The nineteenth-century English literary critic Matthew Arnold believed that Western civilization was the result of the confluence of two cultural streams, the Hebraic (Biblical) and the Classical. But it was to the Greeks that he gave credit for making the most important formative contributions to Classical Antiquity. In his view, the Romans were merely students and imitators of the Greeks in all matters intellectual.
Today, however, we give near-parity to the Romans in the shaping of the classical heritage. The Romans made distinctive contributions of their own, and several aspects of the classical heritage handed down from antiquity bear a diacritical Roman stamp.
First, Roman culture was a logocentric one; that is, it was focused on the written word. The aristocracy and middle classes of the Roman world were profoundly committed to communication and dissemination of information and ideas through written texts. The transmission occurred in two forms of written material—inscriptions on stone and writings on paper. Vast numbers of stone inscriptions from Roman times have survived. They were first edited, collated, and published by the late-nineteenth-century German historian of Rome, Theodor Mommsen, and are still being discovered, edited, and published today.
The vast amount of writings on paper, used for government documents, legal records, private correspondence, and literature, have for the most part disappeared in the cold and wet climate of Western Europe, but many such paper texts have survived in the dry and warm climate of the eastern Mediterranean.
Fortunately, in the period between the 500s and 900s A.D., Christian monks and other churchmen in Western Europe copied the contents of most literary and theological texts, written in Latin, from Roman paper onto parchment, made from stretched and bleached skins of sheep. These copies, made in the early Middle Ages, allow us to understand the complex dimensions and rich diversity of antique Roman written culture.
The second important contribution of Roman culture to the heritage of classical antiquity was the educational system that created the high rate of literacy among the upper and middle classes of the Roman world, possibly 50 percent of the adult male population. Schools for young boys led on to high schools for adolescents trained in the rhetorical style and complex grammar of ancient Latin writings.
A third and highest educational level were elite schools of rhetoric, which trained their students to be government officials, lawyers, and imaginative writers of nonfiction. These advanced institutes were mainly supported by the city governments of the Roman Empire, with occasional assistance from the emperor and other rich patrons.
This educational system had already been foreshadowed in the Hellenistic societies of the eastern Mediterranean during the second century B.C., but it was the Romans who improved, systematized, funded, and extended this crucial educational opportunity to all of the Roman Empire’s population. Only a strong, entrenched educational system with relatively open access could have generated a culture focused on the written word.
A distinctive aspect of the Roman educational system was that the content of the curriculum was entirely that of literary humanities. Students were engrossed in texts of imaginative literature and Platonic philosophy. They learned no mathematics, history, natural science, or civics beyond these literary and philosophical texts, many translated from Greek into Latin, but many also Latin originals. Even medicine was learned from texts.
The medieval Western Church inherited this curriculum for its schools, and this singular written content was passed into the schools of contemporary European states. The students graduating from the private (“public”) schools of nineteenth-century Britain, who, like the Roman graduates, went on to rule a vast empire, still received the old Roman humanistic education. Compared to our schools and colleges today, the spectrum of information it disseminated was narrow. But this Roman-shaped literary curriculum produced graduates who were highly skilled in writing and well-versed in the content of the texts of Greek and Roman antiquity.
The contemporary French lycée and the German gymnasium fostered the same kind of narrow literary curriculum. Changes and broadening of the curriculum came to France and Germany around 1890, but in England there was no significant departure from the classical curriculum until the 1920s. Today, when students at Oxford University say they are studying “Greats,” they mean they are majoring exclusively in the Greek and Latin classics, and this is still a popular, although disappearing, option.
Poetry was the literary field in which the Romans excelled, and they proliferated texts of epic and lyric poetry. After Homer’s work, nearly all of the best Greek poetry is to be found in the theatrical tragedies. The Romans seem to have avoided tragedies, but their writers devoted themselves to free-standing poems, both long and short, that serve as models of verse to the present day.
The subject matter was mainly erotic love (Catullus and Ovid), patriotism and heroism (Virgil, Horace), social commentary (Juvenal), and even natural science (Lucretius). Augustus Caesar played an important role in the development of Roman poetry. Virgil, Horace, and, until his exile to the Black Sea for sexual indiscretions, Ovid all wrote under the emperor’s patronage.
To be a poet was a reasonable ambition for scions of the Roman upper class, who enjoyed family wealth or imperial support. The Romans understood poetry as embalmed and concentrated emotion, which is still, for the most part, its character today.
Virgil showed later Europeans how to construct artificial heroic epics. Horace provided models of odes and sonnets. Catullus’s love poetry was of exceptional emotional depth within controlled and intricate versification. Ovid absorbed the prolific imaginative literature of the Hellenistic world and imparted it in readable and condensed form, providing genre and themes for poets down to the present day.
The Romans liked philosophy that offered guidance for behavior. They tended toward applied moral philosophy. Their quintessential philosophic works embraced the theory of Stoicism, to which the second-century A.D. emperor Marcus Aurelius made important contributions.
The Stoics taught a life of restraint and control, the personal cultivation of learning, beauty, and reason. The Stoics asked the Romans to realize that much that is encountered in life is beyond the individual’s control. Make the best of what can be humanly cultivated. It is a kind of Platonism shrunk to a pursuit of private feelings and thoughts: Do the best with what you can control and refine, and let the rest go.
The world is rational, but it is only amenable to active intervention within the limits of the individual’s capacity. Do not try to be an overachiever. Do not dream of social transformation. Private cultivation rather than social action makes for the good life. Although the slave Epictetus was one of the principal Stoic writers, the emperor Marcus Aurelius’s upper-class background is more typical of its devotees.
Stoicism is a narrow ethic, one suitable to the emotional and intellectual needs of aristocrat and slave alike, but less useful for the ambitious middle class.
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The embodiment of the Stoic ideal and its prime disseminator—through his prolific writings in the form of juristic orations, huge numbers of letters, and moral and political treatises—was the first-century B.C. writer Cicero. His elaborate political compositions came to be regarded as prose models in the Latin schools of antiquity and later—in fact, to the present time.
Cicero positioned himself as the prime example of the Stoic-minded old Roman aristocracy, and he certainly moved in these exalted circles. His writings extrapolate the Stoic philosophy, but he was a self-manufactured aristocrat. In reality, Cicero—about whom we know more, in thought and deed, than about anyone else in the ancient world—was largely a self-made man who rose from the educated middle class. He made a fortune practicing law and bought a sumptuous villa to imitate the lifestyle of the old aristocracy. Far from being self-controlled and reserved, he plunged passionately and loudly into politics. After he was elected consul by the old aristocracy, and celebrated it with a very un-Stoic poem—“O, how great for the Roman state was the date of my consulate”—his political career went into steep decline, leading to his death during the turmoil of the late first century B.C. But no one could handle normally clumsy Latin prose with as much skill and force as Cicero.
The law that Cicero practiced was that of the Republic, which featured his great orations before a jury of eighty people. By the end of the first century A.D., the jurisconsuls (legal experts) had, at the emperor’s urging, fashioned a legal system amenable to imperial centralization and smooth operation. The law was now in the hands of panels of prosecuting and deciding judges appointed by the imperial government. Legal proceedings featured not Cicero-type eloquent and passionate argument in court (what is called oral pleading and is still a feature of our Anglo-American common law), but written pleading or arguments submitted to the judges in the form of “briefs” (the word meant letters or documents). The jury was superseded by decision of the judges, who, in criminal cases, used torture to get self-incrimination from the defendant.
This is still the procedure in continental European and Latin American law, although torture was abandoned in the eighteenth century. Under Roman law, defendants could—in antiquity and today—be kept in jail indefinitely until they confessed.
In civil (non-criminal) law, the Romans developed the theory of the written contract, which is still the basis of our business law. For the contract to be valid, the two parties must be reliably informed of the facts of the matter and voluntarily affix their signatures to a written document of agreement.
Roman law stands beside Greek philosophy as one of the two intellectual achievements of classical antiquity that are still central to our culture. The law (called the Civil Code, the law of civilized society) is much more applicable and practical than Platonic and Aristotelian theory, but it still involves highly sophisticated and intricate reasoning. Cicero remained the model and inspiration for the successful lawyer but, in fact, the Roman legal system that has made such a widespread impact to the present day went beyond the loose-and-liberal judicial practices of Cicero’s day. He would have found the imperial legal system constraining, and the imperial judges would have told Cicero to stop talking and submit written briefs.
To those who relish abstract theory, Roman law seems mundane. But it brought learning, applied philosophy, and recognition of the state’s role in society to create a system that functioned well beyond its immediate articulation in the Civil Code.
Roman law both reflected and stimulated a cast of mind that was statist and conservative and applicable to the literate thinking and lifestyle of the Roman upper classes. As did Greek philosophy, which it partially imbibed and perpetuated, Roman law lay at the center of the classical heritage. It was a social system artificially constructed by a small group of highly literate lawyers and government officials, who saw themselves imposing a grid of uniformity, stability, and rationality upon a multicultural and ethnically and religiously diversified society. This mindset is still perpetuated in the European Union and among the bureaucrats and judges who rule it.
An attractive feature of Roman law, in antiquity and today, is that since it is all written down, it is easily mastered by systematic study within two or three years. The Civil Code thereby instigated professional law schools in the form we know them today.
The classical heritage as shaped by and filtered through Roman culture had two great flaws. First, it prevented the very rich oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean from surviving from antiquity into later times. All that was left as creative forces were Greek philosophy and Roman law. These were very substantial cultures but they represented a great narrowing of what could be passed on from antiquity to later centuries.
The Romans also transmitted a body of poetry that has never been surpassed, as the Greeks did with their theatrical tragedies. But there was not much else. The thoughts and feelings and aspirations of millions that had been transmitted orally from one generation to the next were suppressed or simply forgotten. Those who today celebrate the classical heritage are cultivating only a small part of ancient culture as it really flourished under the protective cover of the Hellenistic and Roman empires.
Second, another deficiency of classical culture was its lack of social conscience, its obliviousness to the slavery, poverty, disease, and everyday cruelty endured by more than half of the fifty million people who inhabited the empire. The classical heritage represented a narrow and insensitive social and political theory reinforcing a miserably class-ridden and technologically stagnant society.
A possible rebellion against this conservative, narrow, and insensitive classical heritage threatened for a while to come from the Christian Church. But by 400 A.D., Christianity had also been put through the wringer of Roman logocentric culture and its class-ridden and cruel manifestations.