The Press.
London, England, 1858-08-28 00:00:00

THE PRESS, AUGUST 28,1858.

them, but because the endeavour to solve them
excites his imagination and gathers into one view
a mass of historical facts. The man who can
satisfactorily account for the acquiescence of the
French in the absolute sovereignty of the Bour-
bons, it may almost be said, knows one half of
the history of France; and he who can explain
their rebellion against that despotism knows the
other half—so long is the chain of causes, so
various are the co-ordinate processes which issue
in any capital political phenomenon. Of this
complex and intricate nature is the problem
which Mr. Merivale has here attempted to solve.
The solution, however, must needs be in great
part conjectural, and after all imperfect where
the materials for a solution are so scanty.
Why did the Romans submit to Nero? A
tyrant commonly depends either upon the force
of his individual character, or upon a strong
party interested in supporting him, or upon
physical force, or upon a Jealous espionage
joined to an energetic suppression of all the
organs of public opinion. But these were not
the pillars upon which the tyranny of Nero
rested. His abilities were nc,t naturally remark-
able, and they were rendered contemptible for
every practical purpose by the worst education
that ever an unhappy human being had. No
party in the State was devoted to him except
those who regarded the name of Caesar with
superstitious reverence, and those who were
willing to support even a Nero so long as he was
in posSession. The military force at his com-
mand was not great ; while the legions remained
at the frontier of the empire, and were often
commanded by men far more fit to be emperors
than he who had the title. Nor did Nero sys-
tematically employ spies ; nor did new books
pass through the hands of a licenser. Ile main-
tained for nine years a government of which the
leading principle was the proscription of virtue
and merit throughout the Roman world ; and
yet he depended neither on partizans, nor on
talents, nor on centurions, nor on police. Why,
then, did his subjects submit to him ?
The question is probably unreasonable. It
would be more to the purpose to ask, had his
subjects sufficient reason to rebel ? For, when a
Government has subsisted and not totally
alienated public affection for upwards of seventy
years, the governed no longer require a reason
for acquiescence, but they require a very strong
reason for rebellion. Tyranny may be oppres-
sive. but yet not heavy enough to set in motion
the huge wheel of revolution, to stop which, as
all know and feel, no machinery in the social
system has been provided. That the empire of
the Caesars had deep foundations Mr. Merivale
has devoted his earlier volumes to showing, and
he has shown it to demonstration. Augustus,
throughout his long reign, had taken every occa-
sion to show his subjects how necessary he was
to them, and had made all men feel that if
liberty was dead he had not killed it, and if he
had become a tyrant it was only because they
had first become slaves. Year by year through
that long reign as this conviction grew the
I louse of the Umesars was more and more felt to
be an elected and heaven-favoured house ; while
that splendour of success which men so easily
persuade themselves is divine never ceased to rest
upon it. Respect for the energy of Tiberius was
more universally felt than hatred of his cruelty.
There was something imposing in the caprice of
Caius. Ile so sincerely believed himself to be a
god that he imposed upon others. The personal
weakness of Claudius made the divine favour
which protected him more manifest. The re-
ligious awe with which, when Nero became Em-
peror, the name of Augustus had come to be re-
garded was such as could not be weakened but by
a long course of extreme misgovernment, and not
extinguished but by ill-success.

Mr. Merivale labours to show by a graphic
picture of the darkest side of Roman manners
that the cruelties of Nero which appear to us so
enormous excited in his contemporaries but a
languid feeling of indignation. The Roman, he
says, who, when he entered his own mansion,
saw daily the slave chained at the gate, and
could mark on the persons of his domestics
the traces of the whip and the branding-iron,
who had himself not unfrequently at the Circus
passed with rapturous delight sentence of death
upon the gladiator who appealed to his mercy,
would he be disgusted at the death of a Seneca
or a Corbulo, or might he not rather sympathize

with the tyrant, feel the pleasure
power, and understand that lust of cruelty which
is by us considered the most mysterious part of
the tyrannic nature ? This, we think, may be
doubted. Humanity does not so easily perish
out of human hearts as some theorists imagine
Man is tenacious of virtue ; after he has Kir.
rendered the outworks, he will maintain the
citadel. A theorist may say that he who can
treat his fellow-creatures like chattels, or murder
them for amusement, cannot have a spark of
humanity left ; yet such a person will often be
found in practice to have very many sparks of
humanity left. The man who has no coin-
passion for his slaves will of,:en have as much
compassion as others for those who are not
slaves. In point of fact, what is it which
has made the name of Nero a proverb of
tyranny ? Probably there have been worse
tyrants in the world, if in somewhat less con-
spicuous stations. Mr. Merivale himself has told
us what gives Nero this distinction. No other
tyrant has been so vividly painted. Yet we can-
not imagine that even the dramatic skill of a
Tacitus would have been capable of producing
the most impressive of all delineations of tyranny,
if the age in which he lived regarded humanity
with indifference. The acquiescence of the
Romans in the oppression of Nero would be less
surprising if the thoughts of men in that age had
been shackled by servile maxims or by an exclu-
sive relikcion. Despotism in England, France,
and Spain has always supported itself by the
doctrine of divine right, and by the assistance of
persecuting priests. But until our own time
there has never been an age of more unbounded
freedom of thought than the age of Nero. At
that time upon all abstract subjects a man might
think and say the thing he would. Nor was he
only allowed—he was even encouraged and
trained to do so. The reader shall hear Mr.
Merivale upon this subject :

f he end of the highest education among the Romans
was to fit a man for the discharge of his public duties. But
in theory at least they took a very liberal view of public
duty, and conceived that everything which refined anti
enlarged his intellectual powers made him a wiserlegis-
lator and an abler megistrate. At the age of seven, or
sometimes a few years later, the child began his course of
public instruction on the benches of the Grammatian. From
hiw he learned to read and speak his own language step
by step with the Greek, and imbued his memory with the
thoughts and language of the classics of either tongue,
from Homer to Enttius or Virgil. At fourteen, or as soon
as the powers of thought began to unfold themselves, he
was transferred to the school of the Rhetorician, wheel he
first began to concentrate his studies upon the future
business of his life. He. was to be made a public man, and
therefore, above all things, a public speaker. He was to be
trained for a perfect orator by declamation, by writing, by
careful study of the best models, by constant exercise in
rivalry with his schoolfellows. But it was not the mere
trick of action or knack of speaking that he was to acquire;
he was :o be thoroughly informed with the matter requisite
for his calling. Every branch of knowledge might some-
times have its application ; every art and science might
serve on occasion to illustrate the topics presented to him
for discussion; and if any were too remote from the sphere
of forensic eloquence they would serve at least to expand
the mind of the pupil, to give breadth and depth and
height to his understanding. Among these sciences,
however, there was one which held the highest place, one
which for its pre-eminence among them deserved to be
removed from the circle of the rhetorician's instructions
and intrusted to the care of a special teacher. At
seventeen, or when the fated struggle begins between the
moral principles and the instinct of appetite,—at the core•
m ence men t, such as morality and religion have represented
it, of the great battle of life between vice and virtue,--the
youth was transferred to the academy of the Philosopher to
learn the mysteries of the Good, the Fair, and the Honour.
able. While he still continued to exercise himself daily in
rhetorical studies Anil practice, he explored the dark by-
ways of morals and metaphysics under accomplished
teachers, and traversed perhaps the whole circuit of Grecian
speculation before he (let...mined in which sect definitively
to enrol himself. Such a course of education, it must be
allowed, was nobly conceived, and nt the hands of the
Romans it received fair ploy ; for it was warped by raf
se..tarino prejudices nor confined by narrow uotiuns o
state policy.
This is an attractive picture, and one which
may well win the heart of the theorist on edu-
cation. here is a complete emancipation of
thought ; here every man thinks for himself, and
with little reluctance suffers his neighbour to
think for himself. But there is something better
still behind; for in the period between Augustus
and Nero we observe that a great change took
place in public opinion. In the Augustan age
the melancholy principles of Epicurism, the ex-
tracted essence of all Paganism, were in vogue.
The doctrine of " Nil admirandum," the dream-
less torpor of the soul, was preached by Horace.
But in the time of Nero, Stoicism had havoc

the reigning creed—Stoicism in that nobler form
which it assumed when it became associated with
Roman seriousness of character—the most ele-
vated system of practical philosophy which the
world before Christianity knew. Seneca," says
Ain Merivale, " discoursed to a large and not
inattentive audience, and surely the soil was
not all unfruitful on which his seed was scat-
• tered, when he proclaimed that God dwells not
"in temples of wood and stone, nor wants the
" ministration of human hands ; that Ile has no
" delight in the blood of victims ; that He is near
"to all His creatures; that His Spirit resides in
men's hearts ; that all men are truly His off-
"spring; that we are members of one body,
" which is God or Nature ; that men must be-
" lieve in God before they can approach llim ;
"that the true service of God is to be like Him;
" that all men have sinned, and none performed
" all the works of the law ; that God is no
respecter of nations, ranks, or conditions, but
" all, barbarian and Roman, bond and free, are
- alike under His all-seeing Providence."
How happy must the world have been when
religious controversies were without bitterness;
when no man was taxed for heresy, but all
had freedom to worship God in their own
fashion; and when the confidence thus reposed
in mankind was so nobly responded to that the
meaner system was spontaneously rejected and
the more magnanimous chosen ! Yet, remember
that this is the dark and dismal age when free-
dom had become a dint tradition, when magic
had taken the place of religion, when all the
hoods of society were loosed, when a Nero was
mit only obeyed, but even worshipped as di-
I Me. What more startling contrast than this?
What more irresistible proof that virtue, liberty,
and piety do not depend on education, or on
institutions of any kind, and cannot be created
In them.

For our parts, though we do not profess
to be able to solve the problem, though the
contemplation of it rather leads us to reflect upon
the mysteriousness of all national life, yet we are
disposed to think that the sloth, the indifference
to politics which creeps over a nation when it
has been content for a long time to see all affairs
transacted for it, acted upon the Romans as a
more binding enchantment than any of the in-
fluences which Mr. Merivale has noticed. It
was by removing all public business out of the
hands of the noblesse and giving it to paid ad-
Nenturers responsible solely to the Sovereign
that the Bourbons bound their subjects in a
slothful slavery. 'When Government is con-
ducted without publicity by a small number of
officers politics become a difficult study to those
not officially occupied with them, and from being
difficult they soon become uninteresting. When
this has taken place the despot is twice as firm on
his seat as before, for those who would be cham-
pions of law are ignorant of law—the nature of
constitutional government has been forgotten—
usurpations arc not known for usurpations. This
total oblivion of all the rights and practices of
freemen was strikingly shown in France at the
time of the Revolution. People appealed to the
universal rights of man because they had for-
gotten the rights of Frenchmen. That the same
oblivion of liberty had really taken place at
Rome in the time of Nero Mr. Merivale has
pointed out. " Even Lucan himself," he says,
" the disciple of Cato, when he girded himself
" like Brutus with a dagger to take the Cresar's life,
" bad no thought of restoring the republic of
" free elections and popular magistracies. We
shall find, as we proceed in this history, that
" Tacitus himseK a patriot of calmer judgment,
" was abundantly satisfied when at a later period
" he found the Senate placed ostensibly at the
" head of affairs, and the Emperor affecting to be
"no more than its hand and its mouthpiece.
l'nder Nerva and Trajan the Roman liberals
believed that they had recovered the days of
" Catulus and Pompeius."
It may, perhaps, be added that people in old
limes worshipped success more universally and
more reverently than they do now. Good for-
tune was by the ancients regarded as more divine
than virtue. The opinion of Sulla's good luck
11!ay have protected hint after his abdication.
k Or, in fact, the gods of Greece and Rome did
out differ from men in being more virtuous, but
_ being more happy and more beautiful.
does not mean virtuous, but hand-
"me. The vices of the blooming young Caesar