Читать книгу The History of Education - Ellwood Patterson Cubberley - Страница 29

DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMAN STATE. About the time that the Hellenes, in the City-States of the Greek peninsula, had brought their civilization to its Golden Age, another branch of the great Aryan race, which had previously settled in the Italian peninsula, had begun the creation of a new civilization there which was destined to become extended and powerful. At the beginning of recorded history we find a number of tribes of this branch of the Aryan race settled in different parts of Italy, as is shown in Figure 16. Slowly, but gradually, the smallest of these divisions, the Latins, extended its rule over the other tribes, and finally over the Greek settlements to the south and the Gauls to the north, so that by 201 B.C. the entire Italian peninsula had become subject to the City-State government at Rome.

[Illustration: FIG. 16. THE EARLY PEOPLES OF ITALY, AND THE EXTENSION OF THE ROMAN POWER In 509 B.C. Attica opened her citizenship to all free inhabitants, and half a century later the Golden Age of Greece was in full swing. By 338 B.C. Greece's glory had departed. Philip of Macedon had become master, and its political freedom was over. By 264 B.C. the center of Greek life and thought had been transferred to Alexandria, and Rome's great expansion had begun.]

[Illustration: FIG. 17. THE PRINCIPAL ROMAN ROADS]

By a wise policy of tolerance, patience, conciliation, and assimilation the Latins gradually became the masters of all Italy. Unlike the Greek City-States, Rome seemed to possess a natural genius for the art of government. Upon the people she conquered she bestowed the great gift of Roman citizenship, and she attached them to her by granting local government to their towns and by interfering as little as possible with their local manners, speech, habits, and institutions. By founding colonies among them and by building excellent military roads to them, she insured her rule, and by kindly and generous treatment she bound the different Italian peoples ever closer and closer to the central government at Rome. By a most wonderful understanding of the psychology of other peoples, new in the world before the work of Rome, and not seen again until the work of the English in the nineteenth century, Rome gradually assimilated the peoples of the Italian peninsula and in time amalgamated them into a single Roman race. In speech, customs, manners, and finally in blood she Romanized the different tribes and brought them under her leadership. Later this same process was extended to Spain, Gaul, and even to far-off Britain.

A CONCRETE, PRACTICAL PEOPLE. The Roman people were a concrete, practical, constructive nation of farmers and herdsmen (R. 14), merchants and soldiers, governors and executives. The whole of the early struggle of the Latins to extend their rule and absorb the other tribes of the peninsula called for practical rulers—warriors who were at the same time constructive statesmen and executives who possessed power and insight, energy, and personality. The long struggle for political and social rights, [1] carried on by the common people (plebeians) with the ruling class (patricians), tended early to shape their government along rough but practical lines, [2] and to elevate law and orderly procedure among the people. The later extension of the Empire to include many distant lands—how vast the Roman Empire finally became may be seen from the map on the following page—called still more for a combination of force, leadership, tolerance, patience, executive power, and insight into the psychology of subject people to hold such a vast empire together. Only a great, creative people, working along very practical lines, could have used and used so well the opportunity which came to Rome [3]

[Illustration: FIG. 18. THE GREAT EXTENT OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE The map shows the Roman Empire as it was by the end of the first century A.D., and the tribes shown beyond the frontier are as they were at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. It was 2500 miles, air line, from the eastern end of the Black Sea to the western coasts of Spain, 1400 miles from Rome to Palestine, and 1100 miles from Rome to northern Britain. To maintain order in this vast area Rome depended on the loyalty of her subjects, the strength of her armies, her military roads, and a messenger service by horse, yet throughout this vast area she imposed her law and a unified government for centuries.]

THE GREAT MISSION OF ROME. Had Rome tried to impose her rule and her ways and her mode of thought on her subject people, and to reduce them to complete subjection to her, as the modern German and Austrian Empires, for example, tried to do with the peoples who came under their control, the Roman Empire could never have been created, and what would have saved civilization from complete destruction during the period of the barbarian invasions is hard to see. Instead, Rome treated her subjects as her friends, and not as conquered peoples; led them to see that their interests were identical with hers; gave them large local independence and freedom in government, under her strong control of general affairs; opened up her citizenship [4] and the line of promotion in the State to her provincials; [5] and won them to the peace and good order which she everywhere imposed by the advantages she offered through a common language, common law, common coinage, common commercial arrangements, common state service, and the common treatment of all citizens of every race. [6] In consequence, the provincial was willingly absorbed into the common Roman race [7]—absorbed in dress, manners, religion, political and legal institutions, family names, and, most important of all, in language. As a result, race pride and the native tongues very largely disappeared, and Latin became the spoken language of all except the lower classes throughout the whole of the Western Empire. Only in the eastern Mediterranean, where the Hellenic tongue and the Hellenic civilization still dominated, did the Latin language make but little headway, and here Rome had the good sense not to try to impose her speech or her culture. Instead she absorbed the culture of the East, while the East accepted in return the Roman government and Roman law, and Latin in time became the language of the courts and of government.

Having stated thus briefly the most prominent characteristics of the Roman people, and indicated their great work for civilization, let us turn back and trace the development of such educational system as existed among them, see in what it consisted, how it modified the life and habits of thinking of the Roman people, and what educational organization or traditions Rome passed on to western civilization.