12 Making of the Complete Citizen
“Roman Law, so far at least as it enshrines a legacy of cul-
ture, is rather an expression of Roman character—a deposit
of Roman common sense working through the centuries on
problems as they successively arose—than the creation of
any outstanding men of genius.”1
Qualities that entered into the Roman tradition were
humanitas, gravitas, pietas. In the Scottish universities
the chair of Latin is called “Humanity,” the meaning of
which it is somewhat difficult to define precisely, though the
word is intended to imply that the studies conducted in that
classroom have some cultural effect in producing a better
understanding of human nature. But in Geneva, from
which the famous Andrew MelviIle came to Scotland in
1574, the chair of Humanity included Greek as well as
Latin. According to the Diary of James Melville, his
nephew, “they having need of a professor of Humanity in
the College, put him within two or three days to trial in
Virgil and Homer.”2 In those days the “humanist” was
relatively a far more important person than he is today. Of
gravitas we see the expression in the dignity and justice of
those who imposed law on the Empire and ensued peace for
all the inhabited world; and of pietas in the loyalty to things
sacred, in genuine reverence as a constitutive virtue in the
Roman family. The idea that Rome was the “eternal city”
had taken such deep root in the mind of the civilized world,
that when it fell at the beginning of the fifth century panic
seized upon the hearts of men: “The ancient majesty of
the imperial city had been violated, and the magic of that
great name was vanishing among agonies of regret.”3
Henceforth the world became RomeIess in the sense that no
longer was Rome ecumenical, nor has there been since then
ɪ Ibid., 209.
2 Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh I, 78n.
ɛ Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, 72.