Nationalism and Culture (70 page)

When from my service there Philippi summoned me homeward, Dispirited, wings clipped, robbed of the herds in my pastures, Yes, of the pastures themselves, then grim-poverty, shameless, Drove me to verse-making. Now that I have means to live by Where is there hemlock enough to cleanse me completely, If it should seem to me better to sleep than to make verses?

This peculiar confession of one of the greatest Roman poets, which is not wanting in inner tragedy, is characteristic of the conditions of the time. To worm into a poet's post was the dearest wish of a horde of hunger-driven beings who had acquired a more or less thorough education in Greek and now tried to find a market for it by reciting rhymed flatteries to the great for wages. In the Golden Age it was practically the profession of the poet to renounce his manhood and become a salaried flatterer of the rich and powerful. One need but peruse the repulsive adulation of their patrons by Martial and Statius to realize to what a state literature had

come in that age, when everything was for sale. It is significant that it was just the most horrible and cruel despots who were most glorified by their poets. Caesarism rested like a mountainous weight on the whole of public life J it transformed the nation into a horde of lackeys among whose leaders the poets took first place. The situation became ever more pitiful and revolting as the inner disruption under the shameless dominion of the Caesars progressed. Persius, Petronius, and especially Juvenal, have pictured for us the general moral foulness of their time. Juvenal in particular was a first-rate depicter of customs, and his satires, especially the sixth, display an actually uncanny power of description.

If one takes the literature of Rome as a whole, one comes to the conviction that it is poorer in independent productions than any other and cannot endure the slightest comparison with the rich and creative literature of the Hellenes. It is entirely dependent on the latter, and its representatives, with a very few exceptions, set themselves with a truly slavish diligence at the imitation of the Greeks. Even so splendid a work as the Golden Ass of Apuleius, which without doubt ranks among the proudest contributions of Roman authorship, would never have come into being without the intellectual stimulation and constructive power of the Greeks. The loveliest part of that work, the charming episode of Cupid and Psyche, shows this with the utmost clarity. Only in the writing of history, which appealed more to the practical Roman than did the flowery pomp of poetry, was a certain originality of presentation noticeable, especially when the writer was dealing with events within his own experience. But even here one must not overlook the fact that the "Roman idea" lay at the foundation of almost all of the writings.

In philosophy the Romans were even more dependent on the Greeks than in anything else. They enriched the world by not a single idea, but were content to pursue old lines of thought and to reproduce them in weakened form. And one must not think of the schools of the philosophers in Athens and other Grecian cities. Such phenomena were altogether unknown in Rome. Here no Socrates spoke publicly to all the citizens; philosophy was at home only in the palaces of the rich, for whom it was the fashion of the moment, as were art and literature. The patriots of the Old Roman party fought philosophy with the same virulence they had displayed toward Hellenic art. In 173 b.c. the adherents of the doctrines of Epicurus were expelled from Rome; twelve years later all philosophers and rhetoricians were banished from the capital, because there was recognized in their teachings a danger to the state. The penetration of Hellenism into Rome gave wider scope to philosophy, but its teachers were always regarded with a certain distrust, and persecutions of philosophers, especially of the Stoics, were carried on under almost all of the Roman emperors.

Of the philosophic systems of the Greeks only Epicurianism, Stoicism, and Skepticism found wide acceptance among the educated Romans. But the adherents of these doctrines did not enrich the concepts of the Greeks with any ideas of their own. When they attempted originality they lost themselves in a shallow eclecticism which entirely lacked inner force of conviction. There was a time when Cicero was honored as a profound thinker J today, it has long been recognized that he never produced a single original idea but confined himself to preparing the most superficial compilations conceivable from the works of Greek thinkers—many of whom were first thus made known to us, even if in greatly weakened form. Mauthner has rightly said: "Cicero would have no place in a history of philosophy, at the most only in a history of the history of philosophy or a history of philosophical terminology j he whose vanity was almost greater than his later fame had definitely committed himself to dependence on the Greeks—himself poor in thoughts, rich only in unminted words." ®

The illuminating didactic poem of Lucretius, De rerum natura ("Concerning the Nature of Things"), is without doubt a splendid presentation of the doctrines of Epicurus, but it is nothing more. This holds also for the line of thought of Pliny, Lucian and the other Roman Epicureans. Much the same may be said of the Roman Stoics j they likewise contributed to their doctrine no ideas of their own, and by far their greatest importance lay in the field of political life. Most of the satirists were found among the Stoics, and in Rome satire offered the only opportunity of hurling stones from concealment at the windows of the high-placed. The Stoics strove for a reform in social conditions j for this reason they sometimes drew upon themselves the wrath of the despots, which often expressed itself in rigorous persecutions. Many of them went pretty far in their ideas j for example, Seneca opposed slavery, and in many of his letters, especially in the nineteenth, reached genuinely socialistic conclusions. Of course we must not neglect to mention that one cannot very well harmonize Seneca's life with his teachings; he had to face in the Senate the accusation that he had accumulated his wealth (he left behind 300,000,000 sesterces, say about 15 million dollars) by wangling legacies and practicing the vilest usury.

There is no field of intellectual life in which the Romans distinguished themselves by originality and independence of thought. We must, therefore, count it as a special merit that they had such capacity for appropriating the discoveries and inventions of others and exploiting them for their own purposes. Their intellectual dependence on the Greeks appears clearly in every field of their scientific activity. At no point did they progress beyond the elementary foundations of Greek science; in many respects they fell far short even of this. This held good especially for their

^ Der Atheismus usw. Band I, p. 161.

astronomy and their conception of the structure of the universe. From the Alexandrians they took over the Ptolemaic system, by which the inspired conception of Aristarchus of Samos was pushed into the background for a whole thousand years until Copernicus led the human intellect back into the right path. Of course, in Rome, science, too, merely served the interests of the state. And in accord with this all education was also debased, reaching under the empire that state of insipid, outworn windiness that Schlosser has so strikingly depicted:

The universal regimentation of the intellect had expelled all vigor and naturalness from life; science was just the handmaid of vain and vulgar ends; the numerous schools, teachers and students were victims in equal degree of empty imagination, overbearing pride, false taste and lack of conviction. Behind the lauded elegance of conversation and the intellectual playing with concepts, ideas and information, lurked hardness of heart, emptiness of soul, selfishness of sentiment and extremely superficial understanding.

A people among whom political effort was rated much higher than any contribution of intellect, could achieve nothing different. Just as religion was to the Romans nothing but the epitome of spiritual bondage, so also in the state they revered the principle of political and social bondage which culminated in the complete subjection of man to the political machine. That the state idea, which with them rested from the very beginning on a military basis, gradually developed into Caesarism and reached its highest point in the elevation of the emperor to the station of an actual God, was the natural consequence of that strict authority principle which will submit to no examination and is inaccessible to every human approach. Rudolf von Jehering, the well-known law scholar, passed his judgment on the Romans in these words:

The Roman character with its virtues and its faults may be designated as a system of disciplined egoism. The chief principle underlying this system is that the subordinate must be sacrificed to the higher, the individual to the state, the particular instance to the abstract rule, the moment to the permanent condition. A people among whom in the presence of the highest love of freedom the virtue of self-subjection has still become second nature, is called to mastery over others. But the price of Roman greatness was surely a dear one. The insatiable demon of Roman selfishness sacrificed everything for its ends: the blood and happiness of its own citizens as readily as the nationality of foreign peoples. The world which belongs to it is a soulless world, robbed of its loveliest possessions, a world ruled not by human beings, but by abstract maxims and rules—a huge mechanism admirable for the firmness, the regularity and the certainty with which it operates, for the power which it develops, crushing to bits everything which opposes it, but just a machine, whose master was at the same time its slave.' ^ Geist ies Romischen Rechts. Leipzig, 1852. Vol. I, p. 298.

A state whose whok history was founded on the principle of conquest and which through all phases of its long historical development adhered to this principle with undeviating consistency came of necessity to a complete surrender of every human consideration. War was its proper element, brutal robbery its life purpose, to which every other was subordinated. Thus came into being that shameful bondage which was in fact the essence of "true Romanism." A state in which, from the first, every citizen had to be a soldier and in which no citizen could be clothed with public office who had not taken part in at least ten battles, could but brutalize its population. In fact the Romans were a people of savage disposition. Even the invasion of Hellenism was able to change this but little, since its influence reached effectively only a small privileged minority and hardly touched the great masses.*

In two fields, however, the Romans revealed an originality of thought and its practical application which no one can justly refuse to recognize— though it is true that these were concerned with social institutions which can hardly be said to have advanced culture. The Romans were the real creators of militarism and the inventors of that brutal and soulless system which we call "Roman law" and which is still today the theoretical basis of the legal constitutions of all so-called "civilized states." Roman law, based only on cold-blooded calculation of the most purely material interests, admitting into its theory no ethical considerations whatever, was the natural result of the Roman state concept. The Roman state was a military state, a power-state in the strictest sense j it knew only one right, the right of the stronger. Therefore Roman law could be nothing else than the most brutal violation of every idea of natural right. It laid the foundation for the dreary formalism of our modern lawbooks, in which vital being is smothered under abstract maxims. And this was not changed at all by the so-called "equality before the law," which was always a lie practically, and theoretically had in view only the equality of slaves who

* Richard Wagner, who in his revolutionary days recognized very clearly the significance of freedom for culture in general and for art in particular, in his work, Kunst und Revolution ("Art and Revolution"), broke out thus about the inner savagery of Romanism: "The Romans, whose national art early gave way before the developed art of the Greeks, employed the services of Grecian architects, sculptors and painters; their wits took up Greek rhetoric and versification; great public amphitheaters were opened, but not to the gods and the mythical heroes, not to the free dancers and singers of the sacred choruses; rather, wild beasts, lions, panthers and elephants, had to tear each other to tatters to delight Roman eyes; gladiators—slaves who had been trained to strength and skill—had to ravish the Roman ear with their death-rattle. These brutal world-conquerors took delight only in positive reality; their imagination could deal only with the materially actual. They permitted the philosopher who timidly fled from public life to devote himself to abstract thought; as for themselves, they loved to give themselves over in public to displays of concrete murder, to see before them examples of actual, physical human suffering,"

found themselves at the same level of degradation. Heinrich Heine, who from the bottom of his soul hated the brutal inhumanity of the concepts of Roman law, poured out his heart in these words:

What a frightful book is the Corf us Juris, the Bible of egoism! I have always hated their legal code as I have hated the Romans themselves. These robbers wished to safeguard their booty, and what they won by the sword they tried to protect by the law; therefore the Roman was at the same time soldier and lawyer, presenting a blend of the most revolting type. Actually we have to thank those Roman thieves for the theory of property— which had previously been just a fact—and the development of that doctrine in all its despicable consistency is that lauded Roman law which lies at the base of all our modern state institutions, although it stands in glaring contradiction to religion, morals, human feeling and reason.*

Never before had any legislation given to the concept of property a form so inhuman, cruel and egoistic. "Property is the right to use and to misuse one's possessions," declares the Roman law. This view, which is still today the legal basis of every exploitation and every economic monopoly, was subject to no limitations except those based on reasons of state. All attempts of later experts in law to cloak or to mitigate the cynical brutality of this declaration have been but futile raising of dust-clouds. Proudhon gave this striking expression: