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Editorial
What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?
by Rick Lewis
“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Salve! This issue’s theme is Roman Philosophy. But as the rebels in Monty Python’s Life of Brian asked, what have the Romans ever done for us? The question seems relevant here; we are philosophers, not archaeologists. What ideas did Roman philosophers contribute that we can actually use today? To answer this, first let’s set the scene.
That invaluable reference work Bluff Your Way in Philosophy (by Jim Hankinson, £4.99 o.n.o.) which romps cheerily through the history of philosophy, contains the dismissive line: “The Romans came and went, it seems, without ever wondering why.” A rare lapse by a magisterial tome, but it reflects a widespread misconception: that the Romans, builders of an empire that spanned the known world, were practical, rather than speculative, by nature. In the days of the old Republic they gradually developed a very practical political system that roused the admiration of later theorists including Machiavelli, as you will read in our opening article by Sam Spound. If you asked the Romans about other practical matters, such as aqueducts or straight roads or skewering barbarian tribesmen, they’d give you a real expert opinion. But about the finer points of epistemology? Probably not.
Is this really fair? We know that in architecture, sculpture, literature and many other aspects of civilisation the Romans were heavily influenced by the Greeks. Standard schooling for young Romans would include studying Homer’s Odyssey as a guide to the virtues. So too with philosophy. Reproduction busts of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other Greek thinkers could be found throughout the Roman Empire, gracing the shelves of anyone with a pretension to culture. From the ruins of Herculanium, buried by Vesuvius’s eruption in 79AD, a villa was excavated with a library of papyrus scrolls whose charred contents mainly concerned the philosophical writings of Epicurus and his followers. The early Stoics and the Sceptics had a huge influence too. When Romans thought about philosophy, they did so in terms set by the Greeks.
That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any Roman philosophy or that they didn’t have original ideas of their own. Busily scribbling philosophers could be found throughout the vast territories and long centuries of the Empire, and in many different strata of society. There were slaves such as Epictetus, and there were scholars and statesmen such as Seneca and Cicero, who is the subject of Abdullah Shaikh’s article here about political philosophy. There were educationalists such as Quintilian, whose ideas on teaching (explained here by Philip Vassallo) were surprisingly modern, except that he thought the most important part of the curriculum was public speaking. What about Emperors? Certainly, there were plenty who were corrupt, decadent, cruel, or power-mad, but surprisingly there was at least one who was a significant philosopher. That was Marcus Aurelius, a public-spirited, deeply reflective ruler who wrote a diary, the Meditations, that continues to inspire individuals such as our contributor Cassandra Brandt to overcome immense personal challenges. The influence of Stoicism in particular on Roman thought will become very clear as you read on. The Early Stoicism of the Greeks had paid considerable attention to metaphysics, but in the Late Stoicism of the Romans the focus shifted towards being a practical guide to living. Perhaps its emphasis on courage chimed with the warrior mentality lurking behind even the placid countenances of plump patricians; Yolanda de Iuliis claims in her article that it may even have influenced Mithraism. The skills Stoicism taught about self-mastery were valued by Romans from Epictetus the slave, who wasn’t even his own master, to Marcus Aurelius, who was master of the entire known world.
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