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Transition from

Greece to
Europe.

CHAPTER VIII.

DIGRESSION ON THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHICAL INFLU-
ENCES OF ROME.

PREPARATION FOR RESUMING THE EXAMINATION OF THE INTELLECTUAL
PROGRESS OF EUROPE.

FRO

ROM the exposition given in the preceding pages of the intellectual progress of Greece, we now turn, agreeably to the plan laid down, to an examination of that of all Europe. The movement in that single nation is typical of the movement of the entire continent.

The first European intellectual age—that of Credulity—has already, in part, been considered in Chapter II., more especially European so far as Greece was concerned. I propose now, after some necessary remarks in conclusion of that topic, to enter on the description of the second European age—that of Inquiry.

age of Inquiry.

For these remarks, what has already been said of Greece prepares the way. Mediterranean Europe was philosophically and socially in advance of the central and northern countries. The wave of civilization passed from the south to the north ; in truth, it has hardly yet reached its extreme limit. The adventurous emigrants who in remote times had come from Asia left to the successive generations of their descendants a legacy of hardship. In the struggle for life, all memory of an Oriental parentage was lost; knowledge died away; religious ideas became debased; and the diverse populations sank into the same intellectual condition that they would have presented had they been proper autochthons of the soil.

The religion of the barbarian Europeans was in many respects like that of the American Indians. They recognized a

Religion of the Old Europeans.

233

the old Eu

Great Spirit-omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. In the Religion of earliest times they made no representation of him under the ropeans. human form, nor had they temples; but they propitiated him by sacrifices, offering animals, as the horse, and even men, upon rude altars. Though it was believed that this great spirit might sometimes be heard in the sounds of the forests at night, yet, for the most part, he was too far removed from human supplication; and hence arose, from the mere sorcerous ideas of a terrified fancy, as has been the case in so many other countries, star worship-the second stage of comparative theology. The gloom and shade of dense forests, a solitude that offers an air of sanctity, and seems a fitting resort for mysterious spirits, suggested the establishment of sacred groves and holy trees. Throughout Europe there was a confused idea that the soul exists after the death of the body; as to its particular state there was a diversity of belief. As among other people also, the offices of religion were not only directed to the present benefit of individuals, but also to the discovery of future events by various processes of divination and augury practised among the priests.

Although the priests had thus charge of the religious rites, they do not seem to have been organized in such a manner as to be able to act with unanimity, or to pursue a steady system of policy. A class of female religious officials-prophetesses -joined in the ceremonials. These holy women, who were held in very great esteem, prepared the way for the reception of Mariolatry. Instead of temples, rock-altars, cromlechs, and other rustic structures were used among the Celtic nations by the Druids, who were at the same time priests, magicians, and medicine-men. Their religious doctrines, which recall in many particulars those of the Rig-Veda, were perpetuated from generation to generation by the aid of songs.

The essential features of this system were its purely local form and its want of a well-organized hierarchy. Even the Celts offer no exception, though they had a subordination from the arch-Druid downward. This was the reason of the weakness of the old faith, and eventually the cause of its fall. When the German nations migrated to the south in their war

Their

priesthood,

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And objects like expeditions, they left behind them their consecrated groves

of adora

tion.

of Roman

and sacred oaks, hallowed by immemorial ages. These objects the devotee could not carry with him, and no equivalent substitutes could be obtained for them. In the civilized countries to which they came they met with a very different state of things:-a priesthood thoroughly organized and modelled according to the ancient Roman political system; its objects of reverence tied to no particular locality; its institutions capable of universal action; its sacred writings easy of transportation anywhere; its emblems moveable to all countries-the cross on the standards of its armies, the crucifix on the bosom of its Influence saints. In the midst of the noble architecture of Italy and Christiani- the splendid remains of those Romans who had once given laws to the world, in the midst of a worship distinguished by the magnificence of its ceremonial and the solemnity of its mysteries, they found a people whose faith taught them to regard the present life as offering only a transitory occupation, and not for a moment to be weighed against the external existence hereafter-an existence very different from that of the base transmigration of Druidism or the drunken Paradise of Woden, where the brave solace themselves with mead from cups made of the skulls of their enemies killed in their days upon earth.

ty upon them.

Import

ance of Ro

vestigation.

The European age of inquiry is therefore essentially conman history nected with Roman affairs. It is distinguished by the religiin this in- ous direction it took. In place of the dogmas of rival philosophical schools, we have now to deal with the tenets of conflicting sects. The whole history of those unhappy times displays the organizing and practical spirit characteristic of Rome. Greek democracy, tending to the decomposition of things, led to the Sophists and Sceptics. Roman imperialism, ever constructive, sought to bring unity out of discords, and draw the line between orthodoxy and heresy by the authority of councils like that of Nicæa. Following the ideas of St. Augustine in his work, 'the City of God,' I adopt, as the most convenient termination of this age, the sack of Rome by Alaric. This makes it overlap the age of Faith, which had, as its unmistakable beginning, the foundation of Constantinople.

Triple Form of Roman Power.

235

Greek intellectual life displays all its phases completely, but not so that of the Romans, which came to an untimely end. They were men of violence, who disappeared in consequence of their own conquests and crimes. The consumption of them by war bore, however, an insignificant proportion to that fatal diminution, that mortal adulteration occasioned by their merging in the vast mass of humanity with which they came in

contact.

I approach the consideration of Roman affairs, which is Great difficulty of thus the next portion of my task, with no little diffidence. It treating it. is hard to rise to a point of view sufficiently elevated and clear, where the extent of dominion is so great geographically, and the reasons of policy are obscured by the dimness and clouds of so many centuries. Living in a social state the origin of which is in the events now to be examined, our mental vision can hardly free itself from the illusions of historical perspective, or bring things into their just proportions and position. Of a thousand acts, all of surpassing interest and importance, how shall we identify the master ones? how shall we discern with correctness the true relation of the parts of this wonderful phenomenon of empire, the vanishing events of which glide like dissolving views into each other? Warned by the example of those who have permitted the shadows of their own imagination to fall upon the scene, and have mistaken them for a part thereof, I shall endeavour to apply the test of common sense to the facts of which it will be necessary to treat; and, believing that man has ever been the same in his mode of thought and motives of action, I shall judge of past occurrences in the same way as those of our own times.

of Roman power

In its entire form, the Roman power consists of two theo- Triple form cracies, with a military domination intercalated. The first of these theocracies corresponds to the fabulous period of the kings; the military domination to the time of the republic and earlier Cæsars; the second theocracy, to that of the Christian emperors and the Popes.

The first theocracy is so enveloped in legends and fictions. that it is impossible to give a satisfactory account of it. The biographies of the kings offer such undeniable evidence of ·

ary times.

Early Roman his

tury.

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The first being mere romances, that, since the time of Niebuhr, they theocracy and legend- have been received by historians in that light. But during the reigns of the pagan emperors it was not safe in Rome to insinuate publicly any disbelief in such honoured legends as those of the wolf that suckled the foundlings; the ascent of Romulus into heaven; the nymph Egeria; the duel of the Horatii and Curiatii; the leaping of Curtius into the gulf on his horse; the cutting of a flint with a razor by Tarquin; the Sibyl and her books. The modern historian has, therefore, only very little reliable material. He may admit that the Romans and Sabines coalesced; that they conquered the Albans and Latins; that thousands of the latter were transplanted to Mount Aventine and made plebeians, these movements being the origin of the castes which long afflicted Rome, the vanquished people constituting a subordinate class; that at first the chief occupation was agriculture, the nature of which is not only to accustom men to the gradations of rank, such as the proprietor of the land, the overseer, the labourer, but also to the cultivation of religious sentiment, and even the cherishing of superstition; that, besides the more honourable occupations in which the rising state was engaged, she had, from the beginning, indulged in aggressive war, and was therefore perpetually liable to reprisal,—one of her first acts was the founding of the town of Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, on account of piracy; that, through some conspiracy in the army, indicated in the legend of Lucretia, since armies have often been known to do such things, the kings were expelled, and a military domination, fancifully called a republic, but consisting of a league of some powerful families, arose.

Throughout the regal times, and far into the republican, the chief domestic incidents turn on the strife of the upper caste, or patricians, with the lower, or plebeians, manifesting itself in the latter asserting their right to a share in the lands conquered by their valour; by the extortion of the Valerian law; by the admission of the Latins and Hernicans to conditions of equality; by the transference of the election of tribunes from the centuries to the tribes, by the repeal of the law prohibiting the marriage of plebeians with patricians, and by the

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