Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 179

It is only slowly, and as the mind is steeped in the spirit of the ancient civilisations, that the real nature of the immense interval which separates their inner life from that of the modern world begins to be realised. It often comes as a surprise, for instance, to the modern mind that a cultivated citizen of the Roman or Greek world could calmly consign an educated fellow-creature to all the unutterable degradation that the position of slave in that period involved, simply because the latter had been taken prisoner honourably in war. If, however, we turn to the thought of even so late, and comparatively liberal, a period as that of the Jystitutes of Justinian, we have the explanation. In the /ustztutes we find it asserted that “slaves are denominated servz because generals order their captives to be sold, and by this means are wont to preserve them and not to put them to death.”?! The inner meaning of these words, in which there is expressed the still surviving spirit of the ancient civilisations, only becomes visible on reflection, The pride, the contempt, the intolerant exclusiveness of citizenship lurking in them is to us almost inconceivable. For they mean nothing more or less than that it had been the spirit of the Roman law to assume, as a matter of course, that a person who was at war with the exclusive body of citizens, and who, therefore, was outside its claims, had absolutely no right to exist. Any position, therefore, however degraded, to which he might be consigned, had been looked upon, not in the light of a punishment, but as a mitigation of the death penalty; and, there-

1 Servi autem ex eo appellati sunt, quod imperatores captivos vendere jubent ac per hoc servare nec occidere solent (Jystit. Sust., lib. i. tit. iii.)