The 5th and 4th centuries B.C., the period between the expulsion
of the Etruscans and the wars which marked the entry of Rome
into world politics, are the great formative period of Roman
history. It is the age that forged the political and military
organization that was to prove the strongest thing in the ancient
world, that was to break Carthage and the East and to realize at
last the Hellenistic ideal of a world kingdom. Yet no ideal could
have been less sympathetic to the mind of the early Latins. They
were pre-eminently a peasant people with all the narrow
regionalism of the peasant outlook. All their energies were
concentrated on the two essential problems of their land, its
tillage and its defence. They had no thought to spare, like their
Hellenic contemporaries, for the understanding and
interpretation of the world around them, but they grew deep-
rooted and persistent as their own oaks, from which they took
their expressive name, for that quality that they valued most--
Robur.
Hence their history is hard to write, for they have left no
material evidence of their culture, like the Etruscans, nor written
records like their Hellenised descendants, who polished and
rationalized and moralized the Roman historical tradition till it
was transformed into literature. Only with the entry of Rome into
the international society of the Hellenistic world does she emerge
from the twilight of legend, only then too does she acquire that
covering of Hellenistic culture without which posterity can never
see her, and of which all Latin literature forms a part.
Indeed the Latin city is something of a misnomer. There was an
Etruscan city and there was an Hellenistic city, but never a Latin
one. The temple and the private house, the forum and the
basilica, the city wall and the aqueduct all came to the Latins
from outside, either directly from the Greeks or through the
Etruscans. Yet there was a Latin society and a Latin state, as
original and far stronger than anything Etruscan and Greek, and
the Latin spirit that created these was powerful enough to
manifest itself also at a later period through the borrowed forms
of Hellenistic civilization. Nor should the incomparably greater
spiritual achievement of the Hellenes blind us to the fact that the
Latins were the greatest free people of the ancient world. The
Greek cities, and especially Athens, however extensive was their
power, were never anything more than free communes. Sparta
remained a narrow tribal aristocracy, and Macedonia, though a
nation, was not free. It was the essential achievement of Rome
that she learnt how to combine the intensive culture of the city
state, as created by Hellenic genius, with the solid foundations of
a free peasant state. At a later period, it is true, the selfish
particularism of the Greek city-state tradition reasserted itself at
Rome with disastrous results, but during the first centuries of the
republic she was indeed a Latin city, a partner in a larger semi-
national unity, which she eventually organized and extended
until it came to embrace the whole of peninsular Italy.
II. The Culture of The latin City
Yet the creativeness of the Roman people in that age [from 330
B.C. onwards] both in politics and war was strangely anonymous.
With the exception of Appius Claudius C�cus, we have no
impression of the personality of the men who led the Roman
state to greatness, and the appearance in Roman history of
Pyrrhus, with his strongly marked and romantic character, only
serves to make us realize more strongly how shadowy and
illusive is our knowledge of early Roman history. Only as Roman
society gradually becomes penetrated by Hellenic influence, or is
reflected for us from the minds of men of Hellenic culture, like
Polybius, does it become really visible and intelligible. And just
in the measure that it becomes visible, it becomes changed, so
that by the time that the individual Roman has become a living
personality, he is, like Scipio Emilianus and the Gracchi, more
than half a Hellenistic Greek. Even at the period with which we
have been dealing, the current of Hellenistic influence was
beginning to grow strong. In 273 Rome entered into relations
with the Court of Alexandria....
Earlier, the rise of the Latin league and the expulsion of
Etruscan power from the greater part of Latium corresponds with
a new wave of Hellenic influence--a movement which has left far
less artistic and monumental evidence than the earlier contact of
the Hellenic world with Etruria, but which is important as the
first step in the direct cultural intercourse between Latins and
Greeks which was eventually to create a new civilization....
A most important part in the development of a Roman culture
at this period was undoubtedly played by Appius Claudius
C�cus, the Censor, a member of the most enlightened and
original of the patrician gentes. To his initiative was due the
building of the first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia, and the first
military road, the Via Appia leading from Rome to Campania, and
thus he may, in a sense, be looked upon as the father of that
great engineering tradition which is one of the most
characteristic and imperishable works of the Roman genius.
He may also claim to be regarded as the founder of Latin
literature, both in prose and verse, for he was the author off a
series of proverbs in Saturnian verse, and his famous speech
against Pyrrhus in the senate was said to have been preserved in
writing--the earliest monument of Roman oratory. He was the
earliest example of that patrician Roman culture, which has such
famous representatives a century and a half later in the Scipionic
circle, and which shows the enduring presence of a receptive and
intellectually active element amidst the stern militarism and
peasant simplicity of the early Roman state. Fabius Pictor at once
a painter and a historian, is another example from this period,
and the fact that he wrote in Greek shows how close was the
connection between Hellenism and literary culture at Rome from
the very beginning, and how great was the danger that Greek
would become established as the literary language of italy.
Everywhere else in the Mediterranean the native languages were
giving way before the one language of cosmopolitan culture.
Famous languages of ancient peoples, like Egyptian and Aramaic,
were sinking into the position of vulgar patois. Yet it was the
destiny of an Italic dialect spoken by a peasant people without
culture or traditions to become a world speech, side by side with
Greek, and one of the formative elements in European
civilization. And the foundations of this development were laid in
the period of which we have written. Each advance in the Roman
power was an advance of the Latin speech, and amidst the
confusion of tongues--Etruscan, Greek, Sabellian, Ligurian,
Illyrian, Gallic--that reigned in ancient Italy, the Latin citizen
colonies introduced centers of uniform Latin speech from one
end of the land to the other.
From <The Sociological Review> (London), October 1923.
This article was taken from "The Dawson Newsletter," Spring
1994, P.O. Box 332, Fayetteville, AR 72702, $8.00 per year.
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