The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 05

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CHAPTER XIX. THE DICTATORSHIP OF SULLA

[81-79 B.C.]

The reign of violence and revolution dated from the victory of the Colline Gate, the first of November, 82. While the young Marius and his colleague still occupied the consular office, the master of Rome, omnipotent as he really was, could not legitimately be invested with any civil authority. The weapon which he wielded with such terrible effect was the unsheathed sword of his proconsular imperium. The tribunal, before which he cited the wretched victims of his policy or vengeance, was the military suggestum of the prætorian tent. The death of Marius a few days later rendered vacant one of the consuls’ chairs. Carbo, who occupied the other, did not long survive, being taken in Sicily and executed by Pompey without respect to his rank or office. Before the close of the year the republic was left without a chief magistrate. The senate appointed L. Flaccus, one of Sulla’s officers, interrex to hold the assembly for the election of consuls for the term which was about to commence. But Flaccus, prompted by his imperator, proceeded to recommend the creation of a dictator.

The senate obeyed, the people acquiesced, and after an interval of 120 years, which had elapsed since Q. Fabius Maximus, the citizens beheld once more the four-and-twenty lictors, who invested with invidious splendour that union of civil and military pre-eminence of which their feelings and institutions were equally jealous. The dictatorship, they might remember, had been the rare resource of the patricians in ancient times, when they roused themselves to defend their hateful privileges against the just claims of the plebeians; but since the rights of either class had been happily blended together, the office itself had ceased to have any significance. To revive it now, when no enemy was at the gates, was only to threaten the commons of Rome with a new aristocratical revolution, to menace rights and liberties acquired in a struggle of two hundred years, and on which the greatness and glory of Rome were confessedly founded. But all these misgivings were hushed in silence.[b]

In the vivid words of Plutarch in North’s old translation, Sulla in the beginning, was very modest and civil in all his prosperity, and gave great good hope that if he came to the authority of a prince, he would favour nobility well, and yet love, notwithstanding, the benefit of the people. And being moreover a man in his youth given all to pleasure, delighting to laugh, ready to pity, and weep for tender heart; in that he became after so cruel and bloody, the great alteration gave manifest cause to condemn the increase of honour and authority, as the only means whereby men’s manners continue not such as they were at the first, but still do change and vary, making some fools, others vain and fantastical, and others extremely cruel and unnatural. But whether that alteration of nature came by changing his state and condition, or that it was otherwise a violent breaking out of hidden malice, which then came to show itself, when the way of liberty was laid open; this matter is to be decided in some other treatise. So it came to pass, that Sulla fell to shedding of blood and filled all Rome with infinite and unspeakable murders; for divers were killed for private quarrels, that had nothing to do with Sulla at any time, who suffered his friends and those about him to work their wicked wills.

But the most wicked and unjust act of all was that, he deprived the sons, and son’s sons of them whom he had killed, of all credit and good name, and besides that had taken all their goods as confiscate. And this was not only done in Rome, but also in all the cities of Italy throughout; and there was no temple of any god whatsoever, no altar in anybody’s house, no liberty of hospital, nor father’s house, that was not imbrued with blood and horrible murder. For the husbands were slain in their wives’ arms, and the children on their mothers’ laps: and yet they which were slain for private hatred and malice, were nothing in respect of those that were murdered only for their goods. And they that killed them might well say, his goodly great house made that man die, his goodly fair garden the other; and his hot baths another.

But besides so many murders committed, yet were there other things also that grieved the people marvellously. For he proclaimed himself dictator, which office had not been of six score years before in use, and made the senate discharge him of all that was past, giving him free liberty afterwards to kill whom he would, and to confiscate their goods; to destroy cities, and to build up new as he listed; to take away kingdoms, and to give them where he thought good. And furthermore, he openly sold the goods confiscate, by the crier, sitting so proudly and stately in his chair of state, that it grieved the people more to see those goods packed up by them, to whom he gave and disposed them, than to see them taken from those that had forfeited them. For sometimes he would give a whole country, or the whole revenues of certain cities, unto women for their beauty, or unto pleasant jesters, minstrels, or wicked slaves made free; and unto some, he would give other men’s wives by force, and make them to be married against their wills.[c]

The people crouched beneath the brandished sword of the conqueror, and the acclamations of the nobles, who relied upon his stern resolution to crush the insolence of the tribunes and repel the advance of democracy. Even the narrow limit of six months which the law had been wont to assign to the duration of this extraordinary despotism was now disregarded. Sulla was required to reform and reconstitute the commonwealth; he was allowed to determine for himself the period so arduous an enterprise would demand, nor less the principles and the means he should think fit to adopt. The Romans solemnly divested themselves of all their political rights, so long as the great reformer should deem it expedient to exercise autocratic control over them. To Sulla they committed without limit or question the power of life and death over citizens and subjects, of amercing his enemies and rewarding his friends, of building cities or destroying them, of giving away kingdoms or incorporating them in the empire. In order perhaps to mark more conspicuously the pre-eminence of this sovereign power above the legitimate dictatorship of ancient times, Sulla required that the consulship should coexist with it in a state of degrading subordination. He allowed the centuriate assembly to elect M. Tullius Decula and Cneius Dolabella for the year 81. In the following year he assumed the consular fasces himself in conjunction with Metellus Pius, while still retaining the ensigns of the dictatorship. He was elected a second time for the year 79; but his ambition was by this time satisfied and he declined the proffered title.

Proscription and massacre had cleared the ground for the social edifice which Sulla proposed to construct. With a blind and arrogant predilection for the traditionary forms of the ancient Roman municipality, he resolved to restore, as far as circumstances could be moulded thereto, by the harshest exercise of his prerogative, the civil ascendency of the old Roman families. To re-enact indeed the letter of the old oligarchical constitution, as it had existed before the days of plebeian encroachment, was impossible; but he hoped at least to reanimate its spirit. The temper however of the dictator was too impetuous and vehement for an undertaking requiring the most delicate management. His reforms were bold and decisive, they were conceived on a single great idea, and executed with consistency and vigour; but they were not adopted with any consideration for the genuine tendencies of society, and accordingly they struck no root in the mind of the people. Sulla, we have seen, had cut off two hundred senators with the sword of the proscriptions; Marius had probably slaughtered an equal number. The remnant had been decimated on the field of battle. To replenish this frightful void the dictator selected three hundred from the equestrian order; but however respectable in birth and rank these new senators may have been, they could hardly restore the lustre of the great council of the state, which had formerly owed its chief authority to the personal distinction of its members. We may conjecture that the numbers of the body thus reconstructed amounted to about six hundred. The vacancies which thenceforth occurred were probably more than supplied by the regular succession to the benches of the senate of the men who had filled certain high offices. Twenty quæstors were elected annually, and passed into it in due rotation.

The principle of hereditary succession to the senate was never recognised under the Roman Republic, but the practical restriction of the great offices from which it was replenished to one or two hundred families, allowed none of the chief Roman houses to remain unrepresented in the great council of the nation. To these houses Sulla wished to confine the entire legislation of the commonwealth. He repealed the lex Hortensia, by which the resolutions of the tribes were invested with the force of law, and gave to the senate alone the initiation of all legal enactments. To the senate he transferred once more the exclusive possession of the judicia, while he extended the authority of the quæstiones perpetuæ, or standing commissions for the trial of political offences, to a large class of criminal cases, which had hitherto fallen under the cognisance of the popular assemblies. Nothing however so much advanced the influence of the senate as the limitations Sulla placed upon the functions of the tribunate. He deprived the champions of the people of the right of proposing measures in the assembly of the tribes,[97] forbade them to exercise their arbitrary veto upon the legislation of the curia, and restricted their protectorate of the plebs to the relief of individuals in a few trifling cases of civil or criminal process. Whatever shadow of authority the office of tribune might still retain, a stigma was cast upon it by the decree which declared its holder incapable of succeeding to any of the chief magistracies of the state. Ambitious men disdained an office condemned to silence and obscurity. By the disparagement of its leaders the assembly of the tribes lost all its real power [though it could make laws with the senate’s consent and elect certain inferior magistrates]. As for the assembly by centuries, Sulla seems to have felt the impossibility of restoring the complicated machinery by which the citizens were enrolled in classes, according to their means, and the numbers of the lower ranks balanced by an artificial adjustment. If he could not restore in this popular assembly the preponderance which the Servian constitution had secured to property, the superiority he conferred upon the senate in the matter of legislation might suffice to keep the comitia in due subordination. The assembly of the centuries retained the election to the higher magistracies; the dictator relied on the influence of wealth, rank, and dignity, in breaking down the independence of the electors, already sapped by the prevalent dissolution of manners and degeneracy of public feeling. Nevertheless, he took from the people the appointment to the college of pontiffs, and placed the great political engine of the state religion in the hands of a self-elective corporation of the noblest members of the aristocracy.

The senate thus planted one foot on the neck of the knights, the other on that of the commons. Having, as we have seen, almost re-created it by one enormous draft from an inferior order, Sulla wished to insure the permanence of its constitution, and he would have looked, we may suppose, with jealousy on the independent action of the censorship, which ought to have called all its members to account every fifth year, and summarily ejected the unworthy. Accordingly he allowed no censors to execute their functions during his retention of power, nor was their venerable office revived for several years afterwards. The slaughter of the civil wars had caused a frightful reduction in the old Roman population. It was necessary to take measures for recruiting it, and on this account, perhaps, more than from any regard for the promises he had made at an earlier period, the dictator abstained from closing the franchise against the Italians.[98] He showed his contempt for the needy and venal populace by the enfranchisement at one blow of ten thousand slaves, the miserable remnant of the families of proscribed and murdered citizens. Left without masters they would have endangered the tranquillity of the commonwealth, but enrolled among the citizens they might become themselves masters in their turn, and help to keep the oppressed and discontented in subjection, both at home and abroad. They might at least devote themselves to the policy of the dictator.

The establishment of military colonies was one of the most important measures of the dictator. Besides satisfying claims he dared not disregard, he might hope to make these establishments the bulwark of his reforms. If so, we shall presently see how much he miscalculated their effect. But the change they produced in the social and political aspect of Italy was neither light nor transient. One hundred and twenty thousand legionaries, as has been said, received lands in the most fertile parts of the peninsula, and with them, of course, the franchise of the city, if they did not already possess it. This was carrying out an Agrarian law more sweeping and far more arbitrary than the Gracchi had even ventured to conceive. But these same legionaries, thus pampered and enriched, became the most restless and dangerous members of the body politic. Scattered broadcast over the face of the land, they became the prolific seed of disturbance and revolution.

SULLA’S LEGISLATION

Sulla’s legislation, besides its grand political bearings, descended to many minute particulars of social and civil economy. His enemies had revelled in the enjoyment of many successive consulships; he forbade any magistrate to fill the same office twice within a period of ten years. Casting a jealous eye on the proconsular imperium, the foundation of his own extraordinary power, he enacted a law of treason (maiestas), which defined the crimes of leaving the province, leading forth the legions, and attacking a foreign potentate without express command of the senate and people. Like other statesmen of antiquity, he was fully possessed with the notion that the moral character of a nation can be reformed and maintained by sumptuary laws. Accordingly, he sought to restrict the luxuries of the wealthy, in which the imitation of foreign tastes caused, perhaps, more scandal than the actual excess. He fixed the precise sums which might be expended on the pleasures of the table, and assigned three hundred sesterces, about sixty shillings, for suppers on the Calends, Ides, and Nones, and certain of the most solemn festivals of the year. He went even further in the same delusive path, in fixing the prices of articles by arbitrary enactment. Such laws could not outlast even the brief rule of the imposer himself, and Sulla seems, indeed, to have set the example of disregarding them in person. Nevertheless the same ineffective legislation continued to be frequently repeated at later periods.

Among other precautions for guarding the morality of the people, Sulla had denounced the vengeance of the law against the crimes of murder and adultery. But he lived himself in a course of notorious profligacy, and besides the guilt of the proscriptions, he showed that no law could deter him from shedding blood to gratify a momentary passion, or, at least, to confirm his enactments by terror. Lucretius Ofella, the officer who had so long blockaded Præneste, ventured to disregard the dictator’s provision for confining the suit for the consulship to persons who had been already prætors. Sulla admonished him to desist; nevertheless he persisted in his claim. A centurion poniarded him in the middle of the Forum. When the people dragged the assassin to the dictator’s tribunal, he commanded them to let the man go, avowing that he had acted by his own orders; and he proceeded, with the rude humour which he affected, to relate a story, how a labourer, being annoyed by vermin, twice stopped from his work to pluck them off; the third time he cast them without mercy into the fire. “Twice,” said Sulla, “I have conquered and spared you; take care lest, a third time, I consume you utterly.”

ABDICATION OF SULLA

[79-78 B.C.]

Such acts and such language were, however, rather ebullitions of a spoiled and vicious temper than any deliberate expression of contempt for law, or the assertion of an unlimited despotism. The reigning principle of Sulla’s actions was still an affectation of legality. He pretended, at least, to consider the oligarchical constitution of the early republic the only legitimate model for its renovation. The success of his schemes of ambition, the overthrow of all his opponents, the complete restoration, as he imagined, of the principles to which he had devoted himself, all combined to work upon a mind prone to superstition and addicted to fatalism, and changed him from a jealous partizan into an arrogant fanatic. Sulla claimed to be the favourite of fortune, the only divinity in whom he really believed. His reforms were complete, his work accomplished, his part performed; he feared to tempt his patroness by trespassing another moment on her kindness. By resigning his power he sought to escape the Nemesis which haunted his dreams.

A Lictor

In the year 79 Sulla abdicated the dictatorship. He could say that it had been conferred upon him for the reconstitution of the commonwealth, and having done what he was appointed to do, it was no longer his to enjoy. But if the Romans were amazed at this act of sublime self-sacrifice, it was with a feeling akin to awe that they beheld the tyrant descend from his blood-stained tribunal and retire with unmoved composure to the privacy of a suburban villa. Aged and infirm,[99] and sated perhaps with pleasure as well as ambition, it is not too much to believe that such a man as Sulla was indifferent to life, and little troubled by the risk to which he might thus expose himself from the daggers of his enemies. But in truth, while his veteran colonists were sworn to maintain his policy, his person was not unprotected, by bands of armed attendants. When the magistrate of a neighbouring town, in the expectation of the old man’s death, delayed paying the local contribution to the restoration of the Capitol, for the completion of which Sulla was anxious, as the only thing wanting to complete his career of prosperity, he could send men to seize the defaulter and even inflict death upon him. Sulla was evidently secure against the vengeance of his victim’s relatives. It may also be remarked that such vengeance would have been foreign to the habits of the Romans. However little they scruple to use the dagger to cut off a political enemy in the midst of his career, there is no instance perhaps in their history of exacting personal retribution from one who had ceased to possess the power of injuring.

There was, moreover, in Sulla a haughty contempt for mankind, and consequently for its highest aims and pleasures. Even while devoting his utmost energies to the pursuit of political eminence and the achievement of a national revolution, he could smile with grim moroseness at the vanity of his own exploits, and the hollowness of his triumphs. He paused in the midst of his career to break the toy with which he had so long amused himself. He had commenced life as a frivolous sensualist; he wished for nothing better than to finish it as a decrepit débauché. At the moment of laying down his office he made an offering of the tenth of his substance to Hercules, and feasted the people magnificently; so much, indeed, did the preparations made exceed what was required, that vast heaps of the superfluous supplies were thrown with ostentatious prodigality into the river.

In the midst of these entertainments, lasting several days, Metella, the consort to whom he was most permanently attached, fell sick and died. As the favourite and perhaps the priest of Venus, his house might not be polluted by the presence of death, and he was required to send her a divorce, and cause her to be removed while still breathing. The custom he observed strictly, through superstition; but the law which limited the cost of funerals, though enacted by himself, he violated in the magnificence of her obsequies. Retiring to his villa at Cumæ he finally relinquished the reins of government. Surrounded by buffoons and dancers, he indulged to the last in every sensual excess which his advancing years and growing infirmities permitted. Nevertheless he did not wholly abandon literature. He amused himself with reading Aristotle and Theophrastus, and dictating memoirs of his own life, upon which he was employed, it is said, only two days before his decease. In those pages he recorded how astrologers had assured him that it was his fate to die after a happy life, at the very height of his prosperity. Stained with the blood of so many thousand victims, and tormented with a loathsome disease—for his bowels corrupted and bred vermin, and neither medicines nor ablutions could mitigate the noisome stench of his putrefaction—in this faith he persisted to the last, and quitted the world without a symptom either of remorse or repining. He believed that a deceased son appeared to him in a dream, and entreated him to rest from his troubles, and go with him to rejoin his lost Metella and dwell with her in eternal peace and tranquillity. Fearful perhaps of the fate of Marius, he directed that his body should be burned; whereas it had ever been the custom of his house to inter the remains of their dead. A monument was erected to him in the Campus Martius, which was standing in the time of Plutarch, after the lapse of two centuries and the events of several revolutions. It bore an inscription, ascribed to Sulla himself, which said that none of his friends ever did him a kindness and none of his foes a wrong without being largely requited. Sulla survived his abdication about twelve months, and died in the year 78, at the age of sixty.

ROME’S DEBT TO SULLA

[81-79 B.C.]

Slowly and with many a painful struggle the Roman commonwealth had outgrown the narrow limits of a rustic municipality. The few hundred families which formed the original nucleus of her citizenship, and which in her earliest and simplest days had sufficed to execute all the functions of her government, had been compelled to incorporate allies and rivals in their own body, to enlarge their views, and to expand their institutions. The main object of Sulla’s policy was to revive at least the spirit of the old restrictions. The old families themselves had perished almost to a man; he replaced them by a newer growth; but he strove to pare away the accretions of ages, and restore the government of the vast empire of Rome to a small section of her children. The attempt was blind and bigoted; it was not less futile than unjust. It contravened the essential principle of national growth; while the career of conquest, to which the Romans devoted themselves, required the fullest expansion and the most perfect freedom of development.

Nevertheless the legislation of Sulla was undoubtedly supported by a vast mass of existing prejudice. He threw himself into the ideas of his time, as far as they were interpreted by history, by tradition, and by religious usage. The attempt to enlarge the limits of the constitution was in fact opposed to every acknowledged principle of polity. It was regarded equally by its opponents and its promoters as anomalous and revolutionary. It had as yet no foundation in argument, or in any sense of right, as right was then understood. Society at Rome was in a highly artificial state; and Sulla with many of his ablest contemporaries, mistook for the laws of nature the institutions of an obsolete and forgotten expediency. But nature was carrying on a great work, and proved too strong for art. Ten years sufficed to overthrow the whole structure of this reactionary legislation, and to launch the republic once more upon the career of growth and development. The champions of a more liberal policy sprang up in constant succession, and contributed, perhaps unconsciously, to the great work of union and comprehension, which was now rapidly in progress. The spirit of isolation which had split Greece and Italy into hundreds of separate communities was about to give way to a general yearning for social and moral unity. The nations were to be trained by the steady development of the Roman administration.

But though Sulla’s main policy was thus speedily overthrown, he had not lived in vain. As dictator he wasted his strength in attempting what, if successful, would have destroyed his country; but as proconsul he had saved her. The tyranny of the Roman domination had set the provinces in a blaze. Mithridates had fanned the flame. Greece and Asia had revolted. The genius of the king of Pontus might have consolidated an empire, such as Xerxes might have envied, on either shore of the Ægean Sea. But at this crisis of her fate, hardly less imminent than when Hannibal was wresting from her allies and subjects within the Alps, Rome had confided her fortunes to the prowess of Sulla. The great victory of Chæronea checked the dissolution of her empire. The invader was hurled back across the Ægean; the cities of Greece returned reluctantly to their obedience, never more to be tempted to renounce it. Sulla followed Mithridates into Asia; one by one he recovered the provinces of the republic. He bound his foe by treaties to abstain from fomenting their discontents. He left his officers to enforce submission to his decrees, and quartered the armies of Rome upon the wretched populations of the East. The pressing danger of the moment was averted, though it took twenty years more to subdue the power of Mithridates, and reduce Asia to passive submission. Rome was relieved from the last of her foreign invaders; and this was the great work of Sulla, which deserved to immortalise his name in her annals.[100]

Nevertheless this rolling back of the tide of aggression, and the return of the legions of the republic to the limits of her former conquests, had no effect in healing the internal sickness of which the irritation of the provinces was only symptomatic. The triumph of her arms and the sense of security it engendered only served to redouble her oppressions and to aggravate the misery of her subjects. The course of events will lead us on some future occasion to trace the remains of resentment and hatred towards Rome, which lingered long in some regions of Italy itself: but for the most part the Italians were now satisfied; they were content to regard the city of Romulus as their own metropolis; and while they enjoyed the fruits of her wide-wasting domination, gradually learned to take a pride in her name. But beyond the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian seas the same ardent vows were formed for enfranchisement which had precipitated upon Rome the Marsians and the Samnites; in more than one quarter the old struggle of the Social Wars was about to be renewed on wider and more distant theatres: but the elements of strife were now more complicated than before; the parties engaged were more thoroughly alien from each other; the hostility of Rome’s new enemies was the more inveterate as they had less sympathy with her institutions, and were ambitious of overthrowing rather than of sharing them. The second period of the civil wars of Rome opens with the revolt of the Iberians in the west, and the maritime devastations of the pirates in the east.

THE ROMAN PROVINCES

Italia, the region to which the privileges of the city had been conceded by the Plautian law, was bounded, as we have seen, by a line drawn across the neck of the peninsula from the Rubicon on the Adriatic, to the Isère on the Tyrrhenian Sea. To the north and south lay two provinces which held the first rank in political importance: on the one hand Gallia, or Gaul within the Alps; on the other the island of Sicily. The Gaulish province was divided into two districts by the Padus, or the Po, from whence they derived their denominations respectively, according as they lay within or beyond that river.

But the whole of this rich and extensive territory was placed under the command of a single proconsul, and the citizens soon learned to regard with jealousy a military force which menaced their own liberties at the same time that it maintained the obedience of their subjects. Sicily, on the other hand, though tranquil and generally contented, and requiring but a slender force to control it, was important to the republic from the abundance of its harvests, to which the city could most confidently look for its necessary supplies of grain. Next among the provinces in proximity to Rome were the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, of which the former also furnished Italy with grain; but both were rudely and imperfectly cultivated, and the unhealthiness of the larger island especially continued to keep it below many far remoter regions in wealth, population, and intelligence. The first province the Romans had acquired beyond their own seas was Spain, where their arms had made slow but steady progress from the period of their earliest contests with the Carthaginians, although the legions had never yet penetrated into its wildest and most distant fastnesses. The connection between Rome and her Iberian dependencies was long maintained principally by sea, while the wide territory intervening between the Alps and Pyrenees was still occupied by numerous free and jealous communities. But in the course of the last half-century the republic had acquired the command of the coast of the Gulf of Lyons; her roads were prolonged from Ariminum to Barcino and Valentia, while the communications of her armies were maintained by numerous fortified positions in the Further Gaul, and a secure and wealthy province extending from the Var to the Garonne.

The Adriatic and the Ionian straits separated Italy from her eastern acquisitions. The great provinces of Illyricum and Macedonia comprised the whole expanse of territory from the Adriatic to the Ægean Sea, and were divided from one another by the long mountain ridges of Boion and Scardus. Ancient Greece, from Thermopylæ to Cape Malea, constituted a single command under the title of Achaia. With Asia, Rome communicated principally by sea, the route of the Hellespont being insecure, and the barbarous tribes of Thrace but imperfectly subjected. The province of Asia, recovered by Sulla, was held by an imperator with a numerous army, destined to control the dependent potentates of Bithynia, Cilicia, and Cappadocia. The eastern proconsul watched the movements of Mithridates, and unravelled his intrigues with every court from the Halys to the Tigris. He intruded himself into the affairs of Cyprus, Palestine, and Egypt, hunted down the mountaineers of Crete, and menaced with the vengeance of the republic the buccaneers who swarmed in every harbour of the eastern Mediterranean. On the southern coasts of the great inland sea the domain which once belonged to Carthage, limited on either side by the lesser Syrtis and the river Bagradas, formed the proconsular province of Africa; while the five cities of the Pentapolis acknowledged their entire dependence on the will of the republic. The extent of her empire under Sulla was hardly one-half of that which it attained under Augustus and Trajan.

The various relations in which the different classes of the provincial population stood to the ruling city, have been compared with the constitution of a Roman household. The colonies of Roman citizens planted in the provinces, enjoying the full exercise of their national rights, and presenting a miniature of the metropolis herself, held the position of the son towards the paterfamilias. The conquered races, which had thrown themselves on the victor’s mercy, were subjected to his dominion as unreservedly as the slave to that of his master. Those among them to whom the state had restored their lands and institutions, occupied a place analogous to that of freedmen. Some cities or nations had voluntarily sought a connection with Rome on terms of alliance, but with acknowledged inferiority. Others again stood on a more independent footing, offering a mutual interchange of good offices and citizenship; and lastly, there were some which entered into confederacy with the republic with perfect equality of rights on either side. All these had their prototypes respectively in the clients, the guests and the friends of the Roman noble. Within the limits of each Roman province there were generally some states which stood in these several relations to the republic; and the strictness of the military and civil administration was maintained or relaxed towards them according to their respective claims. But after all the mass of the provincial population belonged to the class of dediticii, that is, of those who had originally submitted without conditions, the slaves, as they may be termed, of the great Roman family. These were subjected to the severest fiscal and other burdens, enhanced by the rapacity of their rulers, who, from the consul or prætor to the lowest of their officers, preyed upon them without remorse and without satiety.

The appointment to the provincial commands was left ordinarily in the hands of the senate; nevertheless, the people had always regarded it as their own indefeasible prerogative, and sometimes, at the instigation of their demagogues, had not hesitated to resume it. It was the general rule that the consuls and prætors, after serving their year of office in the city, should proceed to administer for one, or sometimes for three years, the affairs of a province. The state placed large standing armies at their disposal, and threw enormous patronage into their hands; while their ambition, avarice, or mutual rivalry, far more than any sense of the public interests, impelled them to exert themselves, during their brief career, in reducing frontier tribes, in quelling insurrections which their own injustice excited, and, whenever they could find an excuse for it, in annihilating the ancient liberties and privileges still retained by the more favoured classes of the provincials. Surrounded by an army of officials, all creatures of their own, all engaged in the same work of carving fortunes for themselves and abetting their colleagues, the proconsuls had little sense of responsibility to the central government, and glutted their cupidity without restraint. Of all the provinces the Cisalpine and Macedonia, and latterly Asia, were the richest and most amply furnished with military armaments, and on both these accounts they were generally coveted by the consuls, and distributed between them by lot. The tithes, tolls, and other imposts, from which the public revenue was drawn, were farmed by Roman contractors, belonging generally to the order of knights, who had few opportunities of rising to the highest political offices at home. The connivance of their superiors in the province, backed by the corrupt state of public feeling in Rome, shielded, to a great extent, the sordid arts by which they were accustomed to defraud both the government and its subjects.

The means of enrichment which the provinces afforded to the nobility became the ultimate object of the deepest political intrigues. A man of ruined fortune looked to the office of proconsul as the sole means of retrieving his affairs. To obtain it, he allied himself with the chief or the party by whose influence he might hope to rise successively through the various steps which led to the consulship. He first sued for the post of quæstor; after a due interval he might hope to be elected ædile, next prætor, and ultimately consul. His grand object was then obtained; for upon the expiration of his term of office he departed as governor to a consular province, from the emoluments of which he calculated on repaying the expenses of his numerous contests, on liquidating the debt of gratitude to his adherents, and accumulating a vast fortune for his own gratification or the advancement of his party.

The cupidity which animated individuals was in fact the mainspring of the political factions of the time. The spoil of the provinces was the bait with which the popular leaders had lured the Italians to their standards. All the legal rights of citizenship had been conceded, but the old oligarchic families, dignified by historic associations, and revelling in the wealth accumulated by centuries of conquest, still hoped to maintain their grasp of the larger share of honours and emoluments, which they contrived to make generally accessible only to the richest. They still looked with scorn themselves, and infused the same sentiment into their inferiors, on the “new men,” the men of talents and education, but of moderate origin and fortune, who were striving on all sides to thrust themselves into public notice. The judicia was the great instrument by which they protected their monopoly; for by keeping this in their own hands, they could quash every attempt at revealing, by legal process, the enormities of the provincial administration. But as far as each party succeeded in retaining or extorting a share in the plunder, the same system was carried on by both. It would be unfair to point to either as exceeding the other in rapacity and tyranny. The distress and alienation of the provinces became the pressing evil and danger of the times. Adventurers sprang up in every quarter, and found a floating mass of discontent around them, from which they were certain of deriving direct assistance, or meeting at least with sullen approbation.

The original vice of the provincial administration of the republic consisted in the principle, openly avowed, that the native races were to be regarded as conquered subjects. The whole personnel of the civil and military government of the provinces was literally quartered upon the inhabitants; houses and establishments were provided for it at the cost of the provincials; the proconsul’s outfit, or vasarium, was perhaps generally defrayed by a grant from the public treasury, but the sums required for his maintenance, and that of his retinue, known by the name of salarium, was more commonly charged upon the local revenues. The proconsul himself indeed was supposed, in strictness, to serve the commonwealth gratuitously for the honour of the office; but practically he was left to remunerate himself by any indirect means of extortion he chose to adopt. As the supreme judicial as well as military authority there was no appeal against either the edicts he issued, or the interpretation he put upon them. The legions in occupation of the province were maintained at free quarters, and their daily pay supplied by the contributions of the inhabitants. The landowners were burdened with a tithe or other proportion of their produce, as a tribute to the conquering city. This payment was in most cases made by a composition, in which the proconsul was instructed to drive the hardest bargain he could for his employers. The local revenues were raised for the most part by direct taxes and customs’ dues; and these were generally farmed by Roman contractors, who made large fortunes from the transaction. Public opinion at home was such as rather to stimulate than to check their extortions. For it was a settled maxim of Roman policy that every talent extracted from the coffers of the provincial for the enrichment of the ruling caste was the transfer of so much of the sinews of war to the state from its enemies. But the rulers of the world were not content with the extortion of money from their subjects. An era of taste in art had recently dawned upon the rude conquerors of the East, and every proconsul, quæstor, and legatus was smitten with the desire to bring home trophies of Greek and Asiatic civilisation.

Punishment of a Traitor

Those among them ambitious of ingratiating themselves with their fellow-citizens sought out the most celebrated statues and pictures, and even the marble columns of edifices, for the decoration of public places in the city. They did not scruple to violate the shrines of the gods, and ransomed rebellious cities for the plunder of their favourite divinities. This thirst for spoil led to acts of abominable cruelty: where persuasion failed, punishments and tortures were unsparingly resorted to; the proconsul and his officials were all bound together in a common cause, and the impunity of the subordinates was repaid by zeal for the interests of the chief. Of those who could refrain from open violence, and withhold their hands from the plunder of temples and palaces, few could deny themselves the sordid gains of money-lending usury. The demands of the government were enforced without compunction, and the provincial communities were repeatedly driven to pledge their sources of revenue to Roman capitalists. The law permitted the usurer to recover his dues by the severest process. In a celebrated instance the agent of one of the most honourable men at Rome could shut up the senators of a provincial town in their curia, till five of them actually died of starvation, to recover the debts due to his principal.

When indeed this intolerable tyranny reached its height, the provinces might sometimes enjoy the sweets of revenge, though with little prospect of redress, or of any alleviation of their lot. In a government by parties, the misdeeds of one set of men could not fail to rouse the pretended indignation of another; and while the factions of Rome contended for the prerogatives of conquest, they tried to brand each other with the iniquity of their abuse. The domination of the senators, as established by Sulla, soon provoked the jealous animadversions of their excluded rivals. Their administration of the provinces, protected as it was by the tribunals in which they reigned themselves supreme, presented a vulnerable point of attack, and against the crimes of the senatorial proconsuls the deadliest shafts of the popular orators were directed. The remains of Roman eloquence have preserved to us more than one full-length portrait of a proconsular tyrant. It is impossible indeed to rely upon the fidelity of the colouring, or the correctness even of the lines; nevertheless the general impression they leave upon us is amply borne out by numerous independent testimonies. There is a limit in the possible and the probable even to the rhetorical exaggerations of the Roman demagogues. A slight sketch from one of these pictures may suffice to give us an idea of the frightful originals.

THE CAREER OF VERRES

About the period of Sulla’s abdication, a young noble named Caius Verres accompanied the prætor Dolabella to his government of Cilicia (80). At Sicyon in Achaia, he chose to demand a sum of money of the chief magistrate of the city, and being refused, shut him up in a close chamber with a fire of green wood, to extort the gratuity he required. From the same place he carried off several of the finest statues and paintings. At Athens he shared with his chief the plunder of the temple of Minerva, at Delos that of Apollo; at Chios, Erythræ, Halicarnassus, and elsewhere on the line of his route, he perpetrated similar acts of rapine. Samos possessed a temple venerated throughout Asia; Verres rifled both the temple and the city itself. The Samians complained to the governor of Asia; they were recommended to carry their complaints to Rome. Perga boasted a statue of Diana, coated with gold; Verres scraped off the gilding. Miletus offered him the escort of one of her finest ships; he detained it for his own use and sold it. At Lampsacus he sought to dishonour the daughter of the first citizen of the place; her father and brother ventured to defend her: one of his attendants was slain. Verres seized the pretext to accuse them both of an attempt on his life, and the Roman governor of the province obliged him by cutting off the heads of both. Such were the atrocities of the young ruffian, while yet a mere dependent of the proconsul, with no charge or office of his own. Being appointed quæstor he extended his exactions over every district of the province, and speedily amassed, by the avowal of his own principal, from two to three million sesterces [about £24,000, or $120,000] beyond the requisitions of the public service.

[75-72 B.C.]

Verres could now pay for his election to the prætorship in the city. For one year he dispensed his favourable judgments to wealthy suitors at home, and on its termination sailed for the province of Sicily. Here his conduct on the tribunal was marked by the most glaring venality. He sold everything, both his patronage and his decisions, making sport of the laws of the country and of his own edicts, of the religion, the fortunes, and the lives of the provincials. During the three years of his government, not a single senator of the sixty-five cities of the island was elected without a gratuity to the proprætor. He imposed arbitrary requisitions of many hundred thousand bushels of grain upon the communities already overburdened with their authorised tithes. He distributed cities among his favourites with the air of a Persian despot; Lipara he gave to a boon companion, Segesta to an actress, Herbita to a courtesan. These exactions rapidly depopulated the country. At the period of his arrival, the territory of Leontium possessed eighty-three farms; in the third year of the Verrine administration only thirty-two remained in occupation. At Motya the number of tenanted estates had fallen from 188 to 101, at Herbita from 257 to 120, at Argyrona from 250 to 80. Throughout the province more than one-half of the cultivated lands were abandoned by their miserable owners, as if the scourge of war or pestilence had passed over the island.

But Verres was an amateur and an antiquary, and had a taste for art as well as a thirst for lucre. At every city where he stopped on his progresses he extorted gems, vases, and trinkets from his hosts, or from any inhabitant whom he understood to possess them. No one ventured to complain; there was no redress even for a potentate in alliance with the republic, such as Antiochus, king of Syria, who was thus robbed of a splendid candelabrum enriched with jewels, which he was about to dedicate in the Capitol of Rome. All these objects of art were sent off to Italy to decorate the villa of the proprætor; nor were the antiques and curiosities he amassed less valuable than the ornaments of gold and silver. Finally Verres laid his hands on certain statues of Ceres and Diana, the special objects of worship among the natives, who were only allowed the consolation of coming to offer them their sacrifices in his gardens.

Nor did the extortions of Verres fall upon the Sicilians alone. He cheated the treasury at Rome of the sums advanced to him in payment of corn for the consumption of the city. He withheld the necessary equipments from the fleet which he was directed to send against the pirates, and applied them to his own use. The fleet was worsted by the enemy, and the proprætor caused its officers to be executed for cowardice. His lictors sold to the victims’ relatives the miserable favour of despatching them at one blow. He crowned his enormities by punishing one of the ruling caste with death. Gavius, a Roman trader, he confined in the quarries of Syracuse; the man escaped, was retaken, and fastened to a cross on the beach within sight of Italy, that he might address to his native shores his plaintive but ineffectual exclamation, “I am a Roman citizen!”

Such is a specimen of the charges which could be plausibly advanced against a Roman officer, and which the criminal, though backed by the united influence of his party, and defended by the most experienced and successful advocate of his times, shrank from rebutting. In most cases however the governor accused of tyranny or malversation could screen himself by bribing his judges, who besides their natural anxiety to absolve one of their own order of crimes which might in turn be imputed to themselves, had been bred in the same school of corruption and venality as himself. The prosecution of these charges became indeed a ready means of acquiring notoriety, and the people, stimulated by their demagogues, encouraged, it was said, the young orators in their attacks, as whelps are trained to hunt down beasts of prey. But the assailants were in almost every case repulsed, and even if successful the provinces themselves reaped no benefit from their efforts. The proconsuls only exerted themselves the more strenuously to grasp the means of securing their acquittal. They could boast that the fruits of three years’ occupation of office would suffice—the first to make their own fortunes, the second to reward their advocates and partisans, the third and most abundant to buy the suffrages of their judges. The provinces, it might be anticipated, would soon come forward of their own accord and pray for the repeal of the laws against malversation, since they only served to redouble the extortions of their oppressors.

[72-69 B.C.]

These frightful iniquities which rendered the dominion of Rome as formidable to the nations in peace as her hostility had been in war, had grown with the progress of luxury and corruption. Her provincial governors had ever wielded their public authority with arrogance and harshness; but in purer and simpler ages they had at least refrained from the sordid exactions and selfish rapacity for which they had now become infamous. The tribunals also had degenerated both in corruption and shamelessness. The knights could venture to assert that during the forty years they had participated in the dispensation of the laws, the justice of Rome had been unstained even by the breath of suspicion. To the notorious venality of the tribunals under the administration of the senate they pointed as a proof of their own superior purity. It was indeed true that the increasing vices of the provincial government were symptomatic of the growing relaxation of morality at home. On the one hand the extension of foreign conquest and the opening in every quarter of new sources of wealth, had inflamed the passions of cupidity and ambition. On the other, half a century of domestic contentions had loosened the bonds of society, overbearing the ancient principles of justice, of respect for law and order, of reverence for things divine. But in fact this greater development of vice was accompanied at the same time by more general publicity, and a more jealous exposure of the faults of political parties. The knights, deterred from the use of force for the recovery of their lost privileges, affected a zeal for justice, to undermine their more fortunate rivals. The constitution of Sulla was assailed and eventually overthrown, not on the field of battle, but on the floor of the law courts.[b]