Auguet - Cruelty and Civilization

Which of us does not recall the horrified fascination we felt as children when looking at those pictures in our school-books which came between the lowly dwellings of our ancestors the Gauls and the picturesque escarpments on which the first keeps of the Middle Ages were built? A gladiator, with movements clumsy and stiff because of his armour, half kneels and raises his hooked vizor, pierced by mysterious holes, towards an imaginary grandstand, menacing with his curved sword the man prostrate at his feet. His calm, the restraint of his gestures, his indifference, are among the things which particularly excite childish wonder. In another picture a lioness leaps upon a condemned man whose almost transparent robe still flutters on the sand; farther on, some vague figures crowd together at the approach of another wild beast; or perhaps the beast crouches, satiated, its paws doubled up over a shapeless mass, aloof and sullenly watching the dense throng of onlookers.

In one sense these pictures, a little morbid and shocking, teach us a lesson: that the life of a man has not always had the value that our own morality strives to give it. In the past it could be a mere episode, and death the instrument of a collective pleasure. But to the Why? which a discovery of this sort usually suggests, the caption below the picture affords no answer. These scenes impress themselves on us because they are monstrous and inexplicable. Their apparent pointlessness incites us little by little to attribute the violence which they reveal to some cruelty in the Roman nature, a prejudice which even closer contact with the ancient world may only correct with difficulty.

There is nothing more incompatible with the Roman mentality than the form of cruelty known as sadism, without which, however, it is hard to explain the continuance and success of certain of these games which have retained so sinister a renown. To a great extent cruelty of this type is pointless; it destroys and consumes without advantage, to satisfy a passion or merely for pleasure. It is a luxury. But the Roman was not only a realist; he was a slave to utility in the narrowest sense. The sacrifice of what could be a source of wealth, made to satisfy a momentary instinct, a partiality or a purely subjective emotion, was for him a serious fault, a slur on the most elementary principle of his morality. That was true in small things as in large; there existed, for example, a whole series of laws aimed at prohibiting the squandering of wealth caused by burning or burying with the dead articles which had belonged to them in life. No Roman would have had his wife and his horse buried with him, like the Great Khanthere would only be small personal objects or household pets such as cats or birds. Even more forcibly, the law prohibited drenching the pyre with costly perfumes or placing gold in the coffin, with the exception, formally specified, of what the dead man might hold in his mouth.

Just as they did not tolerate the wastefulness of grief, the Romans did not surrender to the demands of vengeance. As a rule they treated the vanquished with a generosity based on calculation; they thus avoided kindling a latent desire for revenge and preserved a territory which had become for them a capital gain. Annihilation and pitiless massacre were only a last resort against an irreconcilable enemy, such as Carthage or certain Breton tribes which were exterminated en masse