THE SERVILE WAR IN SICILY. ACQUISITION OF THE KINGDOM OF PERGAMUS. ARISTONICUS. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS.
The punishment for so foul a deed was not slow in overtaking the Romans. Even before the fall of Numantia, a servile war broke out in Sicily; though indeed this does not so much belong to Roman, as to Grecian history. It was brought on by the depopulation of the island owing to the many wars in which famine and pestilence were raging, as in Germany during the Thirty Years’ war. Twenty-four years had not yet passed since the first Punic war, when the second completed the misery of Sicily: it was in a state of desolation, like that of Ireland after the peace of Limerick, in the times of William III. Much of the land was made ager publicus, and thus fell into the hands of speculators; in this way there arose large estates in Sicily, which were chiefly used for grazing. Thus (according to the Codex Theodosianus) nearly the whole of Lucania, Bruttium, and Calabria, in the days of Honorius and Arcadius, was pasture land, of which the owners, who were partly Romans, partly Siciliotes, kept large studs of horses and herds of cattle. Herdsmen in Italy are a degenerate race of men: they are, almost all of them, as far as I know, (in the States of the Church and in the kingdom of Naples,—in Tuscany there are few of them,) the associates of robbers: the herdsman is as bad and as robber-like, as the peasant, on the other hand, is respectable. On these large estates, there was an immense number of slaves,—often as many as thousands together on one alone. The traffic in slaves, owing to the wars and the continual piracy of those times, had reached a fearful height; so that at the slave-market in Delos, ten thousand are said to have been sold in one day, and they were to be had for a mere trifle. They were treated with the greatest cruelty, and had to work in the fields in chains; of course, there were among them many respectable men from all parts, Carthaginians, Achæans, Macedonians, Celtiberians, and others, who deserved quite a different fate, and could not but thirst for the blood of their tyrants. Thus the Servile war broke out in Sicily, and it is not to be wondered at that there was then another of these risings in Greece: the cause was everywhere the same. In Greece, tillage had formerly been mostly the business of the freedmen, and it was only of late that it had fallen into the hands of the slaves. The war had now reached its fourth year; several Roman armies had been utterly routed, and it required a consular one under P. Rupilius to reduce the island (620): for the slaves were masters of the strongest places, Enna and Tauromenium, and they had for their leader Eunus (Εὔνους), a Syrian, who, like Jean François at St. Domingo in the year 1791, put on the diadem in due form. The struggle was carried on with the same relentless cruelty which slaves have met with everywhere, as in the West Indies and in North America. Sicily was laid utterly waste by it, and thirty years afterwards, the same circumstances led to the same results. The details are awfully interesting; yet, as we have said before, they are not in their place here.
In the meanwhile, Attalus Philometor of Pergamus, the son of Eumenes, died, and with him the race of Philetærus became extinct. The first kings of Pergamus whom the Romans had raised to greatness, were on the whole clever men and mild princes; and under their rule the country flourished: this state of things was a desirable one, although, if looked upon in a moral point of view, much might be said against it. But the last Attalus was a tyrant and a wicked wretch, such as is only to be met with in the East, where a certain perversity reaches its highest pitch, and takes delight in what is most unnatural and revolting: in a word, he was an incarnate fiend, like Sultan Ibrahim. The only art in which he employed himself, was that of cultivating deadly plants and of preparing poison: it was sport to him, to get those who were his nearest kindred out of the world. He bequeathed the whole of his kingdom to the Romans; and indeed he could not well have done otherwise, as every one of his dispositions had still to be approved of by the Romans, who would hardly have acknowledged the rule of any one else. They took it as a property which of right belonged to them, very much as a master might take the goods of one of his freedmen who had not been fully emancipated, and had died without leaving a will. Thus Rome had a new province, which, however, was to be won by the sword, as Aristonicus, a bastard son of Eumenes, laid claim to the throne. According to the notions of the East, this defect of birth was not a bar to the succession, so that, but for the will of Attalus, he would have been the lawful heir. He had very little trouble in getting hold of the diadem soon after the death of his brother; for the people had a horror of the Roman rule, and they had learned to know the tyranny and rapacity of the Roman prætors and proconsuls who made their appearance every year: many towns declared for him; others, like Ephesus, which had lately gained their freedom by the help of Rome, took up arms against him. How he came to believe that he could hold out, is quite inconceivable. He had no aid whatever: in his neighbourhood were Pontus, Cappadocia, and Bithynia, all three of which were only small kingdoms, and the two last quite unwarlike; the Syrian kings were likewise tottering to their fall, and their whole attention was turned to the East, where the Parthian empire was spreading farther and farther, and Babylon was already conquered. There was not a soul in the world who could help Andronicus; and yet he would engage in the mad undertaking of raising war against the Romans. But the struggle lasted longer than one would have thought: not only did the womanish inhabitants of Lydia and Ionia, countries which are an earthly paradise, carry it on with great resolution, but the pretender had likewise many Thracians in his pay. The Romans, on the other hand, were badly commanded: their leaders thought of nothing but enriching themselves; they were very glad when wealthy towns rebelled, as they could then plunder them. Rome had not only a consular army, but also troops from Bithynia and Pontus; a Roman general, P. Licinius Crassus, was even defeated and taken prisoner. This man has some name in history; and yet, his rapacity was so abominable, that the Asiatics ill-treated his dead body because of it: so cheap was it at that time to be deemed a man of honour. He died, however, a noble death, himself asking to be killed. At length, M. Perperna overcame Aristonicus, and took him prisoner; but M. Aquillius snatched the triumph from him. This is of later date than the tribuneship of Tib. Gracchus (619); that is to say, in 622.[63]
The province of Asia was now regularly formed, but within narrower limits. Rome was generous to the native princes: Nicomedes had his territory enlarged, and Great Phrygia was given to Mithridates of Pontus. But in the latter case, this was not done before the tribuneship of C. Gracchus, who, however, seems to have spoken against it, Mithridates having perhaps gotten this quite unnecessary cession of land by bribing the Roman commissioners.
The changes in the constitution of Rome in those days, are most of them unimportant, as the distinction between patrician and plebeian was now at an end. In 622, for the first time, two plebeians are censors; in 580 already, both the consuls were from the same order. Here we find this entry in the Capitoline Fasti, ambo primi de plebe: Livy makes no remark whatever about it, circumstances having become so ripe for the change, that no one even thought any longer of putting any obstacle in the way of a plebeian. Dionysius says, that in his time not more than fifty patrician families were still left, which is to be understood of actual families, and not of gentes, of which there may have been only about fifteen. As gentes, they are no longer held in any account: these had lost their importance together with the curies. In a gens, moreover, all the families were not ennobled: of the Claudia, there was only one; of the Valeria, the Messalæ; the Cornelia consisted of Scipiones, Lentuli, Cethegi, Sullæ (these last being added but of late); in the Æmilia, were the Lepidi, and perhaps also the Scauri. But of the plebeian familiæ nobiles there was a very great number, and they were still ever increasing. Of the senate, by far the larger part belonged to them; ever since the end of the war with Hannibal, most of the prætors were likewise plebeians, scarcely one out of six being a patrician: nor does it seem as if any stress had been laid on it; it was merely the effect of time. In the troubles of the Gracchi, we find the families quite indiscriminately in both parties. Appius Claudius, sprung from a family which in former times had headed the patricians against the plebeians, was the father-in-law of Tib. Gracchus, and sided with him, and carried through all the laws put forth by him; whilst, on the other hand, those, who were the most enraged against the Gracchi, and the most interested in withstanding them, were, with the exception of Scipio Nasica, all of them plebeians. The feuds had long been settled, and they had passed to the novi homines and nobiles, the latter of whom were in the last century very incorrectly called patricians, especially by foreigners (the French). This change has been known ever since the revival of learning. The censorship remained forty years longer than the consulship in the possession of the patricians; for as the elections for this were only every five years, there were still men enough to fill it.
About the same time, the holding the ædileship by turns must have been done away with; and certainly this office must of late have been a heavy burthen upon the patricians, as it entailed considerable expense.
The tribuneship of the people had quite changed character; the tribune holding arbitrary sway just like any tyrant. A tribune (C. Atinius Labeo), a few years after Gracchus, wanted to have the censor Metellus thrown from the Tarpeian rock for having excluded him from the senate; and it was only with difficulty that his family succeeded in getting another tribune to intercede for him. Such instances are not unseldom met with, as the tribunes themselves no longer knew what their office meant. It was very likely the same Atinius, who brought in the law that the tribunes were eo ipso senators, and could only be excluded by the same rules as other senators.