The New Deal in Old Rome

APPENDIX II

IF YOU WISH TO READ FURTHER

WITH the bewildering number of books on Roman history, any short list must represent rather arbitrary and personal selections. An excellent introduction to the whole field is the concise survey in the last 250 pages of James H. Breasted’s remarkable textbook, Ancient Times, revised edition of 1935. The same material appears in the revised edition of his The Conquest of Civilization. Adequate single-volume histories are Tenney Frank’s A History of Rome, with special attention to the economic side, and M. Cary’s A History of Rome, which has interesting chapters summarizing social and economic conditions at the end of each century. H. F. Pelham’s Outline of Roman History, pre-eminently political, is a marvel of lucid condensation.

For the period of the Republic, Frank’s Roman Imperialism traces the development of Roman expansion. A. H. J. Greenidge’s A History of Rome, B.C. 133–104, is a beautiful book. The author’s untimely death prevented the completion of the history he had planned. Rice Holmes’s three-volume The Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire is especially full for the period of Julius Cæsar. Another standard work is W. E. Heitland’s The Roman Republic, in three volumes. In Methuen’s admirable series, A History of the Greek and Roman World, published in London, Howard H. Scullard treats of the period from 753 to 146 B.C. Frank Burr Marsh takes up the story in A History of the Roman World from 146 to 30 B.C. Professor Marsh’s book presents a fresh point of view, as does his The Founding of the Roman Empire. His discussion of the senatorial machine suggested the treatment of my chapter, “Big Business in Politics.” In two volumes on The Architect of the Roman Empire, Mr. Holmes gives a vivid account of the death struggle of the Republic and of the work of Augustus.

Primitive Italy and the Beginnings of Roman Imperialism, by Léon Homo, is the work of an accomplished French scholar. It is a pity that his brilliant book La Civilisation Romaine has not been translated. Primitive Italy is one of a great series, “The History of Civilization,” brought out in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf. Most of the volumes are translations from the French. Those dealing with Rome, aside from the one just mentioned, are J. Declareuil’s Rome the Law-Giver, Homo’s Roman Political Institutions, Albert Grenier’s The Roman Spirit, Paul Louis’s Ancient Rome at Work, Victor Chapot’s The Roman World, and Ferdinand Lot’s fascinating book: The End of the Ancient World. Another volume in the series that I have found useful is A. R. Burn’s Money and Monetary Policy in Ancient Times.

G. Ferrero’s The Greatness and Decline of Rome covers in five attractively written volumes the history to the close of the reign of Augustus. Some historians, I believe, regard Ferrero as more brilliant than sound. The second volume of M. Rostovtzeff’s A History of the Ancient World, dealing with Rome, is by one of the most eminent modern authorities. Mommsen’s A History of the Roman Republic shows that a learned German historian may be interesting. His history has flashing passages.

The Imperial period is briefly but well described in A Short History of the Roman Empire to the Death of Marcus Aurelius, by Wells and Barrow. A valuable discussion of the latter part of the Empire is H. M. D. Parker’s A History of the Roman World from A.D. 137 to 337. This is in the Methuen series already referred to. It covers rather briefly the field of the more elaborate last two volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History. The early chapters of J. W. Thompson’s The Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages contain material on the barbarian invasions. The later years of the Western Empire are described in the first volume of J. B. Bury’s History of the Later Roman Empire. The first half of Christopher Dawson’s fascinating book: The Making of Europe deals with this period. So do Parts One and Two of Henri Pirenne’s Economic and Social History of Mediaeval Europe, stressing the destruction of urban life by the Moslem conquests. A fine and scholarly history of the Empire not yet translated is Eugène Albertini’s L’Empire Romain. Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall, Bury edition, I suspect is discouragingly long and detailed for the average reader. Besides, the great additions to the knowledge of Roman history since he wrote it cannot be taken care of in notes, even by so accomplished a scholar as Professor Bury.

The economic history of the Mediterranean world has received adequate attention only in fairly recent years. For the general reader the best single book is perhaps Tenney Frank’s Economic History of Rome, revised edition of 1927, unfortunately out of print, but to be found in libraries. The farm problem is elaborately discussed by W. E. Heitland in his Agricola — “The Farmer.” M. P. Charlesworth’s Trade Routes of the Roman Empire presents a valuable survey of commercial development. The classic economic history of the Empire is RostovtzefFs monumental volume: The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. An interesting point is raised by Tenney Frank’s criticism of Rostovtzeff in his Martin Lectures. Professor Frank was born on a Kansas farm and is familiar with American farm life. He believes the continental historians are misled by their European background into supposing that the Roman farmers were essentially European peasants. Instead, in Frank’s opinion, they were much like the independent American farmers. Louis’s Ancient Rome at Work already has been mentioned.

The most extensive collection of material bearing on the economic life of Rome and the Empire is the elaborate series edited by Frank: “An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome.” Its five volumes by specialists cover Italy of the Republic and Empire and the Roman provinces. It is an amazing work. Supplementing Frank and Rostovtzeff on the economic side are the volumes on Rome of the great Cambridge Ancient History. This co-operative history is rather preoccupied with politics and wars, but it has fine chapters on social and economic conditions, literature, art, and religion. It is indispensable for reference.

Among the significant magazine articles dealing with economic aspects of Roman history are those by W. L. Westermann, American Historical Review, July 1915 and January 1938; and by V. G. Simkhovitch, Political Science Quarterly, June 1916, discussing the farm problem under the Empire. Ellsworth Huntington in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1917, attributes Rome’s decline largely to changes in climate, with very sketchy evidence. A summary of the majority opinion against this view is given by Ellen Churchill Semple in The Geography of the Mediterranean Region. The best account of the panic of A.D. 33 is Tenney Frank’s in the American Journal of Philology,1935, pages 336–41. With these should be mentioned two pamphlets by W. E. Heitland: The Roman Fate and Iterum, stimulating essays on the Roman decline by an eminent scholar.

Various aspects of Roman history are dealt with in many volumes that combine sound scholarship with delightful reading. Frank’s Social Behavior in Ancient Rome, Martin Classical Lectures, Volume II, just mentioned, has chapters on family life, religious change, and social reform. W. Warde Fowler’s Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero gives a vivid picture of everyday life. The same subject a century later is covered by L. Friedländer’s Life and Manners under the Early Empire, in four volumes, and T. G. Tucker’s Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul. Grant Showerman’s Monuments and Men of Ancient Rome tells of the recent excavations, with enthusiastic chapters on travel and biography. F. F. Abbott’s The Common People of Ancient Rome reviews in some detail Diocletian’s famous wage-price edict. Herbert S. Hadley’s Rome and the World Today is useful especially for its discussion of Roman law from the point of view of a practising attorney. Pictures of the Empire in its glory and decay are given in Sir Samuel Dill’s Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, and Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire. The Legacy of Rome, edited by Cyril Bailey, includes chapters by specialists on such subjects as “Communications and Commerce,” “Literature,” and “The Science of Law.” Numerous topics are interestingly treated in Sir H. Stuart Jones’s Companion to Roman History. J. C. Stobart’s The Grandeur that was Rome, revised edition, is a popular account of the Roman civilization. Government is dealt with in Greenidge’s Roman Public Life, Abbott’s and Johnson’s Municipal Administration in the Roman Empire, which is out of print, and Homo’s Roman Political Institutions. The standard discussion of slavery is R. H. Barrow’s Slavery in the Roman Empire. Jack Lindsay’s Marc Antony gives a modern Marxist view of the conspiracy of Catiline. Two biographies of especial interest are Gaston Boissier’s Cicero and His Friends, and John Buchan’s Augustus. His Julius Cæsar, while interesting, is much slighter. The Reign of Tiberius, by Frank Burr Marsh, is a stimulating history and character study. The successor of Augustus was maligned by malicious tradition as a cruel and sensual monster. Rehabilitated by modern historians, he emerges from Professor Marsh’s analysis as a real statesman.

While Latin literature does not come within the field here surveyed, attention should be called to Professor J. W. Mackail’s Latin Literature and his Classical Studies, and to J. Wright Duff’s A History of Latin Literature in the Golden Age and A History of Latin Literature in the Silver Age — all very pleasant as well as enlightening.

Space limitations of this book prevented discussion of the Roman occupation of Britain; but I am sure many American readers would find stimulating material in Haverfield and Macdonald’s The Roman Occupation of Britain, in R. G. Collingwood’s slender volume: Roman Britain, and in the more elaborate study by Collingwood and Myres: Roman Britain and the English Settlement.

Unfortunately Smith’s great two-volume Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities is long out of print. A small English substitute for this is the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Sandys’s A Companion to Latin Studies is elaborate, but its usefulness is impaired by the absence of a comprehensive general index.

Anyone with even moderate curiosity will be repaid for looking into the translations of Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch. These may be inexpensively obtained in Everyman’s Library, as well as in the Loeb Classical Library. The Loeb Library includes several hundred volumes of Greek and Latin writers, the original text on one page, a good translation on the page opposite. It is a superb project with one blemish: the indexes are terrible! But one may pick up almost any volume dealing with the Roman period, Cicero’s Letters, his De Officiis, the Tusculan Disputations, Pliny’s Letters, Strabo, Polybius, Appian, Dio, Sallust, Cato, Vitruvius (on architecture), Ammianus, and be amazed and delighted by the keen observations on human nature there shown. J. W. Mackail suggests the fascination of these ancient books when he writes of The Lives of the Cæsars by Suetonius, “who tells us the colour of Cæsar’s eyes, who quotes from a dozen letters of Augustus, who shows us (the mad) Caligula shouting to the moon from the palace roof, and Nero lecturing on the construction of the organ.” For those who wish their classics in small packages there are two useful compendiums: Greek Literature in Translation and Latin Literature in Translation, by Howe and Harrer.