They were not
imaginative, they were not intellectual; they had little national poetry,
little art, little philosophy. They were moral and practical. In these two
directions the force that was in them entirely ran. They were free
politically, because freedom meant to them not freedom to do as they
pleased, but freedom to do what was right; and every citizen, before he
arrived at his civil privileges, had been schooled in the discipline of
obedience. Each head of a household was absolute master of it, master over
his children and servants, even to the extent of life and death. What the
father was to the family, the gods were to the whole people, the awful
lords and rulers at whose pleasure they lived and breathed. Unlike the
Greeks, the reverential Romans invented no idle legends about the
supernatural world. The gods to them were the guardians of the State,
whose will in all things they were bound to seek and to obey. The forms in
which they endeavored to learn what that will might be were childish or
childlike. They looked to signs in the sky, to thunder-storms and comets
and shooting stars. Birds, winged messengers, as they thought them,
between earth and heaven, were celestial indicators of the gods' commands.
But omens and auguries were but the outward symbols, and the Romans, like
all serious peoples, went to their own hearts for their real guidance.
Pages:
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38