Life in Ancint Rome.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 6260, 5 July 1890, Page 3

Life in Ancint Rome.

Canon Liddon, discouring in St. Pauli’s Cathedral recently, on the public virtues in Ancient Borne, said everything outward at Borne, the world’s centre, was on a splendid scale. The public buildings, the temples, the baths, the public shows, everything connected with the army, everything connected with the machinery and the apparatus of government, was calculated to impress, and even to awe, the imagination; but there was one overshadowing defect .in that great world which would have come home with especial force to ; the minds of the class from which the rank and file of the Boman forces wore chiefly recruited —it was a world without love j it was a world full of want and suffering, and the whole of the great social and political machine went round and round without taking any account of this. It would be easy he said, to point to a few facts which might at first sight appear to traverse this severe judgment. Liberality was indeed a sort of virtue which had to be practised, whether ho liked it or not, by every public man in Borne, from the Emperor downwards. Every public man had to make over to the public in some shape or other, a certain part of his income, whether in gifts to his native city or to the club or society to which he belonged, over and above gifts to his friends and relatives. He must build a theatre, or an aqueduct, or a fountain, or a temple ; he must make a new road, he must repair the city walls, he must give corn, wine, oil to be distributed among the citizens ; he must endow public baths; he must endow a public library. When, for instance, Julius Caesar triumphed the people were feasted in the streets at 22,000 tables, and the costliest wines of Southern Italy and of the Greek Archipelago were said to have run in rivers. But all this was not the outcome of love ; they were forms of expenditure which were selfish. The main object of such expenditure was to secure that sort of popularity which means political power. It wos repaid, if not in kind,yet substantially. It had no more to do with charity, which loves its object for his own sake and not for the sake of what can be got out of him, than any other kind of outlay of capital with a view to a calculated return has to do with it. In order to do real good the eye must rest not on what is prudent in, or on what is expected of, the giver, but on what is needed in the recipient, Nothing was done systematically in the old world for classes or individuals who could make no return. There was no sort of care for widows or for orphans, there were no hospitals, there was no public provision for those who were not citizens, and therefore bad no influence, there was no consideration, it was little enough to say that, for the immense class of slaves. Slaves were mere property to be bought and sold and punished, and, at one lime, killed at the discretion of their masters. All this was in harmony with principle laid down by the great teachers of the ancient world such as Plato and Aristotle. In Plato’s ideal state the poor have no place, beggars are expelled or left to die. In Aristotle’s account of the virtues, the most prominent, from a Christian point of view, is generosity, but on examination generosity turns out to be a prudential mean between avarice and extravagance.