Samuel Johnson's Two Views on Ancient Rome

[guy]

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was an English writer, best known for "A Dictionary of the English language" written in 1755. He was also an essayist, biographer, and literary critic.

He was also a very odd-looking gentleman with strange tics and mannerisms. (Modern researchers believe he had Tourette syndrome.) He was deaf in one ear and blind in one eye. He also suffered from childhood scrofula, a localized tuberculosis infection of the cervical lymph nodes, resulting in facial scarring and neck swelling. 

 

First, here is his complementary quote on ancient Rome recorded by his biographer James Boswell:

Quote

 

 A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. On those shores were the four great empires of the world: the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.

Dr. Samuel Johnson: Boswell’s Johnson, year 1776.

 

 

Johnson was a complex man who was also able to say this about ancient Rome:

 

Quote

"I know not why any one but a school-boy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another. A people, who while they were poor robbed mankind; and as soon as they became rich, robbed one another."

Johnson: Review of Thomas Blackwell's "Memoirs of the Court of Augustus" 1756

 

I found these two quotes so diametrically opposed but despite their contradictory nature, so true. Similarly, Samuel Johnson himself was a complex person with many contradictions.

 

(Interestingly, many people incorrectly assume that Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, were friends. Although near contemporaries and traveling in similar social circles, these two men had a very complex and sometimes unfriendly relationship.)

 

Edited December 10, 2017 by guy