It is tempting to see in the Romans’ culture a synthesis of the ways of the Athenians and those of the Spartans. This is an example of Hegel’s famous dialectic: one way of thinking, along with the human groups that gather around it, forms and grows, and then an opposite way of thinking rises up like a kind of cosmic response to the first way. The two struggle, interact, and finally meld into a true synthesis, which is not like a compromise because it is a new way with a life of its own.

The people who are born into the new way are not aware they are using some elements from one philosophy and some from another. The new way is simply their way, and supporting ideas that are added to the new system make it seem like a neat, smooth, seamless whole. Thesis, antithesis, then synthesis, over and over, with the system always spiraling upward to greater and greater consciousness. This is Hegel’s model of human social evolution.

It is tempting. It’s a fairly simple model, and with a little stretching it can be made to seem to fit in era after era and country after country when we study human history. But it is simply too simple. The Roman ways of thinking of life did contain some ideals similar to those of both the Athenians and the Spartans, but we know that there was too much else going on in the thinking and living styles of the Romans for Hegel’s model to be seen as satisfactory today. Human societies are subtler than that. What makes more sense is to examine each society‘s worldview, values, morés, and behavior patterns and observe how they coordinated to produce a whole culture and way of life that met citizens’ survival demands of the time. Under that humbler view, we can learn much more about how human societies really work.

The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book doesn’t attempt to be as all-encompassing as Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis model because the process of human cultural evolution doesn’t fit Hegel’s model. Rather, the process of human cultural evolution is more closely analogous to the process of evolution in the rest of nature—by genetic variation and natural selection and accident and disaster.

Life didn’t move forward through time and proliferate into its many forms by the mechanism that Hegel describes. In the past, conditions like tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and even collisions with giant meteors suddenly closed down, or opened up, reams of opportunities. Then, usually, life forms moved in opportunistically. Life spreads across time and space not like a chain or road, but like a bush branching and bifurcating from that primal trunk started from a few cells eons ago.

The model of human cultural evolution presented in this book can’t match Hegel’s dialectic for cognitive attractiveness. Hegel’s model seems so neat and complete. But life isn’t that neat, and our models of human culture must be placed in the realm of the living. The model explored here can do what we need it to do. It can give us enough insights into how human cultures work, and what right and wrong are for us to then be able to build a rational moral code. And that is all we need.

So let’s return to our main line of thought. The Romans put more practicality, discipline, and efficiency into the Athenian values and morés they borrowed. They built roads, bridges, and aqueducts of great size and engineering sophistication by employing knowledge they had learned from the Greeks, mainly the Athenians, and from their 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 times.

 

                                              Tuscan wrestlers, 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 truly thought 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 world view, by a direct chain of logic, assigned to the Romans the most important role that had ever existed in the history of the world. For them, their gods did not rule them and their universe with cruelty. Instead, for generations, the Romans were certain of where they stood: clearly, the gods (later, God) loved Rome.

                                     Glory days of ancient Rome, as depicted by T. Cole, American artist

This worldview produced an Athenian kind of patriotism 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 accustomed 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 one not love such a country? What would one not endure for her?

When slaves eventually became nearly half of the population of southern Italy, the Romans viewed this situation as 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 those that were part of the total cultural outlook of the Romans. These people were convinced, 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 felt 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 depleted until it was bankrupt and overdrawn. By the time its people realized that Rome really could fall, it was too late.

                                  Late Roman decadence, as conceived by artist T. Couture

Note how the decline of the Romans’ value system and the laziness of the later Romans regarding ideals of citizenship and honesty presaged that fall. Note also how we today understand intuitively the crucial roles values play in the shaping of citizens’ lifestyles and, therefore, in the success of their state. We know of this relationship at a level so deep that we take it to be obvious. When the Romans became hypocritical and corrupt, we assume the collapse of their state was inevitable. (This idea is common among modern scholars, but it comes from Edward Gibbon, whose work on the subject is still, arguably, the most respected of all time.³)