II "FROM GREAT ROME" 57 assumed. Hannibal surmounted the walls of snow and ice,1 and the great flood has been bridged by steam. Measured in time, America, and even Australia, is now nearer to England than were some parts of Great Britain from others in Burke's time. The flame of enthusiasm has often been handed on to British statesmen and administrators by sayings which "have come down to us from great Rome." Lord Melbourne was never tired, we are told, of quoting that noble sentence of Cicero's "It has always been my policy to defend the senate on the platform, and the people in parliament."2 Macaulay used to say that the finest sentence ever written is contained in Caesar's answer to Cicero's message of gratitude for the humanity which the conqueror had displayed towards those political adversaries who had fallen into his power at the surrender of Corfinium : "Meum factum probari abs te, triumpho gaudio. 1 Opposuit natura Alpemque nivemque, Diducit scopulos et montem rumpit aceto. The passage is thus rendered by Dryden : x. 152. Spain first he won, the Pyrenaeans past, And steepy Alps, the mounds that nature cast: A passage thro' the living rocks he rent the reference being to the tale told by Livy of Hannibal's passage of the Alps, that he blasted by fire and vinegar the rocks which barred his route. 66 2" Ita est a me consulatus peractus, ut nihil sine consilio senatus, nihil non approbante populo Romano egerim, ut semper in rostris curiam, in senatu populum, defenderim" (In Pisonem, 3. 7). Neque illud me movet quod ii, qui a me dimissi sunt, discessisse dicuntur ut mihi rursus bellum inferrent; nihil enim malo quam et me mei similem esse, et illos sui." (I triumph and rejoice that my action should have obtained your approval. Nor am I disturbed when I hear it said that those, whom I have sent off alive and free, will again bear arms against me; for there is nothing which I so much covet as that I should be like myself, and they like themselves.) "Noble fellow!" was Macaulay's marginal note against this passage. The letters in which Caesar expressed his clemency towards his conquered enemies were, says Sir George Trevelyan, quite as much to the taste of Fox. When the Duke of Enghien was arrested Fox copied out the epistle to Oppius, with the intention of sending it to Napoleon, but was prevented by the arrival of the fatal news.1 How often has inspiration been found by British political and military officers in the famous lines of Virgil defining wherein lay the true greatness of Rome : Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; 1 The Marginal Notes of Lord Macaulay, p. 42, and The Early Life of Charles James Fox, p. 282 n. The passage of Caesar's letter to Cicero is from the Letters to Atticus, 9. 16. 2; for Caesar's letter to Oppius, see Ad Att. 9. 7c. 2 I can find no verse translation which seems to do justice to this famous passage (Aen. vi. 853). So I give two of the best prose translations for the reader to make choice from. "Be thy charge, O Roman, to rule the nations in thine empire; this shall be thine art, to lay down the laws of peace, to be merciful to the conquered and beat the haughty down" (Mackail). II ROME AND BRITAIN 59 The lines of a later poet, which I have cited elsewhere,1 describe in greater detail the humane policy of the Roman Empire, and have often been applied to the British commonwealth of states. In the same poem Claudian goes on to speak of "the facilities of intercourse introduced by the Romans into their vast empire, partly by the maintenance of peace, and partly by their roads-a passage," says Sir John Sandys, "which has been reduced to sober truth by railways and steamers in the British Empire," and which has been repeated verse, it may be added, by Mr. Kipling : in 2 Hujus pacificis debemus moribus omnes This "Yours, Roman, be the lesson to govern the nations as their lord. is your destined culture, to impose the settled rule of peace, to spare the humbled and to crush the proud" (Conington). It will be noticed that the two translators take the word imperio in different senses. 1 Literary Recreations, p. 175. 2 Keep ye the Law-be swift in all obedience Which is right? Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford. Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown ; By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord! 3 There is no good translation of Claudian. Here is the version of the lines quoted above in the translation by A. Hawkins (1817): In peace her favours fully we obtain, Like fields paternal, view each foreign plain, Remove at will:-see Thule's distant shore; Recesses, horrid thought of old, explore; Drink waters from the Rhone: th' Orontes' stream; And, thus in union, one great nation seem.— Stilicho, iii. 154. The two passages of Claudian were aptly quoted by the Public Orator at Cambridge in presenting for honorary degrees-first, Sir William Hunter, the editor of the great Imperial Gazetteer of India; and secondly, Lord Strathcona, one of the two foremost promoters of the Canadian Pacific Railway.' Is it true, as was once written, that beneficent empires exist but to dig their own graves? It is the fear of some, and the hope of others, that such is destined to be the fate of the British Empire in India. If so, a quotation may be suggested for some future Secretary of State, if the wheel of fashion and the progress of education should by that time have restored the classics to Parliament. "It may be," wrote Lord Cromer, "that at some future and far distant time we shall be justified, to use a metaphor of perhaps the greatest of the Latin poets, in handing over the torch of progress and civilisation in India to those whom we have ourselves civilised":2 Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur, Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum, 1 See a letter by Sir John Sandys in the Times, January 14, 1910. 2 Ancient and Modern Imperialism, p. 127. Lord Cromer, writing in 1910, added, however, "All that can be said at present is that until human nature entirely changes, and until racial and religious passions disappear from the face of the earth, the relinquishment of that torch would almost certainly lead to its extinction." 3 Lucretius, De Rer. Nat. ii. 77-79, thus translated by Calverley : Pass, and a race has arisen which was not as in a racecourse, II MR. ASQUITH'S QUOTATIONS 61 Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset: the famous sentence passed by Tacitus upon Galba has often occurred to critics of "great, wise, and eminent men" who have disappointed expectations. Mr. Asquith quoted it in his obituary oration upon Sir Henry CampbellBannerman: "There have been men who, in the cruel phrase of the ancient historian, were universally judged to be fit for the highest place only until they attained and held it. Our late Prime Minister belonged to that rarer class whose fitness for such a place, until they had attained and held it, was never adequately understood.” A very happy adaptation of a classical quotation. But Mr. Asquith, who is so well qualified to shine in this art, pays regard to the passing of fashion, and shows his taste for the most part in quotations from the English poets. For peroration of the same speech on Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman he used the "Character of a Happy Life" by Sir Henry Wotton, and the conclusion of his tribute to Alfred Lyttelton will be remembered: "Those who loved him—and they are many-in all schools of opinion, in all ranks and walks of life, when they think of him will say to themselves : This was the happy Warrior; this was He It is a testimony, by the way, to Wordsworth's success in drawing a picture of an ideal type. of |