The Earliest Romans: A Character Sketch

Preface

PREFACE How should we tell the story of the earliest Romans—scattered ‹rst over their seven hills and then in time spreading across the whole center of the Italian peninsula, until their state was grown great enough, and their destiny suf‹ciently grim, to engage them in their endless wars with Carthage? There is no easy answer. Now, after some centuries, archaeology still shines its light only on a handful of sites among those hills, and illuminates the later processes of Roman growth not one bit better. Certainly there is a written record of this period, and a very ample one it is. The work of one author alone, Livy, was once in the West more read and familiar than that of any other of Antiquity’s historians. The relevant part of his text survives in some hundreds of pages. But he is rightly seen as “a romantic novelist” (chap. 5)—which is a problem, is it not? We might turn also to Dionysius of Halicarnassus. His account of those early times survives in equal bulk but is equally to be challenged because he, like Livy, wrote many hundreds of years after the events and developments he describes. It is by no means clear how or how much he or Livy can ever have known about their subject . The same dif‹culty infects various other sources of information that we might try to learn from. Where there is so little information that we have good reason to trust, what we do have we must arrange in some form that will satisfy our skepticism and yet allow our time-travel, our curiosity, to take us among those most ancient toga-clad fellow human beings. The method I propose requires us to think of that entire people as one personality, who, like any real individual, makes choices at crossroads, and so traces a path through life at the dictates of personality; so to know the one is to know the other. To explain: thanks to scholarly books I have written in U.S. history I am acquainted with one certain period: the second generation of the young republic, say around 1830. The human types of that time are recognizable today. There, once, and still today, we see the man of business focused all on the risks and chances of the market, bent on winning; or women young or perhaps not young but unafraid, cutting loose from the old to try a brand-new life on their own.1 At the time, these were not worldwide human types at all; they were as they remain American; and the ‹rst real genius in what we would now call sociopolitical studies, Alexis de Tocqueville, marked them out as such, distinct in the new nation that he observed in his travels around the country, comparing what he saw with what he knew in the Old World and doing so in the hope of discovering what sort of society it was that he then saw in its adolescence.2 What sort of person did it produce? He believed that, at such a point in its history, a society’s characteristic individual, or individual character, would be already shaped. Here was where we should look “if we would understand the prejudices , the habits, and the passions which will rule his life. . . . The entire man, is so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child”.3 And he goes on to unfold his thought: The growth of nations presents something analogous to this: they all bear some marks of their origin; and the circumstances which accompanied their birth and contributed to their rise, affect the whole term of their being. If we were able to go back to the elements of states, and to examine the oldest monuments of their history, I doubt not that we should discover the primary cause of the prejudices, the habits, the ruling passions, and in short of all that constitutes what is called national character. . . . This might explain the destinies of certain nations. The ideas expressed may not be scienti‹c but, perhaps better yet, they are close to common sense. This much I infer from the pages of the New York Times where, on average every year over the half century and more that I’ve known that useful publication, you can ‹nd at least some reference to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or some review of a new book on that oracle. The traits of Americans’ nature that...