—Temple of Castor and Pollux Roman Forum
FIG. 14—Two Roman Mosaics Top, Museo Nazionale, Naples. Bottom, Capitoline Museum, Rome
FIG. 15—The Gemma Augusta Vienna Museum
FIG. 16—An Arretine Vase From the Loeb Collection, Harvard University
FIG. 17—The Portland Vase British Museum
FIG. 18—Frieze from the Altar of Peace Uffizi Gallery, Florence
FIG. 19—Frieze of Tellus from the Altar of Peace Uffizi Gallery, Florence
FIG. 20—Portrait of a Young Girl Museo delle Terme, Rome
FIG. 21—Clytie” British Museum
FIG. 22—“Spring” A Mural from Stabiae
FIG. 23—Details of Mural From the House of the Vettii, Pompeii
FIG. 24—Mural from the Villa Farnesina Museo delle Terme, Rome
FIG. 25—“Sappho” Museo Nazionale, Naples
FIG. 26—The Colosseum
FIG. 27—Interior of the Colosseum
FIG. 28—Roman Soldier and Dacian Relief from the Column of Trajan
FIG. 29—Antinoüs Museo Nazionale, Naples
FIG. 30—Altar Found at Ostia Museo delle Terme, Rome
FIG. 31—Arch of Trajan at Benevento
FIG. 32—Ruins of Timgad
FIG. 33—Pont du Gard at Nîmes
FIG. 34—Temple of Iuppiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek
FIG. 35—Temple of Venus or Baachus at Baalbek
FIG. 36—Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome
FIG. 37—Reconstruction of Interior of Baths of Caracalla
FIG. 38—Mithras and the Bull British Museum
FIG. 39—Sarcophagus of the Empress Helena
Vatican, Rome