The Private Life of the Romans. Harold Whetstone Johnston

Чтение книги онлайн.

INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      1 The topics that are discussed in this book have to do with the everyday life of the Roman people. Such things will be considered as the family, the Roman name, marriage and the position of women, children and education, slaves, clients, the house and its furniture, clothing, food and meals, amusements, travel and correspondence, funeral ceremonies and burial customs, etc. These things are of interest to us in the case of any ancient or foreign people; in the case of the Romans they are of especial importance, because they help to explain the powerful influence which that nation exerted over the old world, and make it easier to understand why that influence is still felt in some degree to-day.

      2 Public and Private Antiquities.—The subjects that have been named above belong to what is called Classical Antiquities, taking their place in the subdivision of Roman Antiquities as opposed to Greek Antiquities. They are grouped loosely together as Private Antiquities in opposition to what we call Public Antiquities. Under the latter head we consider the Roman as a citizen, and we examine the several classes of citizens, their obligations and their privileges; we study the form of their government, its officers and machinery, its legislative, judicial, and executive procedure, its revenues and expenditures, etc. It is evident that no hard and fast line can be drawn between the two branches of the subject: they cross each other at every turn. One scarcely knows, for example, under which head to put the religion of the Romans or their games in the circus.

      3 In the same way, the daily employment of a slave, his keep, his punishments, his rewards, are properly considered under the head of Private Antiquities. But the state undertook sometimes to regulate by law the number of slaves that a master might have, the state regulated the manumission of the slave and gave him certain rights as a freedman, and these matters belong to Public Antiquities. So, too, a man might or might not be eligible to certain state offices according to the particular ceremony used at the marriage of his parents. It will be found, therefore, that the study of Private Antiquities can not be completely separated from its complement, though in this book the dividing line will be crossed as seldom as possible.¹

      ¹ Students in secondary schools will find useful for preliminary reading the outline of the Roman Constitution in the Introduction to the author's "Selected Orations and Letters of Cicero." For more advanced students three books have lately appeared on this subject: Abbott's "Roman Political Institutions," Granrud's "Roman Constitutional History," and Greenidge's "Roman Public Life."

      4 Antiquities and History.—It is just as impossible to draw the boundary line between the subjects of Antiquities and History. The older history, it is true, concerned itself little with the private life of the people, almost solely with the rise and fall of dynasties. It told us of kings and generals, of the wars they waged, the victories they won, and the conquests they made. Then, in course of time, institutions took the place of dynasties and parties the place of heroes, and history traced the growth of great political ideas: such masterpieces as Thirlwall's and Grote's histories of Greece are largely constitutional histories. But changes in international relations affect the private life of a people as surely, if not as speedily, as they affect the machinery of government. You can not bring into contact, friendly or unfriendly, two different civilizations without a change in the peoples concerned, without altering their occupations, their ways of living, their very ideas of life and its purposes. These changes react in turn upon the temper and character of a people, they affect its capacity for self-government and the government of others, and in the course of time they bring about the movements of which even the older history took notice. Hence our recent histories give more and more space to the life of the common people, to the very matters, that is, that were mentioned in the first paragraph as belonging to Private Antiquities. This may be seen in such titles as these: Green's "History of the English People," McMaster's "History of the People of the United States."

5 On the other hand it is equally true that a knowledge of political history is necessary for the study of Private Antiquities. We shall find the Romans giving up certain ways of living and habits of thinking that seemed to have become fixed and characteristic. These changes we could not explain at all, if political history did not inform us that just before they took place the Romans had come into contact with the widely different ideas and opposing civilizations of other nations. The most important event of this sort was the introduction of Greek culture after the Punic wars, and to this we shall have to refer again and again. It follows from all this that students who have had even the most elementary course in Roman history have already some knowledge of Private Antiquities, and that those who have not studied the history of Rome at all will find very helpful the reading of even the briefest of our school histories.

6 Antiquities and Philology.—The subject of Classical Antiquities has always been regarded as a branch—"discipline" is the technical word—of Classical Philology since Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) made Philology a science. It is quite true that in the common acceptation of the word Philology is merely the science СКАЧАТЬ