The Provinces

Turning now to a rapid survey of the Roman world from a geographical point of view we shall see the work of restoration and repair, proceeding with the same methodical thoroughness which makes this regime one of the most beneficent in the history of civilisation. We have already seen something of the provincial system as it was reorganised in 27 B.C. The provinces which fell to the share of the senate were these:

These were governed by annual magistrates, chosen by lot from a list selected by the senate—the first two by proconsuls of consular rank, the others also by governors termed proconsuls but actually only of prætorian rank, that is, ex-prætors. Africa was the only one of these provinces which contained troops and the senatorial governors went out in civilian dress as administrators only. Cæsar’s provinces were:

To these were gradually added:

These were all governed by legates of Cæsar, commonly chosen from the ranks of the senate, with the title of proprætor. They held office for as long as Cæsar desired, and were provided with a staff, chosen by him, of trained financiers. In addition to these, other districts under prefects were gradually accumulated:

And others again under procurators:

Further, there were a large number of “allied” or “client” kingdoms and republics:

Thrace.Abitene.
Pontus with Bosphorus. Emesa.
Judæa (till A.D. 6).Galilæa and Peræa.
Commagene.Nabatæa.
Cappadocia.Batanæa.
Armenia.Mauretania.
Arabia.

And the allied states:

In his own provinces Cæsar was supreme in all things; he had the right of making peace, war, and alliance, without consulting the senate. Though he governed through legates or procurators, the Roman law had always granted a right of appeal from a lower magistrate to his superior. This was the source of Paul’s “appeal unto Cæsar” from the procurator of Judæa. In the senatorial provinces his imperium, which had been specially defined as “superior” (maius), gave him precedence when he was actually present. And we have many cases of his interference in senatorial provinces. Cæsar’s legates, such as Agrippa, Tiberius, and Gaius, constantly act as overlords in Asia, though a decree of the senate is required for this. We hear of Augustus founding colonies in Sicily. Moreover, the princeps had sole authority over the army, and for any military operations it would be necessary to borrow troops of him.

The Roman Empire at Its Fullest Extent

The foundations of this great empire were not hastily or carelessly laid. Although of feeble constitution and by nature a man of peace, Augustus spent the first half of his long reign more abroad than at home, in fighting rebels and organising or reforming with unwearied energy. To this part of his work we are unable to devote sufficient attention through lack of material. The ancient historians prefer to record small victories over barbarian tribes, or the petty gossip of the Roman streets, while they have little to say about the tireless administration which in one generation transformed the Roman world from a horrible chaos into that scene of peace and prosperity shown to us in the pages of Strabo and Pliny. So while our eyes are fixed upon the sins and follies of Roman emperors and courtiers, until we get an impression of rotten tyranny conducted according to the caprice of monsters and fools, all the time the greater part of Europe was advancing in peace to a state of general culture and civilisation such as it had never known before, and such as it never knew again until the nineteenth century. A casual glance over the inscriptions of a provincial town probably gives us a truer impression than all the rhetoric of the historians. In Pompeii, for example, a small and unimportant suburb of Naples which scarcely comes into the view of history, we see a busy and useful municipal life carried on in absolute security. There were the ten councillors (decuriones), who corresponded to the Roman senate, and there were two local consuls bearing the title of “duumviri.” In most cases a small municipality would have its “patronus” also, a local squire, perhaps, who in some measure corresponded to the princeps, and who would represent the interests of the town at Rome, or with the Roman prætor. His main business, however, was to equip his town with baths, temples, and colonnades, or to provide it with public banquets. For the rich freedmen, in whose hands was much of the trade of the place, Augustus had provided the new office of Seviri Augustales, which we have already described. There were no rates, for private munificence took their place. There was no direct taxation in Italy, and the indirect taxes were inconsiderable. Internal trade was free. The obligation to military service was so widely distributed that it fell very lightly on Italy, and the natives accordingly became less and less warlike. All the Italian peoples were now Roman citizens. Trade was greatly assisted by the improvement of communications which took place during this period. The care of roads properly devolved upon the senate, but as they showed their usual incompetence in this department the princeps had to step in and organise a special Board of Roads with a curator for each of the trunk lines of communication. Augustus also established an imperial post with a system of stages and relays, which lasted on until the coming of railways. The vehicles and horses were maintained by the roadside communities, and imperial messengers who carried a diploma or passport were allowed to travel express by this means. The great road to Rimini, the Flaminian Way, was the first to be repaired, and Augustus adorned its terminal city with a handsome marble bridge[44] and triumphal arch, possibly as a compensation for the trouble which he himself had inflicted upon the town during the civil wars. Flourishing historic cities like Turin and Brescia owe their origin to colonies founded by Augustus. Towns like Perugia which had been almost destroyed in the civil wars now grew up again and flourished. In all, Augustus founded twenty-eight colonies in Italy, and supplied 90,000 veterans of the civil wars with land which he had bought and paid for. That the sea was now safe for trade and fishery must have meant a great deal to the coast towns. Augustus himself wrote an account of the condition of Italy, and Pliny confesses to using it as his authority. In all the long and important history of Italy it is doubtful whether she has ever enjoyed such peace and prosperity as began for her in the reign of Augustus.

Plate XLV. PORCH AND INTERIOR OF THE PANTHEON, ROME

A broad view of foreign politics showed Augustus two vital points of danger—the North and East. To the north the fierce and warlike barbarians of Germany had been checked indeed by Julius, but also exasperated. Tribes more or less akin to them extended southwards across the Danube and even to the Austrian Tyrol, where they were little more than a week’s march from the gates of Rome. A strong frontier policy was needed here. In the East there were the Parthians, the only possible rival power to Rome. The Romans at Carrhæ noticed that while the chiefs wore their hair parted and curled and their faces painted in the Persian fashion, the warriors had the unkempt locks of barbarian Thrace. It is likely enough that these Parthian bowmen had come in round the shores of the Black Sea from Thrace or South Russia. They had all the characteristics of northern nomads, but their kings had a good deal of Hellenic culture. They could boast of a choice collection of Roman eagles captured not only from Crassus at Carrhæ, but from two armies sent against them by Antony. Thousands of Roman prisoners were still working as slaves on the banks of the Euphrates. The task of punishing them had been definitely laid upon Augustus as a legacy from Julius, who had been slain at the moment when he was about to undertake it himself. Moreover, the Romans felt the loss of those standards very acutely, and not the least motive for their acquiescence in monarchy had been the hope that a monarch would retrieve their honour in this quarter. The earlier poems of Horace constantly express hopes of vengeance.

The manner in which Augustus satisfied these ardent aspirations of national pride is characteristic of him. Instead of the armies and bloody battles which historians demand of their favourites, Augustus achieved his object by luck and strategy. When he was organising the affairs of the East in 29 B.C., after the conquest of Egypt, he had left the Parthian question unsolved. For this, Mommsen takes him to task, but there is little doubt that it would have been folly to undertake a great and perilous war at that moment while the affairs of Rome were still in disorder. Moreover the attitude of the army compelled him to return home. Instead of fighting, he was content to set up rival powers on the Parthian frontier. The Parthians hated their king Phraates and there was a deposed rival in the field, Tiridates, to whom Augustus now gave shelter in the province of Syria, hoping, as indeed happened, that his presence in the neighbourhood would keep Phraates civil. At the same time Augustus set up a buffer kingdom of Lesser Armenia on the Parthian border and in the south strengthened and reinstated Herod the Great. Four or five legions were left to guard Syria.

In 23 B.C. it chanced that Tiridates had managed to kidnap the child of Phraates and was keeping him in custody in the Roman province. It is significant of the changed relations between Parthia and Rome that, instead of marching into Syria to recover the child, Phraates sent an embassy to Rome, whither also Tiridates came in person. Of course the senate made the restoration of the child conditional upon the return of the standards and prisoners. Phraates consented, but there was some delay in carrying out the contract and this may have been secretly arranged to enable Augustus to conduct the affair in a more striking fashion. Augustus marched out with an army and at his mere approach the standards and captives were given up with due formalities. It was really a Roman triumph, almost as great as if it had been attained by bloodshed, for all the world could see the humiliation of Parthia. Augustus, that astute tactician, took care that the event should not be allowed to lose its impressiveness for the mere lack of bloodshed. The return of the standards was treated as a Roman triumph. They were placed with every solemnity in the temple of Mars the Avenger. Coins were struck representing the suppliant Parthian on his knees and the same scene is depicted in relief on the centre of Cæsar’s breastplate on the famous statue. The poets broke out into dutiful pæans.

Plate XLVI. MAISON CARRÉE, NISMES

nunc petit Armenius pacem, nunc porrigit arcum
Parthus eques timida captaque signa manu

cries Ovid. Vergil, after his manner, speaks of the Euphrates flowing more quietly in future. The odes of Horace and the elegies of Propertius contain similar loyal allusions. Ferrero, who regards Augustus as a feeble trickster just as he regards Julius as a shabby adventurer, has nothing but contempt for this episode. But seeing that the Parthians were now utterly weakened by their internal feuds and quite submissive to Rome it would have been folly to embark upon their conquest. That they gave much trouble in the future is true enough, but that might fairly be left for the future to deal with. Extermination might have quieted them for ever, but Augustus had really no excuse for making war upon them.

Surrender of the Standards

On the same visit to the East a still more elaborate system of buffer states forming a double semicircle round Parthia was organised. Armenia yielded to Rome and received at the hands of Tiberius a new king who had been educated at Rome. Augustus himself explains that although he might have made Armenia into a Roman province he preferred to follow the example of “our ancestors” and give the crown to a native king. Augustus never pretended to be a world-conqueror. Similarly Media Atropatene received a new king of Roman education, so did Commagene and Emesa. These formed the outer ring of buffer states.

The central state behind them was Galatia, an arid highland district inhabited by the descendants of those Gauls who had burst into the Greek world under Brennus. Though they had acquired some tincture of Greek civilisation and had a capital of some importance at Ancyra, they still spoke the Gaulish language and were still a warlike race. For these reasons, on the death of their king, Augustus preferred to turn their country into a province. To the north was the very friendly kingdom of Polemo in Pontus, and to the south other friendly princedoms as well as the Roman provinces of Cilicia, Syria, and Cyprus.

For all this elaborate bulwark, the Parthian question was not really settled. They continued to exercise an undue influence in Armenia, and in A.D. 1 there was another solemn mission to the East and a conference between Phraates the Parthian king and Gaius the grandson of Augustus. Once more the Parthian professed submission, and once more the court poets struck their obsequious lyres. When Phraates died, his uncle Orodes who succeeded ruled with such cruelty that he was assassinated. Thereupon the Parthians sent to Rome for a king and Augustus gave them a nephew of the murdered tyrant, a youth also of Roman education. We note this proceeding as common in the foreign policy of Augustus. He must have had something like a school for young barbarian princes at Rome, but whether the lessons that they learnt in Roman society were altogether salutary is doubtful.

Behind this wall the great provinces of Asia, Syria, and Bithynia were wrapped in profound security. Here Greek culture continued to flourish with periodical incursions of oriental religion and philosophy. In every considerable town the Jews formed a great and growing section of the population but even they were half Greek in their ways of life. The country was rich and lazy and utterly unwarlike. Civilisation had risen to a high pitch and it was probably this part of the world which sent to Rome those artists who contributed to the revival of sculpture. Pretty little epigrams in Greek elegiacs seem to have been their principal literary accomplishment. These provinces have very little history—happily for them—at this period. We know them best from the Acts of the Apostles, where we get a glimpse of their superstitions, their eagerness to embrace new religions. We see the fanaticism of Ephesus with its magnificent temple of Diana and stately worship, a religion of oriental character overlaid with Greek culture, and only rivalled in its attractions by the Roman amphitheatre. For these people as for the rest of the world Augustus had his policy. Since worship was their instructive need and Euhemerism had accustomed them to worship men, he set up an elaborate cult of himself, or rather, by a subtle distinction without a difference, a cult of “the genius of Augustus.” Temples were built to “Rome and Augustus” and an elaborate hierarchy of “High Priests,” “Asiarchs,” and “Bithyniarchs,” which became the highest social distinctions in the society of the day. This was his method of securing the allegiance of nations devoted to religion and flattery. Here in the near future was to be the field of that momentous conflict between this State religion and Christianity, with other oriental faiths, such as Mithraism, also claiming their proselytes.

Plate XLVII. THEATRE OF MARCELLUS, ROME

As for old Greece, the Romans never denied their spiritual debt to her, and accordingly they regarded Greece with something of the veneration which a man feels for his university. Augustus himself had been educated at Apollonia, he sent his heirs to various Greek cities for their education. It would have seemed sacrilege to educated Romans to put a legate in charge of Athens. Hence we find Greece enjoying quite an exceptional position in the empire, indeed without exception the freest and most favoured part of it. Towns such as Athens, Lacedæmon, Thespiæ, Tanagra, Platæa, Delphi, and Olympia were free and almost sovereign. Athens continued to coin her silver drachms with the old design of Pallas and the owl, elected her own archons and generals, held assemblies and even had a sort of empire extending over all Attica, part of Bocotia and five islands of the Cyclades. One Julius Nicanor, her “new Themistocles,” purchased the island of Salamis and presented it to his city in the civilised manner of empire-building. Sparta, too, though now shrunken to the size of a village, bore rule over Northern Laconia, while in the south there was a free confederacy to keep her in order. Beside these cities of ancient renown stood the new and splendid creation of Augustus—Nicopolis, the city of victory founded on the promontory of Actium in commemoration of the great victory of 31. Nicopolis had its great athletic festival like Olympia and ruled over a considerable territory. In addition to these free cities there were some Roman colonies. Corinth rose again from her ashes as an important commercial city founded by Julius Cæsar. Patras, on the Corinthian Gulf, a new foundation of Augustus, became one of the most important cities of Greece, as it is to-day. The rest of Southern Greece, consisting mainly of obscure villages, formed the new senatorial province of Achaia and was governed by a proconsul at Corinth. It was a poor unmilitary province. The northern part formed the senatorial province of Macedonia. Thessalonica and Apollonia were the principal centres of government and civilisation in this region. In Greece, as elsewhere, Augustus made it his aim to focus a national unity upon religion. The old Achæan league was revived as a religious gathering with Argos for its centre, and the Delphic Amphictyony, the oldest surviving institution in Europe, became the basis of a Panhellenic confederacy which met annually for religious purposes under Roman patronage, a sort of Eisteddfod combining religion with culture. It sacrificed to Cæsar, and here, too, we find a president called “Helladarch.” But although Greece had liberty and peace, something was amiss with her. Her shrunken population continued to decline. In Strabo’s Geography, Thebes is a mere village.

Plate XLVIII. INNER COURT, FARNESE PALACE, ROME

Crossing the water we find that the newly conquered kingdom of Egypt was the key to the whole position of Augustus. It was the wealth of Egypt which had reconciled Rome to monarchy and it was by means of that wealth that he continued to hold the allegiance of his subjects. Like Greece it had an ancient civilisation which impressed the Romans as something beyond their comprehension. Alexandria, in particular, as the gateway to the wealth of Egypt, and as the greatest existing centre of Greek culture, not to mention its huge population and commercial advantages, seemed to the Romans a really dangerous rival. The fear of that rivalry had been felt very acutely at Rome when news came of the ambitious schemes of Cleopatra and the subservience of Antony. Augustus was really heading something like a national crusade when he declared war upon them. The same fears now actuated him in settling the treatment of Egypt as a province. Though he writes “I added Egypt to the Roman empire,” he treated it rather as an imperial domain under a prefect or viceroy closely attached to his interests. Its first prefect was Cornelius Gallus, a knight from the Gallic colony of Fréjus, a poet himself and a friend of Vergil. Cornelius Gallus was in fact the hero of the famous eclogue: neget quis carmina Gallo? It was specially ordained that no senator might visit Egypt without the express permission of Cæsar. The native Egyptians were already overridden by a Greek aristocracy dating from Alexander’s conquest. They had no rights, and no nationality was designed for them as it had been elsewhere. Augustus accepted the elaborate bureaucratic system which he had found in existence when he came. The Greek aristocracy lived almost exclusively in Alexandria, possessing a municipal constitution, magistracy, and priesthood of their own. The ecclesia was stopped but otherwise there was no attempt to Romanise Egypt. The old Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris had conquered all its conquerors and continued to make inroads even into Rome itself where Augustus was forced to accept it as irresistible. All that had happened in Egypt was that Augustus had taken the place of the Ptolemies in the official religion. It was the motive of fear which led to the appointment of a mere knight as viceroy, though he had three legions under his command. The officials under him were knights or freedmen. The taxes remained very heavy, as was necessary, but now the Egyptians were placed in a better position to pay them. Even before the civil war was quite ended in 29 B.C. Augustus had employed his soldiers to clear the canals and raise the level of the dams which ensure the Egyptian harvests. This process continued, and Egypt never had such prosperity again until Lord Cromer came to resume the work of Augustus. The harvest depended simply on the height to which the Nile rose. The ancient Nilometer at Elephantine records that the Nile rose to an unprecedented height in the latter days of Augustus. Formerly a level of eight ells had meant famine, now it ensured a tolerable harvest. Another inscription found at Coptos gives us the names of the Roman soldiers who built reservoirs of water along the great roads. Then the trade with India along the Red Sea first began to grow great. Whereas in the time of Cleopatra hardly twenty ships sailed to India in a year, there was already in Strabo’s day (about A.D. 18) a great fleet of Indiamen. Taxes on exports and imports returned a huge revenue to the imperial purse.

The prefect who represented his master on the throne of the Ptolemies was in a difficult position. To Rome he was a mere servant, to the Egyptians something like a god. Against these flattering influences Gallus the poet had not strength to resist. He allowed statues to be erected to him and even had his own achievements engraved upon the pyramids. A traitorous friend reported these indiscretions at Rome. Augustus was content to recall him and forbid him to live in the provinces or to enter his presence. But the officious senate voted his condemnation to banishment, and confiscated all his property to Augustus, whereby Gallus was driven to suicide. Then Augustus was sorry and complained that it was hard not to be able to scold one’s friends like a private man. This was the first case of that disease known as delatio (informing) which was afterwards to become such a pest under the Empire. It is satisfactory to learn that the informer was very rudely treated in Roman society. From Egypt, as a base, expeditions were made in the time of Augustus to Arabia and the Soudan. Arabia Felix was to the Romans a kind of Eldorado of boundless wealth, as Horace writes to a friend who was joining the campaign. The Arabs brought their incense into the Syrian markets and already traded with India from Aden, but the national wealth of the country was exaggerated and its difficulties unknown. This expedition of 25 B.C., which was on a very large scale and included contingents from Judæa, was one of the few deliberate wars of conquest ever planned by Augustus. He learnt a lesson by its failure in the burning and trackless deserts. The other campaign against the black Æthiopians of the Soudan under their warlike but one-eyed queen Candace was more successful. Petronius the legate penetrated as far as the Second Cataract and sent a thousand prisoners to Rome, but Augustus seems to have been content to make the First Cataract his southern frontier.

FIG. 1.
COLONNADE OF OCTAVIA

FIG. 2.
ROMAN BAS-RELIEF

Plate XLIX.

The neighbouring client kingdom of Judæa is of importance not only because the days of Augustus saw the birth of that Child in Bethlehem who was destined to conquer Rome and through Rome the world, but because its throne was occupied by the ablest and most remarkable man, next to Augustus, in the whole Empire. Herod the Great, an Edomite Arab by birth, had succeeded to the throne of the Maccabees in 37 B.C. He was not only a daring warrior but a singularly skilful diplomat who was always able to cover up his crimes by adroit flattery and a fascinating manner. He was very successful in trimming between the rivals throughout the civil wars and even shared the favours of Cleopatra with his Roman masters. In these ways he increased his domains by the addition of Gadara, Samaria, and the Philistine coast towns. In compliment to Augustus he refounded Samaria with great splendour as the Greek city of Sebaste and built Greek theatres, Roman amphitheatres, and baths in Jerusalem itself. He even instituted quinquennial games there, wherein naked athletes performed to the infinite disgust of the Jews. He took his sons to Rome for their education and there he met and fascinated both Augustus and Agrippa. He even persuaded Agrippa to visit Jerusalem for the opening of his magnificent new temple in 15 B.C. Agrippa came and sacrificed a whole hecatomb to Jehovah to the apparent delight of the people. Later on Herod made a grand tour of Asia Minor, scattering lavish gifts everywhere and receiving complimentary inscriptions in return. He succeeded in obtaining valuable privileges for his fellow-Jews scattered abroad in those regions. Henceforth they were not forced to render military service and had special permission to keep the Sabbath.

In 9 and 8 B.C., however, he got into trouble with Augustus for conducting a military expedition against the Arabs without permission. This was the greatest offence that a client king could commit, and Augustus declared that henceforth he would treat Herod not as a friend, but as a subject. But in the next year a humble embassy was sent to Rome with the historian Nicolaus as its spokesman. Herod received the gracious permission to deal with his rebellious sons as he thought fit, and accordingly strangled two of them. Herod’s family history is a deplorable record of crimes and intrigues. He seems to have had ten wives, and on his death in 4 B.C., he left three wills among which Augustus had to decide. Seeing that Judæa was so rich and powerful as to be a possible source of danger, he decided to split it up into three. Then began a whole series of troubles, in the course of which the Jews of Jerusalem actually attacked a Roman legion. In revenge the legate of Syria, Quintilius Varus, crucified 2000 of the inhabitants. In the final award Judæa fell to Archelaus, Galilee to Herod Antipas. Ten years later, however, the infamous Archelaus was deposed at the petition of his subjects, and Judæa was made subject to the province of Syria with a procurator of its own. Herod Antipas continued to rule his petty kingdom until about A.D. 34, when it also was united to the province. He is the Herod whom Christ denounced as “that fox,” and he is the Herod of Christ’s Judgment, when he happened to be at Jerusalem on a visit to Pontius Pilatus, the Roman procurator. Pilate was a Roman knight, but Felix, one of his successors, was only a freedman. The seat of the Roman government was not at Jerusalem, but at Cæsarea, so that the prætorium in which the trial of Jesus took place must have been the temporary head-quarters of Pilate in the palace built by Herod the Great.

Plate L. COIN PLATE II

The procurator only commanded auxiliary troops, and nearly all the “Roman soldiers” mentioned in the Gospels must have been of Jewish birth. As soon as it was a province, but not before, Judæa had to pay tribute to Cæsar. Hence the existence of a “chief of the publicans” like Zacchæus. As usual, the Romans preserved what they could of native institutions, and the Sanhedrin continued to act as a national council, so far as could be permitted. Thus it might try Jesus, but it could not pronounce the death sentence. On the other hand, another procurator, Festus, committed Paul to the Sanhedrin for judgment. The fact is that the Jewish law was so peculiarly national that a bewildered and well-intentioned Roman knight like Pilate might often say “take ye Him and judge Him according to your law.” The Roman government was so tolerant of the religion of its subjects that even a Roman citizen who ventured to enter the Holy of Holies was punished with death. The Jewish religion was expressly under Roman protection. Agrippa, as we have seen, had sacrificed to Jehovah, but later on we find Augustus commending his grandson Gaius for not having worshipped Jehovah. As a matter of fact, with the spread of the newer forms of Hellenic philosophy the religious feeling of the world, which had long ago given up its faith in the Olympian mythology, was turning more and more towards monotheism and a mystical system of ethics. The higher Pharisaism, which Paul had learnt at the feet of Gamaliel, was decidedly influenced by Stoicism. Hence the Jewish religion even before its Christian development was extremely fascinating to the Roman mind, and it had to be forbidden in the capital. Even at Jerusalem the Jews were expected to sacrifice, not to but for “Cæsar and the Roman People” every day. Augustus paid for this ritual out of his own pocket. In deference to the feeling of the Jews, the coins struck for Judæa bore no portrait of Cæsar, and even the standards, because they bore portraits, were ordered not to be carried into the Holy City. It is true that the silver denarius of Syria circulated in Judæa to some extent, and it is of such a coin that Christ was speaking when He asked: “Whose image and superscription is this?”

The province of Africa with Numidia was handed over to the senate as peaceful in 27 B.C., and it was one of the only two Roman provinces which Augustus never visited. Nominally it stretched from the boundary of the kingdom of Mauretania at the river Ampsaga on the west to the borders of the Cyrenaica on the east. But actually it consisted of the islands of fertility on the Tunisian coast. Carthage had been colonised by Julius Cæsar and was now refounded by Augustus. There was no inland frontier. In the desert behind the mountains there still flourished the wild Gætulian nomads who occasionally descended upon the peaceful province and provided a Roman triumph. This was the reason why a legion was still kept in Africa. The neighbouring kingdom of Mauretania was assigned to an interesting young royal couple. The husband was Juba, a descendant of Masinissa, who had been educated as a Roman, had served in the Roman army and was so complete a Greek scholar that he wrote among many other works a history of the Drama. The wife was a daughter of Cleopatra by Antony, who had ridden in Cæsar’s triumph at Rome. Both Mauretania and its eastern neighbour Numidia, which had been added to the Roman province, now settled down to wealth and happiness under the Roman rule. The splendid ruins which still survive indicate a prosperity which has not as yet been completely recovered.

Cyrene, where the descendants of the Romans are now carving out a province for themselves, though geographically a part of the African continent, was historically regarded as a Greek island, and united in one province with Crete. It consisted of a group of five Greek cities with a large intermixture of Jews. Cyrene has no history in this period, but after the siege of Jerusalem there was a terrible outburst of Jewish fanaticism. Thousands of Roman citizens were tortured and slain.

Perhaps no country in the world has had such a chequered and miserable history as the pleasant island of Sicily with its rich volcanic soil. For four hundred years it had been mainly Greek. The eastern end, at least, had been scattered with important city-states which, under the leadership of Syracuse, had waged incessant conflict with the Carthaginian invaders in their western strongholds. We have seen how the Romans finally drove out the Semitic element and conquered the Greeks. During the latter part of republican history the island had been of vital importance to Rome as supplying through its tribute the chief part of the corn-supply. At the same time it had been cruelly exploited and oppressed by Roman governors like Verres. Then during the civil wars Sextus Pompeius had made it his head-quarters, and it had been laid under heavy contributions by both sides. Messina, its richest town, had been the scene of a sack and massacre. No country had more to hope from the Pax Augusta, and it now began to enjoy one of its brief periods of rest. Augustus spent the winter of 22 in Sicily at the beginning of his tour in Greece. He founded colonies at six famous cities of old. While he was in the island the Sicilians offered him a kind of round-robin of complaint against the extortion of his procurator. Augustus instantly dismissed the offender and replaced him by his own valued tutor, the philosopher Areus. It was thoroughly in accordance with his policy to put a Greek philosopher in charge of a Greek island.

So far we have been surveying the treatment of that part of the Roman world which was already quite civilised and mainly Greek. We now turn to the barbarian West and North, mainly consisting of newly conquered Cæsarian provinces. In these quarters, the nearer parts of Spain and the Narbonensian province of Gaul were the only regions which could be called civilised. As soon as the provisional settlement of 27 b.c. was effected Augustus hurried away to Gaul. It was generally thought that he was on his way to conquer Britain, for that was the second of the two tasks which Julius had left to his successor. Accordingly the loyal Horace dutifully prays:

serues iturum Cæsarem in ultimos
orbis Britannos.[45]

But this was not the time, and Augustus was not the man, for dazzling conquests. “Hasten slowly” was his favourite motto, and his empire policy was founded on the same principle. For the present the Ocean, then called British, was boundary enough. Augustus was reducing the army and Britain would have taken at least a legion to keep it quiet. So Britain had to delay its prospects of civilisation until Gaul and Spain were organised and the German frontier settled. We have the record of British chiefs coming to Rome with unknown petitions during the period, but beyond that there is silence on our island. As for Gaul, Julius had done the work of conquest thoroughly enough, and the Gauls as an adaptable people were taking to Roman civilisation with avidity. There were indeed corners of it not yet enlightened and the whole government required organisation. Augustus went straight to the capital of the old province, Narbonne, and there he arranged a census and a land register, not, as Ferrero observes, out of mere statistical curiosity. Probably no tribute had come in from Gaul during the civil wars, and Augustus was much concerned with finance. For the moment an outbreak in Spain called the emperor away, but five years later he returned to complete his work. The old province, which has passed into history as Provence, was now handed back to the senate as completely pacified, and the rest of Gaul was eventually divided into three parts: Aquitania, the half-Spanish south-west; Lugdunensis (the east and centre stretching right across France with its capital Lyons or Lugdunum on its eastern border); and Belgica (the northern part with Trier—Augusta Treverorum, not yet founded—and Rheims as its chief towns). This division was mainly, though not entirely, based on racial considerations. Together the three formed one of Cæsar’s provinces as Gallia Comata.

Plate LI. HADRIAN’S WALL: NEAR HOUSESTEADS, NORTHUMBERLAND

The treatment of the conquered land was wise and humane. Druidical religion, already a waning force, was permitted to exist, though it included human sacrifice and was hostile to the Romans. In the reign of Claudius it was forbidden. But other native deities were actually encouraged by the state, and Augustus himself built an altar to some strange Gallic spirits. But side by side with the native religion he fostered the new cult, as in Asia, of “Rome and Augustus.” There had always been tribal councils which culminated in a great national gathering at Lugdunum once a year. Apparently the presiding priests had been elected from the well-born natives and were in opposition to the Druids. Augustus made skilful use of this organisation and fostered it in order to make it a centre for Roman patriotism. He set up a great altar at Lugdunum inscribed “to Rome and Augustus.” It was constructed in a sacred grove, and was surrounded by statues emblematic of the sixty Gallic tribes. The elected priest had to be a Roman citizen of Gallic birth. It soon became a distinction coveted by the grandsons of those who had fought against Julius. This is very characteristic of the systematic empire-building which went on in the days of Augustus. Lugdunum rose to be a great imperial city, the only city in Gaul which possessed full Roman citizenship and had a mint of its own. From it a great and elaborate road system radiated to all parts of France very much in the same directions as the modern railways. Schools were founded and the study of Latin encouraged though not enforced. The Gauls took very ardently to their new studies, displaying in particular a remarkable faculty for rhetoric. The principle came into force that when a town or district could show that it spoke Latin it received important rights of citizenship, including that great privilege, the use of Roman law. The land system of Gaul differed essentially from that of Italy in that it was based on tribes and cantons instead of cities. Already the towns were growing as centres for the tribes, but to this day many of the names of French cities are those of tribes rather than towns: thus Lutetia of the Parisii is Paris, Durocortorum of the Remi is Rheims, Divodurum of the Mediomatrici is Metz, and Agedincum of the Senones is Sens. The tribute ultimately fixed was a high one but on the whole justly regulated. It is probable that the ugly story of Licinius and his extortions is told as an exceptional occurrence. In any case Gaul was taught how to grow rich and prosperous. Mines of silver and gold were successfully exploited, the culture of flax was encouraged, and the soil was found to be admirably suited to cereal crops. Gaul became a hive of industry and a source of ever-increasing wealth. She purchased oil and wine from Italy as well as the articles of Eastern luxury which passed through the hands of Roman merchants. A 2½ per cent. duty was charged at the frontier both on imports and exports. Such were some of the methods by which the Romanisation of Gaul was effected, and the foundations so well and truly laid that through all the invasions of Franks and Burgundians, Gaul remained Roman in speech and thought, and remains so to this day.[46]

Of all the momentous problems which Augustus had to face, the delimitation of the northern frontier was the weightiest. It has always been one of the disputed questions of Roman history, why Augustus, who was generally so cautious and so unwilling to embark upon adventures, deliberately chose to cross the Rhine and plunge into those impenetrable forests of whose dangers and difficulties Julius Cæsar had left so clear a warning. Was it his aim to forestall the danger of a German invasion of Gaul? On the other hand, the Rhine might well seem a sufficient frontier, as indeed for many centuries it was. Was it his aim to exercise his troops in difficult warfare and perhaps secure military renown for the young men whom he had destined for the succession? These are scarcely adequate motives for a man like Augustus. Did he hope to acquire wealth out of Germany as he had done out of Gaul? He must have known that the virgin forests and undrained morasses of Germany would scarcely balance the difficulties and dangers of a campaign there, and that the Germans were far behind their Gallic cousins in civilisation. The problem seems to me insoluble unless we accept the theory that the whole scheme was part of the search for a natural strategic frontier undertaken with false notions of geography. It is certain that many of the ancients believed that they would find the Ocean again where Russia is, and that the Caspian Sea was part of it. In that case the Romans may have hoped to round off their empire satisfactorily in this direction. It would explain the curious tactics by which Roman expeditions crossing the Rhine and plunging into the heart of Germany ordered their fleets to coast along the Dutch and Danish shores.

From whatever motives it was undertaken, this penetration of Germany and its ultimate failure was a fact of vast consequence in the history of Europe. From one point of view the history of Europe may be described as a record of the various relations between the Roman and the German elements, with occasional incursions from the Celtic or Turanian fringes. It is one long contest between Latin and Teutonic race, religion, language, law, and ideas political and economic. Hence it is impossible to overrate the importance of the moment when the first round of that age-long contest was fought out and settled. Hidden among the forests in those mysterious wildernesses beyond the Rhine were the numerous tribes who were destined one day to form the nations of Europe. Here were the Saxons of Saxony and England, the Swabians, the Franks, the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Goths, the Lombards, and many others, yet unnamed, the germs of the nations.

It was by no means their first entrance on the stage of history. We believe that the dominant races of historical Greece, and perhaps of historical Rome, traced back their ancestry to the central regions of Europe. Since then history had recorded several alarming incursions of northern barbarians, and in a general sense the story of the Mediterranean peoples shows how wave after wave of strong warriors from the North descended upon the fertile peninsulas of the South, which always absorbed and assimilated them, until finally they became a prey to the enervating influences of climate, melted into the native strain, and had to make room for a fresh wave of untamed northerners. Read in this light, extraordinary interest attaches to the moment when all-conquering Rome attempted to conquer the wilds which sheltered these mighty tribes. If she had succeeded in taming and Romanising the Germans also, as she had done with the Spaniards and Gauls, the course of history might have been very different. But even then, though she knew it not, behind the Teutonic peoples lay the Slavs, and behind them the Tartars and the Huns. The task of civilising the world from a single centre was impossible. Augustus would have been wiser to choose a strong frontier first and then proceed gradually by peaceful penetration. Probably Augustus judged that the policy of buffer states which he had applied in the East was not applicable to barbarians. As it was, conquest was the method he selected, contrary to his usual custom and contrary to his natural inclination. Herein success led to over-confidence and so to disaster.

We always term the people over the wall “barbarians,” but the Germans had their various political and social systems and some of their tribes were more civilised than others. By comparing the Commentaries of Cæsar with the Germania of Tacitus we get a fairly comprehensive notion of German institutions, which, it must be remembered, were those of our own ancestors. They had no cities. Like the Gauls they were grouped in tribes and the tribes were subdivided into cantons, the cantons into villages. They lived on the produce of their flocks and herds, on the chase, and on a primitive type of “extensive” agriculture, which involved fresh ploughlands every year and thus caused continual unrest and jostling of tribe against tribe. This was what made them such troublesome neighbours to the Gauls, and led to those gigantic “treks” which meet us from time to time in history. Their only political system was a fighting organisation; hereditary chiefs and princes led them in battle and the general in a large movement was elected from amongst the princes by the freemen of the tribe. In peace there was no general magistracy, but the elders and priests administered justice in the villages. Among the warriors there was a rough freedom and equality. The free warrior had very considerable rights, but only as a warrior. Among the Suevi, according to Cæsar, there were a hundred cantons, each of which furnished a thousand men to the army for a year’s service while the rest stayed at home to carry on agriculture and hunting. But this seems, if it is accurate, to be an exceptional degree of organisation. The chastity, the patriotism, the honesty of these barbarians as well as their courage and gigantic stature were favourite themes for Roman eloquence. It is likely enough that Tacitus heightened their virtues with his satirical instinct in order to point a moral to his fellow-countrymen.

Plate LII. PORTA NIGRA, TRIER, GERMANY

Julius Cæsar had left the Rhine as the frontier of his Gallic provinces, though he had crossed it twice by way of reconnaissance. Quite at the beginning of Augustus’s presidency, the Suevi had had to be chased back across the Rhine, and the Treveri across the Moselle. At this time, Germany was still for administrative purposes a part of the Gallic provinces, and as a rule there was some high officer in charge of both. The Rhine was not impassable to the barbarians, and moreover there were Germanic tribes on both sides of it, such as the Treveri of Trier and the Ubii of Cologne, who were in frequent intercourse with their neighbours on the other side. This made the river a somewhat insufficient boundary. There were inroads of German barbarians in 29, 25, 20 and 16 B.C. In the latter case a Roman legate was surprised and defeated, and the eagle of the Fifth Legion carried off in triumph.

This brought Augustus to the spot, and he spent two years in studying the problems of Gaul and Germany. In 12 B.C. the first campaign was undertaken under the command of Drusus, his younger stepson. Drusus, who was not yet twenty-five, was the most brilliant figure of his day, brave, handsome, virtuous, adored by the soldiers, and a thoroughly capable general. On this occasion he crossed the Rhine and descended into Dutch territory, laying waste the lands of the Sygambri and the other hostile tribes who had provoked these punitive measures. He accepted the submission of the Frisians who lived on the coast of North Holland. During the winter his troops seem to have been employed in cutting a canal from the Rhine to the Zuyder Zee. Next year he crossed again, marched on, and threw a bridge across the Lippe, crossed the territory of the Cherusci—the most warlike of all the tribes—and halted on the banks of the Weser. He built a great fort at the junction of the Lippe and the Alme or Ems, and cut a highway along the banks of the Lippe to join the new fort Aliso with a great camp on the Rhine near Xanten. In the next year there was more building and settling, and in 9 B.C. came the great effort. Drusus marched out into Suabia and Cheruscia, crossed the Weser, ravaging everywhere, and reached the Elbe. This river he essayed to cross, but he could not, and, as the historians put it, omens appeared to forbid further progress. This then was the Roman limit. Somewhere between the Saale and the Weser, Drusus fell from his horse and sustained injuries which resulted in his death. Augustus, though greatly grieved, determined to continue his operations. Tiberius was sent to continue the work, and 40,000 Sygambrians were transported into Roman territory.

Plate LIII. RELIEF FROM TRAJAN’S COLUMN. I.

We know little of the work of the next dozen years. Another legate reached the Elbe. A great viaduct was constructed between the Ems and the Rhine. During this period the pacification was apparently proceeding with rapidity. Many of the young Germans came into the Roman camp and learnt Roman ways and Latin speech. The head-quarters were still at Vetera Castra near Xanten and at Mogontiacum (Mainz), with summer quarters at Aliso. In A.D. 4 fresh campaigns were undertaken by Tiberius. For many of these expeditions the Roman historians offer no excuse or justification. They record with pride the immense slaughter and devastation that accompanied them. It is hard to resist the conclusion that much of this fighting was undertaken for its own sake, or to exercise the legions. In A.D. 5 the greatest expedition of all was undertaken. There was a great “durbar” at which the wild Chauci and Cherusci handed in their weapons and did obeisance to the Roman general. The Langobardi—later known as the Lombards—submitted, and Tiberius crossed the Elbe itself, while the fleet which had “circumnavigated the recesses of the Ocean” sailed up the river to meet the army with supplies. All seemed to be going well: Germany was nearly conquered. There only remained the powerful kingdom of the Marcomanni under King Marbod, who dwelt in the fastnesses of Bohemia. Marbod was an able ruler who alone in Germany had succeeded in establishing a strong throne, and had drilled a powerful army of 70,000 foot and 4000 horse. As the historian Velleius observes, his Alpine boundaries were only two hundred miles from Italy, and this formidable power was a real menace to the safety of the empire. Accordingly elaborate plans were made for his destruction by an invasion from three sides at once. Unfortunately just at the moment when the armies were converging upon their prey, there broke out the great Pannonian and Illyrian revolt of A.D. 6, which brought all the tribes of Austria down upon the Romans. It was one of the most dangerous moments in Roman history. Fifteen legions were employed against them, and the military resources of the Empire strained almost to breaking-point. Luckily for Rome, Marbod made no attempt to join the revolt, and the barbarians were under divided leadership. Germanicus, the son of Drusus, helped Tiberius to crush them, but it took three or four years to accomplish it.

Portrait of Varus

Meanwhile Germany itself had to be content with inferior legates. Quintilius Varus was one of those amiable men who cause mutinies by kindness. He fancied that Germany was tranquil. He went about founding cities, holding assizes, collecting tribute and giving justice according to Roman law precisely “as if he had been a city prætor in the Forum at Rome and not a general in the German forests.” Accordingly in A.D. 9 a plot was hatched against him. He was enticed away into the recesses of the Saltus Teutoburgiensis and slaughtered. Then the Cheruscan army swept down upon the three Roman legions and destroyed them.

In itself the disaster was not overwhelming. Three legions had perished, but fifteen more, flushed with their recent victory over the Illyrians, were at hand to avenge them. The Cheruscans immediately submitted and Germanicus found no serious opposition when he penetrated Germany on an errand of chastisement. But for Augustus the reverse was decisive. He was now an old enfeebled man. When he heard of the disaster he beat his head against the wall and was often heard to cry: “Varus, give me back my legions.” He saw that there was no end to these adventures in the forest and no profit in them. As a frontier the Elbe was no better than the Rhine. Therefore he had the supremely good sense to accept the Rhine as his frontier. Henceforth Rhine and Danube with roads and forts along them, and with special arrangements to strengthen the angle where the rivers run small—that should be bulwark enough for the present. And so it was.

The patriotism of German historians has made of this defeat of Varus rather more than it deserves. Arminius the young Cheruscan who led the attack was a patriot though a traitor. He had been, says Velleius, a faithful ally in previous campaigns and had even attained Roman citizenship and equestrian rank. He spoke Latin fluently. His very name is most probably a Latin cognomen, though the patriotism of the Germans will call him “Hermann.” So the German student of to-day sings over his beer:

Dann zieh’n wir aus zur Hermannschlacht
Und wollen Rache haben.

Plate LIV. RELIEF FROM TRAJAN’S COLUMN. II.

It was not half so gallant an act of revolt as that of our British lady, Boadicea, but it had the merit of success. The Germans were able to develop their strength behind the artificial ramparts of the Rhine and Danube until the time came for them to burst through in conquest.

It is commonly said that Augustus immediately after A.D. 9 formed two provinces called Upper and Lower Germany along the Rhine as if to conceal his loss of the real Germany. This is not exact. In the warfare of Tiberius’s days the historians speak only of the Upper or the Lower Army in Germany, and Augustus in his monument speaks of Germany in the singular. Under Tiberius ample revenge was taken for the defeat and Germanicus again and again traversed Germany. The Varus disaster was only one of the episodes which decided the Romans to halt at the Rhine. Aliso was long retained as an outpost, and colonies of Roman veterans were planted on German soil. The Cheruscans and Arminius were defeated in a tremendous battle at Idistavisus near Minden on the Weser in A.D. 16. But on the way back the Roman fleet was shipwrecked and a great many prisoners fell into the hands of the Germans. Some of these were sold as slaves to the Britons and many eventually returned to Rome bringing back marvellous stories of their adventures. As for Marbod, he was defeated in a battle with the Cheruscans and took refuge on Roman soil, where he lived for eighteen years at Ravenna. Arminius, his conqueror, began to play the tyrant in his native tribe and was slain by the treachery of his kinsmen at the age of thirty-seven. His wife Thusnelda and his son had long ago fallen into the hands of the Romans and the boy grew up as a Roman citizen.

The headquarters of the Rhine legions continued to be at Mainz and Xanten with summer quarters at the new Colonia which became Cologne. Four legions of the Upper Army were stationed at the former, and four of the Lower Army at the latter. In due course, we cannot say when, these became the centres of two separate provinces. On the Danube there were three legions in Pannonia, the great new Austrian province. Along this frontier there was now a double line of Cæsarian provinces. Rhætia and Noricum were conquered in 15 B.C. Then there were tedious and unprofitable campaigns in the southern Swiss valleys as the result of which a row of little Alpine prefectures was established. There is still a fine monument to Augustus on the heights above Monaco enumerating forty-six Alpine tribes made subject to Rome. It was erected by the gratitude of the Italian farmers, for the Alpine tribes had always scourged the plains. Roads were constructed here and there over the Alps. The principal pass to Germany lay by way of Turin and the St. Bernard with Augusta (Aosta) to guard it. In Pannonia the old route from Aquilegia over the Julian Alps was restored and a new Via Claudia constructed up the valley of the Adige from Tridentum (Trent) to Augusta (Augsburg). To round off the Danube frontier Mœsia or Mysia was conquered quite at the beginning of the period and added as an Imperial province, probably in A.D. 6, under a prefect. It stretched along the south bank of the Danube, down to the Black Sea, and embraced part of the Balkan high lands. Thus with strong legions posted in permanent encampments all along the Rhine and Danube, Rome had now a satisfactory northern frontier which only required guarding to keep Rome and Italy in security.

Spain had never been entirely subjugated though it had been in the possession of the Republic for nearly two centuries. Parts of it indeed were almost as Roman as Rome. Gades and Corduba, for example, were centres of learning and literature, soon to produce citizens of renown in Lucan, Seneca, Martial, Quintilian, and an emperor in Trajan—a most distinguished galaxy. But a great part of Spain was still in the hands of wild and chivalrous barbarians. Particularly in the north-west the Cantabrians and Asturians were a menace to the peaceful province. For eight years and more the Romans continued to fight them with brief intervals termed “victories.” Augustus himself came over in 26 B.C. and directed operations comfortably from Tarraco. The leader of the rebels was a hero-chief called Corocotta who so exasperated the Romans that

Plate LV. RELIEF FROM TRAJAN’S COLUMN. III.

Augustus offered £10,000 for his capture. This sum the brigand earned by walking into the Roman camp to surrender, and Augustus, charmed at the idea, gave him his liberty as well as the reward. He married a Roman wife and died a Roman citizen as Gaius Julius Caracuttus. Cæsar himself fell seriously ill in the course of the long campaign. Both sides increased in ferocity. The Romans crucified their prisoners and the Spaniards mocked them from the cross. Finally Augustus had to send for Agrippa to finish the business, which he did in 19 B.C. Now Spain was really conquered for ever and even the northern highlanders laid down their arms and accepted civilisation. Bætica, the southern part of the peninsula, was given to the senate to govern, and the northern half divided into the two imperial provinces, Tarraconensis and Lusitania, the latter corresponding roughly to modern Portugal. In Spain also altars were erected to Rome and Augustus. Roads radiated out from Tarraco. Many towns were founded, such as Cæsar Augusta (Saragossa), Augusta Emerita (Merida), Pax Julia (Beja), Legiones (Leon), Asturica Augusta (Astorga). The Celtic religion and probably the very language quickly became extinct. Even in the time of Augustus there were fifty communities with full Roman citizenship. New mines were discovered and vigorously worked, new industries, especially in metal, carefully fostered.

This brief and imperfect sketch of the Roman Empire, as it took shape under the all-seeing eye of Augustus, should indicate, more than all the triumphs she won in battle, more, even, than the story of the Punic Wars, the real “Grandeur that was Rome.” The true greatness of the Roman lies in his indomitable energy and his practical good sense, not to be obscured by the surface of rhetorical culture which had come to overlay it in these latter generations. Now that Rome had at last secured for herself a reasonably secure and sensible form of government, she was able to exercise her natural capacity for affairs and to play the part which destiny had assigned to her of propagating civilisation throughout Europe. If the historians would allow us, we should gladly turn away from the wars and proscriptions to study the quiet useful work which she was performing now and henceforth in every corner of her empire. The motive was, no doubt, self-interest, but it was that broad and far-seeing selfishness which in the realm of public affairs is the nearest approach to altruism. The Republic that sucked the blood of her provinces is detestable to all right-thinking men. The autocracy that cleared out the canals in Egypt, planted flax and encouraged pottery in Gaul, irrigated Africa and taught agriculture to the Moorish nomads, set the wild Iberians to mining and weaving, built aqueducts and roads everywhere, established a postal system and policed land and sea so effectively that a man might fare from York to Palmyra, or from Trier to Morocco “with his bosom full of gold,” may be tyranny governing in its own interests, but it is an institution for which the world has every reason to be grateful.

Plate LVI. RELIEF FROM TRAJAN’S COLUMN. IV.

V
AUGUSTAN ROME

Pater argentarius, ego Corinthiarius.
Anonymous satire on Augustus quoted by Suetonius

HROUGHOUT his great task of repairing a world which had fallen to pieces, Augustus was by no means ignorant of the fact that it is the “spirit that maketh alive.” Indeed it was his constant endeavour to alter facts without changing their names. He was well aware that Sulla had failed miserably when he tossed the Romans a constitution and left nothing but an oath to support it. To adjust frontiers and organise new provinces with the help of his trusty and invincible little legionaries was probably the pleasantest and the easiest part of Cæsar’s task. To reform the ancient imperial city with her centuries of proud and brutal tradition was equally essential, but it was desperate work. For the Empire of Augustus was born into the world suffering from degeneration of the heart. The nobility, upon which everything that was great and glorious in Roman history depended, was morally corrupt, intellectually inert, spiritually void, and even physically decrepit and sterile. The civil wars and proscriptions had systematically pruned away all that was virile and spirited in its ranks. The trimmers and nonentities had survived. The women, long since deprived of the iron control which had kept them in order under the old system of the Roman family, dominated society with an influence that was generally evil. The Roman boudoir with its throng of slaves and parasites was not only profligate, but it had already begun to produce the type of murderous intriguers which we meet more prominently in the Messalinas and Faustinas of imperial history. But as there were virtuous exceptions like Octavia and Agrippina among the women, so there were among the men a few nobles of probity and honour who had somehow, probably by hiding themselves away on their country estates, survived all the conflicts of the past generation. But these, who read Roman history in the same light as Livy, were lovers of the old regime, suspicious and bitterly jealous of the new. We have seen that one of the first official acts of Augustus was to restore the patriciate. But it is easier to make peers than patricians, and we may be sure that there was little love between the old aristocracy and the new. Augustus himself, though the “son of the god Julius” and descended through his mother from Venus and Anchises, was on the father’s side only just respectable. By nature and instinct, however, he was an aristocrat. All his life long he strove to win over the aristocracy to the support of his regime. But he failed, and failed disastrously. Whence throughout the history of the Empire we have in existence more or less prominently a conservative opposition of old nobles, genuine or spurious, sometimes plotting manfully and dying nobly, but more often sneering and writing in secret against the emperors.

But most of the old aristocracy lacked the spirit to oppose Augustus. The few plots which came to light were contemptible affairs. Some of the nobles came down to the senate and devoted their intellects to the choice of a new cognomen for the new Cæsar, or vied with one another in proposing fresh titles of honour for him. But they soon discovered that flattery was not very lucrative in the face of their chilly and statuesque master. Politics at Rome had lost their savour when there was no chance of blood to follow. The noble senators had to be coerced into attending at the curia; they devoted their gifts to drawing-room battles, they collected objets de luxe, they wrote bad verses and sometimes bad histories, and they practised all the vices. They had no religion and very little philosophy. Above all the old Roman family upon which the piers of Roman society had rested was now in ruins. To be the husband of one wife from marriage to death was, so far as the records go, a rare exception. This was no innovation of the Empire. For a century or more men had changed their wives every few years for the sake of a fortune or a political alliance.

FIG. 1.
RELIEF FROM A SARCOPHAGUS

FIG. 2.
ROMAN AND DACIAN

Plate LVII.

Augustus set before himself, as one of the most important phases of his task of regeneration, the moral purification of this society. He had provided the provinces with a new religion which involved a new social organisation. But the cloak of republicanism in which he had chosen to drape his autocracy forbade him to make himself a god in Rome. On the contrary he steadily forbade extravagant flattery. He was not even to be called “dominus.” It is true that the mayors of the new boroughs into which he divided Rome were allowed to set up altars to the Lares and Genius of Augustus.[47] Outside the city throughout Italy there were temples to Augustus and priests in his service. As usual it was a mere quibble when he declined divine honours in Rome. Vergil had plainly called him a god at the very moment when he was dyeing his hands in Roman blood. Julius Cæsar had been formally deified and Augustus regularly styled himself “divi filius.” The title of “augustus” itself carried the notion of transcendent power. Thus the emperor stood on the threshold of heaven, at any rate for the poorer classes, even in Rome itself. But for the aristocracy something else was needed: it is of little profit to claim divinity in a society of atheists. For Roman society, as typified by Ovid, the gods were little more than a literary convention, and it would do a respectable man little credit to be enrolled in their company.

For the reformation of Roman society Augustus had recourse to three methods—legislation, culture, and example. The legislation consisted of a whole series of laws solemnly passed through senate and comitia in the years 18 and 17 B.C. To give them additional sanctity they were called Julian laws. There was one enacting heavier penalties for adultery, another permitting marriage between citizens and freedwomen, designed to meet the circumstance that men outnumbered women in the ranks of the aristocracy. There were also sumptuary laws to curb extravagance. There were laws imposing penalties on celibacy and discouraging the fortune-hunters who lay in wait for the rich bachelor’s legacies. Fiscal privileges were granted to the fathers of families, and Augustus himself went down to the house and read the senate an old speech of Metellus on the increase of population. Unfortunately the emperor himself had not set a good example in the matter of parentage. He had had three wives but only one child, a daughter. Still he exhibited himself in the theatre in the capacity of a father by collecting the children of Germanicus about his knees. Of course legislation proved quite helpless in the matter, besides arousing a good deal of ill-feeling which was chiefly displayed in the ranks of the knights.

Augustus was in a very difficult position when it came to setting an example. The principal evils which his social code was designed to remedy were the prevalence of adultery, the frequency of divorce, voluntary celibacy and formal marriages contracted without intention of producing offspring, and finally, as a consequence of celibacy, the prevalence of a regular profession of fortune-hunting. There was scarcely one of these necessary reforms to which Cæsar himself came with clean hands. He had begun his matrimonial career by repudiating his young betrothed; he had then married an immature virgin, and divorced her for political reasons before the marriage was consummated; in the third place he had married Scribonia, who had already had two husbands, and whose son was already a man at the time of her marriage to Augustus. She was many years older than he, and the marriage was intended to secure a reconciliation with Sextus Pompeius. This third matrimonial venture was terminated in a manner which shocked even Roman society.

Plate LVIII. RELIEF FROM ARCH OF TITUS

On the very day when Scribonia became a mother by him, Augustus put her away charging her with immorality, though he kept her infant Julia as his own and only child. He had been fascinated, it seems, by the fair face and brilliant abilities of Livia Drusilla. Livia was of the highest ancestry in Rome, a descendant of Appius Claudius, and attached by adoption to another very noble family, the Livii. Also she had married another scion of the illustrious Claudian house, the proudest in Rome, and at the age of fifteen had become the mother of Tiberius. Her father had chosen the losing side at Philippi, and committed suicide after the battle. Her husband, Claudius Nero, had taken arms against Augustus—or Octavian, as he then was—in the Perusine War, and his life was forfeited. His beautiful wife sued the conqueror for mercy, and mercy was granted upon conditions. Nero was compelled not only to divorce his wife, but to act the part of a father and give her away in marriage to Augustus. She was then not only the mother of Tiberius, but just about to become the mother of Drusus, who was born in the house of Augustus three months after the marriage. This, then, was the model family on the Palatine which was to set an example to the Roman aristocracy—a daughter whose mother had been divorced on the day of her birth, a mother who had been sold by her husband, and two stepsons whose father had been divorced. The sequel scarcely improved matters. Julia grew up and was married first to the boy Marcellus, then to Agrippa, by whom she had a large family, and when Agrippa died, Tiberius was forced to put away his wife, Agrippa’s daughter Vipsania, whom he really loved, and marry the widow Julia, whose immorality he knew and detested. At last the profligacy of Julia grew so open and notorious that Augustus was informed of it and compelled to banish her in company with her mother Scribonia, who had survived to see her shame. Later on a second Julia, the daughter of the first, suffered a precisely similar fate.

As for Livia the empress, if we choose to call her by that title, there is no doubt that she was a singularly beautiful and clever woman, who managed to retain the affections of Augustus for over forty years—in itself a remarkable feat in Roman society. History records in her favour many acts of royal mercy and charity. She seconded her husband’s efforts at reform, and established a powerful ascendancy over him and over Tiberius. There is no whisper against her chastity when once she entered the household of Augustus. But on the other hand there are very serious charges of crime made by contemporaries and recorded by Tacitus, charges which are supported by the strongest circumstantial evidence. The suspicion is that she was fighting all her life long without remorse or scruple for the succession of her son Tiberius. Augustus did not intend to be succeeded by a Claudius. This he showed again and again in the most public manner. His aim, as soon as he knew that he was destined to leave no male offspring of his own body, was to leave the succession in the sacred Julian line, the family descended from Venus, the house of the star. But that could only be secured through the female line. His first choice was the brilliant young Marcellus, son of his sister Octavia. Marcellus, who had been the first husband of Julia, died of a mysterious complaint just as he came of age. Then Augustus married Julia to Agrippa, and two of her sons, Gaius and Lucius, were next chosen for the succession. They grew up and came of age. Just as they were beginning public life, Tiberius having been banished to make way for them, they too died in the same year, Lucius on board ship as he was sailing to Marseilles, Gaius as the sequel to an assassin’s blow given him in Armenia. In the first case we have no details. In the second, Gaius was recovering from his wound, but he turned aside to an obscure town on the southern coast of Asia Minor, refused the warship which had been sent to convey him home, and begged to be allowed to live there in obscurity. The circumstance is full of suspicion and mystery. Moreover, before his rivals were dead Tiberius had word, from a well-informed prophet, of their approaching decease, and returned to Rome. He himself, living in banishment, must be acquitted of active complicity in the crime. Julia was banished to a lonely island. Her third son was also put out of sight for no crime but sulkiness and grumbling against his stepmother. Deprived of all his hopes, Augustus with very marked reluctance adopted Tiberius, but in his old age he still cherished the idea of a reconciliation with Julia’s third son, Agrippa Postumus, and actually visited in secret the remote island where he was interned. But as soon as Augustus was dead—and his death was carefully concealed as long as possible—Agrippa Postumus was murdered, and this time we have direct evidence that the crime was Livia’s. This sort of domestic intrigue, marked by hideous murders, is one of the blackest features of imperial history at Rome. It arose very largely from the illegitimate character of the imperial throne, and the absence of any legalised system of succession.

Nevertheless, out of these unpromising materials Augustus endeavoured to organise a model Roman family of the old style. Livia and Julia were set to work at spinning and weaving. Augustus would wear no cloaks but of their making. Julia was solemnly counselled never to do or say anything which she would be ashamed to write in her diary. Once when she built a palace for herself Augustus had it demolished. The house on the Palatine was of the simplest character, with a humble portico of the local tufa from Alba and no decorated pavements. In food and drink he was most abstemious, and indeed the prodigious industry of his life left little time for banquets. A slice of bread made from inferior flour, with a relish of pickled fish or dates or olives, often served him for the day. He never drank more than a pint of wine. He slept winter and summer in the same room, and spent most of the year in the city, unless he was travelling. His favourite country seat was on the island of Capri where he could be sure of freedom. His pleasures were simple and almost childish. He liked a little mild gambling, he was fond of playing knuckle-bones with little slave-boys. He attended the circus as a matter of duty and was very strict in enforcing decency of behaviour there. He set his face against changes of fashion and insisted that Roman citizens should wear the old-fashioned toga in public. All his instincts seem to have been for simplicity and clemency. He never permitted a freedman to appear at his dinner-table, but when a slave of his once pushed his master into the way of a charging wild boar in order to shield himself Augustus dismissed the matter with a joke. On the other hand, when the tutor and servants of Gaius showed themselves tyrannical and overbearing to the provincials after their young master’s death, Cæsar had them drowned like rats. Towards personal abuse of himself he was singularly indifferent. It remains difficult to visualise the character of Augustus. Originally he was a typical Roman, as callous towards bloodshed and suffering as the rest of them and quite unscrupulous in his progress towards power. But when he had attained it he had the greatness of mind to perceive that his work of repair could only be done by setting an example of virtuous living and moderation. Self-control was perhaps his most powerful quality.

Twice his self-command broke down. Once when he heard of the defeat of Varus in Germany with the loss of his three legions, and again when some one, probably Livia, revealed to him the scandal concerning Julia. Apart from the blow to his honour as a man, it was the undoing of all his measures for reform and the open publication of their futility. “Her orgies,” men said, “had been conducted upon the very rostra whence her father’s laws against adultery had been proclaimed.” Her accomplices included the flower of the old aristocracy, a Scipio and a Gracchus. Augustus hid himself from the sight of men, banished his daughter to a remote island and officially informed the senate by letter of her disgrace. He was heard to cry out that he envied the father of Phœbe, one of Julia’s slaves who had hanged herself when the scandal went abroad. He quoted a Greek verse:

“O that I had been unwedded and died without a child,”

and he spoke of his wicked daughter as the cancer of his life.

Plate LIX. RUINS OF PALMYRA: VIEW OF GREAT ARCH FROM THE EAST

Legislation was obviously futile, and example had broken down. It was only from within that Roman society could be reformed, only by supplying a spiritual influence which could counteract the materialism and immorality of the day. Augustus had tried in the provinces to raise up a new religion of loyalty and patriotism centred round the altar “to Rome and Augustus.” But that was obviously impossible in Rome itself. The only inspiring motive—in addition to Stoicism which could never be a popular creed—had been, for the last two or three centuries, patriotism, the worship of the sacred city and her glorious destinies. But even that had been shattered by the civil wars. Augustus now set himself deliberately to the task of creating a new Rome and a new Roman culture. He himself, like most of the nobles of his day, had received a Greek education. It was what we should call a good classical education in philosophy, literature, and rhetoric. Besides that he had been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries at Athens, and they were probably the most powerful source of inspiration in the Mediterranean world, for even eclectics like Cicero admitted that they carried with them a hope of immortality. Augustus was himself deeply imbued with Greek culture and like most Roman nobles had dabbled in literature. Thus it is not surprising that the type of civilisation which he fostered in the new Rome was quite as much Greek as Italian. The age of Augustus was in fact the culmination of Græco-Roman culture alike in arts and letters because the fusion between the two races was now complete.

Elsewhere I have ventured to rebel against the current practice in history of subordinating the arts to politics and declaring that artistic production depends upon political facts. It is not so. Literary and artistic results are due to literary and artistic causes. The Roman literary language had only just attained perfection. Cicero had perfected it for prose, and it only remained for poetry to produce a Vergil. Everybody at Rome from Augustus downwards was busily writing hexameters in his spare time, and the recitals which were given at every dinner-party formed one of the social inflictions of the day. Just as Julius Cæsar and Cicero had thrown off their epics, so the great men of the succeeding age were poets—Augustus, Pollio, Mæcenas, Gallus, and all of them except Agrippa. But alongside of these distinguished amateurs, professional literary men of humble birth were now coming to the front. Vergil and Horace are not originally the products of the Augustan age, for they were both established poets before it began. But the conditions of art at Rome were such that a professional man of letters depended very closely upon a patron. That was the tradition handed on from the days of Plautus, when the writers had nearly always been foreign slaves or clients. Cicero, Cæsar, Lucretius, and Catullus had not been of the client class. They had flourished in that brief interval when it still seemed possible for Rome to develop a genuine free literature of her own. But that possibility had been killed like so many other hopes by the civil wars, and now the choice lay mainly between distinguished scribblers or obsequious literary craftsmen. Thus we get a second courtly period of literature like that of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, like that of Louis XIV. or of our own Stuart age when poets wrote to please individual patrons. The patron, if he be a man of taste, generally demands a very high degree of finish, and thus it is the courtly ages which produce the finished craftsmanship. It may be remarked that the ages of private patronage have given the world much of its greatest literature.

In the age of Augustus there was no censorship of letters such as generally prevailed under the stricter emperors of later days. Livy was permitted to publish his great history without curtailment of its strong republican tendency. When libels and pasquinades appeared against Cæsar he was content to contradict them in a proclamation. Nevertheless he made his influence weightily felt in the world of letters. He gave more than £10,000 to Varius for a tragedy which posterity has not thought worth while to preserve. He was himself a kindly and patient listener at the recitation of poems and history, speeches and dialogues, which formed the usual mode of first publication in those days. He only insisted that his own deeds should not form the subject of trivial composition by inferior authors. Horace appears at first to have been warned off from treatment of imperial politics. Vergil too in his early days received a hint not to sing of wars and kings. But later on both these writers were explicitly enlisted in the service of the state. In this part of the work Mæcenas was the emperor’s chief agent. Mæcenas, whose name has come to symbolise literary patronage, was a wealthy noble of an old Etruscan family who was content, like Cicero’s friend Atticus, to pull the wires of state largely by keeping generous hospitality and knowing all the important characters of his day. Luxurious and effeminate in his tastes, he gathered a group of talented authors round his table, and very distinctly suggested to them the lines upon which he desired them to work. Vergil, Varius, Horace, and Propertius were members of his salon. Another noble of high lineage, M. Valerius Messalla, maintained a rival coterie whose most prominent member was the elegiac poet Tibullus. Vergil, a half-Italian native of Mantua, who was not even a citizen by birth, had sprung into fame with his Bucolics, a series of pastoral idylls in the style of Theocritus. But though he was a provincial by birth, though he writes of shepherds and sings pathetically of his ancestral farm, nothing is more untrue than to regard him as a son of the soil, or an inspired ploughboy after the manner of Robert Burns. On the contrary he had received an elaborate education in the style of the day under Greek masters at Cremona, Milan, and Rome. He was steeped in Greek philosophy and letters. His shepherds are not the unsophisticated rustics of the Mantuan plain. They are shepherds “à la Watteau,” borrowed from the pages of Theocritus, and though many a brilliant epithet displays the Italian’s loving observation of nature, the background of the work is artificial and literary rather than rustic or natural. His shepherds, like Sidney’s, talk politics under a transparent disguise, which is often extremely incongruous.

Plate LX. BA’ALBEK: THE TEMPLE OF ZEUS

They are often engaged in praising Gallus or Varus or Pollio, the young poet’s patrons. It was the success of the Bucolics which led Mæcenas to choose Vergil for carrying out an important literary project. A poet was required to sing the praises of country life in such a manner as to encourage the movement “back to the land,” which Augustus was trying to foster. In his Georgics Vergil frankly admits that he is fulfilling the “hard commands” of Mæcenas. The Georgics are a treatise on husbandry, but here again it is not first-hand work. We are informed that Vergil’s poetry had regained him his paternal farm at Mantua. But the Georgics were not written on the farm. They were diligently composed in a library at Naples. They arose from the study of Aratus and Hesiod, not from memory of Italian life, and even in those gorgeous passages where Vergil is praising a country life, it is not of the Italian farm that he is thinking but of literary hills and dells in Greece. I think it is clear that the poet took little pleasure in his task. He very gladly digresses from the description of soils and mattocks to tell us a charming piece of Greek mythology or to introduce a literary reference. Octavian had been a “powerful god” already in the Eclogues before he became Augustus. Now the only question is which of the stars shall receive him after death. “Already the blazing Scorpion contracts his arms and leaves thee more than a fair share of heaven.” Vergil pauses to depict the triumph of Augustus—Nile flowing with blood, Asia tamed, the Niphates driven back, the Parthian conquered. No literary catchword was ever more absurd than the phrase “rustic of genius” applied to Vergil. As soon as he had the means, he gladly turned his back upon his ancestral farm to become a student and a courtier. Nevertheless Mæcenas was magnificently served. Vergil had already forged a weapon of matchless music and eloquence in his surging hexameters, and he used it to depict the honest joys of rustic toil, the laborious tranquillity of the farm, the beauty and interest of nature. He was instantly recognised by Augustus as the destined laureate of the new Rome.

Plate LXI. BA’ALBEK: THE TEMPLE OF BACCHUS, INTERIOR

The Æneid was solemnly devoted to the altar of Rome and Augustus. Homer was the Greek model here, as Theocritus had been for the Bucolics and Hesiod for the Georgics. The origin of Rome was to be linked on to the Trojan story as had already been done by the inventive Greeks. Æneas had fled from Troy to Italy, and had left his son Julus (the eponymous hero of the Julian house) to found an heroic kingdom in Italy long before the genuine Roman heroes. Thus the humble native story of Romulus was superseded. Piety was to be the great virtue honoured by this poem, for piety towards the memory of Julius Cæsar was the principal title upon which Augustus rested his claim to honour. There were other analogies, perhaps. Dido most probably suggested Cleopatra to the Roman reader. But it is to the praise of Rome, to the glorification of that sense of filial duty which the Romans called “piety” that the great epic is mainly devoted. Here again, though the eloquence is so splendid and the versification so majestic, the Æneid like its predecessors is a work of the study quite clearly written to order. The plot is carelessly constructed. Æneas himself, with all his piety, never for a moment lives. The religious motives which led to his desertion of Dido barely satisfy us. Æneas makes the speeches, and the gods continually intervene when danger threatens him. Our sympathies are generally with the enemy, with Turnus or Camilla. Æneas is as chilly and statuesque as Augustus himself.

It is in the famous Sixth Book, which tells of the descent to Hades, that the praise of Rome is most elegant and most explicit. Here we are shown the heroes of Roman history side by side with the heroes of the Greeks, and here the young Marcellus, lately dead, is introduced in those immortal and touching lines which caused Octavia his mother to swoon when the poet recited them. Here too the poet pronounces in very significant language the Roman idea of the destiny of his race.

excudent alii spirantia mollius æra,
credo equidem, uiuos ducent de marmore uoltus,
orabunt causas melius, cælique meatus
describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
hæ tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.

“Others shall mould, I doubt not, the breathing bronze more delicately and draw the living features out of marble, others shall plead causes more eloquently, map out the wanderings of the sky with the rod, and tell the risings of the stars. Thou, Roman, forget not to govern the nations under thy sway. These shall be thy arts: to impose the rule of peace, to spare the subject, and defeat the proud.” In these lines we hear the proud Philistinism of an imperial people. This is the genuine Roman (dare I add “British”?) attitude towards the arts and sciences. They are for others to provide, for Greeks and Egyptians. Even oratory, the highest achievement of the Roman genius in literature, is thus scornfully thrown to the foreigner. The Romans knew that they could buy or seize better statues than they could carve: their task was to conquer and govern—not an ignoble art.

The Æneid is explicitly a national laureate poem. The poet seeks to enshrine all Roman life in his pages, to epitomise Roman history and to introduce allusions to characteristic pieces of myth and ritual. He inserts whole lines of Ennius or Lucretius when they please him. They are superseded and replaced. Just like Dryden, he feels that he is the heir of the ages. The extraordinary popularity which Vergil attained even in his own lifetime grew in the course of a few centuries almost into a cult. His tomb became an object of pilgrimage; in early Christian times he became a prophet and in the Middle Ages a wizard. The gentleness and purity of his personal life played their part in the creation of this strange Vergilian legend.

Plate LXII. BA’ALBEK: THE TEMPLE OF BACCHUS, EAST PORTICO

Horace had less of the courtier’s suppleness and required winning to the imperial cause. It took two efforts of Mæcenas to secure him and we have letters preserved in which Augustus very good-humouredly confesses his disappointment that Horace has refused a secretaryship. Horace was the son of a freedman, as he was not in the least ashamed to confess. But his father had managed to secure for Quintus the education of a gentleman under Greek teachers in Rome, himself attending the boy to school in place of the rascally pedagogue slaves who usually undertook that office. Horace had further enjoyed a University education at Athens, where he had fallen under the spell of Brutus, for whom he fought at Philippi. He was, and remained, a Republican by instinct, but Mæcenas won him over to the cause of Cæsarism. He made his reputation with the Satires, a species of composition which may be termed truly Italian. The satire is a conversational medley written in the language of prose with the rhythm of poetry. In this Horace was imitating the old Roman master Lucilius. It is much to the credit of his critical discernment that Mæcenas was able to descry the brilliant abilities of Horace in this very uninspiring medium. For though his Satires were sometimes bitterly satirical in the modern sense of the word, Horace’s chief literary asset was the charm of a sunny, genial character. He had in addition a gift for composition and an industry which brought him almost but not quite to the level of original genius. It seems to have been Mæcenas who set him to the writing of lyrical odes. Biting satires might have been the most effective literary weapon in republican days, but the glorification of the new regime required something of a loftier strain. Vergil was engaged upon its epic, Horace was instructed to write its occasional verse. The Greek lyrists of the older period had as yet remained unimitated in Latin. Accordingly just as when the young Vergil had wanted to sing of kings and battles “Apollo had plucked his ear and admonished him that a shepherd should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song,” so Horace was deliberately set down to the task of celebrating the new Rome in the style of Sappho and Alcæus and Anacreon. That he accomplished his task so superbly is a proof of his energy and versatility. He himself, a gentle valetudinarian whose idea of a banquet was a mess of cabbage and pot-herbs, had to strike the lyre of revelry and sing of wine and love. He sang without conviction, without a spark of Sapphic fire or a note of natural music, but the noble rhetoric of the Roman schools in the golden age supported him. He laboured for the right word never in vain. No writer has ever equalled his matchless gift for making truisms sound true. No other writer has been able to assert that “it is sweet and comely to die for the fatherland,” or that “life is short” with an equal air of genuine wisdom. Latin with its terse precision is the ideal language for the expression of platitudes. His patriotic eloquence is Roman rhetoric of the best kind. But perhaps his real strength lies in drama. It is strange that Latin of the classical period failed at producing a native drama so completely as it did. Perhaps it was because the writers of that age were so completely under Greek influences that their natural Italian genius for the theatre was stifled under the load of a classical convention. Certainly Horace had the gift, and in such passages as the dramatic duologue (Ode ix. of Book III.) Donec gratus eram tibi, or the Epode of the witches (v.) At, o deorum, or the still more famous Epistle about the bore, he exhibits himself, like Browning, as a dramatist gone astray. Regarded from the purely lyrical point of view, the Century Hymn, which he wrote to order as Rome’s laureate in succession to Vergil, is perhaps his greatest achievement. The Secular Games of 17 B.C. were intended to bring visibly before men’s eyes the glories of the new monarchy and incidentally to carry in their train the salutary but unpopular measures of the Julian moral reform. So the choir of noble youths and maidens were taught to sing in their prayer to Diana:

diua, producas subolem patrumque
prosperes decreta super iugandis
feminis prolisque nouæ feraci
lege marita,[48]

Plate LXIII. BA’ALBEK: THE CIRCULAR TEMPLE

where the goddess is besought to increase the population of Rome and favour the senate’s decrees about marriage. The fourth book of the Odes was added after a long interval at the direct request of Augustus. It is intended to bring the achievements of Augustus and his family, particularly the triumphs of Tiberius and Drusus, into favourable comparison with the heroic stories of republican history. It is most melancholy to observe that Mæcenas, to whom Horace was genuinely attached and whose name constantly occurs in his earlier writings, here drops out of the poet’s verse because he had fallen out of Cæsar’s favour.

Although Horace is in his Odes as classical and conventional as all the Roman writers of his age, his Satires and Epistles are more intimate than any other Latin work of the great period. In them we get real glimpses of life at Rome, or on a country estate. We cannot fail to be struck with its idleness and emptiness. In the city he saunters from the forum to the baths, from the baths to the dinner-table with time and boredom for his only enemies. In the country he sometimes, it is true, toys with husbandry, or shows a faint interest in landscape-gardening or loiters among his books, but the life is to the last degree super-civilised and unreal. The very ideas of hope and progress were alien to the ancient world. The eyes of the Romans were always turned behind them, so that they could not see the greatness of the vista that was now opening for them in front.

The elegists—such as the graceful melancholy Tibullus, or Propertius, the pedant who often stumbled into poetry, and a host of others who are mere names to us—would hardly, but for their prominence in the schoolroom, deserve serious attention. Callimachus the Alexandrian was their model, himself scarcely a first-rate poet. The whole idea of writing love poetry in an absolutely regular distich of hexameter and pentameter was inartistic and unreal. Their fluent prolixity makes them insufferably tedious out of school. It is difficult to sustain interest in the relations between the bards and the married ladies with Greek pseudonyms to whom their verses are addressed. From our point of view the chief interest in these writers lies in the fact that nearly all of them were at one time or another invited to praise the new regime. Tibullus, indeed, who enjoyed a modest competence of his own, limits his praises to his immediate patron Messalla, and frankly admits that war and battles disgust him. But Propertius makes an attempt to carry out his commission, and describes the battle of Actium fifteen years after its occurrence. But though he invites Bacchus to assist his Muse, it is wretched stuff and the poet himself turns from it with disgust. The famous elegy upon Cornelia, daughter of the injured Scribonia, beginning desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum, is however sufficient proof that it was only the want of a really inspiring theme and a suitable medium which prevented Propertius from being in the front rank of the world’s poets.

Ovid, “this incorrigibly immoral but inexpressibly graceful poet,” as Mr. Cruttwell called him, is a far more interesting personality. I think he may fairly be called the wickedest writer on the world’s bookshelves. Others may be wicked through ignorance, or by accident, or out of high animal spirits, but Ovid is immoral on principle, a conscientious and industrious perverter. His greatest work, “The Art of Loving,” is quite frankly a guide to adultery, the precepts it contains being perfectly practical and evidently based on expert knowledge. In his Amores, Metamorphoses, and Fasti he took for his field the domain of religion and exhibited celestial sin in the most captivating light. We have already seen how the loves of the gods came to take their place in the Olympian mythology, and how thinking pagans like Plato regarded them. To such men they were already relics of barbarism, but Ovid draws them out into the light again, gilds them with his wit and makes them altogether charming for the Roman drawing-room. The strange and uncouth old ritual of Italian nature-worship is piquantly dressed out for the up-to-date blasphemer. Nobody who had read Ovid could possibly worship Jupiter any

FIG 1
THE CAPITOL 		FIG 2
THE DECUMANUS MAXIMUS
AND TRAJAN’S ARCH
Plate LXIV TIMGAD

more. It was all done with consummate art and unblushing impudence. When the sad Niobe is bereft of her seven fair children by the arrows of the jealous gods, our poet, ingeniously parodying Vergil, observes:

heu quantum hæc Niobe, Niobe distabat ab illa.

In telling the dreadful tragedy whereby the Greeks had explained the sorrow of Philomela, the nightingale, our poet cheerfully describes the slaughter of the children, adding:

pars inde cauis exultat aënis,
pars ueribus stridunt.

And so he moves from one lovely myth to another, preserving them indeed for our archæologists, but delicately with the breath of his profanity defiling them for ever.

Now Ovid is far more typical of the civilisation of his day than either Vergil or Horace. For Ovid was a Roman noble, rich and gifted, who in earlier days would have passed creditably from one high office to another in the state, humorously plundering a province or two, gracefully collecting objects of art in Asia and possibly losing a battle or two through negligence. He actually started on a public career as a brilliant barrister, and enjoyed the ancient office of decemvir stlitibus iudicandis, something like our Masters in Chancery. But the Roman drawing-rooms soon swallowed him up in their silken entanglements, and he spent the greater part of his life whispering his poisonous little pentameters to ladies like Julia. Of course a single poet with Ovid’s sinister gifts was doing far more to corrupt Rome than all the Julian legislation could do to reform it, and we may fairly conclude that Ovid with his attacks on the traditional Roman morality and religion, together with effeminate bards like Tibullus who sang of the horrors of war, were more than undoing the patriotic work of Vergil and Horace. The plain fact is that though you may hire writers you cannot purchase the spirit of a people, and so Augustus and Mæcenas found, to the great misfortune of the Roman Empire. They failed in their attempt to capture literature. Oppression failed even more signally than corruption. Henceforth all the literary talent of Rome is on the opposition side. Lucan extols republicanism, Tacitus assails the emperors with satirical history, Petronius pillories Nero with satirical romance, Juvenal with satirical poetry. Only the younger Pliny is loyal, and to be praised by Pliny is a very doubtful recommendation. Roman literature had imbibed the republican ideals from its Greek foster-mother. The schoolmasters of Rome continued to teach their pupils to declaim against tyrants.

But Ovid himself was not permitted to flourish in his wickedness. A sudden decree from Cæsar Augustus fell upon him like a thunderbolt. He was banished for ever and bidden to betake himself to Tomi, on the Black Sea, near the mouth of the Danube. From that inhospitable region he continued to pour forth elegiacs, Epistles and Tristia, wherein he protests his innocence, recants anything and everything he has ever said, and bewails the horrors of arctic existence among the barbarians. The actual cause of his banishment is one of the most piquant mysteries in literary history. He has seen something which he ought not to have seen: his eyes have destroyed him. It is fairly clear that his banishment synchronised with the banishment of the younger Julia, and we may well believe that the old emperor, shocked and horrified by this second scandal in his own house, attributed it to the corrupting influence of that singer of gilded sins. The banishment was certainly well merited and the only pity is that it came too late to effect its purpose. The unmanly tone of the Tristia, the effeminate appeals to everybody in Rome including a hitherto forgotten wife, reveal Ovid in his true character. It is a little strange that generations of British youth have been trained not only in the study but even in the imitation of this author.

Plate LXV. POMPEII: THERMOPOLION, STREET OF ABUNDANCE

When we term the Golden Age of Roman literature “Augustan” we ought to remember that it began long before Augustus and ended before his death. Thus with all his patronage he may more justly be called the finisher than the author of it. Of all the great writers, only Ovid, to whom the simple life and bracing air of the Sarmatians afforded an unusual longevity, outlived Augustus. Summing up the characteristics of the literature of this day, we may say that courtliness and artificiality were its most prominent characteristics. The freshness of Catullus, the stern conviction of Lucretius, the fire of Cicero were extinct. Nearly all that was native in Roman letters had perished; only the crispness of epigram, the bite of satire and the dignified music of the language itself remained as the Italian heritage. Greece had quite definitely triumphed over Rome. Technical excellence continued, for this has always been the mark of “Augustan” periods. But the well-meant efforts of the state to capture literature for its own service had failed. The horrors of the civil war outweighed the glories of the new regime and with all his benevolence the emperor could never outlive the memory of his proscriptions. Literature never forgave the murder of Cicero though the author of Thyestes might be loaded with treasure. Indeed the widespread misery of those terrible days in 40 B.C. came home personally to most of our middle-class writers. Vergil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius had each and all received ineffaceable memories in the loss of their patrimonies. It was little wonder that even though they sang of wars and victories when “Cynthius plucked their ear” their natural instinct was to compare Mars and Venus very much to the disadvantage of the former.

When we turn to consider the Art of the period, we must not forget to carry with us the light that we have obtained from the study of its literature. For Augustus and his assistants were attempting precisely similar ends in both regions. With temples, baths, circuses, amphitheatres, colonnades, libraries, and statues the new regime was to flourish its magnificence in the eyes of the world and, above all, to dazzle the citizens of Rome, fill up the emptiness of their lives, and make them forget, if it were possible, the magnitude of their loss. Money was lavished upon this object by the emperor and all his friends, and the building activity which transformed Rome from a city of brick into a city of marble must have given work and pay to vast numbers of the poor. But the magnificence has all perished, as all magnificence must, and it is left for us by the study of a few ruined monuments, a few statues and busts, an altar here, a cornice there, to estimate the spirit of Rome in conformity with its literature.

Roman art supplied much of their inspiration to the artists of the Renaissance. Michael Angelo and Raphael learnt their art by copying the antiquities, and much of the Renaissance architecture was direct imitation of the Augustan age. But with the birth of archæology as a science in the nineteenth century, scholars became accustomed to leap straight over the Roman era, or to regard it merely as a phase of the Hellenistic decline. From that view, undoubtedly erroneous and unjust, there has latterly been an attempt to escape. Wickhoff and Riegl, whose foremost interpreter in this country is Mrs. Strong, have argued that Roman art has an existence per se, not only possessing characteristic excellences of its own, but in many points transcending the limits of Greek art. To such pioneers we owe a deep debt of gratitude. They have undoubtedly drawn our attention to real merits and real steps of progress in the art of the Romans. But on the whole they have failed, as it seems to an onlooker, to prove their case. Partly it is in the long run a question of taste. A convinced Romanist like Mrs. Strong displays for our admiration many works of art which trained eyes, accustomed to Greek and modern art, often refuse to admire. I would take as an instance the well-known “Tellus Group,” a slab from the Augustan Altar of Peace,[49] preserved in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. To me it seems a laborious composition, executed with care and skill, but wholly without inspiration or imagination. It is purely conventional allegory. How would the designer of an illuminated ticket for an agricultural exhibition depict Mother Earth? He would design a group (would he not?) with a tall and richly bosomed lady for his central figure, he would put

Plate LXVI. POMPEII: MURAL PAINTING, STREET OF ABUNDANCE

two naked babes upon her lap, at her feet would be a cow and a sheep, while the background would be filled with flowers and trees. The cornucopia would occupy a prominent position. If he were asked to fill his space with additional figures, he would throw in Air and Water, one on each side, designed on the same plan. There would be little motive in the group, little connection between the figures. The designer’s aim would be that the spectator in a casual glance might observe the fitness of it all—Earth sitting between Air and Water—note it, and pass on. This is just what the Roman artist has done. He has earned his money. He has carved most skilfully and diligently, he has introduced all the conventional emblems. He has drawn his metaphor from stock. I cannot see that he has put any love or religion or indeed faith of any kind into his work. The only thing my eye cares to dwell upon is the absurdity of Air, who is riding (backwards) on a wholly inadequate swan, pretending to form one of a group with the immovably seated Earth. This then is the first point of criticism against the Romanists. I have put it as a mere subjective impression, which involves simply a question of taste. But in reality it is more. They are failing or have failed to make out their case, chiefly because the critical world of art-lovers declines to follow their expressions of enthusiasm, and can give reasons for its refusal.

Secondly, we have a right to ask the apostles of Roman art what they mean by their claims. How justly may we call works like the Altar of Peace,[50] or even the Column of Trajan, “Roman Art”? Was any of it executed by Roman artists? We have just read the true Roman attitude towards art in Vergil’s scornful excudent alii. We may be sure that the Altar of Peace was executed by Greeks. The only named sculptors of the period are Greeks. This is indeed admitted, but then the Roman claim takes one of two forms, (1) that work executed in the Roman Empire may be called Roman, which is absurd, or (2) that apart from mere execution there are in the work certain characteristic innovations which are due to Roman inspiration. The latter claim is true, to some extent, and important.

Just as Mæcenas “plucked the ear” of the poets, and instructed them when to sing or when to refrain from singing of kings and battles, so the patron of art gave instructions to the Greek artists. It is clear enough what instructions he gave. Like Cromwell he cried “Paint me as I am, warts and all. Leave your idealism, your perfect profiles, your serene gods in the tranquillity of Olympus, and depict men with the living emotions displayed in frown and wrinkle.” That was excellent advice, no doubt, but he seems to have gone further. He seems, like the good Dr. Primrose, to have demanded value for his money by insisting upon so many portraits to the square yard of surface to be decorated. Is not this the explanation of the crowded figures in the new style of relief work, as exhibited at Rome from the Altar of Peace to the Column of Trajan? In the friezes of the Mausoleum, the fourth-century Greek sculptors had discovered the advantage of free spacing so that each figure has a value of its own. The florid taste of the millionaire Attalids of Pergamum had made a reactionary movement in the direction of crowded and tangled forms. Now these Roman friezes carry the demand a stage further. In these processions we have a compact mass of faces, each admirably and no doubt faithfully portrayed, but ruining by their very numbers the artistic success of the whole. The spectator is not to admire a composition. As in Frith’s “Derby Day” he is to pick out a face here and there and cry “That is Agrippa: that is Messalla: that is Germanicus.” In its essence such a demand is not the mark of a people with any sense of art. On the contrary it is the measure of their crudity and Philistinism. Nevertheless this new demand enabled the versatile Greek genius to win for itself fresh triumphs, especially in realistic portraiture and narrative relief-work.

FIG. 1.
THE EMPEROR DECIUS 		FIG 2.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Plate LXVII.

Part of the claim which Wickhoff and his followers make for the originality of Roman art is based upon the belief that the limitations of Greek art are not self-imposed; for example, that the Greeks did not know how to express emotion in the plastic arts, that they could not make realistic portraits, that through ignorance they never perceived the beauty of a stark corpse, that Pheidias lacked the intelligence to find a dramatic centre for the Parthenon frieze, and so forth. Such assumptions as these are easily disproved. Greeks were capable of realism (witness the Ludovisi reliefs[51]) but they preferred to idealise. In portraying giants, barbarians, or slaves they could express transient emotions, but for Greeks and gods in statuary they deliberately preferred serenity. The Greeks sought to conceal their art rather than to display it, as we have learnt from the discovery of the subtle secrets of their architecture, and it is rash to assert of any principle of craftsmanship that the Greeks did not know it. Many of the claims of Rome to originality may be refuted by this consideration.

What I believe to be the true statement of the case is this: Greek art did not come to an end with the death of Praxiteles or the Roman conquest. Its central impulse passed over from the impoverished mainland to the still flourishing communities of the East, to Antioch on the Mæander where the Aphrodite of Melos was produced, to Rhodes where the Laocoön was carved, to Ephesus, and farther east still, even into Parthia and possibly India. It was by no means stereotyped but still producing new forms to meet fresh demands, as for sarcophagi in Sidon, or for paintings and mosaics in Egypt. In the course of this period the art of the Greeks was much influenced by the East. The Romans at first were content to take Greek art as they found it. In the days of Mummius they were merely like rich transatlantic collectors in search of beautiful, still more of precious and unique, commodities. They had no doubt some slaves of their own working in Rome at the arts and crafts. Some of these would be Greeks of inferior birth and capacity reproducing old Greek work for the Roman market. But some of them may well have been Italians, some Etruscans preserving the old artistic traditions of their race. This “collecting” era lasted down to the time of Augustus. We have seen it as late as Cicero and Atticus. There was little demand for new creations in those days. Few temples were being built. The artists were still scattered about the Levant. There was little to attract them to Rome.

But when Augustus decided to build a new Rome of marble, founding or restoring his eighty temples, with arches and theatres innumerable all over the Empire, there must have been a great influx of artists from Greece and Asia Minor. Now begins an art to which we may fairly apply the term Græco-Roman in the sense that it was the work of Greek artists under oriental influences supplying Roman demands. The new demands entailed still further artistic developments; some of them, but not all, to be regarded by those who view the history of art as a whole, as improvements. One main effect of Roman conditions was that art largely ceased its service of religion and became devoted to secular purposes. Thus the limitations of the best Greek art, self-imposed as they were, now broke down. The effect is seen especially in portraiture, where the Romans had a tradition of realism resulting from the use of the death-mask in making wax images of the illustrious deceased. Hence in the decoration of the great Altar of Peace at Rome, the Greek artists, who would naturally have produced a frieze of gods or idealised worshippers, were asked for portraits of the men of the day. I think it is clear that enormous skill was devoted to the likenesses of men and very little care to the gods. The composition of the whole was of little account. A little later the demand for historical reliefs on arches and columns was met by the development of quite new features in the art of sculpture, namely, those spatial or tridimensional effects of perspective which are so remarkable on the Trajan column.[52] This art seems to have begun in Alexandrian times but Rome may claim the credit for its development. It was necessary, if sculpture was to do that for

“Clytie”

which it was surely never intended—to tell a story. The Parthenon frieze was religious ornament, the Trajan column is secular history. When the Romans required ornament they were content with decoration merely and the artists complied with the wonderful skill which they had probably learnt in Asia. Never have there been such exquisite natural designs in wreaths and festoons of flowers and fruit as in the sculpture of the Augustan age.[53] It is the same with the art of the goldsmith, as we see in the wonderful discoveries of silver made at Hildesheim and Bosco Reale[54] or in the great imperial cameos wrought in sardonyx.[55] There was money and skill in plenty. But what was lacking was a spirit to animate it.

If we could be sure of our ground in setting down realism as the Roman contribution to the history of Art, it would be a great achievement for Rome. Realism is undoubtedly a fine thing though idealism is a finer. Unfortunately it seems that Hellenic art in the eastern centres was developing realism, or at least illusionism, for itself on its own soil. On the whole, in the controversy between the archæologists, Strzygowski, who claims the East as the inspiring force in Roman days, seems to have the best of it. The coins of Asia Minor present realistic portraiture quite distinct from that which was native on Roman soil. Thus the exquisite festoons of flowers, fruit, and birds, all botanically and anatomically correct to the last feather or stamen, are probably the product of Greece and the East. But we may well believe that the nature of the Roman patron’s demands assisted this movement. The Roman, if we may judge by Pliny the Roman art-critic, was just the man to insist that an apple should not resemble a pear or to count the petals of a poppy. This sort of criticism affords excellent discipline for the artist. The statues of the period, such as the Venus Genetrix by Arcesilaus in the Louvre[56] and the Orestes and Electra group by Stephanus at Naples, are not very interesting works. They are plainly late-born issues of Greek sculpture, though in the latter there is an attempt at expression which seems to be derived from the influence of portraiture. The “Electra,” for example, has the same look in her eyes, a frowning look as of one standing in strong sunlight, that we see in the portrait of Agrippa. Portraiture had taught the sculptor of this day new secrets about the setting of the human eye. They had learnt the effect produced by deepening the hollow under the brow and by making the direction of the glance diverge from that of the head and body. But much of this was a legacy from Scopas. In little things like the hang of Electra’s robe there is visible degeneration. Here, as in the Tellus Group, the contour of the bosom is made to support the falling drapery, an unnatural and very unpleasing effect.

The architecture of the period is distinguished by similar characteristics. It is distinctly Græco-Roman with much of the subtle harmony of fine Greek work lost. The temples are, on the whole, the least interesting part of the work, for they are pale copies of Greek architecture not always very artistically adapted. A good many of the ruined monuments of Rome to which the pious traveller now directs his footsteps date from the Augustan period. Many of the temples of the Republic were now rebuilt on the old plan with more sumptuous materials, as, for example, the round shrine of Mater Matuta,[57] commonly called the Temple of Hercules. Technical innovations include the debasement of the Doric column by omitting those subtle flutings which gave it all the grace whereby its strength was saved from clumsiness, and by erecting it upon a pedestal. But the Romans preferred the more exuberant Corinthian order with its florid capital of acanthus foliage, a type which the Greeks had used very sparingly and seldom externally. Again, the Romans had discovered improved methods of construction which enabled them to use a wider span in roofing, but they made no artistic advantage out of this fact. On the contrary, by dispensing with the peristyle or surrounding colonnade they rendered the exterior of their temples much less interesting.

FIG. 1.
THEEMPEROR CARACALLA 		FIG 2.
THE EMPEROR COMMODUS
Plate LXVIII.

The principal surviving relics of Augustan temples are eight columns of the Temple of Saturn[58] which still stand in the Forum at Rome. The celebrated Pantheon[59] is now recognised to be a work of Hadrian’s time though its plan probably repeats that of the temple erected on the site by Agrippa. But the clearest picture of the ecclesiastical architecture of the day is to be seen on the reliefs of the Altar of Peace, which reproduce the appearance of actual temples with almost photographic exactitude. The finest extant example is undoubtedly the temple at Nismes, known as the Maison Carrée,[60] a graceful erection of this period which exhibits the Corinthian style without undue extravagance.

As the Romans of this day had scarcely any trace of genuine religious feeling it is not surprising that they had little of their own to contribute to temple architecture except wealth and magnificence. But they were naturally devoted to building and that was the favourite extravagance of the rich. Nothing but a few pavements survives of all the handsome villas which dotted the hill-sides at Tibur and Præneste, or lined the coast at Baiæ, Naples, and Surrentum. But there are several secular buildings of Augustan date in which we can see a handsome Græco-Roman style of architecture wherein Greek columns and entablatures were used by Roman architects chiefly as ornament. The Theatre of Marcellus,[61] built in 13 B.C., still presents considerable remains, which though much defaced exhibit an appearance of bygone splendour. The lower story is Doric, the second is Ionic, and the third which has perished was probably in the Corinthian style. We may judge its effective appearance from the copy of its elevation which Michael Angelo produced in his design for the inner court of the Farnese Palace at Rome.[62] The Renaissance learnt much of its architecture from Augustan Rome and these very designs may be seen springing up around us to-day in the banks and town-halls of London. Thus Augustan Rome holds a supremacy for secular building even greater than Periclean Athens achieved for temples. Where magnificence and solidity—and it may be added cheapness—are the principal motives of construction, the Græco-Roman style of the First Century B.C. is unmatched.

The most gorgeous of the architectural creations of Augustus was, however, that Temple of Mars the Avenger which he set up in memory of his triumph over Antony and his punishment of the conspirators. Round it was a piazza (forum) adorned with imaginary portrait statues of all the Roman heroes of history with biographical inscriptions on the bases. In all the Augustan culture we see the impress of the prince’s own Græco-Roman taste. It was all planned to achieve his object of dazzling the multitude and yet gaining over to his side the highest intellect and taste of his day. His own tastes were refined and fastidious: he hated extravagance and utility was always before his eyes. “He read the classics in both tongues” says Suetonius, “principally in order to find salutary precepts and examples for public and private life. He would copy these out word for word and send them to his servants or to the governors of armies and provinces or to the magistrates of the city whenever they required his admonitions. He used to read whole volumes to the Senate, and often publish them in an edict.” We learn further that he always prepared his more important orations most carefully, writing them down and keeping the manuscript close at hand. This practice he followed even in his discourse with his wife. Augustan culture has just this quality: it takes immense pains and succeeds by virtue of them. It lacks a good deal in spontaneity but it makes up in excellence of technique.

FIG. 1.
WARRIORS

FIG. 2.
APOTHEOSIS OF ANTONINUA AND FAUSTINE

Plate LXIX. RELIEFS FROM THE BASE OF THE ANTONINE COLUMN

VI
THE GROWTH OF THE EMPIRE

Ambitionem scriptoris facile auerseris, obtrectatio et liuor pronis auribus accipiuntur quippe adulationi fœdum crimen seruitutis, malignitati falsa species libertatis inest.—Tacitus.

N these words, pregnant and terse as ever, Tacitus gives us a key to the true reading of imperial Roman history. “It is easy,” he says, “to discount the self-interest of the historian and to reject his eulogies, but his malicious criticisms are greedily swallowed. For flattery bears the odious stamp of servility, while malignity wears the false disguise of independence.” Thus out of his own mouth the foremost historian of the early Empire gives us the right to read the literary sources in a spirit favourable to the emperors. So when the historians describe Tiberius as a bloodthirsty tyrant who hid himself away in the island of Capri, and there (at the age of seventy!) began to devote himself to disgusting orgies of lust and cruelty, we shall prefer to reject that story as absurd, and to regard Tiberius as a proud and reserved aristocrat who found it impossible to tolerate the mixture of adulation and spite with which he was treated by the other nobles of Rome, and withdrew from the capital in order to escape it. When Gaius (Caligula) is represented as a lunatic, we merely understand that he was unpopular; when we are told that he made his horse a consul, we recognise a satirist’s humorous exaggeration of his neglect of some noble family’s claims to that office; when we read that he set his army to collect oyster shells on the coast of Normandy, we only conclude that his surrender of the projected invasion of Britain was a subject of ridicule in Rome. Claudius is described as a stupid and clumsy pedant, deformed and inarticulate: in reality he seems to have been a scholar with a leaning towards antiquarian and republican traditions. Even in the case of Nero, the savage ferocity with which he is charged is chiefly due to the fact that his hand lay heavy on the senators. He was undoubtedly popular with the commons, and his real offence was to possess more refinement and culture than was considered proper in a Roman noble, to be too fond of Greeks and art and music. Nevertheless it is impossible to write history in whitewash, and the only safe method of dealing with a period like this is to ignore the personalities on the throne of the Cæsars, and to attempt a broad treatment of the general tendency of these times.

But by neglecting the gossip and the personalities we do, I fear, run the risk of missing much of the interest of the period, and perhaps we lose an important part of the truth. We must not allow ourselves to be wholly deprived of that impression of purple and splendour which hangs about the Golden House of Nero, nor to forget the taint of crime which clings to the palaces of the Cæsars. The latter in particular is an essential part of imperial history. As we have seen, this Empire founded on compromise was and remained illegitimate. The succession was always open to question; there was no law of heredity. This fact was emphasised by the barrenness of the Roman aristocracy. For a hundred years no prince had a son to succeed him, so that the palace was always full of intrigue. Finally, the wickedness of the women is one of the most sinister features of the time. Though it was, indeed, no innovation of the Empire, it now gains a terrible significance in the dynastic conflicts which surrounded the throne. Every one of the early reigns is stained with murders and fearful crimes in the palace. No doubt much of this history is false and malicious. For example, it is by no means likely that Germanicus was poisoned. There were always scandal-mongers to hint at poison when any member of the ruling house died of disease. But even with the most liberal discount for exaggeration, the record is a black one. Let us select two typical stories, in order to suggest the kind of satanic halo which surrounds the imperial houses, as the ancient historians depict them.

Plate LXX. TWO VIEWS OF THE AQUEDUCT OF CLAUDIUS

Claudius, the conqueror of Britain, was in reality the ablest and best of the Claudian Cæsars who succeeded Augustus, but his wife Messalina, thirty-four years his junior, was a creature of shameless lust and remorseless cruelty. Valerius Asiaticus, a Gaul by birth but now the richest noble of his day, was in possession of the far-famed gardens of Lucullus. Messalina coveted the park and accused him to her husband, with the inevitable result. Asiaticus died like a gentleman. He took his usual exercise, he bathed and dined quite cheerfully, and then he opened his veins, “but not until he had inspected his funeral pyre and ordered its removal to another place, for fear that the smoke should injure the thick foliage of the trees.” So died this lover of gardens. Messalina’s sins grew more open, until at last she went through a public pantomime of marriage with one of her paramours, Silius, a consul-elect. The ceremony was performed before a number of witnesses duly invited. Claudius was at that time guided by the counsels of three Greek secretaries, and one of them determined to reveal the shameful truth to the emperor. Tacitus tells the story of her ruin in graphic language. She was celebrating the vintage feast in the gardens she had wickedly gained for herself. The presses were being trodden, the vats were overflowing, women girt with skins were dancing, as Bacchanals dance in their worship or their frenzy. Messalina with flowing hair shook the thyrsus, and Silius, at her side, crowned with ivy and wearing the buskin, moved his head in time with some lascivious chorus. One of the guests had climbed a tree in sport and reported a “hurricane from Ostia.” It was truer than he knew, for just then messengers began to arrive with news that Claudius was on his way from Ostia, coming with vengeance. The revels ceased, the revellers fled in all directions, and Messalina, left deserted, mounted a garden cart to proceed along the road to meet her husband. Her appeal failed, though Claudius would undoubtedly have relented but for the interference of the freedman Narcissus. After dinner, warmed with the wine, he bade some one go and tell “that poor creature” to come before him on the morrow to plead her cause. But Narcissus had already sent soldiers to her, and she was driven to suicide. “Claudius was still at the banquet when they told him that Messalina was dead, without mentioning whether it was by her own or another’s hand. Nor did he ask the question, but called for his cup and finished the repast as usual.”

Nero, too, in the pages of Suetonius appears so incredible in his wickedness that the exaggeration is obvious. Of his splendid new palace the Golden House we read: “The portico was so high that it could contain a colossal statue of himself a hundred and twenty feet in height; and the space it included was so vast that it had a triple colonnade, a mile in length, and a lake like a sea, surrounded with buildings that looked like a city. It had a park with cornfields, vineyards, pastures, and woods containing a vast number of animals of all kinds, wild and tame. Parts of it were entirely overlaid with gold, and incrusted with jewels and pearl. The supper-rooms were vaulted and the compartments of the ceilings, which were inlaid with ivory, were made to revolve and scatter flowers. They also contained pipes to shed scents upon the guests. The chief banqueting-room was circular and revolved perpetually day and night, according to the motion of the celestial bodies. The baths were supplied with water from the sea and the Albula.” At the dedication of this magnificent building, all that he said in praise of it was: “Now at last I have begun to live like a gentleman.” They charged Nero with the murder of all his relatives, and there is a grim sort of humour in the story of his frequent attempts upon his mother’s life. His grievance against her was that she was too strict. First, he deprived her of her bodyguard, and suborned people to harass her with lawsuits which drove her out of the city. In her retirement he set others to follow her about by land and sea with abuse and scurrilous language. Three times he attempted her life by poison, but finding she had previously rendered herself immune by the use of antidotes, he next designed machinery to make the floor above her bed-chamber collapse while she was asleep. When this failed he constructed a special coffin-ship, which could be made to fall in pieces, and then sent her a loving invitation to visit him at Baiæ, the Brighton of the Romans. The ships of her escort were likewise instructed to ram her by accident on the way home. He attended her to the vessel in a very cheerful spirit and kissed her bosom at parting with her. After which he sat up late at night waiting with great anxiety for the joyful news of her decease. But news arrived that the accident had miscarried, the dowager empress was swimming to shore. When her freedman came joyfully to narrate her escape, Nero pretended that the man had come to assassinate him and ordered her to be put to death. Suetonius adds “on good authority” that he went to view her corpse and criticised her blemishes to his followers, and then called for drink. After this he was haunted by her ghost.

The famous story of his death is told with a little restraint, and the latter part of it is not incredible. When the first bad news came of the revolt of Vindex with the legions of Gaul, Nero summoned his privy council and held a hasty consultation with them about the crisis, but spent the rest of the day in showing them a hydraulic organ and discoursing upon the intricacies of the invention. Then he composed a skit upon the rebels, and prepared a pathetic speech which was to make the mutineers return to his allegiance in tears. He sat down to compose the songs of triumph which should be sung upon that occasion. In preparing his expedition his first thought was to provide carriages for the band: he equipped all his concubines as Amazons with battle-axes and bucklers. But when he heard of the revolt of the Spanish army under Galba also, he fell into a temper and tore the dispatch to pieces. He broke his precious cups and put up a dose of Locusta’s poison in a golden box. He ordered the prætorian guard to rally round him, but they only quoted Vergil to him:

“Is death indeed so hard a lot?”

At midnight he awoke and found that the guards had deserted his bedside. Even his bedding and his golden box of poison had been stolen. So he stumbled out into the night as if he would throw himself into the Tiber. But a few faithful slaves came to him and a freedman offered him his country villa for a refuge, and Nero rode thither in a shabby disguise. An earthquake shook the ground and a flash of lightning darted in his face; he heard the soldiers in the prætorian camp shouting for Galba. Skulking among bushes and briers, he crawled on all fours to a wretched outhouse of his freedman’s villa. There he ordered them to dig a grave and line it with scraps of marble. The water and wood for his obsequies were prepared, while he uttered the famous words “qualis artifex pereo!” either meaning “What an artist the world is losing!” or (more probably) “What an artistic death!” A dispatch came to announce that he had been declared a public enemy by the senate, and was to be punished according to the ancient custom of the Romans. He asked what sort of death that meant, and was informed that the criminal was generally stripped naked and scourged to death with his head in a pillory. Then he took up daggers and tried the points, but still he dared not die. He begged one of his attendants to give him the example. At last he heard the horsemen coming, quoted a line of the Iliad very appropriately, and drove, with the help of his secretary, a dagger into his throat.

Now, even of this, three-quarters is pure rhetoric. For example, it was impossible that Nero should have heard the soldiers in the Esquiline Camp from the road which he took to his servant’s villa. The details are the invention of malice, or the attempt of a literary artist to improve his story. Even Suetonius admits that the populace continued to deck Nero’s tomb with spring and summer flowers, that they dressed up his image and placed it on the rostra as if he were still alive, and that a pretender, who arose in his name twenty years later, was received with acclamation among the Parthians.

FIG. 1.
ARCH OF TITUS 		FIG 2.
ARCH OF CONSTANTINE
Plate LXXI.

Having made this concession to the literary tradition which can be shown to be very largely fiction, we may now endeavour to gather up the fragments of history and briefly trace the progress of the Empire during its first century. First, as to its geographical growth; although Augustus had bequeathed in his testament the advice not to enlarge the frontiers of the Empire, and Tiberius had observed the precept, yet conquest still remained an object of ambition in the heart of every emperor who sought military renown or fresh sources of revenue. Britain, the declined legacy of Julius, was obviously beckoning the Romans. Diplomatic relations with the many kings of that island had always been frequent, and it was found that Britain was an inconvenient neighbour for a rapidly Romanising Gaul. There was a continual coming and going across the water, for there were kindred peoples on each side. Especially, it was the last refuge of the anti-Roman force of Druidism, a religion which was already declining and was suppressed by Claudius in Gaul. That this was so is shown by the forward movement of the Romans in the direction of Anglesey. The details of the conquest of Britain are, in spite of voluminous discussions, by no means certain. Aulus Plautius Silvanus with four legions, and with the future emperor Vespasian as one of his brigadiers, defeated Cymbeline and ten other kings of South Britain, crossed the Thames and conquered Colchester (Camulodunum), which became a Roman colonia and the centre of government. This was in A.D. 43, and Claudius himself spent a fortnight in our island in order to receive the honours of victory. The conquest was not too easily achieved, for there were five great battles in which the emperor, though absent, received the titles of victory. Plautius himself seems to have reached the line of the Trent and Severn. Ostorius Scapula, his successor, was mainly occupied in subduing the Silures of the Welsh mountains, and in the conquest of the elusive prince Caradoc. The mercy shown to that defeated hero proves that the Romans had advanced in humanity since the days of Jugurtha. The two succeeding legates made no fresh advance, but Suetonius Paulinus in A.D. 59-61 established Chester as his western camp. While he was engaged in the conquest of Anglesey, leaving only the ninth legion to hold the conquered province, there broke out the great rebellion under the heroic Boudicca. There never has been a quarrel in this island which has not had money as its root. It was not so much the oppressive nature of the tribute as the vexatious methods of the Roman financiers, who still as in republican days swarmed in the wake of eagles, that stirred the Iceni and their queen into revolt. Camulodunum, Verulamium, and Londinium were taken and sacked and there was an immense slaughter of Roman civilians and Romanised Britons. But vengeance followed: no barbarians could stand against the strategy and discipline of the legions.

Succeeding governors were mainly content to pacify and civilise the island.

One of the extraordinarily pungent chapters of Tacitus shows us the Roman method of empire-building in Britain. “The following winter,” he says of A.D. 79, “was spent in useful statecraft. To make a people which was scattered and barbarous, and therefore prone to warfare, grow accustomed to peace and quietness by way of their pleasures, Agricola used to persuade them by private exhortations and public assistance to build temples, forums, and houses, with praise for the eager and admonitions for the laggard. Thus they could not help embarking on the rivalry for honour. Now he began to instruct the sons of chieftains in the liberal arts, to extol the natural abilities of the Britons above the

Plate LXXII. THE COLOSSEUM, ROME

studious habits of Gaul, so that those who lately rejected even the Roman language now became zealous for oratory. So even our dress came into esteem, and the toga was commonly worn. The next step was towards the attractions of our vices, lounging in colonnades, baths, and refined dinner-parties. They were too ignorant to see that what they call civilisation was really a form of slavery.” There is no doubt that the Britons took as readily as their Gallic cousins to the Roman civilisation. Many of them took Roman names and became Roman citizens. They learnt the pleasures of the bath and the amphitheatre, their mines were exploited, arts and industries were introduced, agriculture was improved. The Druids hid themselves away in the unconquered fastnesses of Wales or crossed over to the Hibernian island which the Romans never had leisure to conquer. Meanwhile the Britons were learning to worship the obsolete gods of Rome, and presently the Eastern deities who came in their train.

It was the father-in-law of Tacitus, Julius Agricola, who conquered, or at least defeated, the northern tribes of England. Among the powerful Brigantes he established a garrison at York (Eburacum), which eventually became the most important of all the Roman centres. He advanced into Scotland also, and inflicted a bloody defeat upon the wild Caledonians. But Scotland remained unconquered, as did the neighbouring island upon which also Agricola had cast his ambitious eyes. The Roman army was wanted elsewhere, and the Emperor Domitian declined to assist any further adventures. Little more of our island’s story is recorded until the travelling Emperor Hadrian came out to visit us in A.D. 122. He saw that the wild north was only to be won by a gradual advance with more or less peaceful penetration northwards. The system of fortified frontiers was already established on the Rhine and Danube, and Hadrian drew his finger across the seventy miles between Bowness and Wallsend. Across this space, where the Tyne and Solway almost overlap, the Roman lines ran straight over hill and dale, and there they are to this day as a silent proof of the greatness of the Roman people.[63] This was more than a frontier: it was a vast elongated camp which looked south as well as north and frowned alike upon the Brigantes and the Caledonians. It was pierced at intervals by fortified gates and great roads ran northwards through it. On the north there was first a ditch, and then a stone wall broad enough for two or three men to walk abreast along it and nearly twenty feet high. Behind this, in a space of about 140 yards wide runs a road connecting a chain of fourteen large camps, some of which grew into towns. Southward again was the quadruple rampart of earth, a mound, a dyke, and then a double mound. This immense labour, though it is small in comparison with Roman works elsewhere, was achieved not by British slaves, but by Roman soldiers, some of whom were Britons, some Spaniards, and some Germans. It was completed gradually under various emperors. There were detached forts both north and south of the wall of Hadrian. It was Antoninus Pius who made the next step twenty years later. The Antonine wall from the Forth to the Clyde is only about half as long and of inferior strength. There were camps even north of this, in Stirlingshire for example, and it is clear that the Romans intended to feel their way into the Highlands. But that was contrary to their fates.

Gaul meanwhile was becoming as civilised as Italy herself. Numbers of the Gauls who had acquired the Latin speech received the jus Latinum, which was almost equivalent to full citizenship. Claudius admitted the chiefs of the Ædui into the Roman senate, and part of the speech in which he did so is preserved on bronze tablets at Lyons. Twice in the course of the century there were interesting attempts to give political expression to the Gallic sense of nationality. The revolt of Vindex at the close of Nero’s reign was little more than a mutiny, but the projected “Empire of the Gauls,” which was set up during the confusion which followed the fall of Vitellius, came very near success. Jealousy between the Gauls and Germans wrecked it.

Plate LXXIII. THE COLUMN OF TRAJAN

In the case of Germany, it looked for a time as if Tiberius, who, of course, had personal knowledge of the difficulties and advantages of further conquest, meant to break his stepfather’s precept and annex more territory. But probably the annual expeditions of Germanicus were not intended to be more than punitive and demonstrative. Blood enough was shed, and acres enough laid waste, to appease the unburied ghosts of Varus and his legions. But though the great battle of Idistavisus was hailed as a Roman victory, Arminius himself continually eluded the Romans and the legions were more than once in peril of ambush. When Tiberius cried halt, it was open to the critics to find a malevolent explanation in his jealousy of Germanicus, but it is much more likely to have been the deliberate policy of an emperor who had knowledge of Germany. Thus, although Arminius presently fell a victim to his own ambition, and perished by the dagger of a tyrannicide kinsman, he had done his work and saved the liberty of Germany. Henceforth the Romans confined themselves to the Rhine frontier, though they had posts and summer camps beyond it. By degrees the generals of the Upper and Lower Armies in Germany developed into governors of two German provinces, but Germany was unconquered. There was a great military road along the left bank of the Rhine joining the garrison towns where the legions were quartered. Mogontiacum (Mainz) and Vetera Castra (Xanten) remained as the head-quarters, until the latter was superseded by Cologne (Colonia Agrippinensis) founded under Claudius. Trier (Augusta Treverorum), another foundation of about the same date, grew into an important centre of Roman civilisation, as its majestic Roman gate[64] and fine amphitheatre still bear witness. Under Claudius also the great Via Claudia over the Brenner Pass was completed, and the canal joining the Maas to the Rhine. This was better work for Roman soldiers than slaughtering Chatti and Chauci in their native forests. The re-entrant angle of the Rhine and Danube about the Black Forest, where the rivers run small, was recognised as a danger-point. The barbarian Germans were accordingly cleared away to make room for a body of Gallic emigrants, who received lands on condition of paying a tithe of their produce as rent, and of undertaking their own defence. This was a new piece of frontier policy which was often imitated in later times.

Roman Limes

It seems to have been the Flavian emperors, Vespasian and Domitian, who advanced a step farther. On the other side of the Rhine and beyond these Agri Decumates the Romans began to construct a line of forts and wooden watch-towers linked by a rampart of earth, and known as the Limes Trans-Rhenanus. This frontier of Upper Germany left the Rhine between Linz and Andernach, crossed the Lahn at Ems, and then turned eastwards north of Wiesbaden (Aquæ Mattiacæ) and Frankfort. After Saalburg it runs on a north-easterly curve to Gruningen, whence it turns south, and continues for more than 100 miles through Aschaffenburg and Worth to join the Rhætian limes at Lorch. From Lorch the Rhætian limes goes eastwards to join the Danube a few miles above Regensburg. At first perhaps it was little more than a police and customs limit, but it gradually grew into a formidable barrier behind which the Roman Empire rested in a too profound security. Trajan continued it. Hadrian strengthened it with a wall and palisade. Commodus further fortified and extended it. A similar bulwark ran along the Danube.

Plate LXXIV. DETAIL OF THE ANTONINE COLUMN

This policy of setting up immobile defences like the Great Wall of China is always a dangerous one. Useful at first and visibly strong, it tends to lull the defenders into a false security. The camps and forts grew into towns, the armies into peaceful citizens living with their wives and children and devoting themselves to trade and husbandry. Meanwhile the barbarians on the other side were growing stronger and learning the art of war as fast as the Romans were forgetting it.

After this the danger-point for the Empire shifted gradually eastwards down the Danube. Claudius had converted Thrace from an allied kingdom into a Roman province in A.D. 46. Much difficulty was caused by the Dacians, who lived just across the Danube on the north bank opposite the Roman province of Mœsia and in the modern Roumania. As the Danube was apt to become frozen in winter it ceased to offer a satisfactory frontier, so long as there were powerful enemies on the other side. At first the Romans tried the system of transplanting them, 50,000 under Augustus and 100,000 under Nero, and settling them in the province of Mœsia. But it was a stupid policy, for it meant constant intrigues between the free barbarians and their enslaved kinsfolk. Vespasian accordingly moved two legions down from Dalmatia to reinforce the two already stationed in Mœsia. But presently there arose an able and heroic king called Decebalus, who welded the Dacians into a compact and organised kingdom, and began to menace the security of the Empire. Like Marbod of Bohemia, he drilled his barbarians on the Roman model. In A.D. 85 he invaded Mœsia, won victories and did great damage. Domitian, called upon to face this peril, was content with inflicting a single defeat upon them and then accepting Decebalus as a client prince. He gave him Roman engineers and artillerymen, and even sent gifts of money which the barbarians were pleased to regard as tribute. This has been set down as cowardice, but it was certainly unwisdom in Domitian, for Decebalus grew stronger and more dangerous. It was left for Trajan, the greatest soldier of all the early emperors, to face this thorny problem in the two great Dacian Wars of 101 and 105 B.C. The whole war is depicted for us by pictures in stone. The spiral reliefs which cover the column of Trajan tell us, with far more detail than the narrative of Dio, the history of the two Dacian Wars. We see the embarkation of the Roman army, we see it on the march with its scouts in advance, we see the solemn purifications, sacrifices, and harangues which preceded battle. We see the battles themselves, in which the Romans with sword and pilum defeat the Dacians and their mail-clad Sarmatian cavalry. The great bridge built across the Danube at Viminacium by the Greek architect Apollodorus is faithfully depicted. We can watch the siege of the Dacian capital, Sarmizegethusa, and observe the construction of the siege-engines. Scenes of pathos are most graphically portrayed, the torturing of Roman prisoners by the barbarian women, the suicide of the Dacian chiefs by poison, and the death of the heroic Decebalus. At intervals throughout the story there appears and reappears the calm and stately figure of Trajan, steering his ship, sacrificing for victory, leading the march or the charge, haranguing his troops, directing the labour of engineering, consulting with his officers, or receiving the submission of the foe.[65]

The end of the two wars was that Dacia was annexed and became a province of the Empire. Here, as elsewhere, Trajan showed his contempt of natural frontiers. As a gallant soldier himself, he believed in the invincibility of the Roman arms, and preferred to put his trust in legions rather than in walls. For this he has been condemned by modern historians, but history is on his side. More than anything else it was reliance on natural frontiers and artificial ramparts, with the consequent loss of military instincts, which was to be the undoing of the Roman Empire.

FIG. 1.
THE “MONDRAGORE” ANTINOUS		FIG 2.
ANTINOUS (BRITISH MUSEUM)
Plate LXXV.

On the eastern frontier it was for a long time a game of tug-of-war between Rome and Parthia, the rope being supplied by the kingdom of Armenia. The Augustan policy of filling the oriental thrones with princes trained at Rome was not a great success. You might learn bad lessons at court; you might even learn to know Rome without learning to love or fear her. The princes sent to Armenia or Parthia were unstable allies and the ordinary course of events was for the Romans to send out a king to Armenia and for the Parthians to depose him. Again it was left for Trajan to attack this problem in the old Roman fashion; when the usual submissive embassy arrived, Trajan answered, as a Metellus might have done, that he wanted deeds not words, and he led his army on. Trajan found the Eastern legions, whose headquarters were at Antioch, already civilianised and orientalised so that they had become useless for fighting. At this time there were four legions in Syria, one in Judæa and one in the new province of Cappadocia. The first task was to restore discipline and energy to these troops. Then, without bloodshed, in A.D. 115 Armenia was declared a province. Parthia, distracted by civil war, was overrun, its capital Ctesiphon easily taken by siege. Mesopotamia was made a province, and to Parthia was given a new king. The client kingdom of Adiabene became a third new province under the name of Assyria. This meant that the Tigris became the eastern frontier instead of the Euphrates. Unfortunately these conquests had been too easily achieved, largely through the temporary dissensions of the Parthians, who accordingly failed to experience the salutary discipline of real defeat. Trajan died on his way home, and Hadrian, who was more of a statesman than a warrior, reversed his predecessor’s policy. He surrendered the three new provinces and even acquiesced in the Parthians’ choice of a king of their own in place of the Roman nominee. The only new provinces of Trajan’s creation which Hadrian retained were Dacia and Arabia.

Although their military force was contemptible, their spiritual zeal made the Jews the most difficult people to govern in the whole empire. Worshipping their Jealous God with fierce ardour, they could not join in the Cæsar-worship which was the outward sign of loyalty and patriotism throughout the Roman world. Moreover the Semitic question had already begun to vex the soul of Europe. Throughout the East and especially in the trade centres such as Antioch, Alexandria, and Cyrene there were already large communities of Jews who lived on the usual terms of deep-rooted racial animosity with their neighbours. It is only fair to the Roman government to admit that it tried to conciliate its difficult subjects. Though the vanity of Caligula led him to accept the suggestion of erecting a colossal statue of him in the Temple at Jerusalem, yet when the philosopher Philo and his fellow-ambassadors came over to plead against the outrage the emperor good-humouredly remarked that if people refused to worship him it was more their misfortune than their fault. As a rule the Roman procurators who administered Galilee and Judæa were almost too tolerant of Jewish fanaticism. The Jews were exempt from military service: their Sabbaths were respected. A Roman soldier who tore a book of the law was put to death. It was useless to argue with such sects as the Zealots and Assassins. The Anti-Semite spirit broke out into massacres. In Cæsarea, Damascus, and elsewhere the Gentiles slew the Jews; in Alexandria and Cyrene the Jews slaughtered the Gentiles. In Jerusalem the Romans had to face violent discord between the rival factions, and naturally they sided with the more tolerant and moderate Sadducees against the stern Pharisees and the smaller sects of extremists. In A.D. 66 matters came to a crisis. A Roman garrison was attacked and destroyed: the army which came from Syria to avenge them was repulsed with slaughter. This occurred while the Emperor Nero was on one of his theatrical tours in Greece, and in the next year Vespasian was sent with an army of three legions and auxiliaries which increased its numbers to more than 50,000. During the death of Nero and the short reigns of his three successors, Vespasian was gradually subduing Palestine and driving the irreconcilables before him into Jerusalem. Vespasian himself became emperor and it was left to his son Titus to finish the tragedy.

Plate LXXVI. ANTINOUS: VILLA ALBANI RELIEF

The siege of Jerusalem (A.D. 70) was one of the most difficult tasks which the Romans ever had to face. In addition to its natural strength there were six lines of fortification to be overcome one by one, and each was defended with all the grim tenacity of which the Semite race is capable when it is on the defensive. Five months the great siege lasted, and at the end Jerusalem was a heap of ruins. Some of the temple treasures were saved for the Roman triumph, and the Arch of Titus still shows us the famous seven-branched golden candlestick being carried up to the temple of Capitoline Jove.[66] It is said that one million Jews perished in the siege and 100,000 more were sold into slavery. Jerusalem became merely the camp of the Tenth Legion. All Judæa became one province, and the scattered Jews were only allowed to keep their privileges on condition of registering their names and paying a fee of two denarii every year for their licence.

But this awful lesson had not quenched the fire of Jewish patriotism nor killed their hopes of an earthly Messiah who should restore the kingdom of David. Once again under Hadrian there was a Jewish rebellion stimulated by the fact that the emperor forbade the rite of circumcision and decreed the foundation of a Roman colony at Jerusalem with a temple to Jupiter on Mount Zion. The revolt was stamped out with merciless severity and the Jews were scattered for ever.

The only other noteworthy addition to the Roman Empire was Mauretania (Morocco), which was incorporated as a province by Caligula. The motive alleged was the emperor’s desire to possess himself of the treasures of Ptolemy, its king.

On the whole, then, we can see that the Roman Empire had almost reached its natural limits. It had seized as much as it could govern, and now, with the exception of the Parthian kingdom, all that lay outside its frontiers was naked barbarism. So the centre grew more and more unwarlike, while the legions had little to occupy their minds except the speculation whether their particular general had a chance of the purple. For this reason alone the Cæsars were loth to embark on conquests, unless like Trajan they were willing to neglect everything else and undertake the campaigns in person. A victorious general was always to be dreaded by his master.