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

by Unknown

CHAPTER XVII. THE BEGINNING OF CIVIL STRIFE

“When Caius Gracchus fell,” said Mirabeau, “he seized a handful of dust tinged with his blood and flung it toward the sky; from that dust was born Marius.” This phrase of Mirabeau’s, though a whit rhetorical, is historically true. The patricians were willing to cede nothing to the Gracchi, and they were decimated by Marius. The struggle changed its methods: one fought no more with laws as the only weapons, but yet more with proscriptions. Marius was the incarnated pleb; as ignorant, pitiless, formidable, he had something of Danton, except that Danton was no soldier.[b]

Marius had taken no part hitherto in the old contentions of classes at Rome. But his plebeian origin, the attitude of defiance he had assumed towards the nobles on the occasion of his first election to the consulship, the outrage he had done to establish usage in the enlistment of proletarians, above all, perhaps, the arrogance with which he had extorted so many successive consulships from the hands of the most illustrious competitors, all combined to mark him as the champion of the “movement party,” whatever its immediate objects or popular cry might be.

Under the shadow of his anti-oligarchical aggressions, the people and their tribunes renewed the demands of the era of the Gracchi. The knights were irritated by the loss of their monopoly of the judicia, and a cry for a new agrarian distribution was always sure to interest a portion at least of the multitude. But envy and spite against unpopular individuals among the nobles were still more effective instruments to work with. Q. Servilius Cæpio, who had been defeated by the Cimbrians, was selected as an object of popular persecution. A few years before he had captured Tolosa in Gaul by an act of signal treachery, such, however, as the Romans seldom animadverted severely upon as long as they were successful. But Cæpio had forfeited their forbearance by his recent disaster, and the hoards of gold which he had rifled from the temples of the Gallic deities were supposed to have brought the vengeance of Heaven upon him, and the country whose armies were entrusted to him. The people, at the instigation of their demagogues, proposed to deprive him of his imperium, confiscate his property, and declare him incapable of serving the state in future. The senate defended its luckless proconsul, who had helped to restore to it a share in the judicia; but the tribune Vibius Norbanus drove the nobles from the comitium, together with two of his own colleagues who sided with them. In the tumult by which this act of violence was consummated Æmilius Scaurus, the prince of the senate, was wounded on the head by a stone. Cæpio was deprived, cast into prison and subsequently banished, unless indeed, according to another account, he was strangled in his dungeon. The retribution of his crime did not stop here. His noble family was further dishonoured by the licentious conduct of his two daughters, and the gold of Tolosa passed into a proverb, for the unlawful gain which precipitates its possessor into misery and disgrace.

[102-100 B.C.]

In the year 102 the tribune Domitius, transferred to the people the election of the chief pontiff, which had formerly been invested in the appointment of the pontifical college. The head of the national religion was an important political personage. He held in his hands the threads of the state policy, which opened or shut the oracular books of the Sibyls, appointed sacrifices and ceremonials, interpreted the will of the gods from portents, and placed the seal of the divine approbation upon every public act, or withheld it from it. This engine of government had been long firmly grasped by the nobles; it could still be handled only by patricians; but the patricians had ceased to be identified in interest and feeling with the ruling oligarchy, and from the hands of patricians the traditions of the old republic were destined to receive their rudest shocks. The appointment of the chief pontiff by the people became eventually an important agent in the overthrow of the Roman constitution. In the year of the battle of Aquæ Sextiæ, Marcius Philippus proposed an agrarian law, which, however, was rejected. But at the same time another tribune, Servilius Glaucia, carried a resolution of the people for wresting the judicia once more from the senators, and conferring them again upon the knights exclusively. He increased the stringency of an existing law against extortion in the provinces; and to the holder of the Latin franchise, who should convict a senator of its violation, he assured the superior privileges of full Roman citizenship.

THE SIXTH CONSULATE OF MARIUS

[100 B.C.]

When Marius returned to Rome (101) he was already for the fifth time consul. But he was not satisfied with this extraordinary series of honours, and was not the less anxious to obtain a further renewal of his long lease of office. The nobles, he felt, were his natural opponents. He hastened therefore to connect himself with the leaders of the people, to whom the chief of the aristocracy was personally hostile. Allying himself with the tribunes Servilius Glaucia and Appuleius Saturninus, he mingled his disbanded legionaries with the dissolute mob of the Forum, and by threats, promises, and largesses easily overpowered the votes of the honest citizens.[84] Marius was raised to a sixth consulship: yet he was neither popular in his manners nor eloquent in his address (100). On the contrary, in all civil matters, it is said, and amid the noise of popular assemblies, the conqueror of the Cimbrians was utterly devoid of courage and presence of mind. The undaunted spirit he showed in the field entirely failed him in the Forum, where he was disconcerted by the most ordinary praise or censure.

In his policy also Marius was unfixed and wavering; and instead of steadily courting the prejudices of the Roman rabble, he favoured and rewarded the Italians, of whom the Roman commons now entertained a deep jealousy. After his late victories he ventured to stretch the prerogative of the consulship to confer the citizenship on a thousand soldiers of the state of Camerinum, who had served him well in the field. The act was illegal as well as unpopular, and Marius did not, perhaps, make it more palatable by the excuse he gave for it: “Amid the din of arms,” he said, “I could not hear the voice of the laws.”[85]

The tribunes, however, who wished to strengthen their position by a new alliance, bestowed their countenance upon the Italians also. They caused a measure to be enacted, by which Marius was allowed to create three Roman citizens in every colony which enjoyed the Latin franchise, thus enabling him to bestow the boon they chiefly coveted upon many of the soldiers who had distinguished themselves in his service. With the same view Saturninus carried another measure, by which the unfortunate inhabitants of the trans-Alpine provinces were deprived of their estates, and forced to make room for the victors of Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. The nobles resented these concessions to the conquered Italians, and even the commons regarded them with uneasiness and distrust. They sought to interrupt the proceedings on the occurrence of rain or thunder. “Be still,” cried Saturninus, “or it shall presently hail.” His adherents armed themselves with stones. Tumults arose in the Forum; the senators and their partisans among the populace were driven away by the fury of the veterans, and Saturninus carried his rogation with open violence. Marius kept warily aloof, and affected great horror at the illegal disturbance. He excited the nobles underhand to protest against the execution of a law carried in a manner so irregular, which the tribunes insisted on their accepting under specified penalties. As soon, however, as they had committed themselves, Marius withdrew his countenance from them, and left them the choice of submitting with dishonour, or enduring the punishment of refusal. The senators, entrapped and cowed, took the oath required, till it came to the turn of Metellus; but the haughtiest of the nobles, though urged and entreated by his friends to yield to necessity, disdained to swerve from the principles he had avowed. Saturninus demanded that he should be outlawed, and fire and water forbidden him. His friends were numerous and strong enough to have defended him with arms, but he forbade them to draw their swords, and went proudly into banishment.

Saturninus obtained the renewal of his tribunate. He had carried matters with a high hand: on the occasion of his first election he had daringly murdered an opponent; he had thwarted the nobles, and even risked his popularity with the commons by proclaiming himself the patron of the Italians. It was now requisite, perhaps, to recover his ground with his supporters in the city; and for this purpose he imposed one of his freedmen upon the citizens, as a son of their favourite Tiberius Gracchus. This intrigue, indeed, seems to have had little success; Sempronia, the widow of Scipio Æmilianus, and sister of the murdered tribunes, vehemently denounced it, and the people laughed at the imposture, if they did not resent it. But force, after all, was more familiar to Saturninus than fraud. When C. Memmius, one of his adversaries, was about to be elected consul, he caused him to be poniarded in the Forum by the bandits who surrounded his own person.[86] But he had now gone too far. To save himself he rushed into open revolt. He climbed the Capitol, with his companion Glaucia and his band of ruffians and assassins, seized the citadel, in virtue perhaps of his official dignity, and defied the republic to arms. The nobles retorted upon him with the fatal cry, that he aspired to royalty; and the people, already perplexed at his leaning to the Italians, and shocked, perhaps, at the frantic violence of his proceedings, were not indisposed to listen to it. They acquiesced without a murmur in the decree of the senate, by which the state was declared in danger and Marius charged as consul to provide for its safety.

The city was placed in what in modern times is called a state of siege; that is, the consul, whose ordinary functions within the walls were purely judicial and administrative, received the power of the sword as fully as if he were in the camp. He proceeded to invest the fortress, which was considered impregnable to an attack, and could only be reduced by blockade. By cutting some leaden pipes, upon which, in the security of the times, the citadel of the republic had been allowed to become dependent for water, the insurgents were deprived of the first necessary of life. Saturninus offered to capitulate on the promise of personal safety. Marius guaranteed his life; and in order to preserve him from the fury of the populace, placed him, in the first instance, with his followers, in the Curia Hostilia, a large public building at the foot of the hill. But when the people scaled the walls, tore off the roof, and poured missiles upon the wretched captives, the consul made no effort to save them, and they all perished miserably—a deed of blood which was long remembered, and afforded at a later period the handle for a persecution of the nobles themselves.

No event, perhaps, in Roman history is so sudden, so unconnected, and accordingly so obscure in its origin and causes, as this revolt or conspiracy of Saturninus. The facility with which a favourite champion of the people is abandoned and slain by his own clients, seems to point to some unseen motive, with which history has forgotten to acquaint us. The Roman demagogues were well aware of the inveterate horror with which the people regarded the name of king; and none of them, it may be safely said, notwithstanding the oft-repeated calumnies of their opponents, ever ventured to aspire to it. If it be true then (as the historians represent) that Saturninus was hailed as king by his adherents, and accepted the invidious designation with joy, it is highly probable that his adherents were foreigners and Italians rather than citizens. We have already seen the use which leaders of all parties were making at this time of the claims of the Italians to emancipation from the state of conquered subjects in which they were still held. All in turn pressed these claims, when it suited their particular purpose, nor did most of them scruple to abandon them when their convenience required it. Sometimes the nobles, sometimes the commons, were cajoled into supporting them, as a counterpoise to the aggressions of their immediate opponents; but both the one class and the other were at heart bitterly opposed to them, and the hope of obtaining favour or justice from the republic seems to have gradually disappeared from the minds of the claimants themselves. They hated Rome, and with Rome they identified, perhaps, republican government itself. They could only hope for redress of their grievances from a revolution which should overthrow the supremacy of the senate house and the Forum. This was the menace from which even the licentious rabble of the city recoiled, and which determined Marius to allow the violation of his plighted faith, and the sacrifice of his friend and ally.[87] Even if entirely devoid of patriotic feeling, which we may well believe, Marius was deeply interested in preventing any demagogue from attaining a monarchical ascendency superior to his own.

CLAIMS OF THE LATINS AND ITALIANS TO THE CIVITAS

[100-90 B.C.]

The citizen of Rome, in complete possession of that illustrious title, combined the enjoyment of two classes of rights, civil and political. The civil law regulated the forms and effects of marriage, the exercise of paternal authority, the holding of property, the capacity of willing and inheriting; it secured, further, the inviolability of the citizen’s person. The political law, on the other hand, gave the right of suffrage in the election of magistrates, and in voting upon projects of law; it conferred eligibility to public office; it permitted initiation in certain religious rites, and, finally, it conceded the honour and advantage of military service in the legions. The combination of these rights and capacities constituted the complete title to the Roman franchise. It was sometimes thus conferred upon individuals, in reward for special services; in a few cases the inhabitants of a favoured city were invested with it in the mass.

The admission, however, of a foreign city, in alliance with the republic, to the full right of citizenship, required it, in the first place, to renounce its own ancient institutions. The favoured community adopted at once the civil law of Rome, and organised itself internally upon the Roman model, with an assembly of the people, a curia, representing the senate, and superior elective magistrates, generally two in number, corresponding with the consuls. A city thus constituted took the name of a municipium, that is, an office-bearing community. The inhabitants, when they presented themselves in Rome, might exercise the right of suffrage there, and were rendered capable of filling any of its magistracies.

It seems, however, that the petty states of Italy, attached to their own domestic institutions, were frequently unwilling to sacrifice them for these advantages, and rejected the concession of political rights, contenting themselves with the acquisition of the civil; which, while they placed them upon a footing of equality with the inhabitants of the city in respect to marriage, family authority, property, and person, did not require the surrender of their own political customs. Rome herself was not unwilling to recognise this distinction, and was wont to dispense the favour of her franchise with affected coyness, conferring her civil rights upon various states in succession, but reserving her political franchise as a special boon for the most meritorious.

Thus were formed within the bosom of the great Roman Empire various classes of communities, of different grades of civil and political condition; but every one among them, which acquired any portion of Roman rights, obtained the common designation of a municipium. Each municipium retained entire authority over everything relating to (1) the exercise of its religion; (2) the administration of its local finances, the election of its magistrates, the maintenance of its edifices and public works; (3) its internal police. The regulation of these matters appertained generally to the curies or governing bodies, sometimes to the mass of the people. Accordingly, the municipes, or citizens of such a community, possessed, as Cicero proclaims, two countries, the one natural, the other political—the one actual, the other privilegial. Thus, he continues, we regard as our fatherland both the spot where we were born, and that which has adopted us; but that one of the two has the strongest claims upon our affection which, under the name of “commonwealth,” constitutes our own country pre-eminently; it is for that fatherland that we ought to be ready to die. “I shall never deny,” he says, “Arpinum, as my country; but Rome will be always more peculiarly such; for Rome comprehends Arpinum.”

While such were the distinctions introduced by the republic among those whom she adopted as her own citizens, she did not omit to classify also the condition and privileges of the various nations of Latium and Italy which fell successively under her sway.

Roman Catapult

The first rank among the allies of Rome belonged to the tribes of the Latin confederation; their treaties with the republic contained generally more favourable conditions than were acquired by the other Italian communities. Thus, for instance, the Latins preserved their territory, their laws, their alliances, under the paramount control of Rome; they were placed, as regarded the payment of tribute, upon a footing of almost complete equality with the citizens of the republic; nor could they justly complain of being required to furnish a military contingent to fight side by side with the legions themselves. They could acquire the rights of Roman citizenship by the exercise of certain magistracies in their own state, or by the transfer of their domicile to Rome, provided they left children behind them in their native place, or by the successful impeachment of a Roman officer for political offences. In respect of property they enjoyed a portion of the Roman privileges. But they were excluded from the rights of Roman matrimony, and of paternal authority; from the faculty of willing in favour of a Roman citizen, or inheriting from one; nor could they claim the immunity from stripes and capital punishment, which was counted the most precious of all privileges by a people who invested their highest magistrate with the terrors of the axe and the rod. The condition of the Latin was far better than that of any other subjects of the republic, but it was decidedly inferior to that of the citizen; its most engaging feature was the capacity it conferred of acquiring completer rights, and changing the first foretaste of freedom into its full enjoyment.

This mass of privileges, peculiar, in the first instance, to the Latin cities, and flowing from the rights conceded to them by treaty, became extended in due time, under the general name of jus Latii, or Latinitas, both to individuals and to communities which had no connection with Latium at all. As the Roman law admitted, by a fiction, the existence of Romans without the city itself, so it allowed the name and rights of Latium to be claimed by more distant foreigners. These foreign Latins, under the name of New Latins, became, in process of time, a distinct class of citizens, a special subdivision of the second rank of the republic’s favoured children.

Among the allies of the republic, the Italians occupied a rank next to the Latins. The name of Italy was confined at this period to the peninsula, extending from the rivers Isère and Rubicon on the north to the promontories of Rhegium and Iapygia. The Etruscans, the Umbrians, the Samnites, the Marsians, the Greek communities of Campania and Apulia, in submitting to the Roman arms, had generally made treaties with the republic, but had failed to secure for themselves the advantageous terms extorted by the Latins in the period of her greater weakness or moderation. Yet in transferring their swords to the service of their conquerors, they had merited on many a battle-field the amelioration of their political lot. Accordingly the Italians were allowed, for the most part, to preserve their domestic independence, their laws, magistracies, and tribunals, while they were forbidden to form political alliances among one another; and, though free in outward appearance, they received the commands of Rome, which claimed to decide upon their mutual disputes. Together with domestic liberty they enjoyed, like the Latins, immunity from personal and territorial tribute, and shared with them the same guarantees for the acquisition and enjoyment of property. The chief point in which the Italian was inferior to the Latin was his not possessing the same capacity of becoming a Roman. In the natural order of things, it was requisite for the Italian to pass through the stage of Latinitas, or Latium, to obtain Roman civitas; nevertheless the privileges peculiarly his own were justly regarded as a boon in comparison with mere provinciality; for even within the barrier of the Alps the Gauls and Ligurians hardly escaped the character of enemies of the republic, and were subjected to military control and the severest exactions under the plenary authority of imperators and proconsuls. Accordingly these privileges became an object of desire to the less fortunate subjects of the empire, and, as in the case of the jus Latii, so also the jus Italicum became extended, in many instances, to individuals and communities beyond the limits of Italy.

The development of this political organisation, logical and methodical as it appears, was in fact the result of no theoretical legislation, but the gradual and almost fortuitous effect of a series of revolutions. Up to the moment of its complete accomplishment, even the wisest of the Roman statesmen neither counselled nor foresaw it. But thereupon Italy presented, under the supremacy of the metropolitan city, a hierarchy of communities, of which one was already completely Roman; the others more or less nearly prepared to become so; the whole machine, in all its parts and subordinations, seemed to gravitate with a slow and regular movement towards the central point—the franchise of the republic. But this movement was arrested by domestic jealousies and selfish prejudices. The same spirit of isolation and monopoly which had striven, in the time of the kings, to shut the gates of the city against the Latins and Etruscans, which had conceded so slowly and reluctantly the inferior grades of privilege to the Italians themselves, still arrayed itself against the natural tendency of the principle of assimilation. The jealousy of the Roman commons was blind and ignorant; that of the nobles, who came forward to marshal and direct it, was more consciously selfish and interested. All classes, with few and honourable exceptions of individual statesmen, wished to hinder, as far as they could, the Latins from becoming Romans, the Italians from becoming Latins.

The struggle for these privileges had commenced almost from the period of the first conquest of Latium and Italy; but it was not till after the overthrow of Carthage, and the commencement of a brief period of domestic repose, that it attained force and consistency, and succeeded in enlisting in its favour the leaders of Roman parties. With the extension of her conquests in the rich provinces of the East, the citizenship of Rome became more precious; and amidst the degradation of so many subject nations, the allies who had fought and bled for the republic felt themselves entitled to rise to a higher level. The Latins claimed with urgency and vehemence a perfect equality with the Romans, the Italians pretended to succeed, at least, to the privileges of the Latins; but to make the first concession was clearly no less than to open the door to the abolition of all existing distinctions. The Romans were not unnaturally alarmed at the shape in which the question now presented itself to them. The idea of sacrificing to the conquered the nationality of the conquerors was so new in the history of antiquity that we cannot wonder at the reluctance, the pious horror, with which it was generally regarded. Moreover, practical statesmen, who might soar above the scruples of a mere sentiment, were still perplexed and terrified at the prospect of the administrative difficulties which such a change would introduce. They beheld in their imagination the roads of the peninsula crowded with troops of foreigners hastening to Rome at every recurring election, to swamp the votes of the urban population; or taking up their abode within its walls, and conquering, as it were, the citadel of their conquerors. In the amalgamation of Rome with Italy they could only foresee the annihilation of Rome itself.

Meanwhile the allies, repulsed in every overt attempt to scale the fortress of the constitution, contrived to glide surreptitiously within the sacred pale. As early as the year 286 the censors discovered no less than twelve thousand Latins settled in the city, and pretending to the rank of genuine citizens. The intruders were indignantly expelled. Ten years later a new fraud was exposed. The foreigners sold their children to actual citizens, with the understanding that they should be immediately enfranchised. The stroke of the prætor’s wand conferred upon them the full franchise of the city. The precautions and prohibitions of the senate would have been of little avail, had they not been seconded, in a great measure, by the magistrates of the Italian cities themselves, who regarded with jealousy the flight of their own people to Rome, whereby the burden of their domestic dues were enhanced. The Samnites and Pelignians reclaimed four thousand of their own countrymen who had thus established themselves in the Latin town of Fregellæ, there acquiring the Latin privileges and preparing to sue for the Roman. For half a century, however, these fraudulent acquisitions of the Roman franchise were only partial or individual. The agitation of the Sempronian reforms raised a general ferment in the minds of the Italians, and gave force and volume to the tide of their ambition.

It would seem that while the great Roman nobles pretended to detain vast tracts of public domain, they cultivated and even occupied only small portions. The conquered communities, though nominally dispossessed of their lands, were allowed, by abuse and connivance, to enjoy the use of a large part of them. But when the state should resume her rights over these estates, and actually redistribute them among her poorer citizens, the claims of the intruding natives would meet with no consideration; they would be dispossessed of them a second time, and absolutely excluded from their enjoyment. Accordingly, upon the first mooting of the Agrarian laws of Tiberius, all the Italians found themselves united by the same pressing interest, and they had no other alternative than either to defeat the passing of these laws by combining with the faction opposed to them in Rome itself, or, by obtaining the rights of the city, to acquire a legal title to share with the actual citizens. They hesitated and balanced as to their course; but upon the whole the wish to obtain Roman privileges and Roman exemptions, to escape the tyranny of Roman magistrates and enjoy the fruits of Roman conquest, combined with the legitimate ambition of their soldiers and statesmen to enter upon the noble field of Roman employments, determined them to press their claims to admission. For a hundred and fifty years the various races inhabiting the peninsula, distinct as they were in origin and language, had been arrayed together under the same discipline and a common yoke. The Romans had unconsciously formed their subjects into one nation, and the time was arrived when a common sentiment could arm the whole mighty mass in a combination against them. Italy had at last become a cry and a sentiment not less powerful than Rome herself.

The senate and the nobles, who retained the national feelings in all their strength, girded themselves to resist the threatened innovation; but in the time of the Gracchi, the mass of the commons was already adulterated by foreign admixtures, and felt far less keenly the old prejudices of race and country. Accordingly, when their favourite leaders, overlooking every ulterior consequence rather than justly estimating them, called the Latins and Italians to their standards, the Roman populace were easily persuaded to admit them to a share in their own struggle, and pledged themselves to advance together the respective interests of both. The allies themselves, under the able direction of the Gracchi, turned all their indignation against the aristocracy of the city, which they sought to make their own. They ascribed to the peculiar constitution of Rome the jealous and selfish opposition they encountered, and denounced republican government itself, on account of prejudices incident, in fact, to all conquering races. Monarchy indeed, it may be allowed, is generally more favourable than aristocracy to the surrender of national prejudices; and the Italians acted upon a genuine instinct in invoking kingly rule, and, while the tribunes allured them with the hope of citizenship, seducing the tribunes themselves with the prospect of the regal diadem. It was said that Saturninus was actually saluted king by his seditious followers; and nothing, perhaps, but the deep impression, so sedulously fostered by the nobles, of the traditional tyranny of the Tarquins, prevented the Roman commons from joining generally in the same cry. But the title of king was destined still to remain the popular bugbear for many centuries; and no man had yet arisen with genius to disguise a monarchy under the republican names of dictator or imperator.

The nobles attacked the tribunes with brute violence; the Roman commons and the Italian confederates they managed by craft and intrigue. At one time they sought to sow dissension between them, at another to outbid their own demagogues in the liberality of their offers, which they took care never to fulfil. They debauched the populace by largesses and amusements, and detached them from the cause of the allies. Alarmed at the progress Marius had made in opening the franchise to his Italian veterans, they contrived, at last, to throw a cloud over the brilliancy of his reputation, and availing themselves of the venal voices of the tribes, to recall Metellus from banishment and consummate another aristocratic reaction. In the insolence of their triumph they enjoined the consuls of the year 95 to expel from the city all the Italians who had domiciled themselves within the walls; and the law of Crassus and Scævola, which repeated the harsh enactments of eighty and ninety years before, convinced the injured subjects of the republic that their mistress had learned neither wisdom nor justice by the triumph of her arms and the extension of her empire.

[95-91 B.C.]

But though conquered, the Italians had not ceased to be formidable. The free constitution of the generality of their cities had nourished a race of able speakers and statesmen, and the Cimbrian War had trained many thousands of brave veterans, who had been disbanded after the battle of Vercellæ, and not yet recalled to their standards by the urgency of any other foreign contest. With these resources among themselves, they had still, moreover, a powerful friend in the Roman tribunate. M. Livius Drusus, a son of the opponent of the Gracchi, whom the senate had commissioned to promise still ampler concessions to their assailants than the Gracchi themselves, had devoted himself in earnest to the policy which his father only pretended to advocate. But in assuming the patronage of the reformers, the younger Drusus did not abandon the party of the nobles with which he was hereditarily connected. He sought, with every appearance, it may be allowed, of honest zeal,[88] to conciliate the interests of all parties. He restored the judicia to the senators, while, at the same time, he introduced three hundred knights into the senate. He coupled these measures with a promise of lands to the needy citizens, and of the franchise to the Italians and Latins. Of all the Roman demagogues Drusus may justly be esteemed the ablest and the wisest. Full of confidence in himself, his views were large, and his frank and bold demeanour corresponded with them. He affected the generous virtues of the ancient republic. When his architect offered him the plan of a house so disposed as to exclude his neighbours’ supervision, “Build me rather,” he exclaimed, “a dwelling in which all my countrymen may behold everything I do.” His principles however were less rigorous than his pretensions. The necessities of his position, which required him to make friends of all parties, demanded an exorbitant outlay, and the means by which he supplied it were reprobated as dishonourable. His profusion surpassed that of all his predecessors in the arts of popular flattery; and he ventured to vaunt that his successors would have nothing left to give but the skies above and the dust beneath them. His manners were overbearing, and might suggest the idea that he aimed at regal domination. He spoke of the commonwealth as “his own”; and when the senators invited him to attend at their ordinary place of meeting, he replied that he would await their coming in the curia of Hostilius, which happened to be most convenient to himself. Such was the man whom the Italians gladly invoked as their leader. In his sickness all the cities of the peninsula offered vows for his safety. It seemed as if the salvation of the country depended upon his recovery.

Drusus required indeed strong support in that quarter to enable him to bear up against the odium excited by his measures among the privileged orders at home. Even in his own house he was surrounded by timid and murmuring friends; his own family were imbued with hostility to his avowed policy. Among them was his nephew, M. Porcius Cato, at that time about four years old. A chief of the Marsians, admitted to the uncle’s hospitality, amused himself by asking the child to support the cause of the Italians. Cato, so ran the story, frowardly refused; he was offered playthings and sweetmeats; still he refused. At last the Marsian, piqued at his obstinacy, held him from the window by the leg, and again demanded his assent, threatening to cast him headlong unless he yielded. But caresses and menaces were equally fruitless, and the Marsian sighed to think of the resistance he must expect to encounter from the men, if a mere child could display such dogged inflexibility.

Roman Cuirass

[91 B.C.]

During the progress of the tribune’s intrigues, the indisposition of both the senate and the knights to his measures became more strongly marked; and notwithstanding the adherence of some of the principal nobles, he was compelled to draw closer the bands of alliance between himself and the Italians. The impatience of his foreign associates was not easily restrained, and he was obliged himself to denounce a plot they formed for murdering the consuls at the great festival of the Latin feriæ. But his influence waxed more and more powerful with them, and the oath they took to promote the common interests of the confederacy expressed their entire devotion to the person of their generous leader. They swore that they would have no other friends than his friends, that they would count his foes their foes, that they would spare nothing, neither their parents, nor their children, nor their own lives, for his advantage together with that of the common cause. “If I become a Roman citizen,” the oath continued, “I will esteem Rome my country and Drusus my benefactor.” The senate heard with indignation of the progress of these intrigues, at the moment when it was called upon to ratify by a vote the proposal for conferring the franchise upon its mutinous subjects. It was informed that Pompædius Silo, the chief of the Marsians, was marching at the head of ten thousand men, along by-roads and with arms concealed, towards the city, to intimidate the nobles. A force was despatched to intercept his progress, and a parley ensued, in which the leader of the Romans assured his adversary that the senate was actually prepared to concede the boon required.

For the moment blows were averted; but in the curia the discussion was still animated and the decision dubious. The classes opposed to the concession had gained some of the Italians to their side, and with the support of the Umbrians and Etruscans, alarmed at the projected foundation of new colonies in their territories, ventured still to withhold the concession. When the day for voting arrived, the consul Marcius Philippus attempted to break up the meeting. One of the tribune’s officers seized and throttled him till the blood sprang from his mouth and eyes. The city was now thrown into a state of the fiercest excitement. Tribunes were arrayed against tribunes, nobles against nobles, Romans against Romans, Italians against Italians. The streets were traversed by armed bands on either side. Everything seemed to portend a bloody solution of the crisis. At this juncture Drusus, attended by a number of his adherents, was returning one evening to his house. Passing along an obscure corridor he was heard suddenly to cry out that he was struck, and fell to the ground with a poniard planted in his groin. In a few hours he expired, exclaiming with his dying breath, “When will Rome again find so good a citizen as myself?” The assassin had escaped in the crowd (91).

The murder was generally imputed to the senatorial party, and especially to the consul Philippus. The magistrates omitted to make inquiry into the circumstances, while the murdered man’s opponents hastened to abrogate such of his measures as had already passed into laws; and his adherents were too stupefied to resist. Severe decrees were speedily issued against the Italians, and they were peremptorily forbidden to interfere in the affairs of the republic. An obscure tribune of foreign extraction, named Varius, was put forward by the knights to impeach some of the principal nobles, as reputed favourers of the movement. A Bestia, a Cotta, a Mummius, a Pompeius and a Memmius were condemned and banished. Among the accused was the illustrious Æmilius Scaurus. The only reply he deigned to make to the charge was this: “Varius the Iberian accuses Scaurus prince of the senate, of exciting the Italians to revolt. Scaurus denies it. Romans! which of the two do you believe?” The people absolved him with acclamations. But the knights still thirsted for vengeance upon their hereditary enemies, and the actual outbreak of the threatened insurrection alone prevented them from effecting a wider proscription of the most unpopular of the nobles.

The allies flew desperately to arms. The death of Drusus and the prostration of his adherents within the city reduced them to their own national resources; but their last scruples vanished with the loss of their Roman associates. The Marsians were summoned to take the lead, and their chief Pompædius Silo was the soul of the confederacy. Eight or more nations, the Picentines, the Vestines, the Marrucines, the Pelignians, the Samnites, the Lucanians and the Apulians, together with the Marsians, gave mutual hostages and concerted a simultaneous rising. Now for the first time they vowed to unite together in a permanent association. They proposed to constitute a great federal republic, organised on the model of Rome herself, with a senate of five hundred, two consuls, twelve prætors, and for their capital the central stronghold of Corfinium in the Apennines, to which they gave the name of Italia. They struck medals bearing the impress of the Sabellian bull trampling under foot the Roman she-wolf. This alliance indeed was confined for the most part to the nations of Sabellian origin, and its decrees were issued in the Oscan language, the common root of the idioms then in use among the central tribes of the peninsula. The Etruscans, the Latins, and the Umbrians held aloof from it, and together with Campania, which was already thoroughly Romanised, adhered to the fortunes of Rome. The Bruttians no longer existed as a nation, and the cities of Magna Græcia had ceased to have any political importance. The Gauls beyond the Rubicon, who had joined Hannibal against the Romans, long since exhausted by their struggles, made no effort now to recover their independence.

What was the relative strength of the combatants now arrayed against each other? Three centuries earlier, at the date of the great Gaulish invasion, the nations of Sabellia, together with the Apulians, could arm, it is said, 200,000 men, while the Etruscans, Latins, and Umbrians vaunted 120,000 warriors. Supposing, therefore, the proportions to remain the same at the later period, the allies alone who still remained to the republic may have balanced in numbers three-fifths of the whole force opposed to her. At the same time the census of Rome herself gave a total of at least four hundred thousand warriors; and she could draw vast numbers of auxiliaries from her provinces and dependencies beyond the limits of Italy. The forces, therefore, of Rome trebled or quadrupled those of her adversaries. She occupied, moreover, the chief places of strength throughout their territories, securely fortified against sudden attacks, and communicating with one another and the capital by the great military roads. But from this formidable enumeration of her resources great deductions have on the other hand to be made. It was necessary to maintain powerful garrisons at every point of her vast empire. Greece and Spain, Asia and Africa, drew off her life-blood from the heart to the extremities. The disposition of her allies was doubtful and precarious; her own citizens were capricious, and might easily be seduced by the arts of the demagogues, while her internal dissensions had made her suspicious of many of her ablest statesmen. The mass of the commons of Rome took no vital interest in the political question for which the Italians contended, and served in the legions with no other feeling than that of mercenaries.

THE SOCIAL WAR

[90 B.C.]

The Social or Marsic War commenced in the year 90. The republic was taken by surprise, while her adversaries had already completed their preparations and hastened to assume the offensive. The Italian consuls, the Marsian Pompædius and Papius Mutilus, a Samnite, commanded two different branches of the confederacy—the one acting in the north between the Adriatic and the frontiers of Etruria, whence he sought to penetrate by the valley of the Tiber to Rome; the other directing himself against Campania and Latium on the south. While such was the disposition of their principal armies, various detachments, led by Judacilius, Lamponius, Afranius, Præsenteius, Vettius Scato, Marius Egnatius, Herius Asinius, and others, were charged with the reduction of the strong places occupied by the Romans in the heart of their own country. The whole confederacy was in a moment in arms, and the final embassy which it despatched to Rome announced the defection of three-fourths of Italy. The senate boldly refused to listen to demands extorted by the sword, and required the allies to lay down their arms before presuming to ask a favour. The consuls summoned the citizens to their standards, and while Alba in the country of the Marsians, Æsernia in Samnium, and Pinna in the Vestinian territory, kept the confederates in check, they drafted a hundred thousand men into the legions, and went forth to confront the enemy. Lucius Julius Cæsar undertook the defence of Campania, Publius Rutilius placed himself on the line of the Liris and Tolenus, which cover Rome in the direction of the Marsians and Pelignians. Perperna, with a smaller detachment, maintained the communications between the consular armies, and guarded the approach to Latium through the frontier of the Volscians. The great Marius himself, of whose fidelity the senate might entertain suspicion, was entrusted with a small force on the flanks of Rutilius, while Cæpio and Pompeius, Sulpicius and Crassus were directed to harass the operation of the enemy by making incursions within their territories, and menacing their armies in the rear. A considerable reserve was kept at the same time in Rome itself, and the gates and walls duly repaired and guarded against a sudden attack. Since the flight of Hannibal the city had forgotten the possibility of being again exposed to a siege.

But the Romans had scarcely time to make these dispositions before the Italians rushed impetuously upon them, and broke their lines in various quarters. The consul Cæsar was routed by Vettius Scato in Samnium, and driven from the gates of Æsernia and Venafrum, which he was anxious to support. While the first of these places continued to hold out against a rigorous blockade, the other was surrendered by treachery and its garrison put to the sword. Mutilus defeated Perperna, turned to the left and threw himself into Campania. Disregarding or masking the fortresses on his flanks and rear, he traversed the country with his troops, received the submission of Nola, Pæstum, Stabiæ, Salernum, massacring some of their defenders, and pressing others into his own ranks. But the hearts of the Campanians were still with Rome. Naples, Nuceria, Capua, and Acerræ remained firm, even while their territories were overrun by the Samnite, their slaves liberated and enlisted by thousands among the soldiers of the confederacy.

Tribune in the Dress of a Warrior

The losses and disgraces of the Romans still crowded upon one another. Lamponius defeated Crassus and recovered Grumentum, the strongest place in Lucania; while Canusium and Venusia in the same quarter were taken by Judacilius. Cæsar sustained a second defeat from Egnatius in attempting to relieve Acerræ, Pompeius received a check on the frontiers of Umbria, and lastly the consul Rutilius, drawn into an ambuscade by Vettius Scato, was routed and slain on the Tolenus with a large part of his forces. Marius, who was posted lower down the stream, was advertised of his general’s disaster by the corpses wafted past him by the descending current. He promptly crossed the river, and took possession of the enemy’s camp in their rear, while they were still occupied in gathering the trophies of their victory. But the success of this brilliant manœuvre failed to compensate even one of the many discomfitures the arms of the republic had received.

The spirits of the victors of so many encounters were elated to the highest pitch. The Etruscans and Umbrians began to falter in their allegiance to Rome, while the envoys of the Italians were seeking a more distant and still more formidable alliance at the court of Mithridates, king of Pontus, a chieftain whose power and resources the republic had not yet learned to measure. The Romans on their part, though neither dismayed nor disconcerted, began to feel the imminence of their danger. The sense of peril restored, perhaps, their national feelings of pride and mutual confidence. The bodies of the consul and the brave officers who had fallen had been carried into the city, and had excited the deepest sensations of distress. The senate was compelled to decree that henceforth the dead should be buried on the spot where they fell. As in the days of the Gallic tumults, all the citizens arrayed themselves in arms, and swords were placed in the hands of the freedmen, of whom several corps were formed for the defence of the city and its environs. In this attitude of grave resolution they awaited the arrival of succours from the provinces. Sicily signalised its fidelity by the zeal with which it furnished the necessaries of war. The Cisalpine Gaul sent ten thousand soldiers to the army of Cæsar at Teanum; and he was further reinforced by numerous bodies of Moors and Numidians. Enabled now to reassume the offensive he advanced once more to the relief of Acerræ, defeated Mutilus with great slaughter, and threw succours into the place. The citizens were reassured by this gleam of victory, and resumed within their walls the garb and occupations of peace.

MARIUS ASSUMES THE COMMAND

With this victory of Cæsar fortune began to turn to the side of the Romans, but still with faltering and uncertain steps. After the defeat of Rutilius the senate had united his shattered forces with the divisions of Marius and Cæpio, but so deep was its jealousy of its veteran general that it combined his inexperienced colleague in the command with him with equal authority. Cæpio, dazzled by a trifling success, allowed himself to fall into the snares of Pompædius. The Marsian, pretending to deliver himself up to the republic, came with two young slaves, to personate his own sons, as hostages, with ingots of gilt lead to represent gold, and offered to surrender to the Roman the army confided to him. Cæpio put himself under his guidance, and was led into an ambuscade. Pompædius galloped to an eminence under pretence of reconnoitring, and gave the signal to his troops. The Romans were surrounded, attacked, and cut to pieces, and Cæpio the proconsul with them. This disaster, followed by the surrender of Æsernia, which had suffered the extremity of famine, compelled the senate to transfer to Marius the undivided command of all its forces in that quarter. He commenced his operations with the same circumspection which he had manifested in his campaign against the Teutones. By the able choice of his positions he secured the frontier against the inroads of the victorious Marsians, whom he refused to encounter in the open field with his own beaten and dispirited soldiers. “If you are so great a general,” exclaimed his opponent, “why come you not to the combat?” “So powerful and so victorious, why do you not compel me?” replied Marius.

But when the proper moment arrived, the conqueror of the Cimbri knew how to profit by it. He engaged the enemy and defeated them with great slaughter, including the loss of Herius Asinius, chief of the Marrucinians. But the peasant of Arpinum, the accomplice of Saturninus, the man who had defied the nobles of Rome, who had armed the proletaries, and enfranchised the Italian veterans, could not fail to cherish sympathy with the nations now opposed to him. To Marius at least the war was a civil war, and many of his legionaries appear to have entertained a similar feeling. When his troops found themselves arranged in front of the forces of Pompædius, they recognised in the opposite ranks many of their own guests and kinsmen. They called one another by their names, and made kindly gestures with their hands. The two chiefs came forth from the ranks and entered into conversation together, deploring the unnatural contest which had so long divided them. Encouraged by the familiarity of their leaders the soldiers themselves broke from their lines, and mingled with one another in the plain, like citizens in their common forum. We may believe that Marius would have been well pleased to put an end to the war by the concession upon the spot of demands to which he at least was indifferent or favourable. But he commanded a portion only of the forces of the republic, and besides the army of Cæsar in the south, he was checked by the jealous observation of his own lieutenant Sulla, who had already more than once snatched the laurels from his hand. He was forced to engage the enemy once more; but he fought without spirit, and refused to complete his victory. The honour of the day fell again to his youthful rival, who attacked the Italians in their retreat, and thoroughly routed them. It was the first time, according to the boast of the vanquished Marsians, that the Romans had ever won a battle either against them, or without them.

Marius might plead the languor and ill-training of his raw soldiers for the want of spirit he had himself manifested; but the easy success which followed upon the more decisive blows of his subordinate were sufficient to refute him. The same vacillating and inconsistent politician, who as tribune had repudiated a popular measure, who as consul had launched himself against the senate, who had seconded Saturninus and presently reduced him to submission, who had favoured the Italians and finally had led the legions against them, had now once more abandoned his post, and grounded his arms in the moment of victory. After the affair of Saturninus, suspicious and suspected on all sides, he had retired moodily into voluntary exile. He now renounced the command by which he had made the Italians his enemies without securing the gratitude of the Romans, and pretended that age and infirmities unfitted him for the duties of the camp. He retired to his villa at Misenum, formerly the residence of the mother of the Gracchi, while Sulla sprang into his place at the head of the legions and at the summit of popular favour.

Meanwhile the Roman arms had been crowned with success in other partial encounters. The Umbrians and Etruscans, who had threatened for a moment to join the general defection, were chastised and checked. But fresh dangers were accumulating in the remoter distance. The trans-Alpine province was harassed by an insurrection of the Salyes, which required to be promptly repressed, and the king of Pontus was preparing to take up arms and wrest from the republic her possessions in the East. At such a conjuncture policy might dictate the concessions which pride had so resolutely refused, and in the moment of victory they could be accorded with a better grace. The consul Cæsar was empowered to carry a law for imparting the franchise to all the Italian states which had held aloof from the general insurrection, together with those already in the enjoyment of Latin rights. The lex Julia, both in its principle and its immediate effects one of the most important enactments of the republic, required the citizens of such states, including Umbria, Etruria, and the southern extremities of the peninsula, to come in person to Rome, and demand the freedom of the city within sixty days. The time allowed for deliberation was not long, and the hardships and dangers of the journey might deter many even of those who could resolve at once to renounce their own laws and institutions for the charges and immunities of the metropolis. It is probable therefore that the concession was after all more specious than real; and that the numbers who actually availed themselves of it were but limited. Nevertheless, it served to impart new hopes to the Italians, to distract their councils, and to relax the sinews of resistance.

[90-88 B.C.]

With the commencement of the second year of war (89), the Romans were enabled to assume the offensive in every quarter. Cn. Pompeius and Porcius Cato, the consuls of the year, assailed the confederates in the north; the one in Picenum, the other on the banks of the lake Fucinus. Sulla and Cæsar turned their legions against Mutilus in Campania, while the cities of Apulia and Lucania were attacked and recovered by officers of inferior note. Porcius himself was slain in battle with the Marsians, but his death was speedily avenged by his colleague. Judacilius, who commanded in Asculum, unable to repel his besiegers, constructed a pyre in the principal temple of the place, and laid his couch on the summit. He then caused a repast to be served, took poison, and applied the torch. The Romans entered the undefended walls, massacred the inhabitants, and reduced the city to ashes.

Asculum was the bulwark of the Italian confederacy in the north, and its fall opened the heart of their territories to the Romans. Another great defeat, with the loss of Vettius Scato, crushed the spirit of the Marsians, the Pelignians, and the Marrucinians, who hastened to lay down their arms. Pompeius, the victorious general, obtained a triumph, and among the captives who were led in chains before his chariot was a child, carried at his mother’s breast, who lived to become a consul at Rome and to gain the honour of a triumph himself. This was a native of Asculum, by name Ventidius, whose strange reverse of fortune deserved to become the theme of public admiration. The laurelled car was followed by the Roman legionaries, and among them we may suppose was a youth, who gained in after times a far nobler reputation, Cicero, the chief of Roman orators, who earned under the auspices of Pompeius his first and only stipend.

In the south, the death of the late consul Cæsar had thrown upon Sulla the conduct of the war. The cities of Campania fell successively before his prowess and good fortune. Stabiæ was overthrown, Herculaneum and Pompeii capitulated. His progress was checked for a moment by a mutiny in a division of his forces, in which his lieutenant, Postumius, lost his life. Sulla recalled the men to obedience, and required them to expiate the slaughter of a citizen by torrents of hostile blood. Assured of their ardour and devotion to his ascendant genius, he led them against the Samnite general, Cluentius, and gained a sanguinary victory under the walls of Nola. Leaving this impregnable fortress behind him, he next entered the territory of the Hirpinians, and sacked their capital, Æculanum. Meanwhile a Roman officer, named Cosconius, penetrated into Lucania, and defeated Egnatius by treachery. The shattered remnant of the confederate armies, reduced to thirty thousand men, were enclosed in the defiles of the Apennines. Pompædius, the last survivor of the gallant band of Italian generals, sought to envelop the Romans, as his last resource, in the flames of a servile insurrection. He summoned the slaves to rise throughout Italy, and put arms into their hands; at the same time he continued to press Mithridates for succours, and his emissaries solicited the subjects of the republics in Greece, Asia, and Africa. The final struggle of the expiring confederacy was not uncheered by a gleam of sunshine. Pompædius gained a victory, and entered Bovianum with the imitation of a Roman triumph. But his success was transient, and his laurels quickly faded. He was slain in the third year of the war in an encounter with the prætor Metellus, near Teanum in Apulia (88).

Nevertheless the exultation of the Romans at the gradual change in their fortunes had been repressed by the alarming accounts they continued to receive from Asia, where the king of Pontus, the ablest and most powerful opponent they had yet encountered in the East, was shaking the edifice of their dominion to its centre. They hastened to send their best general and their choicest armies to meet him; and they were disposed in the moment of victory to make further concessions, in order to disengage themselves from the hostility of the crushed and broken Italians. The lex Plautia-Papiria extended to all their Italian allies the privilege which had been accorded to Umbria and Etruria by the lex Julia. The franchise, that is, of the city was offered generally to such of the Italians as chose to claim it in person within sixty days. The Romans followed up this specious concession by great moderation in the use of their final victory. Very few, at least, of the captive chiefs of the confederacy were punished with death. The territory of the subjected cities was not confiscated to the state, although the condition of its finances compelled the senate to sell the lands appropriated to the pontiffs and augurs beneath the shadow of the Capitol itself. The Italians, weary of the war, were easily appeased by this politic treatment. Corfinium, the presumptive rival of Rome, dwindled once more into a petty provincial town. The political combination of the states of the peninsula, the offspring of a moment of enthusiasm, fell in pieces, never to be reunited again; and even their common language, proscribed by the Romans in the public instruments of their cities, fell into disuse, and was speedily forgotten. But the results of the war still lingered after the war itself had died away. Bands of armed marauders continued to prowl about the country, exciting partial movements in various quarters. The mountains of Samnium, and the great forests of Sila, continued to harbour the enemies of peace and order rather than the enemies of Rome. There, for more than half a century, the materials of insurrection were never wanting; political outlaws and fugitive slaves still maintained themselves against the regular forces of the republic; life and property were rendered insecure; the rustic labourer and the wayfaring man were kidnapped on the public roads; even in the cities men began to accustom themselves to the wearing of weapons, nor did the dignified and noble venture to travel abroad without an armed retinue of clients and retainers.

[88 B.C.]

The lex Plautia-Papiria, so called from the tribunes who effected its enactment, offered, as we have seen, the franchise to all the allies of Rome in Italy. The boon, however, was far from universally accepted. The richest and the poorest classes were those to which alone it proved seductive—to the former, for the sake of sharing the fruits of distant conquest; to the latter, on account of the largess it offered to the dissolute and idle. Of these classes many, we may suppose, flocked to Rome, and took up their residence within reach of the Forum. The names of the chiefs of the Italian confederacy, of Papius and Egnatius, of Asinius and Cluentius, of Vettius and Afranius, rank from henceforth among the aristocracy of Rome; while her orators and historians might plausibly attribute the increasing degeneracy of the inferior populace to the foreign elements which now began so deeply to tinge it. But the middle classes of the Italians, to whom these advantages were less accessible, and to whom constant attendance at assemblies and elections was impossible, found themselves amply compensated for the loss at home, where, content with their own municipal privileges and honours, they could enjoy without rivalry or disturbance the comfort and dignity of self-government. The number of new citizens thus enrolled on the list of the censors was not disproportioned, perhaps, to the new tribes, eight, or as some say ten, which were now added to the existing thirty-five. The citizen was still compelled to present himself in person at the polling-booths; the distance of his actual residence could not plead against inveterate usage and the sanction of the national religion. For the Roman Forum was a holy place, elections and assemblies were holy ordinances, sanctified by auspices and ritual ceremonies; the devices of modern governments, by which the votes of federal communities can be taken on the spot, or their voices represented by local delegates, were inadmissible on the principles of Roman, and indeed generally of all ancient polity.

The theory that the same individual could not be at the same time a citizen of two states, and that in accepting the prerogative of Roman civitas, he forfeited the franchise of his native country, might cause many devoted patriots to hesitate in accepting the proffered boon. Several cities, especially those of Greek origin, to whom the institutions of Hellenic civilisation were justly dear, such as Naples, Heraclea, and Puteoli, continued steadfastly to reject it. Brundusium did not at once accept it, but received the Roman privilege of immunity from the land tax at a later period from Sulla. We are at a loss to ascertain the regulations under which the municipal governments were conducted, where the inhabitants were nearly equally divided between Romans and Italians. It is probable, however, that the concession became speedily accepted almost throughout the peninsula. The right of suffrage might be justly disregarded, but citizenship conferred rights of property, marriage, and immunity from taxation, which were felt to be substantial benefits. The inviolability of the person, and exemption from official caprice and tyranny, were advantages also which could not fail to be highly prized. From henceforth the admissibility of the provincials to the privileges of the capital became more generally recognised as a fundamental principle of policy. The full franchise was conceded in special instances to various states in Spain, Africa, and Gaul, and it became necessary to declare what nations, from their barbarism and inveterate hostility, as for instance the Germans and certain Gaulish tribes, should be formally pronounced ineligible.

The enrolment of the Italians among her own citizens deserves to be regarded as the gravest stroke of policy in the whole history of the republic. In modern times it has been frequently condemned as an unqualified error, and the general approbation it met with from the Roman writers may, doubtless, be explained by the fact that the masters of Roman literature were in almost every case Italians or provincials themselves; but in fact they require no such excuse for the opinions they have so generally expressed. They judged correctly in pronouncing the policy of comprehension upon which the republic now boldly entered, and from which she never long departed till the whole mass of her subjects were incorporated with her own children, both just and salutary. Doubtless it helped in some measure to accelerate the destruction of the old national sentiments; but these were already mortally stricken, and were destined quickly to perish in the general corruption of society. It reduced the legions more directly to instruments of their general’s personal ambition; but the strongest check to that fatal tendency had been already removed by the enlistments of Marius, and these the necessities of the state, as we have seen, had both justified and approved.[c]