The establishment of elective assemblies, of graduated magistracies, of local and provincial justice, of public officers and public institutions, free museums, baths, theatres, libraries, and schools — all that we understand by organised society, in a word, may be traced back to the Empire. Throughout all Western Europe, from that germ, civilisation arose and raised its head after the invasion of the Northern tribes. From the same source, too, arose the force, at once monarchic and municipal, which overthrew the feudal system. It was the remnant of the old Roman ideas of provincial organisation that first formed the counties and duchies which afterwards coalesced into a state. It was the memory of the Roman township which gave birth to the first free towns of Europe.
It was the tradition of a Roman emperor which, by long intermediate steps, transformed the Teutonic chieftain into the modern king or emperor. London, York, Lincoln, Winchester, Gloucester, and Chester were Roman cities, and formed then, as they did for the earlier periods of our history, the pivots of our national administration. Paris, Rouen, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, in France; Constance, Basle, Cob- lentz, Cologne, upon the Rhine; Cadiz, Barcelona, Seville, Toledo, Lisbon, in the Iberian — Genoa, Milan, Verona, Rome, and Naples in the Italian peninsula, were in Roman, as in modern times, the great national centres of their respective countries. But, above all else guided tours turkey, Rome founded a permanent system of free obedience to the laws on the one hand, and a temperate administration of them on the other; the constant sense of each citizen having his place in a complex whole.
Special creation of universal law
The Roman's strength was in action, not in thought; but in thought he gave us something besides his special creation of universal law. It was his to discover the meaning of history. Egypt had carved on eternal rocks the pompous chronicles of kings. The Greeks wrote profound and brilliant memoirs. It was reserved to a Roman to conceive and execute the history of his people stretching over seven hundred years, and to give the first proof of the continuity and unity of national life. In art the Roman did little but develop the Greek types of architecture into stupendous and complex forms, fit for new uses, and worthy of his people's grandeur.
But the great tri-umphs of his skill were in engineering. He invented the arch, the dome, and the viaduct. The bridges of the Middle Ages were studied from Roman remains. The great domes of Italian cathedrals, of which that of our own St. Paul's is an imitation, were formed directly on the model of a temple at Rome. But in thought, the great gift of Rome was in her language, which has served as an admirable instrument of religious, moral, and political reflection, and, with many dialectic variations, forms the base of the languages of three of the great nations of Europe. Then it was, under the Roman empire, that the stores of Greek thought became common to the world.
As the empire of Alexander had shed them over the East, the empire of Rome gave them to the West. Greek language, literature, poetry, science, and art became the common education of the civilised world; and from the Grampians to the Euphrates, from the Atlas to the Rhine and the Caucasus, for the first and only time in the history of man, Europe, Asia, and Africa formed one political whole. The union of the oriental half, indeed, was mainly external and material, but throughout the western half a common order of ideas prevailed. Their religion was the belief in many gods — a system in which each of the powers of nature, each virtue, each art, was thought to be the manifestation of some separate god. It was a system which stimulated activity, self-reliance, toleration, sociability, and art, but which left the external world a vague and unmeaning mystery, and the heart of man a prey to violent and conflicting passions. It possessed not that idea of unity which alone can sustain philosophy and science, and alone can establish in the breast a fixed and elevated moral conscience.
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