P. G. Wodehouse - "A Man of Means"

Thomas Dixon - "The One Woman"

Bertrand Russell - "Political Ideals"

Louisa May Alcott - "A Modern Cinderella"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

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PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




The abandonment of military duty by the Roman people had, among other
things, made slavery more immoral than ever, because there was no longer
any semblance of a division of labour: the master could no longer be
said to defend the slave in war while the slave supported him by labour
at home. Becoming more immoral, slavery became more cruel. The six
thousand crosses erected on the road from Capua to Rome after the
Servile War were the terrible proof.

As to the existence of an oligarchy in the bosom of the dominant
republic, this would in itself have been no great evil to the subject
world, to which it mattered little whether its tyrants were a hundred or
a hundred thousand; just as to the unenfranchised in modern communities
it matters little whether the enfranchised class be large or small. In
fact, the broader the basis of a tyranny, the more fearless and
unscrupulous, generally speaking, the tyranny is.

We need not overstate the case. If we do we shall tarnish the laurels of
Caesar, who would have shown no genius in killing the republic had the
republic been already dead. There was still respect for the law and the
constitution. Pompey's hesitation when supreme power was within his
grasp, Caesar's own pause at the Rubicon, are proofs of it. The civil
wars of Marius and Sulla had fearfully impaired, in the eyes of Romans,
but they had not utterly destroyed, the majesty of Rome. There were
still great characters--characters which you may dislike, but of which
you can never rationally speak with contempt--and there must have been
some general element of worth in which these characters were formed. If
the recent administration of the Senate had not been glorious, still,
from a Roman point of view, it had not been disastrous: the revolt of
the slaves and the insurrection in Spain had been quelled; Mithridates
had been conquered; the pirates, though for a time their domination
accused the feebleness of the government, had at length been put down.
The only great military calamity of recent date was the defeat of
Crassus, whose unprovoked and insane invasion of Parthia was the error,
not of the Senate, but of the Triumvirate. Legions were forthcoming for
the conquest of Gaul, and a large reserve of treasure was found in the
sacred treasure-house when it was broken open by Caesar. Bad governors of
provinces, Verres, Fonteius, Gabinius, were impeached and punished.
Lucullus, autocrat and voluptuary as he was, governed his province well.
So did Cicero, if we may take his own word for it. We may, at all
events, take his own word for this, that he was anxious to be thought to
have ruled with purity and justice, which proves that purity and justice
were not quite out of fashion. The old Roman spirit still struggled
against luxury, and we find Cicero suffering from indigestion, caused by
a supper of vegetables at the house of a wealthy friend, whose excellent
cook had developed all the resources of gastronomic art in struggling
with the restrictions imposed by a sumptuary law. There was intellectual
life, and all the civilized tastes and half-moral qualities which the
existence of intellectual life implies. In spite of the sanguinary
anarchy which often broke out in the Roman streets, Cicero, the most
cultivated and the least combative of men, when in exile or in his
province, sighs for the capital as a Frenchman sighs for Paris. In
short, if we consider the case fairly, we shall admit, I believe, that,
besides the force of memory and of old allegiance, there was enough of
worth and of apparent hope left, not only to excuse republican
illusions, but probably to make it a duty to try the issue with fate. I
say probably, and, after all, how can we presume to speak with certainty
of a situation so distant from us in time, and so imperfectly recorded?

The great need of the world was public virtue--the spirit of self-
sacrifice for the common good. This the empire could not possibly call
into being. The public virtue of the ancient world resided in the
nationalities which the conquering republic had broken up, and of which
the empire only sealed the doom. The empire could never call forth even
the lowest form of public virtue, loyalty to the hereditary right of a
royal family, because the empire never presented itself as a right, but
merely as a personal power. The idea of legitimacy, I apprehend never
connected itself with these dynasts who were, in fact, a series of
usurpers, veiling their usurpation under republican forms. When the
spirit which leads man to sacrifice himself to the good of the community
appeared again it appeared in associations and notably in one great
association formed not by the empire but independently of it in
antagonism to its immorality, and in spite of its persecutions.
Accidentally the empire assisted the extension of the great Christian
association by completing the overthrow of the national religions, but
the main part of this work had been done by the republic and it was the
merit neither of the republic nor of the empire.

It is said with confidence that the empire vastly improved the
government of the provinces, and that on this account it was a great
blessing to the world. I do not believe that any nation had then
attained, I do not believe that any nation has now attained, and I doubt
whether any nation ever will attain, such a point of morality as to be
able to govern other nations for the benefit of the governed. I will say
nothing about our Christian policy in India, but let those who rate
French morality so highly, consider what French tutelage is to the
people of Algeria. But supposing the task undertaken, the question which
is the best organ of imperial government--an assembly or an autocrat--is
a curious one. I am disposed to think that, taking the average of
assemblies and the average of autocrats, there is more hope in the
assembly, because in the assembly opinion must have some force. The
autocrat is in a certain sense, raised above the dominant nation and its
interests, but, after all, he is one of that nation, he lives in it, and
subsists by its support. Even in the time of Augustus, if we may trust
Dion Cassius Licinius the Governor of Gaul, was guilty of corruptions
and peculations curiously resembling those of Verres, from whom he seems
to have borrowed the device of tampering with the calendar for the
purpose of fiscal fraud, and when the provinces complained, the Emperor
hushed up the matter, partly to avoid scandal, partly because Licinius
was cunning enough to pretend that his peculations had been intended to
cut the sinews of revolt, and that his spoils were reserved for the
imperial exchequer. The rebellions of Vindex and Civilis seem to prove
that even Caesar's favourite province was not happy. Spain was
misgoverned by the deputies both of Julius and Augustus. In Britain, the
history of the revolt of the Iceni shews that neither the extortions of
Roman usurers, nor the brutalities of Roman officers, had ended with the
republic. The blood tax of the conscription appears also to have been
cruelly exacted. The tribute of largesses and shows which the empire,
though supposed to be lifted high above all partialities, paid to the
Roman populace, was drawn almost entirely from the provinces. Emperors
who coined money with the tongue of the informer and the sword of the
executioner, were not likely to abstain from selling governorships; and,
in fact, Seneca intimates that under bad emperors governorships were
sold. Of course, the tyranny was felt most at Rome, where it was
present; but when Caligula or Caracalla made a tour in the provinces, it
was like the march of the pestilence. The absence of a regular
bureaucracy, practically controlling, as the Russian bureaucracy does,
the personal will of the Emperor, must have made government better under
Trajan, but much worse under Nero. The aggregation of land in the hands
of a few great land-holders evidently continued, and under this system
the garden of Italy became a desert. The decisive fact, however, is that
the provinces decayed, and that when the barbarians arrived, all power
of resistance was gone. That the empire was consciously levelling and
cosmopolitan, surely cannot be maintained. Actium was a Roman victory
over the gods of the nations. Augustus, who must have known something
about the system, avowedly aimed at restoring the number, the purity,
the privileged exclusiveness of the dominant race. His legislation was
an attempt to regenerate old Rome; and the political odes of the court
poet are full of that purpose. That the empire degraded all that had
once been noble in Rome is true; but the degradation of what had once
been noble in Rome was not the regeneration of humanity. The vast slave
population was no more elevated by the ascendency of the freedmen of the
imperial household than the female sex was elevated by the ascendancy of
Messalina.

That intellect declined under the emperors, and that the great writers
of its earlier period, Tacitus included, were really legacies of the
Republic, cannot be denied; and surely it is a pregnant fact. The empire
is credited with Roman law. But the Roman law was ripe for codification
in the time of the first Caesar. The leading principles of the civil law
seem by that time to have been in existence. Unquestionably the great
step had been taken of separating law as a science from consecrated
custom, and of calling into existence regular law courts and what was
tantamount to a legal profession. The mere evolution of the system from
its principles required no transcendant effort; and the idea of
codification must have been something less than divine, or it could not
have been compassed by the intellect of Justinian. The criminal law of
the empire, with its arbitrary courts, its secret procedure, its elastic
law of treason, and its practice of torture, was the scourge of Europe
till it was encountered and overthrown by the jury system, a
characteristic offspring of the Teutonic mind.

Tolerant the empire was, at least if you did not object to having the
statue of Caligula set up in your Holy of Holies, and this toleration
fostered the growth of a new religion. But it is needless to say that,
in this respect, the politicians of the empire only inherited the
negative virtue of those of the republic.

As to private morality, we may surely trust the common authorities--
Juvenal, Suetonius, Petronius Arbiter--supported as they are by the
evidence of the museums. There was one family, at least, whose colossal
vices and crimes afforded a picture in the deepest sense tragic,
considering their tremendous effect on the lot and destinies of
humanity.

It is a glorious dream, this of an autocrat, the elect of humanity,
raised above all factions and petty interests, armed with absolute power
to govern well, agreeing exactly with all our ideas, giving effect to
all our schemes of beneficence, and dealing summarily with our
opponents; but it does not come through the "horngate" of history, at
least not of the history of the Roman empire.

The one great service which the empire performed to humanity was this:
it held together, as nothing else could have held together, the nations
of the civilized world, and thus rendered possible a higher unity of
mankind.

I ventured to note, as one of the sources of illusion, a somewhat
exaggerated estimate of the amount and value of the Roman element
transfused by the empire into modern civilization. The theory of
continuity, suggested by the discoveries of physical science, is
prevailing also in history. A historical theory is to me scientific, not
because it is suggested by physical science, but because it fits the
historical facts. It may be true that there are no cataclysms in
history, but still there are great epochs. In fact, there are great
epochs, even in the natural history of the world; there were periods at
which organization and life began to exist. There may have been a time
at which a still further effort was made, and spiritual life also was
brought into being. Things which do not come suddenly or abruptly, may
nevertheless be new. A great sensation has been created by an article in
the _Quarterly_, on "The Talmud," which purports to shew that the
teachings of Christianity were, in fact, only those of Pharisaism. The
organ of orthodoxy, in publishing that article, was rather like our
great mother Eve in Milton, who "knew not eating death." But after all,
Pharisaism crucified Christianity, and probably it was not for
plagiarism. Supposing we adopt the infiltration theory of the Barbarian
conquests, and discard that of a sudden deluge of invasion, it remains
certain, unless all contemporary writers were much mistaken, that some
very momentous change did, after all, occur. Catholicism and Feudalism
were the life of the Middle Ages. Catholicism, though it had grown up
under the Empire, and at last subjugated it, was not of it. As to
Feudalism, it is possible, no doubt, to find lands held on condition of
military service under the Roman empire as well as under the Ottoman
empire, and in other military states. But is it possible to find
anything like the social hierarchy of Feudalism, its code of mutual
rights and duties, or the political and social characters which it
formed?

In France and Spain, much of the Roman province survived, but in
England, not the least influential of the group of modern nations, it
was, as we have every reason to believe, completely erased by the Saxon
invaders, who came fresh from the seats of their barbarism, hating
cities and city life, and ignorant of the majesty of Rome. If a Roman
element afterwards found its way into England with the Norman conquest,
it was rather ecclesiastical than imperial, and those who brought it
were Scandinavians to the core. Alfred had been at Rome in his boyhood,
it is true, and may have brought away some ideas of central dominion;
but his laws open with a long quotation, not from the Pandects, but from
the New Testament--his character is altogether that of a Christian, not
of a Roman ruler, and if he had any political model before him, it was,
probably, at least as much the Hebrew monarchy as the military despotism
of the Caesars. Many of the Roman cities remained, and with them their
municipal governments, and hence it is assumed that municipal government
altogether is Roman. But there was a municipal government in the Saxon
capital, and evidently there must be wherever large cities exist with
any degree of independence. The Roman law was, at all events so far lost
in the early part of the Middle Ages when Christendom was in process of
formation that the study of it afterwards seemed new. Roman literature
influenced that of mediaeval Christendom down to about the end of the
twelfth century. Our writers of the time of Henry II. compose in half
classical Latin and affect classical elegancies of style. But then comes
a philosophy which in spite of its worship of Aristotle is essentially
an original creation of the mediaeval and Catholic mind couched in a
language Latin indeed but almost as remote from classical Latin as
German itself: the tongue in truth of a new intellectual world. Open
Aquinas and ask yourself how much is left of the language or the mind of
Rome. The eye of the antiquary sees the Basilica in the Cathedral, but
what essential resemblance does the Roman place of judicature and
business bear to that marvellous and fantastic poetry of religion
writing its hymns in stone? In the same manner the Roman _castra_
are traceable in the form as well as the designation of the mediaeval
_castella_. But what resemblance did the feudal militia bear to the
legionaries? And what became of the Roman art of war till it was revived
by Gustavus Adolphus? The outward mould of Christendom the Roman empire
was and that it was so gives it great dignity and interest, but it was
no more. The life came from the German forest the life of life from the
peasantry of Galilee the least Romanized perhaps of the populations
beneath the sway of Rome.

The founder of the Roman empire was a very great man. With such genius
and such fortune it is not surprising that he should be made an idol. In
intellectual stature he was at least an inch higher than his fellows
which is in itself enough to confound all our notions of right and
wrong. He had the advantage of being a statesman before he was a soldier
whereas Napoleon was a soldier before he was a statesman. His ambition
coincided with the necessity of the world which required to be held
together by force, and therefore his empire endured for four hundred, or
if we include its eastern offset, for fourteen hundred years, while that
of Napoleon crumbled to pieces in four. But unscrupulous ambition was
the root of his character. It was necessary in fact to enable him to
trample down the respect for legality which still hampered other men. To
connect him with any principle seems to me impossible. He came forward,
it is true, as the leader of what is styled the democratic party, and in
that sense the empire which he founded may be called democratic. But to
the gamblers who brought their fortunes to that vast hazard table, the
democratic and aristocratic parties were merely _rouge_ and
_noir_. The social and political equity, the reign of which we
desire to see was, in truth, unknown to the men of Caesar's time. It is
impossible to believe that there was an essential difference of
principle between one member of the triumvirate and another. The great
adventurer had begun by getting deeply into debt, and had thus in fact
bound himself to overthrow the republic. He fomented anarchy to prepare
the way for his dictatorship. He shrank from no accomplice however
tainted, not even from Catiline; from no act however profligate or even
inhuman. Abusing his authority as a magistrate, for party purposes, he
tries to put to a cruel and ignominious death Rabirius, an aged and
helpless man, for an act done in party warfare thirty years before. The
case of Vettius is less clear, but Dr. Mommsen, at all events, seems to
have little doubt that Caesar was privy to the subornation of this
perjurer, and when his perjuries had broken down, to his assassination.
Dr. Mommsen owns that there was a dark period in the life of the great
man; in that darkness it could scarcely be expected that the Republicans
should see light.

The noblest feature in Caesar's character was his clemency. But we are
reminded that it was ancient, not modern clemency, when we find numbered
among the signal instances of it his having cut the throats of the
pirates before he hanged them, and his having put to death without
torture (_simplici morte punivit_) a slave suspected of conspiring
against his life. Some have gone so far as to speak of him as the
incarnation of humanity. But where in the whole history of Roman
conquest will you find a more ruthless conqueror? A million of Gauls, we
are told, perished by the sword. Multitudes were sold into slavery. The
extermination of the Eburones went to the verge even of ancient license.
The gallant Vercingetorix, who had fallen into Caesar's hands under
circumstances which would have touched any but a depraved heart, was
kept by him a captive for six years, and butchered in cold blood on the
day of the triumph. The sentiment of humanity was at that time
undeveloped. Be it so, but then we must not call Caesar the incarnation
of humanity.

Vast plans are ascribed to Caesar at the time of his death, and it seems
to be thought that a world of hopes for humanity perished when he fell.
But if he had lived and acted for another century what could he have
done with those moral and political materials but found what he did
found--a military and sensualist empire? A multitude of projects are
attributed to him by writers who we must remember are late and who make
him ride a fairy charger with feet like the hands of a man. Some of
these projects are really great, such as the codification of the law and
measures for the encouragement of intellect and science; others are
questionable, such as the restoration of commercial cities from which
commerce had retired; others, great works to be accomplished by an
unlimited command of men and money, are the common dreams of every
Nebuchadnezzar. What we know if we know anything of his intentions is
that he was about to set out on a campaign against the Parthians in
whose plains this prototype of Napoleon might perhaps have found a
torrid Moscow. No great advance of humanity can take place without a
great moral effort excited by higher moral desires. The masters of the
legions can only set in action by their fiat material forces. Even these
they often misdirect; but if the empire could have given every man
Nero's golden house the inhabitants might still have been as unhappy as
Nero.

It is not doubtful that Caesar was a type of the sensuality of his age.
His worshippers even feel it necessary to gird at characters deficient
in sensual passion with a friskiness which is a little amusing when you
connect it with the spectacles and the blameless life of a learned
professor. So gifted a nature will absorb a good deal of mere sensual
vice, it is true, but a sensualist could hardly be a pure and noble
organ of humanity. In this I have the Positivists with me. Even in
Caesar's lifetime the world had a taste of the vicissitudes of empire
while he was revelling in the palace of Cleopatra and leaving affairs to
Antony and Dolabella. Perhaps the satiety of the voluptuary had
something to do with the recklessness with which at the last he
neglected to guard his life. He was the greatest patron of gladiatorial
shows and signalized his accession to power by magnificent scenes of
carnage in the arena--a strange dawn for the day of a new civilization.
Must we not a little doubt the consistency of his policy and even his
insight when we find him after all this enacting sumptuary laws?

Still Caesar was a very great man and he played a dazzling part, as all
men do who come just at the fall of an old system, when society is as
clay in the hands of the potter, and found a new system in its place,
while the less dazzling task of making the new system work, by probity
and industry, and of restoring the shattered allegiance of a people to
its institutions, descends upon unlaurelled heads. But that the men of
his time were bound to recognise in him a Messiah, to use the phrase of
the Emperor of the French, and that those who opposed him were Jews
crucifying their Saviour, is an impression which I venture to think will
in time subside. No golden scales were hung out in heaven to shew the
republicans that the balance of Divine will had turned, and that their
duty was submission. "Momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum--" The only
sign vouchsafed to them was the conversion of an unprincipled debauchee.

They have, therefore, a fair claim to be judged each upon the merits of
his case, and not in the lump as enemies of the human race; and to judge
them fairly is a good exercise in historical morality. The three
principal names in the party are those of Cato, Cicero, and Marcus
Brutus. Pompey, though the nominal chief of the republicans, may rather,
as Dr Mommsen truly says, be called the first military monarch of Rome.
There is a vigorous portrait of him, from the republican point of view,
by Lucan, who, though detestable as an epic poet, sometimes in his
political passages, and especially in his characters, shews himself the
countryman of Tacitus. Pompey is there described with truth as combining
the desire of supreme power with a lingering respect for the
constitution. The great aristocrat is painted as simple in his habits of
life, and his household as uncorrupted by the fortunes of its lord--the
last relics of the control imposed by the spirit of the republic on
private luxury, which was soon to be released by the Empire from all
restraint and carried to the most revolting height.

Marcus Cato was the one man whom, living and dead, Caesar evidently
dreaded. The Dictator even assailed his memory in a brace of pamphlets
entitled Anti-Cato, of the quality of which we have one or two
specimens, in Plutarch, from which we should infer that they were
scurrilous and slanderous to the last degree; a proof that even Caesar
could feel fear, and that in Caesar, too, fear was mean. Dr Mommsen
throws himself heartily into Caesar's antipathy, and can scarcely speak
of Cato without something like loss of temper. The least uncivil thing
which he says of him, is that he was a Don Quixote, with Favonius for
his Sancho. The phrase is not a happy one, since Sancho is not the
caricature but the counterfoil of Don Quixote; Don Quixote being spirit
without sense and Sancho sense without spirit. Imperialism, if it could
see itself, is in fact a world of Sanchos and it would not be the less
so if every Sancho of the number were master of the whole of physical
science, and used it to cook his food. Of the two court poets of Caesar's
successor, one makes Cato preside over the spirits of the good in the
Elysian fields, while the other speaks with respect, at all events, of
the soul which remained unconquered in a conquered world--"Et cuneta
terrarum subacta praeter atrocem animum Catonis." Paterculus, an officer
of Tiberius and a thorough Caesarian, calls Cato a man of ideal virtue
("homo virtuti simillimus") who did right not for appearance sake, but
because it was not in his nature to do wrong. When the victor is thus
overawed by the shade of the vanquished, the vanquished can hardly have
been a "fool." Contemporaries may be mistaken as to the merits of a
character, but they cannot well be mistaken as to the space which it
occupied in their own eyes. Sallust, the partizan of Marius and Caesar,
who had so much reason to hate the senatorial party, speaks of Caesar and
Cato as the two mighty opposites of his time, and in an elaborate
parallel ascribes to Caesar the qualities which secure the success of the
adventurer; to Cato those which make up the character of the patriot. It
is a mistake to regard Cato the younger as merely an unseasonable
repetition of Cato the elder. His inspiration came not from a Roman, but
from a Greek school, which, with all its errors and absurdities, and in
spite of the hypocrisy of many of its professors, really aimed highest
in the formation of character; and the practical teachings and
aspirations of which, embodied in the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius, it
is impossible to study without profound respect for the force of moral
conception and the depth of moral insight which they sometimes display.
Cato went to Greece to sit at the feet of a Greek teacher in a spirit
very different from the national pride of his ancestor. It is this which
makes his character interesting: it was an attempt at all events to
grasp and hold fast a high rule of life in an age when the whole moral
world was sinking in a vortex of scoundrelism, and faith in morality,
public or private, had been lost. Of course the character is formal, and
in some respects even grotesque. But you may trace formalism, if you
look closely enough, in every life led by a rule; in everything in fact
between the purest spiritual impulse on one side and abandoned
sensuality on the other.