IANCIENT SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
Atthe end of the year 1906, while sojourning in Paris, where I had been giving at the Collège de France a course of lectures on Roman history, I received an invitation from Emilio Mitré, the son of the famous Argentine general, to undertake a long expedition to South America. This invitation evoked general surprise. What, my friends asked, was I, the historian of the ancient world, going to do in the newest of new worlds, in ultra-modern countries, in countries without a past and caring only for the future, where industry and agriculture fill the place which for the ancients was occupied by war? Why, if I was willing to leave my studies and my books for one moment, did I not repair to Egypt or the East, the scene of so much of the history which I had recounted, where the Romans have left so many traces of the world which has passed away, and where so many important excavations, tending to enrich history with new documentary evidence, are in progress?
I answered my questioners by pointing out that I wasnot a bookworm, whose interest was confined to ancient books and archæological parchments; that life in all its aspects interested me, and that I was, therefore, curious, after devoting so much attention to ancient peoples, to study awhile the most modern of nations, the newest comers in the history of our civilisation. Did my friends suppose that, because I had written a history of Rome, I had pledged myself never again to direct my gaze to modern life? But, though I explained the reason for my voyage in this way, I, no less than my friendly objectors, was convinced at that time that my travels in America would be only a parenthesis in my intellectual life. In other words, I thought that I was going to America in search of an intellectual diversion, hoping for some relaxation for my mind, obsessed for the last ten years by ancient history, in bringing it to bear on an entirely different world. That this diversion would be useful to me, I had no doubt; but not because America might help me to a better understanding of ancient Rome, but because to change every now and again the subject-matter of my studies and to enrich my mind with new impressions always seemed to me one of the most profitable intellectual exercises, especially for a historian to whom a wide experience of human nature is a necessity. To-day, after having made not one, but two journeys to America, after having seen not only the two largest and most flourishing states of South America, but also that North America which, more than all the other states of the New World, representsin the eyes of contemporaries the more modern part of our civilisation, the reign of machinery, the empire of business, the rule of money, I am no longer of this opinion. It is my present belief that a journey in the New World is of supreme benefit intellectually to a historian of the ancient world; and that, in order to understand the life and history of Greek or Roman society, it is perhaps just as important to visit the countries of America as Asia Minor or Northern Africa. That is what I said on one of the last days of my stay in the United States to a genial professor of ancient history connected with Cornell University, with whom I was discussing the most famous schools of the present day for the pursuit of historical studies, and the methods adopted in these schools. “Many of you Americans,” I said, “go to European universities to study ancient history. It seems to me that you might well invite many European professors to come and go through a finishing course in America, studying not only in libraries but in the live world, and observing what happens in American society. Nobody is in a better position than are you to understand ancient society.” My remark may seem at first sight a paradox. But it is no paradox, if one goes to the root of the problem. For what we, men of the twentieth century, call ancient civilisations, were really, when they flourished, new and young civilisations, with but few centuries of history behind them; and so are the American civilisations of the present day. For this reason, we find in ancientcivilisations, on however much reduced a scale, many phenomena which are now peculiar to American social systems; while we should look for them in vain in European civilisation, which has more right to call itself ancient civilisation than have the civilisations of Greece and of Rome. This I propose briefly to prove.
One of the social phenomena which are most characteristic of North America, but which would be looked for in vain in Europe, is the munificence of the donations of wealthy men to the public. Families of great wealth in America nowadays feel it incumbent on them, as a social duty, to spend a part of their substance on the people; to encourage education and culture, to bestow benefactions, to help the more needy classes, and to assist with their purses the public authorities in the execution of their functions. In Europe, the case is different. Large fortunes may be numerous, but they are kept more in the background than in America. Rich men are much more selfish in the enjoyment of their riches. Even the richest are, as a rule, content to leave some small sum in their wills to the poor, or to some educational institution. But donations in excess of four thousand pounds are rare, and make a great stir. It is for this reason that certain sections of society in Europe accuse the upper classes of selfishness and hold up before them American generosity as an example to follow. But this censure is exaggerated, for the times and the social conditions are different in Europe. The history of the ancient world shows that thisgenerosity on the part of the rich is a phenomenon peculiar to a certain stage in the development of society, which recurs in all flourishing and prosperous, but as yet not very ancient, societies. In these, some of the public functions are assumed by the rich, because the State has not yet had the time to bring them under its control and to direct them according to laws by it established. If the millionaires of America have, as a matter of fact, but few imitators in Europe, they can boast numberless forerunners in the histories of Greece and Rome. In Athens to begin with, and, later, in the Roman Empire, to mention only the most famous states of the ancient world, education, charity, public amusements, even public works, such as roads, theatres, and temples, were always in part left by the State to the generosity of wealthy individuals, who felt it their duty to contribute out of their means to the public welfare.
Amongst the inscriptions which have reached us from the Roman world, and which have been collected in theCorpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, we find a considerable number referring to these donations. In all the provinces of the vast Empire, in all the cities great and small, stories have been found recounting, often in forcible terms, the donation by some citizen, during his life or at his death, of a certain sum to the city, it might be to construct or repair an edifice, it might be to distribute grain to the people in time of dearth, or to give bounties of oil on festive occasions,or to assure to the people the enjoyment of certain periodical spectacles, or to supplement the finances of the city, which had been thrown into disorder by excessive expenditure, or which were not equal to all the calls made upon them. Every city, then, had her own millionaire benefactors, her little Carnegies, her Huntingtons, Morgans, and Rockefellers in miniature, whose generosity was necessary to the public good, and to whom were raised in gratitude monuments, many of which have come down to our time.
The Roman Emperor himself was, at first at any rate, only the most generous and the best known of these rich donors: a kind of Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller of the Empire. Suetonius, for instance, tells us what sums Augustus spent in the course of his life, out of his private patrimony, on public objects. Augustus himself, in the famousMonumentum Ancyranum, the great inscription found in Asia, in which he gives a clear résumé of the story of his life, enumerates many of the gifts which he made to the public out of his own pocket. On several occasions, he simply liquidated the deficit in the Empire’s budget out of his private purse. At another time, he repaired at his own expense the roads of Italy which after the civil wars had through neglect fallen into disrepair. On countless occasions, he spent money for public works, for the relief of famine, for popular amusements, for all the forms of beneficence then customary, without paying any regard to the serious inroads he was making on the fortune which hewould have to leave to his own heirs. This is exactly what many wealthy men are doing to-day in the New World. It would be in accord with the facts to say that those striking largesses were one of the means by which imperial authority was gradually concentrated at the heart of the Roman State, and surrounded itself with so much gratitude, so many interests, and so many hopes as to be able definitely to secure the principal position amongst all the organs of the State.
But if the Emperor was the most generous of the public benefactors, he was not the only one. The chief men throughout the Empire followed his example, some of them on so elaborate a scale as to challenge comparison with the most munificent American millionaires, when account is taken of the difference in the standards of riches in the respective epochs. The best-known figure among these donors is Herodes Atticus, an immensely rich Athenian of the second centuryA.D.What was his origin, and whence he got his money, we do not know. Probably he belonged to one of those families which had accumulated immense property in the provinces, during the first century of the Christian era, a century of rapidly acquired and great fortunes. This much is certain, that he applied himself to study, and became what was then called a rhetor, corresponding more or less closely to what we term a professor of literature, not however with a view to earning a livelihood, but with the object of cultivating his own and other people’s minds. Highly cultured, erudite,and at the same time one of the richest men in the Empire, Herodes was a great friend of Antoninus Pius and of Marcus Aurelius. But, great as was his reputation for wisdom and literary taste, and notwithstanding the enhancement of his prestige through the friendships of the two celebrated emperors, he left a name in the social history of the Roman world more particularly because of the vast sums he gave away all over the Empire. At Athens, he repaired in a splendid way the most ancient and famous buildings of that celebrated city. He presented, repaired, and maintained theatres, aqueducts, temples, and stadia in the cities of Greece and Italy.
For the rest, several of the most highly admired buildings and most imposing ruins in Rome are actually gifts made to the public by ancient citizens. Out of them all, I may cite the Pantheon, that marvellous Pantheon, which we all still admire in the heart of Rome, the monument which stands deathless while the stream of ages flows by. This was constructed by Agrippa, the friend of Augustus, at his own expense, and can be compared in this respect to Carnegie Hall in New York. Agrippa built the Pantheon from the same notions of civic zeal that impelled Carnegie to endow New York with his great Hall. And the two monuments, built by the personal munificence of two ultra-wealthy citizens, with an interval of twenty centuries between them, express the same desire to extend to the whole people a share in the enjoyment of the donor’s private fortune.
Naturally, my earliest studies in Roman history led me to fix my attention on this bountiful munificence on the part of private persons in the ancient world, by which the rich, either spontaneously or at the call of public opinion, took upon themselves a share of the public burdens. But I had not fully grasped the meaning of this system, until I visited America, and saw the colleges, schools, and hospitals founded and subsidised, the museums and universities endowed, and all the other public institutions aided with millions of dollars by the rich business men and bankers of America. For Europeans, living on a continent where nowadays the State has almost monopolised these functions and exercises them zealously, seeming to resent the interference of private persons, it is difficult to picture correctly a social system in which private generosity is at once possible and necessary, the advantages by which such generosity is accompanied, and the manner in which it is exercised.
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The munificence of the wealthy citizens is only a special instance of a more general and more extensive phenomenon in which America approaches more nearly to the ancient world than Europe; I mean, in that her society is less essentially bureaucratic. In the ancient world, there was no bureaucratic organisation in any of the Greco-Asiatic monarchies founded by Alexander or in the latest period of the Roman Empire which could be considered to resemble even remotely, on a smallerscale and merely in broad outlines, that which flourishes in the Europe of to-day. Now, in the most splendid moments of Greek and Roman history, we find states in which all the public functions, even the executive ones, were elective; so that they all changed periodically according to the whims of an electoral body. The need for technical training and professional education for the exercise of certain executive functions was so little recognised that even the command of the military forces and the chief magistracy were filled by public election. A general became a general, not in the course of his professional career, but at the will of the people, assembled in thecomitia; and with generals chosen in this way, Rome conquered the world. It is impossible to imagine a social constitution in more striking contradiction to the social constitution of contemporary Europe, which entrusts all the executive functions to a bureaucracy professionally trained, formed into a rigid hierarchy, and dependent on the State, over which the people have practically no power. Men in Europe become generals or judges because they have studied the art of war or law in special schools, not because the majority of an electoral body have thought it opportune to entrust the office to an individual who has been clever enough to appeal to them more strongly than do his rivals.
This difference was and is one of the greatest difficulties met with by European historians in the study of the ancient world. I am of opinion, for example, thatthis is one of the weakest points in Mommsen’s history. Accustomed to see bureaucratic states at work, European historians find it difficult to imagine how those states can have prospered in which the magistrates changed periodically, sometimes every year, and in which there was no professional division between the different functions. Instinctively, they tend also to paint the ancient state in the colours of the European state, attributing to it the same virtues and the same defects, and, therefore, representing its weaknesses as well as its merits in a false light. For an American, on the other hand, especially for a North American, the difficulty of understanding the ancient states is much less formidable. Certainly the principle of professional specialisation is much more highly developed in modern American society than it was in the ancient societies. Modern civilisation is nowadays too complex and too technical to admit of the principle of popular election being applied indiscriminately, as at Athens or Rome, to all the public offices. What sensible man would consent to-day, even in the purest of democracies, to the election of the admirals, for instance, by universal suffrage? Nevertheless, in the American confederation many of the public offices, which are now entrusted in Europe to the professional bureaucracy, are elective. And this fact by itself is enough to represent a distinctrapprochementbetween American society and ancient society.
For this reason, an inhabitant of New York can more easily than an inhabitant of London or Paris picture to himself certain aspects of the life of the Athens or Rome of ancient days; especially the continual and frequent succession of elections, and the complete change of interests and of directing forces involved in the change of the magistrates in office. It is true that we in Europe have periodical elections, as in America. Periodically, in the Old, as in the New World, the people assemble to exercise their sovereign right by means of the ballot. But if, regarded superficially, the act and the procedure are identical, their value and importance are different. The populace in the old states of Europe elect only consultative and legislative bodies, while the executive power remains to a great extent independent of the people, residing in a professional bureaucracy whose members cannot be changed from day to day.
In America, on the contrary, as in ancient Athens and Rome, many of the magistrates who hold in their hands and exercise directly governing powers are periodically changed at the will of the people, which, therefore, moulds more directly the government and its different organs and more directly inspires and controls its particular functions, just as it used to control them in the ancient states.
It is not strange, therefore, that we find ancient Rome reappearing in one of the most important juridical institutions of the United States, an institution which we should search for in vain in Europe, great mistress oflaws though she be accounted. One of the American institutions which seems to Europeans most contrary to the modern spirit, and for that reason most deserving of severe blame, is the right of “injunctions” with which American magistrates are invested. To Europe, where the bureaucracy, though immovable and little subject to control, cannot step outside the precise prescriptions of the law in the exercise of its functions, this discretionary power of the American magistrates seems little less than an instrument of intolerable tyranny. A brilliant European, who is a distinguished professor of literature in one of the universities of North America, but who, notwithstanding a very lengthy sojourn in the American republic, has preserved intact the ideas and the spirit of the Old World, said to me one day in New York: “In this land of liberty, there is one tyranny more terrible than all the tyrannies of Europe, that of the judicial power!” That a magistrate should have the power to give orders, be they of only momentary validity, which are the expressions of his own will and not of the letter of the law, seems to the European a monstrous thing, a relic of the ancient tyrannies, which harmonises but ill with republican institutions.
A historian of the ancient world, on the other hand, is in a position to understand more easily this seeming contradiction. The injunction is nothing else than theedictumof the Roman magistrate; the power, that is to say, which the Roman magistrate possessed, and which the American magistrate, maybe in a less degree,possesses, of making good with his personal authority the lacunæ and deficiencies in the law, on every occasion when public order or the principles of justice seemed to demand it urgently. In the eyes of ancient Rome, the magistrate was not only, as in the bureaucratic states of Europe, the cautious and impartial servant and executor of the law. He was also the living personification of the State and of the general interest, invested with full powers of exercising his own judgment, over and above the laws, on behalf of the State and of the general interest, when the law was found wanting. In short, by reinforcing the authority of the magistrates, the ancient states endeavoured to make amends for the weakening of the State which was bound to ensue from the continual electoral changes and the instability of all the offices; while Europe, on the other hand, which, with her rigid bureaucracies, has made the power of the State so strong, can rigorously limit the powers of her functionaries with laws of immense scope. But one last remnant of the ancient conception, tempered by the modern spirit of the State, survives in North America, where, the elective principle being more extensively applied than in the states of Europe, the tendency is, by way of compensation, to reinforce by some discretionary power, like the “injunction,” some at least of the judicial offices. Perhaps we may explain in this way the fact that some European writers in the nineteenth century have ventured to assert that the ancients never knew what liberty was, even in what were apparentlythe most democratic republics; while others have maintained that more liberty is to be found in the constitutional monarchies of Europe than in the authoritative American republics.
Another instance still more curious is afforded us by those dictators who, under varying titles and with varying success, have appeared in almost all the republics of Spanish America, after the emancipation of these territories from the mother country. The latest of these dictators was Porfirio Diaz, who governed Mexico for so many years. Europe has never properly understood these dictators. She has mistaken them for caricatures, now of Nero, now of Napoleon, and has drawn the conclusion that the republics in question were impregnated with the disease of tyranny, and could not exist in a state of liberty. But a historian of the ancient world recognises at once in these dictators a modern incarnation of a figure which constantly appears in ancient history, the Greek τύραννος, the Romanprinceps. Pisistratus and Augustus, not Nero and Napoleon, are the prototypes of these dictators. States based on an electoral system which is not controlled by organised parties or by other social forces calculated to ensure its working in conformity with precise and certain rules, are subject to eruptions of disorder, which end in establishing the personal power of that individual who succeeds in making the political and administrative machine work with comparative regularity. Augustus was throughout forty-one years re-electedevery five or ten years head of the republic, because he had succeeded, by his influence and personal ability, in making the machine of thecomitiaand senate run smoothly, at a time when the Roman aristocracy, which had controlled it for centuries, could no longer, owing to its own discords, do so. The reason why the power of Augustus was prolonged and extended in all directions until it became a dictatorship for life, cloaked under legal forms, was that he alone seemed capable of ensuring a wise government and of preventing civil wars. And was not just this the real reason for the long tenure of power by Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, and for his prolonged presidency, which was merely a dictatorship masquerading under republican forms? Anyone who wishes to understand the government of Mexico during the last forty years might find the history of Augustus of great service; just as a profound knowledge of the recent history of Mexico might help to the understanding of the ancient history of Augustus.
A profound study of ancient history is, therefore, an excellent preparation for the rapid understanding of certain parts, at any rate, of the American constitution and of American society; just as a knowledge of America should be an excellent aid to the study of ancient history. In fact, in the course of my travels and observations in America, after having devoted ten years to the study of a large section of ancient history, I have realised how much the ancient history, which I had studied in Europe, helped me to understand America;and how much the America which I had before my eyes helped me to a better understanding of the distant reality of that vanished world of long ago. And if we follow the track of these studies and reflections, I think that we shall be able to attribute also a more precise meaning to that epithet of “young,” which is constantly applied to America. Who does not talk a hundred times a year of old Europe and young America? Now what do these two much-used and much-abused epithets mean? That Europe has a longer history than America? In that case the contrasting terms would not mean much. For that is a simple chronological statement, which only demands a knowledge of the fact that America was not discovered till 1492A.D.Do they mean that America is more vigorous, more active, more daring than Europe, just as young men usually possess these qualities in a greater degree than the old? As a matter of fact, many people do use the two adjectives in this sense. But, in that case, they assume as proved one of the most complex, one of the deepest and most difficult problems of modern life, that is to say, the problem whether a comparison can be struck between Europe and America, and if so, on the basis of what criterion? That there should be those who strike this comparison and resolve it in this way, is not surprising. But no one will be found to pretend that the judgment contained in those two words “young” and “old,” thus interpreted, can or ought to be accepted as true by everyone.
On the other hand, it is possible to agree on a more narrow and precise interpretation of these words; to say that America is young and Europe old, because America reproduces some of the characters and phenomena which we find in antiquity, that is to say, in the remotest epochs of our history. European civilisation, as the result of her migration to America, there to found new states and societies, has really become, in a certain sense, regenerated, because she has again become, in the light of certain characteristics and certain institutions, what she was twenty centuries ago. And if the “youth” of America is understood in this sense, it is not rash to argue that it too will grow old. The study of ancient history can be of a certain practical value to those who consider America with the object of divining, in this great community, the tendencies and inclinations of the future. For students of that history can bring a plausible criterion of prevision to their observations. In fact, it is not rash to suppose, at least if some unknown force does not unexpectedly divert the course of events in the New World, that all the parts of American life and society which most resemble ancient society are destined to disappear gradually, as America grows older and elaborates a complex and artificial civilisation; just as the ancient institutions and ideas of which we find so many traces in America gradually disappeared in Europe in the progress of time, as civilisation in the Old World became artificial and complex. If this prophecy is not fallacious, we should expect history,which eternally repeats herself, to require the man of the New World to witness the same phenomena whose more gradual realisation they have already witnessed in the ancient world. In the New World also, we should expect to see a society regulated by elective and authoritative institutions gradually become bureaucratic and at the same time fetter every branch of political and administrative powers with the tight bonds of rigid juridical principles. This will be a slow, but profound transformation, in the course of which many things will change their position and value. Perhaps the inexhaustible public munificence of the millionaires will become exhausted, and the State will grow in prestige and influence, if not in power.