Italy and the Roman
The pleasant land of Italy needs no description here. Our illustrations[2] will recall its sunny hill-sides, its deep shadows, its vineyards and olive-yards. But there are one or two features of its geography which have a bearing upon the history of Rome.
To begin with, the geographical unity of the Italian peninsula is more apparent than real. The curving formation of the Apennines really divides Italy into four parts—(1) the northern region, mainly consisting of the Po valley, a fertile plain which throughout the Republican period was scarcely considered as part of Italy at all, and was, in fact, inhabited by barbarian Gauls; (2) the long eastern strip of Adriatic coast, an exposed waterless and harbourless region, with a scanty population, which hardly comes into ancient history; (3) the southern region of Italy proper, hot, fertile, and rich in natural harbours, so that it very early attracted the notice of the Greek mariners, and was planted with luxurious and populous cities long before Rome came into prominence; and (4) the central plain facing westward, in which the river Tiber and the city of Rome occupy a central position. Etruria and Latium together fill the greater part of it. Its width is only about eighty miles, so that there is no room for any considerable rivers to develop, and, in fact, there are only four rivers of any importance in a coast-line of more than 300 miles. We may call the whole of this region a plain in distinction from the Apennine highlands; but it is, of course, plentifully scattered with hills high enough to provide an impregnable citadel, and to this day crowned with huddled villages.
Rome herself on her Seven Hills began her career by securing dominion over the Latin plain which surrounded her on all sides but the north. The Roman Campagna,[3] which is now desolate and fever-stricken, was once all populous farmland. The river Tiber, though its silting mouth and tideless waters now render it useless for navigation, was in the flourishing days of Ancient Rome navigable for small vessels and Ostia was a good artificial harbour at its mouth. Thus it is history rather than geography which has made Rome into an unproductive capital. We may conclude that geography has placed Rome in a favourable position for securing the control of the Mediterranean and especially of the western part of it.
It is worth while also to notice the neighbours by whom she was surrounded when she first struggled forward into the light. Just across the Tiber to the north of her were the Etruscans of whom we shall see more in the next chapter. Their pirate ships scoured the sea while their merchants did business with the Greeks of Sicily, Magna Græcia and Massilia. It was perhaps her position at the tête du pont that led to Rome’s early prominence in war. Across the water on the coast of Africa was the dreaded city of Carthage, which had for centuries been striving to establish itself on the island of Sicily. All these were seafaring, commercial peoples, but it was not by sea that Rome met them. Behind Rome, among the valleys and on the spurs of the Apennines, were a whole series of sturdy highland clans who like all highlanders noticed the superior fatness of the valley sheep. It was against these Umbrians, Marsians, Pelignians, Sabines, and Samnites that the cities of the plain were constantly at feud, and it was mainly her struggles with these that kept the Roman swords bright in early days.
As to the Romans themselves and their origin there is little that we can say for certain. Ancient ethnology is not by any means yet secure of its premises. One thing is clear enough, if we can place any reliance whatever upon literary records—the national characteristics of the ancient Roman were very unlike those of the modern Italian. The one was bold, hardy, grave, orderly and inartistic: the other is sensitive, vivacious, artistic, turbulent and quick-witted. There is not a feature in common between them and yet the modern Italian is surely the normal South European type. As you go southwards through France you find the people approaching these characteristics more and more. The Spaniard and the Greek share them. The Ancient Roman of republican days, unless he is a literary invention, is assuredly no southerner in temperament, though the southern qualities undoubtedly begin to grow clear as Roman history progresses. And then the whole of early Roman history is marked by a strife between the two orders Patrician and Plebeian, which is certainly not simply a struggle between two political parties, nor a mere conflict between rich and poor. There is a division between the two of religion and custom in such matters as burial, for example, and marriage-rites. The patricians fear contamination of their blood if the plebeians are allowed to intermarry with them. These considerations and others like them have led Prof. Ridgeway to formulate for Rome, as he has already done with success for Greece, a theory of northern invasion and conquest in very early days. Probably it is a theory which can never be proved nor disproved, so woefully scanty is our evidence for the earliest centuries of Roman history. But it explains the great riddle of Roman character as no other theory does.
The archæology of the spade does not help us much though it has made some interesting discoveries on the soil of Italy. There is of course at the base a Neolithic culture resembling that of the rest of Europe. Then there is a phase of pile-dwellings widely spread among the marshes of the Lombard plain called the “Terramare” civilisation. As this phase belongs to the bronze age we may infer that civilisation developed later in Italy than in Greece owing to the lack of fortified cities. In this Terramare period the dead were carefully buried whole, often folded up into a sitting posture to fit their contracted graves. Then comes an Early Iron period, called “The Villanova,” where the cremated ashes of the dead are collected in urns and deposited in vaults generally walled with flat slabs of stone. Above these two stages come Etruscan and Gallic remains and then those of the Rome of history. It is probable enough that the Iron Age of the Villanova culture represents a conquest from the north. It is likely that in prehistoric times Italy experienced the same fate as throughout the ages of history. The Alpine passes are easier from north to south than in the reverse direction, and the smiling plains of North Italy have always possessed an irresistible attraction for the barbarian who looks down upon them from those barren snow-clad heights. Whether the invader be an Umbrian or Gaulish or Gothic or Austrian warrior, Italia must pay the price for her “fatal gift of beauty.”
I
THE BEGINNINGS OF ROME
arx æternæ dominationis.
Tacitus.
HAT Rome was not built in a day is the only thing we really know about the origin of Rome. There is, however, nothing to prevent us from guessing. The modern historian of the Economic School would picture to us a limited company of primeval men of business roaming about the world until they found a spot in the centre of the Mediterranean, a convenient depot alike for Spanish copper and Syrian frankincense, handy for commerce with the Etruscans of the north, the Sicilian Greeks of the south, and the Carthaginians of the African coast. They select a piece of rising ground on the banks of the river Tiber, about fifteen miles from its mouth, a spot safe and convenient for their cargo-boats, and there they build an Exchange, found a Chamber of Commerce (which they quaintly term senatus), and institute that form of public insurance which is known as “an army.” Thus equipped they proceed by force or fraud to acquire a number of markets, to which in due course they give the name of “Empire.”
This picture, being modern, is naturally impressionistic and rather vague in its details. From all accounts a good deal of engineering would be required to make the natural Tiber suitable for navigation on a large scale. Not only does its mouth silt up every year and its channel constantly change, but just between the hills on the very floor of Rome every spring made pools and swamps. Nor is there any tide in the Mediterranean to help the rowers up to the city against the stream. The Etruscans, who diversified their commercial operations with systematic piracy, held almost the whole of this western coast in subjection. The Greeks of the south, who have plenty to say about Etruscan and Carthaginian seafarers, have forgotten to mention their early Roman customers. But perhaps that is because the primeval trader from Rome cannot have had anything much to sell, and certainly had no money at all to buy with. In founding his Bourse he seems to have forgotten to provide a Mint; at any rate, long after the Sicilian Greeks had evolved a most exquisite coinage of silver and gold, the Romans were still content with the huge and clumsy copper as. I think we may confidently dismiss external trade from among the causes of the early rise of Rome. The coinage is the surest evidence we possess, no foreign trade could have passed in the Mediterranean on a basis of the copper as, and in Latin the equivalent for “money” is a word denoting “cattle.” Whoever the early Romans were, they were mainly, as all their religion and traditions show, land-soldiers and farmers.
Livy takes a more sensible view. He admits that the current accounts of the foundation of the city are involved in mystery and miracle, but he asserts with justice that if any city deserved a miraculous origin Rome did. Thereupon he proceeds to relate the pleasant tale of her foundation in the year 753 B.C. by Romulus and Remus.
It is surely unprofitable to search very deeply for grains of truth in the sands of legend which cover the early traditions of Rome, but it is sometimes interesting to conjecture how and why the legends were invented. The story of Romulus and Remus, for example, may have taken its rise in a
Roman As (bronze, full size)
Plate IV. THE CAPITOLINE WOLF
“sacristan’s tale” about an ancient work of art representing a wolf suckling two babes. A fairly ancient copy of this motive is preserved in the famous Capitoline Wolf.[4] The wolf at least is ancient, and the children have been added in modern times from representations of the famous group on ancient coins. It is possible that the original statue may go back to days of totemistic religion when the wolf was the ancestor of a Roman clan.
The Seven Kings of Rome are for the most part mere names which have been fitted by rationalising antiquarians, presumably Greek, with inventions appropriate to them. Romulus is simply the patron hero of Rome called by her name. Numa, the second, whose name suggests numen, was the blameless Sabine who originated most of the old Roman cults, and received a complete biography largely borrowed from that invented for Solon. Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Martius were the hostile and martial inventors of military systems. Servius Tullius was a man of servile origin, and on this foundation Freeman built his belief that the Roman kingship was a career open to talent!
As for the two Tarquins, the latter of whom was turned by Greek historians into a typical Greek tyrant and made the subject of an edifying Greek story of tyrannicide closely modelled on the story of Harmodius, their names are said to be Etruscan. There is a recent theory that the saving of Rome by Horatius and his comrades is fable designed to conceal the real conquest of Rome by the Etruscans. As a matter of fact there is a good deal of other evidence for that theory: reluctant admissions in history and literature, records of an ancient treaty of submission, the fact that the ritual and ornament of supreme authority at Rome seems to be of Etruscan origin, and above all the evidence of the stones. There are traces of very early skill and activity in building at Rome, and, unless the Romans afterwards declined very remarkably in the arts and crafts, their early works, such as the walls and some of the sewers, must have been built under foreign influence. That some sort of early kingship at Rome is more than a legend is certain; the whole fabric of the Roman constitution and its fundamental theory of imperium imply the existence of primeval kingship. On the whole, then, we may well believe that at some early period the city of Rome under Etruscan princes formed part of an empire which embraced a number of ports and towns up and down the Italian coast, though it did not necessarily concern itself with the intervening and surrounding territories. During all the early centuries of Rome it must have been a constant struggle between civilised walled towns on or near the coast and warlike hill tribes, quite uncivilised, from the mountainous interior.
These mysterious Etruscans have formed the theme of an internecine war of monographs. On the whole we may pronounce that those scholars who maintain their Lydian origin have completely demolished the arguments of those who aver that they sprang from the Rhætian Alps—and vice versâ. It remains possible, therefore, that the Etruscans came from nowhere in particular but were as aboriginal and autochthonous as any European people. It is true that we cannot make out much of their language, but that is also true of the aboriginal Cretans—and of many other autochthonous peoples. Their earliest remains are of a type familiar to us in the earliest strata of production all over the Mediterranean coast-lands—prehistoric polygonal masonry, a beehive tomb, incised bucchero nero vases and so forth. Their later and finer work shows a distinct cousinship with that of Greece though sometimes curiously debased and uncouth in spirit. In bronze-working they were very skilful.[5] They developed painting to a high pitch in early times, and the British Museum possesses some interesting examples from Cære. It was indeed believed by Pliny that Corinthian painters had settled in Etruria, that being the usual account by which the ancients explained resemblances. But we may believe that the art of painting is indigenous on the soil of Tuscany. Their pottery is very similar to that of Greece.[6] It appears that the flourishing period of Etruscan art coincided with that of the greatest
| FIG. I. ARCHAIC BRONZE: PAN | FIG. 2. ARCHAIC BRONZE: ARTEMIS |
| Plate V. | |
Etruscan Fresco. Head of Hercules
extent of their empire, namely, the sixth and early fifth centuries B.C. Their plastic work was mostly in terra-cotta, for the native marbles do not seem to have been quarried. Some of their terra-cotta coffins, adorned with conventional portraits of the deceased and finished off by the application of paint, show considerable technical skill, but always that strange grotesque spirit.[7] From all accounts these Etruscans were a superstitious and cruel race. It was from them that the Romans learnt their bloody craft of divination by the inspection of the entrails of newly slain victims, and there is little doubt that the victims had not always been the lower animals. We are told that the insignia of royalty at Rome—the toga with scarlet
Prehistoric Etruscan Pottery
or purple stripes, the toga with purple border, the sceptre of ivory, the curule chair, the twelve lictors with their axes in bundles of rods—were borrowed from the Etruscans. Thus it seems that the ancient garb of the Roman citizen, a tunic covered by a long mantle or toga, a costume which is essentially the same as the chiton and himation of the Greeks, started as a fashion introduced by their more civilised northern neighbours. It seems clear also that the earliest Roman art, the decoration of temples with painted terra-cotta ornaments, was Etruscan in origin. Some of the earliest statues of the gods seem to have been painted, for we hear of a very ancient red Jupiter. Thus there is some probability that Rome passed through a period, perhaps in the sixth century, of alien rule and alien civilisation. Remembering the cousinship between Greece and Etruria we shall find that Rome had been prepared for the reception of Greek culture in very early times.
Plate VI. ETRUSCAN VASE
The Roman Toga
The fifth century seems to have been a period of decline for the Etruscan power. The Greek republics, with, as I hope we agreed, their northern stiffening, had advanced far beyond their Etruscan kinsmen in intelligence, and the tyrant Hiero of Syracuse defeated them in a great sea-fight in 474 B.C. It is agreeable to the historian to have a fact so certain and a date so well attested in all the wilderness of legend that surrounds the early history of Italy. Then the warlike hill tribes of the Southern Apennines began to press upon their southern colonies, and finally the Gauls from the north swept down upon Etruria at the beginning of the fourth century and broke up their declining empire for ever. It was probably during this period that the Romans expelled their Etruscan princes, and replaced royalty by a pair of equal colleagues sharing most of the royal power and regal emblems except crown and sceptre. So we get to the Rome of the earliest credible tradition—a Rome governed by two consuls and a senate of nobles. It is a city composed of farm-houses and in each house the head of the family rules in patriarchal majesty.