Part 26 (1/2)

Then came the mania for public lectures. Pollio, a favorite of Augustus, had set the example. For a century it was the fas.h.i.+on to read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends a.s.sembled to applaud them. The taste for eloquence that had once produced great orators exhibited in the later centuries only finished declaimers.

=Importance of the Latin Literature and Language.=--Latin literature profited by the conquests of Rome; the Romans carried it with their language to their barbarian subjects of the West. All the peoples of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the Danubian lands discarded their language and took the Latin. Having no national literature, they adopted that of their masters. The empire was thus divided between the two languages of the two great peoples of antiquity: the Orient continued to speak Greek; almost the entire Occident acquired the Latin. Latin was not only the official language of the state functionaries and of great men, like the English of our day in India; the people themselves spoke it with greater or less correctness--in fact, so well that today eighteen centuries after the conquest five languages of Europe are derived from the Latin--the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Roumanian.

With the Latin language the Latin literature extended itself over all the West. In the schools of Bordeaux and Autun in the fifth century only Latin poets and orators were studied. After the coming of the barbarians, bishops and monks continued to write in Latin and they carried this practice among the peoples of England and Germany who were still speaking their native languages. Throughout almost the whole mediaeval period, acts, laws, histories, and books of science were written in Latin. In the convents and the schools they read, copied, and appreciated only works written in Latin; beside books of piety only the Latin authors were known--Vergil, Horace, Cicero, and Pliny the Younger. The renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries consisted partly in reviving the forgotten Latin writers.

More than ever it was the fas.h.i.+on to know and to imitate them.

As the Romans constructed a literature in imitation of the Greeks, the moderns have taken the Latin writers for their models. Was this good or bad? Who would venture to say? But the fact is indisputable. Our romance languages are daughters of the Latin, our literatures are full of the ideas and of the literary methods of the Romans. The whole western world is impregnated with the Latin literature.

THE ARTS

=Sculpture and Painting.=--Great numbers of Roman statues and bas-reliefs of the time of the empire have come to light. Some are reproductions and almost all are imitations of Greek works, but less elegant and less delicate than the models. The most original productions of this form of art are the bas-reliefs and the busts.

Bas-reliefs adorned the monuments (temples, columns, and triumphal arches), tombs, and sarcophagi. They represent with scrupulous fidelity real scenes, such as processions, sacrifices, combats, and funeral ceremonies and so give us information about ancient life. The bas-reliefs which surround the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius bring us into the presence of the great scenes of their wars. One may see the soldiers fighting against the barbarians, besieging their fortresses, leading away the captives; the solemn sacrifices, and the emperor haranguing the troops.

The busts are especially those of the emperors, of their wives and their children. As they were scattered in profusion throughout the empire, so many have been found that today all the great museums of Europe have collections of imperial busts. They are real portraits, probably very close resemblances, for each emperor had a well-marked physiognomy, often of a striking ugliness that no one attempted to disguise.

In general, Roman sculpture holds itself much more close to reality than does the Greek; it may be said that the artist is less concerned with representing things beautifully than exactly.

Of Roman painting we know only the frescoes painted on the walls of the rich houses of Pompeii and of the house of Livy at Rome. We do not know but these were the work of Greek painters; they bear a close resemblance to the paintings on Greek vases, having the same simple and elegant grace.

=Architecture.=--The true Roman art, because it operated to satisfy a practical need, is architecture. In this too the Romans imitated the Greeks, borrowing the column from them. But they had a form that the Greeks never employed--the arch, that is to say, the art of arranging cut stones in the arc of a circle so that they supported one another.

The arch allowed them to erect buildings much larger and more varied than those of the Greeks. The following are the princ.i.p.al varieties of Roman monuments:

1. The _Temple_ was sometimes similar to a Greek temple with a broad vestibule, sometimes vaster and surmounted with a dome. Of this sort is the Pantheon built in Rome under Augustus.

2. The _Basilica_ was a long low edifice, covered with a roof and surrounded with porticos. There sat the judge with his a.s.sistants about him; traders discussed the price of goods; the place was at once a bourse and a tribunal. It was in the basilicas that the a.s.semblies of the Christians were later held, and for several centuries the Christian churches preserved the name and form of basilicas.

3. The _Amphitheatre_ and the _Circus_ were constructed of several stories of arcades surrounding an arena; each range of arcades supported many rows of seats. Such were the Colosseum at Rome and the arenas at Arles and Nimes.

4. The _Arch of Triumph_ was a gate of honor wide enough for the pa.s.sage of a chariot, adorned with columns and surmounted with a group of sculpture. The Arch of t.i.tus is an example.

5. The _Sepulchral Vault_ was an arched edifice provided with many rows of niches, in each of which were laid the ashes of a corpse.

It was called a Columbarium (pigeon-house) from its shape.

6. The _Thermae_ were composed of bathing-halls furnished with basins. The heat was provided by a furnace placed in an underground chamber. The Thermae in a Roman city were what the gymnasium was in a Greek city--a rendezvous for the idle. Much more than the gymnasium it was a labyrinth of halls of every sort: there were a cool hall, warm apartments, a robing-room, a hall where the body was anointed with oil, parlors, halls for exercise, gardens, and the whole surrounded by an enormous wall. Thus the Thermae of Caracalla covered an immense area.

7. The _Bridge_ and the _Aqueduct_ were supported by a range of arches thrown over a river or over a valley. Examples are the bridge of Alcantara and the Pont du Gard.

8. The _House_ of a rich Roman was a work of art. Unlike our modern houses, the ancient house had no facade; the house was turned entirely toward the interior; on the outside it showed only bare walls.

The rooms were small, ill furnished, and dark; they were lighted only through the atrium. In the centre was the great hall of honor (the atrium) where the statues of the ancestors were erected and where visitors were received. It was illuminated by an opening in the roof.

Behind the atrium was the peristyle, a garden surrounded by colonnades, in which were the dining halls, richly ornamented and provided with couches, for among the rich Romans, as among the Asiatic Greeks, guests reclined on couches at the banquets. The pavement was often made of mosaic.

=Character of the Roman Architecture.=--The Romans,[162] unlike the Greeks, did not always build in marble. Ordinarily they used the stone that they found in the country, binding this together with an indestructible mortar which has resisted even dampness for eighteen hundred years. Their monuments have not the wonderful grace of the Greek monuments, but they are large, strong, and solid--like the Roman power. The soil of the empire is still covered with their debris. We are astonished to find monuments almost intact as remote as the deserts of Africa. When it was planned to furnish a water-system for the city of Tunis, all that had to be done was to repair a Roman aqueduct.

=Rome and Its Monuments.=--Rome at the time of the emperors was a city of 2,000,000 inhabitants.[163] This population was herded in houses of five and six stories, poorly built and crowded together. The populous quarters were a labyrinth of tortuous paths, steep, and ill paved. Juvenal who frequented them leaves us a picture of them which has little attractiveness. At Pompeii, a city of luxury, it may be seen how narrow were the streets of a Roman city. In the midst of hovels monuments by the hundred would be erected. The emperor Augustus boasted of having restored more than eighty temples. ”I found a city of bricks,” said he; ”I leave a city of marble.” His successors all worked to embellish Rome. It was especially about the Forum that the monuments acc.u.mulated. The Capitol with its temple of Jupiter became almost like the Acropolis at Athens. In the same quarter many monumental areas were constructed--the forum of Caesar, the forum of Augustus, the forum of Nerva, and, most brilliant of all, the forum of Trajan. Two villas surrounded by a park were situated in the midst of the city; the most noted was the Golden House, built for Nero.

THE LAW