ROME OF CAESAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 36, 11 August 1936, Page 14

ROME OF CAESAR

GROWTH OF THE EMPIRE

FOUNDATIONS OF SLAVERY •

A TERRIBLE PRICE

It is the Colosseum, majestic in its crumbling skyline. On its outer wall maps show the far-flung frontiers of the old Ruman Empire. Mussolini enters, the Dictator whose bust, carved in- marble, recalls the head and shoulders of Julius Caesar. Legions of exultant Fascists raise their right arms in the old Roman"salute. They acclaim the man. They acclaim the

occasion, writes P. W. Wilson in the |, "New York Times." j ', 'A question arises. How does the | rhetoric of the present—so fervid, so j [ valuable to politics—compare with the !, realism of the past? What was this ' Roman Empire that emerges into the twentieth century as a mirage? What did.it cost and why did it end? Look first at the maps. The Roman Empire did not consist alone or mainly ! of Italy. It was a world in itself. The : whole Mediterranean was enclosed ■ within that orbis terrarum. At the ' maximum—the second century of our j era—it included Britain south of the j Tweed and Rumania beyond the' Danube, with Mesopotamia on the: Euphrates. Indeed, the Koman Empire' was too big and too busy to worry about conquering a mere Ethiopia. The contribution of pagan Rome to the ancient world was w&U denned. Itj was not religion, for it was Judea and the Orient that led man into the eternities. It was not aTt and letters, for it was from Greece.that Rome derived her culture. Not science, for Rome, compared, with the mathematicians and astronomers of Egypt, Babylon, and remote China, was merely a pupil counting -his numerals — Roman numerals—on his fingers. For instance", what we call the Julian calendar was supplied to Caesar by Sosigenes of Alexandria. It was not as a source of culture that Rome was unique. Culture was an import. Poetry, sculpture, and philosophy flourished in Rome later than elsewhere. ■ THE WEAPON OF POWER. Rome's weapon was power and her i job was government. First, there was I the Roman law, strongly administered in the Latin language, and the same law at York in England and! at Antioch i in Syria. Second, there were Roman j roads—still splendidly traceable on; the map of Europe—which bridged i rivers, crossed mountains, and bound the empire together by a network \bf civil and military communications. There was also the use of m a wonder-j ful concrete in buildings "and a remarkable elaboration of water supply.

The Empire conferred important benefits. There was freedom of trade *and a resultant accumulation of wealth. There was interchange of ideas. The world educated Rome and so educated itself. It was Rome that created the idea of a coherent Europe, and. it has been plausibly argued that Germany is today a problem' because she was.neyer within the discipline of the Roman Empire. ■. <

The price paid for the Roman Empire is often underestimated. It was a price so appalling as to be scarcely credible in . a serious retrospect. Broadly, the actualities fall within two groups. There was aggression abroad. There was slavery at home.

Twenty-seven centuries ago there was a migration of Trojans from the Dardanelles to the region of the River Tiber. Like other tribesmen, they built their little towns. But within their minds seethed the Homeric visions that associated men . with OJympus, where dwell the gods. Rome, 'fighting for her existence, was empireconscious. Her instinct was expansion, the triumph of power politics in international affairs.

FEOM CITX TO STATE. Rome started as a city. She became a State. She subdued Italy. She wrested the command of the Mediterranean from the Phoenicians. She conquered Gaul, Spairi, Northern Africa, the Balkans. Asia Minor, Britain, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia.

It was an epic of brute force—swords plunged into bodies up to.the hilt, battles won and lost, cities besieged and sacked, houses razed to the ground, captives in chains. The very, games in the ampitheatre were gladiatorial; men trained to be beasts,, and set to slay one another as beasts? Such was the splendour of the Colosseum. -

, The destruction of human values was continuous and deplorable. The vast commercial metropolis of Carthage, the Liverpool of the Mediterranean, burned for seventeen days, and what remained was levelled to the ground. During the eight years of his Gallic wars Julius Caesar slew millions and-reduced much of what is now France to a cemetery. The destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, indeed of Palestine as a whole-^if we are to believe Josephus—stands for ever as a crime against civilisation without a parallel for wanton and futile ferocity.

It has always been a question with historians whether liberty, at home is compatible with imperialism abroad. In Rome the two minds were in perpetual conflict. On the one hand were citizens like Cicero and Brutus, who gave their lives for the rights of the individual within the State; on the other hand was the triumphant, violence of autocracy. The republic fought for its life in vain. It was bludgeoned into an empire. Many Roman officials had a high if restricted sense of duty. But the empire was frequently scandalised and rent asunder by the abuses and rivalries of despotism. WHO WERE THE CAESARS? Who were, the Caesars? Some were great men—for instance, Augustus him-

self. But they included a Nero, eter-

nally notorious in his excesses. Caligula, assassinated in the year 41, was the amiable benefactor who wished that all the Romans had one neck— that he might strike it off at one blow. In 54 Claudius, being a scholar, was poisoned. Nero committed hara-kiri. In the year 69 the Emperor Vitellius was lynched and in 78 the Emperor Domitian was executed for his atrocities. Why continue the painful list of casualties?

Century after century the many suffered exploitation by the few. In earlier days the patricians .tlius oppressed the plebians and Rome as a republic was in chronic commotion. The Empire, when it developed, was by far the most stupendous of all slave sovereignties. There has been nothing like it, before or since.

In modern Ethiopia one ■ person out of five used to be a slave. According to Gibbon's. estimate, one-half the population within the Roman Empire were slaves, bought and sold as property, but later research has shown that Gibbon underestimated. Three out of four of the people were in this unhappy plight. In Italy alone there were over 20,000,000 chattel slaves.

The slave had no rights. He could not marry within the law. As a witness he was tortured. On the soil he worked in a chain gang. In galleys he

was chained to the bar. In mines men and women, chained and naked, laboured lor speculators under the

lash. Even in private houses the porter at the door was chained. Such a system, imposed on a large majority of the people, could only be maintained by force. The orbis terrarum, or Roman World, was a realm of terror, and the symbol of this terror is known today as Fascism. The fasces were rods bound by red thongs of leather around an axe. The lictors, admired by Mussolini in a recent utterance, carried the fasces. THE PEACE OF ROME. There was no mystery abo»t the duties of a lictor. As an executioner he used the axe to cut off heads. The rods were unbound and applied to the backs of offenders. Thrice was the Apostle Paul beaten with rods, and i this was only a minor punishment. ,The Fascist Caesars also used the scourge, a terrible whip loaded with lead, and it is to the Roman. Empire i that the sole credit must be given for ; elaborating the ultimate infamy of crucifixion. .

For 300 years or thereabouts the Roman Empire held. together. Then began that "decline and fall" which, as narrated by Gibbon and later historians, ranks .as a supreme tragedy, a calamitous interruption in the progress of mankind. It was more than an empire that collapsed. Civilisation itself was swept as if by a scythe. For a period the ancient world did enjoy the blessings of what we are accustomed to call the Pax Romana or Roman Peace. There was law that men obeyed. There was order to which they submitted. But what was the world which thus lay quiescent? It was a world that had been stunned into submission, a world suffering from exhaustion—the ] fatal lassitude of communities that had been bled white of all power to resist an authority, however just or unjust. , Conquest destroyed the desire of the ; conquered to defend themselves. As a result the conquered had no particular enthusiasm for defending the conqueror.