The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  He admits the difficulty of reconciling evil, suffering, apparently unmerited misfortune, with a good Providence; but we cannot judge the place of any element or event in the scheme of things unless we see the whole; and who shall pretend to such total perspective? It is therefore insolent and ridiculous for us to judge the world; wisdom lies in recognizing our limitations, in seeking to be harmonious parts of the universal order, in trying to sense the Mind behind the body of the world, and co-operating with it willingly. To one who has reached this view “everything that happens happens justly”—i.e., as in the course of nature;47 nothing that is according to nature can be evil;48 everything natural is beautiful to him who understands.49 All things are determined by the universal reason, the inherent logic of the whole; and every part must welcome cheerfully its modest role and fate. “Equanimity” (the watchword of the dying Antoninus) “is the voluntary acceptance of the things that are assigned to thee by the nature of the whole.”50

  Everything harmonizes with me that harmonizes with thee, O universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me that thy seasons bring, O Nature. From thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.51

  Knowledge is of value only as a tool of the good life. “What, then, can direct a man? One thing only—philosophy”52—not as logic or learning, but as a persistent training in moral excellence. “Be thou erect, or be made erect.”53 God has given every man a guiding daimon, or inner spirit—his reason. Virtue is the life of reason.

  These are the principles of the rational soul. It traverses the whole universe, and surveys its form, and extends itself into the infinity of time, and embraces the cyclical renewal of all things, and comprehends that those who come after us will see nothing new, nor have those before us seen anything more; but in a manner he who is forty years old, if he has any understanding at all, has seen, by virtue of this uniformity, all things that have been or will be.54

  Marcus thinks his premises compel him to puritanism. “Pleasure is neither good nor useful.”55 He renounces the flesh and all its works, and talks at times like some Anthony in the Thebaid:

  Observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus, tomorrow will be a mummy or ashes. . . . The whole space of man’s life is but little, and yet with what troubles it is filled . . . and with what a wretched body it must be passed! . . . Turn it inside out, and see what kind of thing it is.56

  The mind must be a citadel free from bodily desires, passions, anger, or hate. It must be so absorbed in its work as hardly to notice the adversities of fortune or the barbs of enmity. “Every man is worth just so much as the things about which he busies himself.”57 He reluctantly concedes that there are bad men in this world. The way to deal with them is to remember that they, too, are men, the helpless victims of their own faults by the determinism of circumstance.58 “If any man has done thee wrong, the harm is his own; it is thy duty to forgive him.”59 If the existence of evil men saddens you, think of the many fine persons you have met, and the many virtues that are mingled in imperfect, characters.60 Good or bad, all men are brothers, kinsmen in one God; even the ugliest barbarian is a citizen of the fatherland to which we all belong. “As Aurelius I have Rome for my country; as a man, the world.”61 Does this seem an impracticable philosophy? On the contrary, nothing is so invincible as a good disposition, if it be sincere.62 A really good man is immune to misfortune, for whatever evil befalls him leaves him still his own soul.

  Will this [evil] that has happened prevent thee from being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent . . . modest, free? . . . Suppose that men curse thee, kill thee, cut thee in pieces: what can these things do to prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, and just? If a man stand by a limpid, pure spring and curse it, the spring never ceases to send up clean water; if he cast dirt into it, or filth, it will speedily wash them out and be unpolluted again. . . . On every occasion that brings thee trouble, remember to apply this principle: that this is not a misfortune, but that to bear it nobly is good fortune. . . . Thou seest how few the things are to which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life that flows on quietly and is like the existence of the gods.63

  Marcus’ life, however, did not flow on quietly; he had to kill Germans while writing this Fifth Gospel, and in the end he faced death with no consolation in the son who would succeed him, and no hope of happiness beyond the grave. Soul and body alike return to their original elements.

  For as the mutation and dissolution of bodies make room for other bodies doomed to die, so the souls that are removed into the air, after life’s existence, are transmuted and diffused . . . into the seminal intelligence of the universe, and make room for new souls.64 . . . Thou hast existed as a part; thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee. . . . This, too, nature wills. . . . Pass, then, through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journeys in content, just as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the nature that produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.65

  VI. COMMODUS

  When the officer of the guard asked the dying Marcus for the watchword of the day he answered: “Go to the rising sun; my sun is setting.” The rising sun was then nineteen, a robust and dashing youth without inhibitions, morals, or fear. One would have expected of him, rather than of Marcus the ailing saint, a policy of war to victory or death; instead, he offered the enemy immediate peace. They were to withdraw from the vicinity of the Danube, to surrender most of their arms, return all Roman prisoners and deserters, pay Rome an annual tribute of corn, and persuade 13,000 of their soldiers to enlist in the Roman legions.66 All Rome condemned him except the people; his generals fumed at allowing the trapped prey to escape and fight again another day. During the reign of Commodus, however, no trouble came from the Danubian tribes.

  The young prince, though no coward, had seen enough of war; he needed peace to enjoy Rome. Back in the capital, he snubbed the Senate and loaded the plebs with unprecedented gifts—725 denarii to each citizen. Finding no field in politics for his exuberant strength, he hunted beasts on the imperial estates and developed such skill with sword and bow that he decided to perform publicly. For a time he left the palace and lived in the gladiators’ school; he drove chariots in the races, and fought in the arena against animals and men.67 Presumably the men who opposed him took care to let him win; but he thought nothing of fighting, unaided and before breakfast, a hippopotamus, an elephant, and a tiger, which made no distinctions for royalty.68 He was so perfect a bowman that with a hundred arrows he killed a hundred tigers in one exhibition. He would let a panther leap upon some condemned criminal and then slay the animal with one arrow, leaving the man unhurt to die again.69 He had his exploits recorded in the Acta Diurna and insisted on being paid, out of the Treasury, for each of his thousand combats as a gladiator.

  The historians upon whom we must here depend wrote, like Tacitus, from the viewpoint and traditions of the offended aristocracy; we cannot tell how much of the marvels they relate are history, how much are revenge. We are assured that Commodus drank and gambled, wasted the public funds, kept a harem of 300 women and 300 boys, and liked to vary his sex occasionally, at least by using a woman’s garb, even at the public games. Tales of unbelievable cruelty are transmitted to us: Commodus ordered a votary of Bellona to amputate an arm in proof of piety; forced some women devotees of Isis to beat their breasts with pine cones till they died; killed men indiscriminately with his club of Hercules; gathered cripples together and slew them one by one with arrows. . . .70 One of his mistresses, Marcia, was apparently a Christian; for her sake, we are told, he pardoned some Christians who had been condemned to the Sardinian mines. Her devotion to him suggests that in this man, described as more bestial than any beast, there was some lovable element unrecorded by history.

  Like his predecessors, he was aroused to the wildest ferocity by fear of assassination. His aunt Lucilla formed
a conspiracy to kill him; he discovered it, had her executed, and on proof or suspicion of participation put so many men of rank to death that soon hardly any survived who had been prominent in Marcus’ reign. Delators, who had almost disappeared for a century, returned to activity and favor, and a new terror raged in Rome. Appointing Perennis as praetorian prefect, Commodus yielded the reins of government to him, and (the tradition says) abandoned himself to sexual dissipation. Perennis ruled efficiently but mercilessly; he organized his own terror and had all his opponents slain. The Emperor, suspecting that Perennis planned to replace him, surrendered this second Sejanus to the Senate, which reenacted its role of glowing revenge. Cleander, a former slave, succeeded Perennis (185) and surpassed him in corruption and cruelty; any office might be had for a proper bribe, any decision of any court could be reversed. Under his orders senators and knights were put to death for treason or criticism. In 190 a mob besieged the villa where Commodus was staying and demanded Cleander’s death. The Emperor accommodated them. Cleander’s successor, Laetus, after holding power for three years, judged that his time had come. One day he chanced upon a proscription list that contained the names of his supporters and friends, and of Marcia. On the last day of 192 Marcia gave Commodus a cup of poison; and when it worked too slowly the athlete whom he had kept to wrestle with strangled him in his bath. He was a youth of thirty-one.

  When Marcus died Rome had reached the apex of her curve and was already touched with decay. Her boundaries had been extended beyond the Danube, into Scotland and the Sahara, into the Caucasus and Russia, and to the gates of Parthia. She had accomplished for that confusion of peoples and faiths a unity not of language and culture, but at least of economy and law. She had woven it into a majestic commonwealth, within which the exchange of goods moved in unprecedented plenty and freedom; and for two centuries she had guarded the great realm from barbarian inroads and had given it security and peace. All the white man’s world looked to her as the center of the universe, the omnipotent and eternal city. Never had there been such wealth, such splendor, or such power.

  Nevertheless, amid the prosperity that made Rome brilliant in this second century, all the seeds were germinating of the crisis that would ruin Italy in the third. Marcus had contributed heavily to the debacle by naming Commodus his heir and by wars that centralized ever more authority in the hands of the Emperor. Commodus kept in peace the prerogatives assumed by Aurelius in war. Private and local independence, initiative, and pride withered as the power and functions of the state increased; and the wealth of nations was drained away by ever-rising taxation to support a self-multiplying bureaucracy and the endless offensives of defense. The mineral wealth of Italy was diminishing,71 pestilence and famine had taken bitter toll, the system of tillage by slaves was failing, governmental expenditures and doles had exhausted the Treasury and debased the currency. Italian industry was losing its markets in the provinces through provincial competition, and no economic statesmanship appeared to make up for a languishing foreign trade by a wider distribution of buying power at home. Meanwhile the provinces had recovered from the exactions of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, and Antony; their ancient skills had revived, their industries were flourishing, their new wealth was financing science, philosophy, and art. Their sons replenished the legions, their generals led them; soon their armies would hold Italy at their mercy and make their generals emperors. The process of conquest was finished and was to be reversed; henceforth the conquered would absorb the conquerors.

  As if conscious of these omens and problems, the mind of Rome, at the close of the Antonine age, sank into a cultural and spiritual fatigue. The practical disfranchisement of first the assemblies and then the Senate had removed the mental stimulus that comes from free political activity and a widespread sense of liberty and power. Since the prince had almost all authority, the citizens left him almost all responsibility. More and more of them, even in the aristocracy, retired into their families and their private affairs; citizens became atoms, and society began to fall to pieces internally precisely when unity seemed most complete. Disillusionment with democracy was followed by disillusionment with monarchy. The “Golden Thoughts” of Aurelius were often leaden thoughts, weighted down with the suspicion that Rome’s problems could not be solved, that the multiplying barbarians could not long be held back by a sterile and pacific breed. Stoicism, which had begun by preaching strength, was ending by preaching resignation. Almost all the philosophers had made their peace with religion. For 400 years Stoicism had been to the upper classes a substitute for religion; now the substitute was put aside, and the ruling orders turned back from the books of the philosophers to the altars of the gods. And yet paganism, too, was dying. Like Italy, it was flushed only with governmental aid and was nearing exhaustion. It had conquered philosophy; but already its temple precincts heard reverently the names of invading deities. The age was heavy with the resurrection of the provinces and the incredible victory of Christ.

  * * *

  I It was probably written in 98, before Trajan’s campaign against the Dacians.

  II Eight adorn the Arch of Constantine; three are in the Museo de’ Conservatori.

  BOOK IV

  THE EMPIRE

  146 B.C.–A.D. 192

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

  B.C.

  1200:

  Goidelic Celts invade England

  900:

  Brythonic and Belgic Celts invade England

  350:

  Pytheas of Marseilles explores the North Sea

  248:

  Arsacid Dynasty begins in Parthia

  241-10:

  Sicily becomes a province

  238:

  Sardinia and Corsica acquired

  211-190:

  Arsaces II of Parthia

  197:

  Spain acquired

  170-38:

  Mithridates I of Parthia

  168:

  Macedonia acquired

  167:

  Illyricum

  146:

  Achaea, “Africa,” Epirus

  145-130:

  Ptolemy VII

  135-105:

  John Hyrcanus, King of Judea

  135-51:

  Poseidonius

  133:

  Attalus III bequeaths Pergamum

  124-88:

  Mithridates II of Parthia

  121:

  Gallia Narbonensis

  112-05:

  The Jugurthine War

  110:

  Philo of Byzantium, physicist

  104-78:

  Alexander Jannaeus, King of Judea

  102:

  Cilicia; Pamphylia

  88-4:

  First Mithridatic War

  88:

  Massacre of Romans in Near East

  83-1:

  Second Mithridatic War

  78-69:

  Alexandra, Queen of Judea

  76:

  Timomachus of Byzantium, painter

  75-63:

  Third Mithridatic War

  74:

  Bithynia

  74-67:

  Cyrene and Crete

  69-63:

  Aristobulus II, King of Judea

  64:

  Syria

  63:

  Pontus and Judea become Roman provinces

  63-40:

  Hyrcanus II, King of Judea

  58:

  Cyprus

  58-50:

  Caesar conquers Gaul

  55,54:

  Caesar in Britain

  50:

  Hero of Alexandria; Meleager of Gadara

  46:

  Numidia

  40:

  Parthians invade Syria

  37-4:

  Herod the Great

  30:

  Egypt

  25:

  Galatia

  B.C.

  25-4:

  Aelius Gallus’ expedition into Arabia Felix

  1
7:

  Upper and Lower Germany acquired

  15:

  Noricum; Raetia

  14:

  Maritime Alps

  11:

  Moesia

  7:

  Fl. Strabo, geographer

  4(?):

  Birth of Christ

  B.C.. 4-6 A.D.:

  Archelaus, King of Judea; Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee

  A.D 17:

  Cappadocia

  40:

  Mauretania

  43:

  Britain

  47:

  Revolt of Caractacus

  50:

  Dioscorides, pharmacologist

  51-63:

  War between Parthia and Rome

  55-60: