Читать книгу Ancient Rome: The Lives of Great Men - Mary Agnes Hamilton - Страница 15

To understand this character better one may look at it from another angle, studying a man in whom these qualities were spoiled by the faults that belong to them. Courage may become cruelty: pride fall into arrogance: high contempt for others will grow to selfishness and hardness; even a high devotion to one’s country may be spoiled if it comes to mean a devotion to one’s own idea of what that country should be like and how it should treat oneself. It may then be mere selfishness. Many men love their country not as it is but as they think it ought to be. This may be a good and helpful feeling if what they think it ought to be depends not on their own private wishes and welfare only, but on that of the people as a whole. A love of country of this kind makes men strive incessantly to make it better. But some Romans forgot the welfare of the people as a whole. The men belonging to the old families, men who claimed to be descended from the early settlers, who called themselves ‘patricians’, that is, the fathers of the State, were apt to consider that what they thought must be so: that they alone knew what was right and good. The welfare of the State depended on them. They were the leaders in the army and in the government. They had no patience with those who said that they should not settle everything in Rome, that their idea of what was right and patriotic was not the end of the matter; men who said that Rome was not this class or that but the whole people. The city was growing fast; new settlers had come in, men not counted as citizens, but men whose happiness and comfort depended on the way the State treated them. These people, the ‘plebs’ as they were called, were despised by many patricians. They looked upon them not as Romans, but as creatures who could be made into soldiers when the city needed soldiers, but at other times should keep quiet.

The faults and virtues of the patricians—and nearly all the heroes of Roman story belong to patrician families—are well shown in the life of Caius Marcius, called Coriolanus in honour of his victory outside the town of Corioli.