Beastly to the Romans
The Revolutions of Ancient Rome. By F. R. Cowell. (Thames and Hudson, 21s.) IN 509 tic the Romans staged their first revolu- tion: they turned out the royal house of Tarquin and established a republic. For the next 200 years the internal struggle for power, between the patres, and the plebs, was unceasing: the appointment of the first.Tribunes of the People, the revolution which won recognition for the Plebeian Assembly—the matter for students of constitutions is edifying and unending. But by 280 tic a'reasonable balance had been achieved, and Roman energies were diverted to the win- ning of an empire. Then, with the wealth which came from great possessions, came quarrels about its distribution; a process which cul- minated in the Civil War, Cmsarism and the establishment of Augustus in what was in effect a military dictatorship. The Romans had started with a hill village and'conquered the world; but politically they were back in square one.
In The Revolutions of Ancient Rome F. R. Cowell gives a clear and consequential account
• of this circular progress from despotism to despotism. While his own writing is undis- tinguished, he has selected for the purposes of • illustration some pithy passages from ancient historians; and in the sum he has produced an admirably brief and ,,practical handbook of Roman politics and institutions. Having brought us, however, to the inception of empire and the conclusion of his narrative, Dr. Cowell is tempted to moralise by way of farewell. 'No Roman,' he writes, 'considered that all human beings are born free and equal': and he goes on to point up the defects of the empire by specific and repeated comparison between Roman ideals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Now, no one in his senses pretends that Rome under the emperors was a particularly whole- some concern, but it is idle, it is historically false, to start judging the Romans by standards which were not generally articulated until another two millennia had passed. When all is said, the Romans of the empire did a lot of useful spade-work in the interest of adminis- tration and good order, and without this those responsible for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could have had not even the ele- mentary foundations on which to build.
Again, what Dr. Cowell and many with him persist in forgetting is that the Romans, with their massive good sense, did not prescribe enthusiasm for their rule; provided you observed certain simple forms, you might be as cool about it all as you chose—an important point of difference between their empire and Mussoll'irs. The Romans, in a word, were tolerant: they interfered neither with your private life nor your religion—unless, as with Christianity, the latter sought to discredit the forms on which they conceived sound government to depend.
Finally, Dr. Cowell has rather priggishly over- looked the fact that the Romans, at their worst, could be very entertaining. He complains that a typical feature of the empire was a decline in literature and the arts: a decline there certainly was, but it was a decline only from the highest excellence, and I should have thought that Tacitus, Suetonius, Itivenal, Martial and Petronius repre- sented a body of survival of which any regime might be proud. The Imperial Romans were beasts; but at least they were well-organised and often amusing beasts, which is more than could be said of most people either then or now.
SIMON RAVEN
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