Вольтер
A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 09
ROADS
It was not until lately that the modern nations of Europe began to render roads practicable and convenient, and to bestow on them some beauty. To superintend and keep in order the road is one of the most important cares of both the Mogul and Chinese emperors. But these princes never attained such eminence in this department as the Romans. The Appian, the Aurelian, the Flaminian, the Æmilian, and the Trajan ways exist even at the present day. The Romans alone were capable of constructing such roads, and they alone were capable of repairing them.
Bergier, who has written an otherwise valuable book, insists much on Solomon's employing thirty thousand Jews in cutting wood on Mount Lebanon, eighty thousand in building the temple, seventy thousand on carriages, and three thousand six hundred in superintending the labors of others. We will for a moment admit it all to be true; yet still there is nothing said about his making or repairing highways.
Pliny informs us that three hundred thousand men were employed for twenty years in building one of the pyramids of Egypt; I am not disposed to doubt it; but surely three hundred thousand men might have been much better employed. Those who worked on the canals in Egypt; or on the great wall, the canals, or highways of China; or those who constructed the celebrated ways of the Roman Empire were much more usefully occupied than the three hundred thousand miserable slaves in building a pyramidal sepulchre for the corpse of a bigoted Egyptian.
We are well acquainted with the prodigious works accomplished by the Romans, their immense excavations for lakes of water, or the beds of lakes formed by nature, filled up, hills levelled, and a passage bored through a mountain by Vespasian, in the Flaminian way, for more than a thousand feet in length, the inscription on which remains at present. Pausilippo is not to be compared with it.
The foundations of the greater part of our present houses are far from being so solid as were the highways in the neighborhood of Rome; and these public ways were extended throughout the empire, although not upon the same scale of duration and solidity. To effect that would have required more men and money than could possibly have been obtained.
Almost all the highways of Italy were erected on a foundation four feet deep; when a space of marshy ground or bog was on the track of the road, it was filled up; and when any part of it was mountainous, its pretipitousness was reduced to a gentle and trifling inclination from the general line of the road. In many parts, the roads were supported by solid walls.
Upon the four feet of masonry, were placed large hewn stones of marble, nearly one foot in thickness, and frequently ten feet wide; they were indented by the chisel to prevent the slipping of the horses. It was difficult to say which most attracted admiration – the utility or the magnificence of these astonishing works.
Nearly all of these wonderful constructions were raised at the public expense. Cæsar repaired and extended the Appian way out of his own private funds; those funds, however, consisted of the money of the republic.
Who were the persons employed upon these works? Slaves, captives taken in war, and provincials that were not admitted to the distinction of Roman citizens. They worked by "corvée," as they do in France and elsewhere; but some trifling remuneration was allowed them.
Augustus was the first who joined the legions with the people in labors upon the highways of the Gauls, and in Spain and Asia. He penetrated the Alps by the valley which bore his name, and which the Piedmontese and the French corruptly called the "Valley of Aöste." It was previously necessary to bring under subjection all the savage hordes by which these cantons were inhabited. There is still visible, between Great and Little St. Bernard, the triumphal arch erected by the senate in honor of him after this expedition. He again penetrated the Alps on another side leading to Lyons, and thence into the whole of Gaul. The conquered never effected for themselves so much as was effected for them by their conquerors.
The downfall of the Roman Empire was that of all the public works, as also of all orderly police, art, and industry. The great roads disappeared in the Gauls, except some causeways, "chaussées," which the unfortunate Queen Brunehilde kept for a little time in repair. A man could scarcely move on horseback with safety on the ancient celebrated ways, which were now becoming dreadfully broken up, and impeded by masses of stone and mud. It was found necessary to pass over the cultivated fields; the ploughs scarcely effected in a month what they now easily accomplish in a week. The little commerce that remained was limited to a few woollen and linen cloths, and some wretchedly wrought hardwares, which were carried on the backs of mules to the fortifications or prisons called "châteaux" situated in the midst of marshes, or on the tops of mountains covered with snow.
Whatever travelling was accomplished – and it could be but little – during the severe seasons of the year, so long and so tedious in northern climates, could be effected only by wading through mud or climbing over rocks. Such was the state of the whole of France and Germany down to the middle of the seventeenth century. Every individual wore boots; and in many of the cities of Germany the inhabitants went into the streets on stilts.
At length, under Louis XIV., were begun those great roads which other nations have imitated. Their width was limited to sixty feet in the year 1720. They are bordered by trees in many places to the extent of thirty leagues from the capital, which has a most interesting and delightful effect. The Roman military ways were only sixteen feet wide, but were infinitely more solid. It was necessary to repair them every year, as is the practice with us. They were embellished by monuments, by military columns, and even by magnificent tombs; for it was not permitted, either in Greece or Italy, to bury the dead within the walls of cities, and still less within those of temples; to do so would have been no less an offence than sacrilege. It was not then as it is at present in our churches, in which, for a sum of money, ostentatious and barbarous vanity is allowed to deposit the dead bodies of wealthy citizens, infecting the very place where men assemble to adore their God in purity, and where incense seems to be burned solely to counteract the stench of carcasses; while the poorer classes are deposited in the adjoining cemetery; and both unite their fatal influence to spread contagion among survivors.
The emperors were almost the only persons whose ashes were permitted to repose in the monuments erected at Rome.
Highways, sixty feet in width, occupy too much land; it is about forty feet more than necessary. France measures two hundred leagues, or thereabouts, from the mouth of the Rhone to the extremity of Brittany, and about the same from Perpignan to Dunkirk; reckoning the league at two thousand five hundred toises. This calculation requires, merely for two great roads, a hundred and twenty millions of square feet of land, all which must of course be lost to agriculture. This loss is very considerable in a country where the harvests are by no means always abundant.
An attempt was made to pave the high road from Orleans, which was not of the width above mentioned; but it was seen, in no long time, that nothing could be worse contrived for a road constantly covered with heavy carriages. Of these hewn paving stones laid on the ground, some will be constantly sinking, and others rising above the correct level, and the road becomes rugged, broken, and impracticable; it was therefore found necessary that the plan should be abandoned.
Roads covered with gravel and sand require a renewal of labor every year; this labor interferes with the cultivation of land, and is ruinous to agriculture.
M. Turgot, son of the mayor of Paris – whose name is never mentioned in that city but with blessings, and who was one of the most enlightened, patriotic, and zealous of magistrates – and the humane and beneficent M. de Fontette have done all in their power, in the provinces of Limousin and Normandy, to correct this most serious inconvenience.
It has been contended that we should follow the example of Augustus and Trajan, and employ our troops in the construction of highways. But in that case the soldier must necessarily have an increase of pay; and a kingdom, which was nothing but a province of the Roman Empire, and which is often involved in debt, can rarely engage in such undertakings as the Roman Empire accomplished without difficulty.
It is a very commendable practice in the Low Countries, to require the payment of a moderate toll from all carriages, in order to keep the public roads in proper repair. The burden is a very light one. The peasant is relieved from the old system of vexation and oppression, and the roads are in such fine preservation as to form even an agreeable continued promenade.
Canals are much more useful still. The Chinese surpass all other people in these works, which require continual attention and repair. Louis XIV., Colbert, and Riquet, have immortalized themselves by the canal which joins the two seas. They have never been as yet imitated. It is no difficult matter to travel through a great part of France by canals. Nothing could be more easy in Germany than to join the Rhine to the Danube; but men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.
ROD
The Theurgists and ancient sages had always a rod with which they operated.
Mercury passes for the first whose rod worked miracles. It is asserted that Zoroaster also bore a great rod. The rod of the ancient Bacchus was his Thyrsus, with which he separated the waters of the Orontes, the Hydaspus, and the Red Sea. The rod of Hercules was his club. Pythagoras was always represented with his rod. It is said it was of gold; and it is not surprising that, having a thigh of gold, he should possess a rod of the same metal.
Abaris, priest of the hyperborean Apollo, who it is pretended was contemporary with Pythagoras, was still more famous for his rod. It was indeed only of wood, but he traversed the air astride of it. Porphyry and Iamblichus pretend that these two grand Theurgists, Abaris and Pythagoras, amicably exhibited their rods to each other.
The rod, with sages, was at all times a sign of their superiority. The sorcerers of the privy council of Pharaoh at first effected as many feats with their rods as Moses with his own. The judicious Calmet informs us, in his "Dissertation on the Book of Exodus," that "these operations of the Magi were not miracles, properly speaking, but metamorphoses, viz.: singular and difficult indeed, but nevertheless neither contrary to nor above the laws of nature." The rod of Moses had the superiority, which it ought to have, over those of the Chotins of Egypt.
Not only did the rod of Aaron share in the honor of the prodigies of that of his brother Moses, but he performed some admirable things with his own. No one can be ignorant that, out of thirteen rods, Aaron's alone blossomed, and bore buds and flowers of almonds.
The devil, who, as is well known, is a wicked aper of the deeds of saints, would also have his rod or wand, with which he gratified the sorcerers: Medea and Circe were always armed with this mysterious instrument. Hence, a magician never appears at the opera without his rod, and on which account they call their parts, "rôles de baguette." No performer with cups and balls can manage his hey presto! without his rod or wand.
Springs of water and hidden treasures are discovered by means of a rod made of a hazel twig, which fails not to press the hand of a fool who holds it too fast, but which turns about easily in that of a knave. M. Formey, secretary of the academy of Berlin, explains this phenomenon by that of the loadstone. All the conjurers of past times, it was thought, repaired to a sabbath or assembly on a magic rod or on a broom-stick; and judges, who were no conjurers, burned them.
Birchen rods are formed of a handful of twigs of that tree with which malefactors are scourged on the back. It is indecent and shameful to scourge in this manner the posteriors of young boys and girls; a punishment which was formerly that of slaves. I have seen, in some colleges, barbarians who have stripped children almost naked; a kind of executioner, often intoxicated, lacerate them with long rods, which frequently covered them with blood, and produced extreme inflammation. Others struck them more gently, which from natural causes has been known to produce consequences, especially in females, scarcely less disgusting.
By an incomprehensible species of police, the Jesuits of Paraguay whipped the fathers and mothers of families on their posteriors. Had there been no other motive for driving out the Jesuits, that would have sufficed.
ROME (COURT OF)
Before the time of Constantine, the bishop of Rome was considered by the Roman magistrates, who were unacquainted with our holy religion, only as the chief of a sect, frequently tolerated by the government, but frequently experiencing from it capital punishment. The names of the first disciples, who were by birth Jews, and of their successors, who governed the little flock concealed in the immense city of Rome, were absolutely unknown by all the Latin writers. We well know that everything was changed, and in what manner everything was changed under Constantine.
The bishop of Rome, protected and enriched as he was, was always in subjection to the emperors, like the bishop of Constantinople, and of Nicomedia, and every other, not making even the slightest pretension to the shadow of sovereign authority. Fatality, which guides the affairs of the universe, finally established the power of the ecclesiastical Roman court, by the hands of the barbarians who destroyed the empire.
The ancient religion, under which the Romans had been victorious for such a series of ages, existed still in the hearts of the population, notwithstanding all the efforts of persecution, when, in the four hundred and eighth year of our era, Alaric invaded Italy and beseiged Rome. Pope Innocent I. indeed did not think proper to forbid the inhabitants of that city sacrificing to the gods in the capitol, and in the other temples, in order to obtain the assistance of heaven against the Goths. But this same Pope Innocent, if we may credit Zosimus and Orosius, was one of the deputation sent to treat with Alaric, a circumstance which shows that the pope was at that time regarded as a person of considerable consequence.
When Attila came to ravage Italy in 452, by the same right which the Romans themselves had exercised over so many and such powerful nations; by the right of Clovis, of the Goths, of the Vandals, and the Heruli, the emperor sent Pope Leo I., assisted by two personages of consular dignity, to negotiate with that conqueror. I have no doubt, that agreeably to what we are positively told, St. Leo was accompanied by an angel, armed with a flaming sword, which made the king of the Huns tremble, although he had no faith in angels, and a single sword was not exceedingly likely to inspire him with fear. This miracle is very finely painted in the Vatican, and nothing can be clearer than that it never would have been painted unless it had actually been true. What particularly vexes and perplexes me is this angel's suffering Aquileia, and the whole of Illyria, to be sacked and ravaged, and also his not preventing Genseric, at a later period, from giving up Rome to his soldiers for fourteen days of plunder. It was evidently not the angel of extermination.
Under the exarchs, the credit and influence of the popes augmented, but even then they had not the smallest degree of civil power. The Roman bishop, elected by the people, craved protection for the bishop, of the exarch of Ravenna, who had the power of confirming or of cancelling the election.
After the exarchate was destroyed by the Lombards, the Lombard kings were desirous of becoming masters also of the city of Rome; nothing could certainly be more natural.
Pepin, the usurper of France, would not suffer the Lombards to usurp that capital, and so become too powerful against himself; nothing again can be more natural than this.
It is pretended that Pepin and his son Charlemagne gave to the Roman bishops many lands of the exarchate, which was designated the Justices of St. Peter – "les Justices de St. Pierre." Such is the real origin of their temporal power. From this period, these bishops appear to have assiduously exerted themselves to obtain something of rather more consideration and of more consequence than these justices.
We are in possession of a letter from Pope Arian I. to Charlemagne, in which he says, "The pious liberality of the emperor Constantine the Great, of sacred memory, raised and exalted, in the time of the blessed Roman Pontiff, Sylvester, the holy Roman Church, and conferred upon it his own power in this portion of Italy."
From this time, we perceive, it was attempted to make the world believe in what is called the Donation of Constantine, which was, in the sequel, for a period of five hundred years, not merely regarded as an article of faith, but an incontestable truth. To entertain doubts on the subject of this donation included at once the crime of treason and the guilt of mortal sin.
After the death of Charlemagne, the bishop augmented his authority in Rome from day to day; but centuries passed away before he came to be considered as a sovereign prince. Rome had for a long period a patrician municipal government.
Pope John XII., whom Otho I., emperor of Germany, procured to be deposed in a sort of council, in 963, as simoniacal, incestuous, sodomitical, an atheist, in league with the devil, was the first man in Italy as patrician and consul, before he became bishop of Rome; and notwithstanding all these titles and claims, notwithstanding the influence of the celebrated Marosia, his mother, his authority was always questioned and contested.
Gregory VII., who from the rank of a monk became pope, and pretended to depose kings and bestow empires, far from being in fact complete master of Rome, died under the protection, or rather as the prisoner of those Norman princes who conquered the two Sicilies, of which he considered himself the paramount lord.
In the grand schism of the West, the popes who contended for the empire of the world frequently supported themselves on alms.
It is a fact not a little extraordinary that the popes did not become rich till after the period when they dared not to exhibit themselves at Rome.
According to Villani, Bertrand de Goth, Clement V. of Bordeaux, who passed his life in France, sold benefices publicly, and at his death left behind him vast treasures.
The same Villani asserts that he died worth twenty-five millions of gold florins. St. Peter's patrimony could not certainly have brought him such a sum.
In a word, down to the time of Innocent VIII., who, made himself master of the castle of St. Angelo, the popes never possessed in Rome actual sovereignty.
Their spiritual authority was undoubtedly the foundation of their temporal; but had they confined themselves to imitating the conduct of St. Peter, whose place it was pretended they filled, they would never have obtained any other kingdom than that of heaven. Their policy always contrived to prevent the emperors from establishing themselves at Rome, notwithstanding the fine and flattering title of "king of the Romans." The Guelph faction always prevailed in Italy over the Ghibelline. The Romans were more disposed to obey an Italian priest than a German king.
In the civil wars, which the quarrel between the empire and the priesthood excited and kept alive for a period of five hundred years, many lords obtained sovereignties, sometimes in quality of vicars of the empire, and sometimes in that of vicars of the Holy See. Such were the princes of Este at Ferrara, the Bentivoglios at Bologna, the Malatestas at Rimini, the Manfredis at Faenza, the Bagliones at Perouse, the Ursins in Anguillara and in Serveti, the Collonas in Ostia, the Riarios at Forli, the Montefeltros in Urbino, the Varanos in Camerino, and the Gravinas in Senigaglia.
All these lords had as much right to the territories they possessed as the popes had to the patrimony of St. Peter; both were founded upon donations.
It is known in what manner Pope Alexander VI. made use of his bastard to invade and take possession of all these principalities. King Louis XII. obtained from that pope the cancelling of his marriage, after a cohabitation of eighteen years, on condition of his assisting the usurper.
The assassinations committed by Clovis to gain possession of the territories of the petty kings who were his neighbors, bear no comparison to the horrors exhibited on this occasion by Alexander and his son.
The history of Nero himself is less abominable; the atrocity of whose crimes was not increased by the pretext of religion; and it is worth observing, that at the very time these diabolical excesses were performed, the kings of Spain and Portugal were suing to that pope, one of them for America, and the other for Asia, which the monster accordingly granted them in the name of that God he pretended to represent. It is also worth observing that not fewer than a hundred thousand pilgrims flocked to his jubilee and prostrated themselves in adoration of his person.
Julius II. completed what Alexander had begun. Louis XII., born to become the dupe of all his neighbors, assisted Julius in seizing upon Bologna and Perouse. That unfortunate monarch, in return for his services, was driven out of Italy, and excommunicated by the very pope whom the archbishop of Auch, the king's ambassador at Rome, addressed with the words "your wickedness," instead of "your holiness."
To complete his mortification, Anne of Brittany, his wife, a woman as devout as she was imperious, told him in plain terms, that he would be damned for going to war with the pope.
If Leo X. and Clement VII. lost so many states which withdrew from the papal communion, their power continued no less absolute than before over the provinces which still adhered to the Catholic faith. The court of Rome excommunicated the emperor Henry III., and declared Henry IV. unworthy to reign.
It still draws large sums from all the Catholic states of Germany, from Hungary, Poland, Spain, and France. Its ambassadors take precedence of all others; it is no longer sufficiently powerful to carry on war; and its weakness is in fact its happiness. The ecclesiastical state is the only one that has regularly enjoyed the advantages of peace since the sacking of Rome by the troops of Charles V. It appears, that the popes have been often treated like the gods of the Japanese, who are sometimes presented with offerings of gold, and sometimes thrown into the river.
