A Short History of Rome E-Book

Mary Platt Parmele

• Herausgeber: Enhanced Media Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A Short History of Rome traces the rise and fall of Rome, its conquests, cruelty and excess, its myths and stories - from Romulus and Remus to the Rape of Lucretia.

Leseprobe

A Short History of Rome

By Mary Platt Parmele

Table of Contents

Title Page

A Short History of Rome

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Further Reading: Alexander Hamilton

A Short History of Rome by Mary Platt Parmele. First published in A Short History of Rome and Italy by Mary Platt Parmele in 1901. This edition published  2017 by Enhanced Media. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-365-73715-2

Chapter I

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The peninsula of Italy has more powerfully influenced the destiny of the human race, in its material aspects, than any other spot upon the earth. Bethlehem of Judea and Greece have flooded the world, the one with spiritual life, and the other with intellectual splendor; but working upon a lower plane and with coarser implements, Rome seems to have been predestined to open up the channels through which those streams should nourish humanity. Her appointed task was to lay the foundations for Christendom.

But Rome did not lay the corner-stone of modern civilization. She is its corner stone. In the pedigree of nations she is the great progenitor, the cause of causes, and must ever remain the prodigy among earthly empires. What was the secret of her strength? To what was she indebted for her amazing pre-eminence? Not to her geographical position, for she had no sea-port, and in a land of exceptional fertility and charm she occupied a spot too sterile to support her own people, and was surrounded by malarial marshes unfriendly to human life. Not to her ancestry, for she had none. She did not engraft her youthful vigor upon an old pre-existing state; had not, like Persia and Macedon and Carthage, the stored riches and experience of a parent kingdom with which to build the new. We, in America, while glorying in our own phenomenal development, should remember that we are not only the heir of all the ages, but that we started with a great political inheritance, the wisdom and experience which Great Britain had been accumulating for a thousand years. But Rome first built her city, then by sheer native force peopled it, then compelled all of Italy, and finally all the then existing world, toward the centre she had created. And when after long ages her temporal sovereignty was slipping from her weakened hands, she gathered to herself a spiritual sovereignty, and remains today the supreme ruler over the hearts and consciences of a large part of mankind in an empire which knows no geographical limits. There may be great world-powers in the future, but will there ever be one which will leave such a heritage of strength and political wisdom as did that empire with its throne upon the seven hills of Rome? Will there ever be another which even while it is perishing can, out, of its superabundant strength create such a group of world-powers, and then bequeath to future ages a judicial system so just, so wise, so perfectly adapted to the needs of human society, that after 3,000 years will still stand the model for the legislation of Christendom?

In what sort of a cradle was this giant nourished? What were the influences which shaped its childhood? and what the attributes which enabled it to establish such a dominating influence in the world's affairs?

The cradle for the Roman Empire was commenced in the earliest geologic ages, and was fashioned by titanic forces. It was circumstances seemingly quite fortuitous which sent that narrow peninsula jutting out into the sea and straggling toward the East. A few more, or a few less volcanic upheavals and there would have been a different Italy, and then a different history of Rome, and hence of the world. But when Nature paused, when she had fashioned that curious leg-shaped strip of land with its rigid skeleton of mountains; when she had made it strong, rock-ribbed with her most ancient limestone, so that the elements and the sea would strive in vain to devour it, and then when she had sprinkled the depressions and basins with rich black loam which would blossom into matchless beauty beneath the sun's rays, she had determined the course of history as we read it today. And that region between the Alps and the Apennines, watered by streams from both ranges, the most fertile garden spot in Europe, was that the chosen site for the future lords of Italy and of the world? Not at all. On the Tiber, back from the sea, in the most uninviting spot in the whole peninsula, where the earth rises in seven irregular hills, there was the rough limestone cradle of the future Roman Empire.

When and how this land was first occupied by man we may never know, nor whence came the aboriginal races which existed there at the early dawn of the European day. But when it emerges from the region beyond the verge of history there were many strongly contrasting tribes crowded upon the narrow peninsula, separated from each other by the natural ramparts of the Apennines, and the no leas effectual wall of race antipathy and language. These may be roughly divided into the Pelasgians—with marked Hellenic traits — on the east and south (Magna Graecia), the Oscans, Sabellians, and Umbrians, a more indigenous people occupying Central, Western, and Northern Italy; last of all the Etruscans, on the western coast, the most interesting of the entire group, whose origin baffles even conjecture; the remains of their language offering not the slightest clew, and leaving them a companion mystery to that of the Basques in Spain and Western Europe. These are the chief primitive divisions roughly drawn. Latium, of more recent origin, seems to have been of both Pelasgian and Oscan descent; the Latin language having the same Aryan roots and structure as the Greek, but with a large vocabulary drawn from the warlike Oscans; from which facts scholars read, not that the Pelasgians and Latins were descended from the Greeks, but, as is more probable, were off-shoots of the same parent stem (Aryan) at nearly the same point, and also that at some remote period there was a conquest of the Pelasgians by the more powerful native Oscans, who then became the dominant race. How and why the Pelasgian name Italia should have gradually extended from the toe of the peninsula until it embraced the whole, may never be known. Thus far we stand upon conclusions which have the sanction of modern scholarship. But now we enter upon a more shadowy region—the region of legend and tradition, and are told that its men and women are phantoms, its facts fables, and that the fascinating narrative which has been the theme of poets and has charmed the world for two thousand years is only fiction. It was not until recently that any serious doubts were entertained of the truth of the early history of Rome. But in 1811 Niebuhr published a book of learned and searching criticism which by revealing fatal inconsistencies undermined the whole fabric. But skepticism would go too far in rejecting the only existing clews to this interesting problem. The very existence of the tradition, true or untrue, illuminates the dark and inaccessible past. It is a revelation of prehistoric hearts and character quite as genuine and of more value than the records we read in the stratifications of rocks. And however discredited we can never tear from our histories those first immortal chapters, if for no other reason than that they have been for a period which cannot be measured, an inspiration, setting before men heroic ideals of a supreme type. There was not a man in Rome, when Christ came into the world, who did not know the story of Horatius holding the bridge; nor is there a man in London or New York today who can afford not to know that immortal story. Even though it be true that Horatius the man never existed, the ideal for which he stood did; and that has a more profound significance. It matters little whether Junius Brutus did or did not hand his son over to the executioners for conspiring with the enemies of Rome. But it matters much that this was the type of civic virtue that prehistoric Rome delighted in, and this throws a flood of light upon the genesis of Roman character, and the stern, untender, uncompromising nobility of a later historic Rome. Regarding the credibility of the legends it should be remembered that in that ancient world oral tradition was unwritten history, and in a state whose very existence depended upon the truth of family traditions, it must have been cultivated as an art. The entire structure, political and social—the chief governing body, the Senate—the superior rights of the patricians—each and all alike existed by and through ancestral claims. So we may imagine that the stories upon which so much depended were endowed with an imperishable vitality. Besides this, is it not inconceivable that a political organism so coherent and consecutive, in which each step taken grew out of the one which had gone before, could have developed without accurate knowledge of legislative and historical precedents. We may not believe that Romulus was the son of Mars, nor that Egeria whispered to Numa the secret which made him the transmitter of the will of the gods. But that the main line of development is to be traced through the legendary history, we may and must believe.

Chapter II

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The legendary history of Rome begins with the flight of Aeneas from the burning city of Troy, bearing upon his shoulders his old father Anchises, and leading his son Ascanius by the hand. He also carried away with him some of the sacred fire from the altar of Vesta, which must never be extinguished, for Vesta was the protectress of the race; and the gods had told Aeneas that he was going to found a mighty nation in the West. After long wanderings, described a thousand years later by Virgil, he was led to the shores of Italy. There he married Lavinia, daughter of the King of Latium, and in her honor named the city he founded Lavinium, and there he reigned over Latium and performed many mighty deeds. And when one day he disappeared, because the gods had taken him, he was worshipped as Jupiter Indiges, the god of the country. Then Ascanius (or Iulus), his son, built a new city on a ridge of the Alban hills, which he called Alba Longa, and there he reigned; and when Ascanius died, Silvius, son of Aeneas and Lavinia, also reigned there, as did eleven Silvian kings, during the next 300 years, each of them bearing the surname Silvius.

When Procas, the last of this line, died, he left two sons. The younger, Amulius, seized the inheritance, and drove away his elder brother Numitor. He then killed Numitor's son and heir, and dedicated his daughter, Rhea Silvia, to the service of Vesta, to keep alive the sacred flame brought from Troy, and be a virgin priestess forever. But although the maiden was safe from mortal lovers, the god Mars loved her, and she bore him twin boys. The penalty for her offence was to be buried alive, and when this was done, and the terrible uncle had ordered the twins to be thrown into the Tib [...]