Read Nationalism and Culture Online
Authors: Rudolf Rocker
Tags: #General, #History, #Sociology, #Social Science, #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Culture, #Multicultural Education, #Nationalism and nationality, #Education, #Nationalism, #Nationalism & Patriotism
Nationalism and Culture (68 page)
But the military character of the Roman state, ever bent on conquest, actually brought it about that the patricians had to yield to the demands of the plebs. They did not do this willingly j they defended their privileges
with obstinate determination, even forbidding marriage between patricians and plebeians. In consequence of the state's cold-blooded policy of conquest, especially in the era of the republic, ever heavier demands were laid upon the poorer population, and the gulf between the two classes was constantly widened. However, the Roman policy demanded soldiers j it was this necessity which had gradually compelled the patricians to share their privileges with the plebs. Along with these concessions there was set up a new nobility to support that imperial world-policy which was to bring all important countries of the then known world under the power of Rome and build up the Roman state into that frightful plunder-machine which in all the history of the peoples of the earth has no parallel.
Some historians assert that it was during the reign of the emperors that Rome first became the robbers' cave of the world, into the insatiable mouth of which the freedom and the wealth of peoples disappeared. Without doubt what they called the "Roman spirit" was most effective under the empire J but one must be blind not to recognize that the poisonous bloom of Caesarism was sown in the time of the republic. In it were prepared the indispensable preliminaries for every possible further development of unlimited power. Under the republic arose the fateful institution of the dictatorship, which justified on principle every abuse of power and smothered at its birth every liberty of man. The constitution of the republic placed two consuls at the head of the state, who were armed with all the powers of the former kings. In emergencies the consuls with the consent of the Senate could appoint a dictator who was clothed with unlimited authority. The dictator had the right to suspend all existing laws and to demand from all officials of the state unconditional obedience} he could suspend all those rights of freedom and security guaranteed to citizens by the constitution. Only a state which was based entirely on war and the subjugation of other peoples could have called into being such a terrible institution.
From dictatorship to Caesarism is only a step. The empire was merely the ripened fruit of a system which had established power as the basic principle of life. Hegel was entirely right when he said that "Rome was from the very beginning an artificial, forced, not-primeval thing," and that "the Roman state, geographically and historically, rested on the impetus of violence." The will to power, in which the "spirit of Rome" is so perfectly embodied, created that gruesome ideology which debases the individual into the spiritless tool of the state, the insensate automaton of a higher powerj which justifies every means for the realization of its aims. The much praised "Roman virtue" was never anything else than state-slavery raised to a principle and stupid selfishness unmitigated by a trace of sympathy. Both flourished in republican Rome quite as luxuriantly as in Rome of the Caesars. Even Niebuhr, who was in general an unre-
Strained admirer of the Roman state-policy, states in his Roman History that "from the earliest times down the most frightful vices prevailed, insatiable lust of power, conscienceless contempt for the rights of foreigners, unfeeling indifference to the sufferings of strangers, avarice, robbery, and a settled exclusiveness from which arose a quite inhuman hard-heartedness not only towards slaves but even towards fellow citizens." The pillars of the Roman state were calculating and methodical in their policy; they shrunk from no baseness, no infamy, no treachery, no breach of faith which promised advantage to their plans. They were the real inventors of the "reason of state" which in the course of time has grown into a frightful curse to every principle of humanity and justice. Not for nothing was a she-wolf the symbol of Rome; the Roman state in truth had wolf-blood in its veins.
Though at first the subjugation of the Italian peninsula was the aim of Roman policy, there appeared quite logically after its attainment, that ambition for world dominion which has such unmistakable attraction for every state with pretensions to power. The Italian peninsula, with its long coastline, was too freely exposed to the attacks of hostile powers to permit the inauguration of any larger plans until the country was politically united and well fortified. The entire mainland is by nature a great geographic unit, and the principal aim of the crafty Roman policy was directed towards converting this geographical unity into a political unity. By a series of internal wars one people after another was made subject to the Roman state. In general the treatment accorded these Italian tribes by the conquerors was milder than that which they later practiced towards other subjugated peoples. This was clearly owing to well-considered political reasons, for the Roman statesmen dared not imperil their rulership over the Italian mainland by continual uprisings of the conquered populations if they were to'pursue further their highflown plans; hence their tenderness. The irruptions of the Gauls favored this cunning policy, since it made the indigenous populations so much the more dependent on the protection of Rome. Thus there developed in the course of time a feeling of closer cohesiveness that gradually solidified into the "national idea": not only in Rome, but over the whole peninsula, men felt themselves to be Romans.
Only after the political unification of the mainland had been accomplished could Roman policy set itself larger undertakings, which its leaders then pursued with unscrupulous greed and stern persistence, never allowing themselves to be frightened off by temporary setbacks. With these wider aims before their eyes there grew in the Romans an inner assurance of their strength and that peculiar arrogance towards other peoples which is characteristic of world-conquerors. Rome, once she became the focus of the world, believed herself rightfully called upon to subject all other peoples to her rulership. Her successes won for her a "historic mission"
long before Hegel set this notion at the foundation of his theory of history. In the Aeneid, the national epic of the Romans, Virgil gave this fixed idea a poetic expression:
Others will polish more charmingly bronzes that stand as if breathing, Carve, I am certain, as easily, faces in marble as lifelike, Plead in the courts with an eloquence finer, and measure with gnomon Courses of stars in the heavens and tell us the hours of their rising. Be thou, O Roman, concerned about wielding world-mastering power! Thine be such arts, then; and after, thine be it to scorn and to strike down Proudly the man who would set up a world where the people are peaceful!
After the fall of Carthage and Corinth these ideas grew with the Romans to an inner conviction, a sort of political religion; so arose gradually that monstrous mechanism of the Roman state, supported by force and plunder, which Kropotkin described in striking words:
The Roman dominion was a state in the true sense of the word. To our own day it remains the ideal of the legislator and the legal expert. Its institutions covered a mighty realm as with a fine-meshed net. Everything converged on Rome; economic life, military life, legal relations, property, education, even religion. From Rome came the laws, the judges, the legions to protect the country, the office-holders, the gods. The collective life of the realm culminated in the Senate, later in the Caesar, the all-powerful and all-knowing, the God of the realm. Every province, every district had its tiny capitol, its fragment of the Roman sovereign, which guided its collective life. A single law imposed from Rome ruled throughout the realm. This realm was in no sense a union of citizens; it was a herd of subjects.-^
In fact, Rome was the state -par excellence^ the state which was completely bent upon a gigantic centralization of all social forces. No other state has been able to maintain so long its worldwide dominion; no state has exerted such a commanding influence on the later political development of Europe and upon the form of its legal institutions. And that influence has even today not completely vanished; in the years since the World War it has even increased. The "idea of Rome," as Schlegel called it, is still the basis of the policy of all modern Big States, even when the forms of this policy have taken on a different appearance.
If everywhere in the history of Greece we meet with the spirit of autonomy and complete national dismemberment, in Rome we find, from the very outset, the idea of ah all-embracing political unity, which found its most perfect expression in the Roman state. No other empire developed the idea of political unity to such a degree and planted it so deeply in actual life. It runs through all of Roman history and forms, so to speak, the leitmotif of its collective content.
^ The State: Its Role in History.
Of course, Rome never thought of granting to the conquered lands outside of the Italian peninsula which were incorporated into the realm as provinces, political or national rights of any kind. The foreigner—even when his country had been conquered by the Romans—was utterly without rights in Rome. It is characteristic of the mode of thought of the Romans that their language had for the ideas "foreigner" and "enemy" only the one word, hostis. It is, moreover, an entirely erroneous notion that the Roman state concerned itself only with the economic exploitation of the subject peoples and in other respects was guided in its treatment of the conquered by cosmopolitan ideas. Hand in hand with military and political subjugation, went the Romanizing of the conquered territoriesj and this was carried out with implacable consistency. Only towards religions did the Romans display a certain broadmindedness—so long as these were in no way dangerous to their supremacy. And in this connection we must not forget that in Rome even religion was completely subordinated to the purposes of the state. There was, therefore, no church which could stand out as a rival to the state. Every cult was under the supervision of the state. The Senate regulated all religious affairs, as is clear from innumerable decrees. The priests were subordinate officers of the state} and, besides, the highest priestly positions were all in the hands of the leading statesmen or of the Senate.
To a world-dominion like Rome every cult is equally acceptable so long as it subordinates itself to the state. Alexander of Macedon had already given an instructive example in this respect by making toleration of foreign religious systems an instrument of political power. He rendered to Apis of the Egyptians or to the God of the Jews the same honors as to Zeus of the Greeks. "Such a toleration," remarks Mauthner, "which was really indifference, became first with the Romans a genuine instrument of their permanent imperialism, their policy of world conquest." If, however, a religion became bothersome or actually dangerous to the state, tolerance quickly ended and persecution set in. This was the basis of the attacks on the early Christians, whose doctrine struck at the very foundations of the empire, and who refused to render divine honors to the person of the emperor. Religious persecutions in Rome always sprang from political motives.
The religion of the Romans displayed little that was primitive. They borrowed elements of religious faith from every possible people and incorporated them in their own body of ideas. It is today the fairh unanimous opinion that they derived a large part of their ancient cult from the Etruscans. This is especially true of their belief in demons and of the meticulously regulated ceremonial of their worship, which played a part in every phase of their daily life. Elisee Reclus remarks pointedly;
The ceremonials of the tribunals, the governmental palaces, the temples, the private dwellings, which the Romans followed almost without change for centuries, were likewise adopted from the Etruscans. From whatever point of view one regards it one cannot avoid the conclusion that the Roman people was nourished on the substance of the Etruscans, much like those insects which find their food all ready in the brood-cells that have been prepared for them.^
In no case can one identify the religion of the Romans with that of the Hellenes, as is so often done. It is true there are found in their cult many borrowings from the Greeks j the same is true for a number of their gods. But one cannot infer from this an essential relation between the two religions. A sober, unpoetic people like the Romans had no understanding at all of the cheerful activity of the Greek Olympus. The free, spontaneous behavior of the Hellenic gods was hard to harmonize with the Roman sense of order. Religion meant to the Romans spiritual bondage, as is revealed in the very derivation of the word. Bondage, however, simply did not go down with the Hellenes j in this sense they were not religious. Zeus was to them simply the father of the gods, otherwise endowed with exactly the same excellences and the same weaknesses as all the other gods. The dignified Jupiter of the Romans, however, was quite especially the guardian god of the capitol and of the Roman state.
The polytheism of the Greeks was the product of a poetically illumined mysticism, in which the various natural forces were embodied in the individual divinities. Among the Romans, the divinity often embodied nothing more than an abstract principle with a practical application. Thus they had gods of the frontier, of concord, of welfare, of theft, of pestilence, of fevers, of contentment, of worry, to whom the faithful could resort in special cases. The residences of the gods were arranged just like the Roman state: each god had his particular post, where nobody else had any business. For the Roman religion, like everything else, was designed to be practical and purposive} their whole cult exhausted itself in a ritual as rigid as it was spiritless. Even the cults of the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Persians and others, which later found a home among the Romans, had to adapt themselves to the peculiar character of the Roman state. The idea of political unity stood among the Romans ahead of every other consideration, a firm article of faith which must not be distorted and need not be explained.
If the assertion were true that national or political unity is the indispensable condition for the unhampered cultural development of a people, then the Romans should have overshadowed completely all other peoples in history as to both creative power and cultural activity, for among no
^ UHomme et la Terre, Volume II.
Other people were these concepts so firmly and so universally held as among them. Furthermore, the dominance of Rome extended through a period of twelve hundred years j no other world power has lasted so long. Therefore no one can assert that the Romans did not have sufficient time to bring their cultural capabilities to full development. In spite of this, not even the most fanatical admirer of the Roman state and the "political genius" of the Romans would venture to assert that they were a culturally creative people or that they could be compared, even in a dream, with the nationally and politically completely disunited Hellenes. The mere thought of such a comparison would be treason to all culture. AH distinguished minds whose mental vision has not been dimmed by the will to power are agreed that the Romans were, by and large, an unimaginative people with purely political interests, and that because of this purely political obsession they had no comprehension of the deeper significance of culture. Their actual cultural achievements were of trifling significance j in no field of culture did they make a single outstanding contribution; they remained always a race of imitators. Of course, they knew how to appropriate the creative products of others and to exploit them for their own special ends. At the same time, they always infected them with death-germs, for one cannot with impunity constrain cultural effort in political forms.
Every people possesses certain creative endowments and capabilities, and it would be ungracious to deny all such to the Romans. But these natural abilities were limited by the external conditions of the social environment and constrained into definite directions. Or, to speak with Nietzsche, every people—just as every man—has control over only a certain total of powers and capacities, and so much of this total as is expended for world-dominion or in political effort is necessarily withheld from cultural activity. This is the same thought which Hegel clothed in the words: "The Roman principle was fixed entirely on dominion and military power. It had no intellectual focal point as an aim to occupy and to satisfy the mind." The strained unity of the state structure was not of a type to give free range to the cultural capacities of the Romans. On the contrary, its entire twelve-hundred-year-long history gave conclusive proof that political unity is one thing and creative cultural activity is another thing.
The Romans tortured their natural talents to death on the Procrustean bed of political unity. Every creative idea was crippled by the rigid framework of their military and bureaucratic machine. They had made of the state an earthly Providence which guides everything, determines everything, decides everything; and in doing this they smothered at its birth every, impulse toward spontaneous, independent activity. They sacrificed the whole world—and themselves—to this Moloch. The more extended and powerful the Roman state made itself in the course of the centuries,
just so much more man shrank In spiritual worth and social importance} just so much more completely his sense of personality shriveled and with it his urge to cultural creation, which can endure no political coercion.
The Romans reveal this especially in their art, which among every people represents the high point of cultural creativeness. Until after the complete subjugation of all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean one cannot speak of a Roman art at all. Everything in Rome which could be assigned to the field of representative art up to that time was of either Etruscan or Grecian origin. The influence of the Etruscans is already easily recognizable in the earliest days of Rome. Later, out of the Grecian settlements at the south of the peninsula, there issued this other influx, which for the first time brought the Italic people into close contact with the art of the Hellenes. From the conquest of Greece after the second Punic war and the forcible incorporation of the country in the Roman realm, came that immediate union which was to be for the Hellenes of a later time a fatality, but which brought into Rome the first forms of a higher culture. The Roman commanders robbed the Greek cities of their most splendid treasures and dragged off to Rome everything transportable. Of the fabulous wealth of stolen art treasures we can hardly form a just estimate. Taine informs us in his Philosofhy of Art: "When Rome had completely plundered the Grecian world she possessed a population of statues almost equal to her people. They estimate today the number of the statues which, after all the centuries and all the destructions, have been found in Rome and its environs at more than sixty thousand."
But the Romans had no sort of inner understanding of this art. They decorated their homes and their cities with Greek pictures, somewhat as today rich American upstarts buy Rembrandts and Van Dycks, because they thought they owed it to their station. Whence could they have gotten such an understanding?
The glad enjoyment of life of the Oriental Aryans, the joy of the Hellenes in nakedness, in the beauty of human nature, is in its every detail completely alien to the Roman. He has no splendid holiday plays, he honors no poets and writers, and he carries prudery so far that a son-in-law is not allowed to bathe with his father-in-law. What distinguishes the Roman is his intensity, his method. He must know that his house and his state is in order. His family life is strictly regulated and therefore extremely dull; he names his daughters "Fifth" and "Sixth," and he puts his son to death if he is disobedient. Unlike most Aryans he sets a high value on externals, on keeping up appearances. Gravity, dignity, decorum—these are his favorite expressions, words which on the lips of the facetious and undignified Cicero become doubly impressive.^
' Albrecht Wirth, \olkstum und Weltmacht, p. 40.
Holding such a concept of life it is surely no wonder that the so-called "genuine Romans" met the intrusion of Greek modes of life always with a certain shyness or even a definite hostility. With many this aversion took quite peculiar forms. Thus Cato the Elder warned his son against Greek physicians, asserting that the Greeks had entered into a conspiracy against the Romans in which the physicians were assigned the duty of poisoning all Roman citizens with their medicines,* The same Cato pronounced Socrates a loud-mouthed, turbulent agitator who well deserved his fate. He also prophesied that when Rome had become saturated with the teachings of Greek philosophy it would lose its dominion over the world. This hard-boiled slave-driver and heartless usurer divined instinctively that culture and world dominion were irreconcilable opposites, either of which could assert itself only at the expense of the other.
How completely and stupidly insensitive the Romans were to every higher cultural experience up to the end of the second Punic war is shown by the cruel and utterly inhuman destruction by the Roman commander, Lucius Mummius, of Corinth, the loveliest city in Greece. Not content with slaughtering all of the population capable of bearing arms, selling the women and children into slavery, and giving the city over to plunder by a rough soldiery, he set fire to it and finally left not one stone upon another. Shortly before the same fate had been dealt out to Carthage where flames raged for seven days, laying waste the land. Over it a plow was driven as symbol of Roman pitilessness.
But despite all this, Rome could not escape the influence of Hellenic culture, and all the warnings of Cato and his adherents were but wasted on the winds. Roman armies could strike down Greece by force of arms, could make Hellas into a Roman province, but they could build no dam against the flood of Hellenic culture. The Roman poet, Horace, has put his recognition of this into words:
