The Earliest Romans: A Character Sketch

4. Practical

4 j PRACTICAL Apractical person sees life as an unfolding set of real problems to be solved, not of intriguing possibilities to be explored; and solutions should be the simplest to hand, so as not to present still another set of problems. There is no need to show off, only to get the job done, and the choice of jobs in their sequence should re›ect the concerns of the largest number of people possible in matters seen as the most pressing. The underlying nature that will explain such responses is most often inferred by observing patterns of action. At a great remove, the Romans may be understood in this way, looking at what even the most casually interested person knows about their civilization: their aqueducts and roads and conquests or, in sum, what an army engineer was best at. No more natural culture hero can be imagined than the legionary faber; and there is in this humdrum ‹gure a particular quality that the English word catches, “engineering ,” which underlines the difference between applied and theoretical knowledge. The difference is clear in retrospect, comparing Romans with Greeks (Greeks, by whom we ordinarily mean the Athenians and with whom we so often make our comparisons). Despite the dependence of the one civilization on the other, in ways already touched on, the Romans were selective in a most revealing way. Not for them, speculation about the origins of the universe and all such idle head-in-the-clouds conjecturing. Philosophy so far as they took it seriously , eventually and characteristically, was of the moral variety and even then, it was to be applied, not theoretical. Ethics might surely be called social engineering in terms of which ordinary lives could actually be lived 43 better; and “better” was to be seen not only in regard to individual contentment but in service also to the larger community. To illustrate Roman choices, notice also how dependence on Greek storytelling, as it was eventually registered in the Romulus legend from the 300s and in ‹ne literature from roughly 200, was put to use for instruction , not delight. It was applied, as was history likewise, to the purposes of moral improvement. It culminated in the Aeneid, celebrating “the pious”, no boastful Achilles; and while piety was what Romans liked to draw from the Iliad, they preferred to take nothing at all from the Odyssey, where the hero was too clever by half, artful deceiver, most un-Roman. By contrast, in the course of a sixth-century siege, the Roman commander “made attempt through the devices of trickery and guile, entirely un-Roman” (so, Livy); or “It was a principle in life for the Roman people”, says that Greek Tocqueville, that shrewd foreign observer Polybius, “and it was something on which they prided themselves, to make war in a straightforward, honorable fashion”; or again, as the two consuls of 278 explained to a great king of the time, “we don’t like to wage war by offering bribes or rewards or through sly tricks”.1 As to those endless scandalous doings on Mount Olympus, so dear to Greeks, the educated Roman in the later Republic knew the stories perfectly well, but didn’t want to import them into his religion as well as his poetry. He and his class didn’t give their collective mind to the invention of their own myths presumably because they didn’t feel the need; they shaped their own way of life as much by rejecting as by accepting what was Greek or Greek-through-Etruscan. The resulting selection, the eventual amalgam, the culture of the late Republic, was thus always their own.2 From the Etruscans, Romans might have adopted the gloomy gods Vanth and Charuns and all the underworld. Instead, only a few imported cults like Vertumnus took root among them. They did accept the use of the divining staff (the lituus) and the science of which it was the instrument , so as to know the intent of superhuman forces around them and thus in effect to know the future. A priest who was especially skilled could stand in a place with a good view all around, and mark what signs, what thunder or what ›ight of different species of birds, might be vouchsafed in what portions of the sky, exactly distinguished. The lituus did the distinguishing . As early as the 390s the story was in circulation that the city’s very origins had involved the rite;3 and, though Rome...