Chapter 11.                            Part C            

           But let’s return to our main line of thought.

           The Romans put more practicality, discipline and efficiency into the Athenian ideas and values that they borrowed. They built roads, bridges, and aqueducts of great size and engineering sophistication, by employing knowledge that they had learned from the Greeks, mainly the Athenians, and the Romans' own neighbors, the Etruscans (or Tuscans). Similarly, in other areas, such as war, law, medicine, and agriculture, the Romans achieved practical successes unmatched in their own times, and also, for centuries after the Empire fell.

 

                           Etruscan banquet scene, from a painting in a tomb in Tarquinia, Italy  

           

            In addition, it is important to note that the Roman republic, as cruel as it could be to outsiders, was dearly loved by Romans. They were citizens of a democracy. They were like family. They knew that they deserved to rule because there had never been any state like Rome. It had been chosen by the gods to be specially gifted and destined. The state religion said so. The Aeneid said so. Thus, the Roman worldview, by a direct chain of logic, assigned to the Romans the most important role that had ever existed in the history of the world. Their gods did not rule them and their universe with cruelty and capriciousness. Instead, the Romans, for generations, were very sure of where they stood: the gods (later, God) loved Rome.

                    glory days of Ancient Rome (as depicted by Thomas Cole, American artist) 

This worldview produced a patriotism that had an Athenian kind of character to it because it was built around a model that gave democratic rights and duties to all Roman citizens, or at least all “true” citizens, namely adult Roman males who owned property. There were aristocratic families, as had been the case in almost all previous states, and these folk were used to the idea of privilege. But there were also plebeians, and they too were full citizens with rights to vote, run for office, have a fair trial if they were charged with a crime, and so on. How could you not love such a country? What would you not endure for her? 

The slaves eventually became nearly half of the population of southern Italy, but the Romans thought that this situation was just part of the natural order.  This view, by the way, that the superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals and activities, did not originate with the Romans. It had been Aristotle’s view centuries before, and he defended it at length for reasons similar to the reasons that were part of the total cultural outlook of the Romans. These people just knew without thinking about it that their country’s system and the patriotism that it fostered - patriotism that had been displayed over and over by them, their fellow citizens, and their ancestors - made them superior. The Romans knew that they deserved to be the masters of inferior cultures.

            A society built on slaves and materialism, and restrained only by a warrior’s code of discipline and loyalty, had to collapse when the warriors ran out of territories to conquer and sank into boredom, sloth, envy, and internal strife. In short, the cultural-code account was drawn on until it was bankrupt. Overdrawn. By the time that they realized that Rome really could fall, it was too late. 

 

                           late Roman decadence (as conceived by French artist, Couture)