The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson

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СКАЧАТЬ that people of all classes, having no ideals tending to social and intellectual advance, and no sufficient channel for the instinct of union in the politics of the autocracy, shall find some channels of a new kind.[62] These are opened in due course, and take the shape especially of religious combinations or churches. Such modes had appeared even in the earlier stages of civic disintegration, when the semi-private or sectarian cults had begun to compete successfully with the public or civic. They did so by appealing more freshly and directly to the growths of emotional feeling (the outcome in part of physiological modification)[63] which no longer found outlet in primary forms, such as warfare and primitive revelry. After having themselves consented in times of panic to the introduction of several cults in the name of the public interest, the ruling classes, instinctively conservative by the law of their existence, take fright at the startling popularity of the unofficial Bacchic mysteries, and decide to stamp out the movement.[64] But the attempt is futile, the causal conditions remaining; and soon Judaism, Osirianism, Mithraism, the worships of Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, Isis, Serapis, all more or less bound up with divination and sorcery, make way in the disintegrating body politic.[65] The wheel of social evolution had, so to speak, "gone full circle" since the first Roman curia, the basis of the State, subsisted as groups with their special sacra, finding in these their reason for cohering. Decadent Rome, all other principles of subordinate cohesion having been worked out, resolves itself once more into groups similarly motived. But the principle is newly conditioned, and the sacra now begin the struggle for existence among themselves. The rise of Christianity is simply the success of a system which, on a good economic foundation, copied from that of the Jewish synagogues, assimilates the main attractions of similar worships, while availing itself of exoteric and democratic as well as esoteric methods. It thus necessarily gains ground among the multitude, rich as well as poor;[66] and its ultimate acceptance by the autocrat was due to the very exclusiveness which at first made it intolerable. Once diffused widely enough to set up the largest religious organisation in the Empire, it became the best possible instrument of centralisation and control, and as such it was accepted and employed.[67]

And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates with the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union, being dug not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the reverse flow of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in the absence of openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new forms of domestic hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours, excluding, or arising in lack of, the play of the saner and higher forms of thought and feeling, beget crude antipathies;[68] and Christianity leads back to bloody strifes and seditions such as had not been seen since the fall of the Republic. There is not intellectuality enough to raise men above this new superinduced barbarism of ignorant instinct; half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old politics, is overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed; and the new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of operation of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.

      § 5

Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate of the reactions of classes. But lest we lose sight of the principle of total causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that conception, thus explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin with, as a case of the unique aggrandisement of a State in virtue of fit conditions and institutions. Thus (1) the comparatively uncommercial situation of the early Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and agriculture, no occupation save war for surplus energy, and no readier way of acquiring wealth;[69] (2) the physical collocation of a group of seven defensive hills, so close that they must be held by a federated group;[70] (3) the ethnic collocation of a set of tribe groups of nearly equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's sinews by constant struggling; (4) the creation (not prescient, but purely as a provision against kingship) of the peculiar institution of the annual consulate,[71] securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a continuous flow of administrative energy;[72] (5) the peculiar need, imposed by this very habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation between the ruling and ruled classes, and for the safeguarding of the interests of the latter by laws and franchises; (6) the central position of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue it piecemeal; and finally (7) the development by all these means of a specialist aristocracy, habitually trained to administration[73]—all these genetic conditions combined to build up the most remarkable military empire the world has ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the explanation of the fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much more early civilised Greek cities of Italy did not.

Of the latter fact we still receive the old explanation that it came of "the habit, which had ever been the curse of Hellenism, of jealous separation and frequent war between town and town, as well as internal feuds in the several cities themselves."[74] But this is clearly no vera causa, as these symptoms are duplicated in the history of Rome itself. The determining forces must, then, be looked for in the special conditions. The Greeks, indeed, brought with them the tradition of the separate City-State; but just as the cities remained independent in Greece by reason of natural conditions,[75] so the Greek cities of Italy remained isolated and stationary at a certain strength, because their basis and way of life were commercial, so that while they restricted each other's growth or dominance they were in times of peace mutually nutritive. They wanted customers, not plunder. For the Romans plunder was the first social need after agriculture, and as they began they continued. When Jugurtha learned that anything could be had of the Romans for gold, he had but read an open secret.

Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external conditions came in time to be initial causes—the teeth and claws, so to speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-class Romans became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and empire and administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by habitual plunder, they showed, despite their intense primeval superstition of citizenship,[76] a degree of sagacity in the conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a main cause of their being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which contrasts markedly with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial Carthage, Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of conquering herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity. Pitted against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a still-growing class supplied their administrators, as the swarming provinces supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant plunder and new lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like Carthage, even when its armies were led by a man of genius, they were still insuppressible, inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders employing mercenaries, where Rome was a community in arms, producing generals as Carthage produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as Hannibal failed. The genius of one commander, exploiting passive material, could not avail against the accumulated faculty for organisation in the still self-renewing Roman patriciate.[77]

Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of class egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles,СКАЧАТЬ