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

by Unknown

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE STATE OF ROME AT THE END OF THE REPUBLIC

A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW OF THE REPUBLICAN CONSTITUTION

Shortly before the year 500 B.C. the change was accomplished which transformed the Roman State from a monarchy or military dictatorship (in which the dictator was confronted by the influence of a powerful council drawn from the ranks of the original burgher families, and by the legal necessity of the concurrence of the whole people, and therefore moved within the limits of a system developed in harmony with customary usages and closely analogous to the organisation of other Latin cities) into an aristocratic-oligarchic republic, with a strong executive authority in the hands of a magistracy annually elected by the people; the substructure of political life keeping in general outline the form into which it had developed and in which it had to a great extent become fixed by the end of the monarchical period.

This constitution was not formulated from the first in any general and fundamental law (any more than the older system had been), nor was it determinately fixed by such a law at any subsequent period, while, by means of particular statutes, some more or less important innovations were by degrees adopted as supplementary to the organisation handed down from primitive times and to the traditional code. Many things were gradually and silently modified by the mere force of altered circumstances. The will of the people was the foundation of all law and all authority in the state, and every man who enjoyed the full rights of citizenship contributed directly, by his vote in the legislative and elective assemblies, to the expression of the popular will; though with varying degrees of influence in individual cases and within the limits of set form and inherited opinion.

The freedom of republican Rome presupposed the existence of a servile population to do the most menial work, a population from which in earlier times the burgher class received only a small accession, invariably unwelcome and regarded with contempt in the first generation of citizenship. At the same time, the ancient usages mos majorum were held by the freemen in high honour, enhanced by a kind of religious reverence, as having come into being by the favour and help of the gods, and having continued to exist under their constant control and in virtue of their intervention (religio).

Among these ancient usages was the classification of burghers according to their wealth and economic independence or their poverty and precarious means of subsistence; a classification which found expression in early times in class divisions and in the application of the same standard to the citizen army, and was even more strikingly manifested in the exclusive employment of wealthy burghers for the special duties of cavalry, with its complement, the formation of an order of knighthood, on the basis of which there arose another class numerically small and a governing body of citizens, to wit, the senate. The majesty of the people (maiestas populi) was recognised by the highest executive power (by the lowering of the symbols of consular authority, fasces submissi, traced back by tradition to Valerius Publicola in the first year of the consulate) and from the people all authority in the state was derived; nemo potestatem habet nisi a populo (Cic. de Leg. Agr. II, 11). In them was vested the right of enacting laws and the right of making war or peace (Polyb. VI, 14); by the popular election of the magistrates they also indirectly determined the composition of the senate and they originally exercised the highest jurisdiction. But their effective action in popular assemblies was dependent on the initiative of the magistrates, which in turn was partly under the control of the senate.

This body (which consisted of life members, and was consequently subject only to gradual change by the infusion of fresh blood, and which maintained its honourable character by the expulsion of unworthy members), as the centre of rule and administration, preserved continuity and balance in the policy of the state by means of special regulations and injunctions set forth within the bounds permitted by express law and ancient custom; but the senate itself could not transact business or pass resolutions except under the presidency and direction of competent magistrates. Moreover, the execution of all decrees and the maintenance of law and order were (like the initiative in legislation and the superintendence of the transactions of the council) in the hands of two or more co-ordinate magistrates elected annually. But these magistrates were chosen solely from among the economically independent burgesses, regard being had to age and to promotion through a fixed course of preliminary steps—requirements which were enforced with more minuteness and exactitude as time went on. From the consulate, that is from the two colleagues invested with the highest authority in matters civil and military (imperium), which they wielded at first with but a limited amount of assistance (from the quæstors), the magisterial authority was gradually split up among a series of officials armed with special powers (potestas) for special functions and departments of the public service. The citizens obeyed the orders of these magistrates with strict subordination and discipline, especially in time of war.

In the records of the first century and a half of the republic the development of the state system and administration from this primary and general basis and the modifications it underwent during the growth (slow at first and then more rapid) of the power and greatness of Rome, are obscured by the fact that a struggle for higher political employment—i.e., over the question whether it should be extended from a close corporation of burgesses (the patricians) to the whole body of citizens—is intermingled with a struggle between aristocracy and democracy for changes in the character of the system and administration itself. This twofold aspect has not been clearly perceived by later writers,[136] and was probably not adequately brought out in the brief historical records of remote antiquity. We shall probably not be wrong in assuming that the patricians, though gradually forced to resign their class privileges, and the institutions and ordinances associated with them, such as the comitia curiata, continued to maintain aristocratic interests and institutions by assuming more and more the position of nobles and allying themselves with the most prominent plebeian families; while the plebeians, as long as they were engaged in the struggle for equal rights, asserted the interests of democracy and extended democratic principles to the whole working of the state.

The first step in the change and development of the older system which had survived the abolition of monarchy, a step which decided the whole subsequent course of the movement, was the creation of an office for the benefit of the less privileged citizens, the tribunate of the plebs (tribunatus plebis), an office which had originally no executive functions but was charged with the protection of the individual citizen and the control of the action of the magistracy. By degrees the tribunate acquired an initiative, first as the medium of the demand of the less privileged citizens for equal rights, and then as the promoter of the interests of the common people and of a general democratic tendency in legislation and administration. The latter function came more decidedly into the foreground when the struggle between patricians and plebeians had been fought out (after 366-300 or 286), though for a considerable time it manifested itself only in constitutional opposition to everything that bore the semblance of encroachment on the part of the senate or of magisterial authority.

But although a twofold initiative had thus come into being in the legislature, that of the consulate in the comitia curiata, relying mainly on the support of the senate, and that of the tribunate in the comitia tributa, legalised by the lex Publilia in 339, the government preserved its aristocratic character during the period between the formation of a confederated state (340-338) and the end of the Punic War, the senate retaining a strong executive authority and an undisturbed supremacy in all affairs, general and particular, without any signal interference on the part of the people beyond what was sanctioned by ancient usage; the reason for this being that only in exceptional cases did the tribunes advance legislative proposals in direct opposition to the will of the senate.

It was not till after the destruction of Carthage, when on the one hand the commons had greatly increased in numbers (in the municipal towns and colonies as well as in Rome) as compared with the ruling or senatorial class, and the poorer portion of the former class had congregated in the capital, and when, on the other hand, discontent was rife in the Italian confederacy; when the senate was falling more and more under the control of a limited number of noble families, who appropriated the major part of the advantages accruing from the enforced exertions of subject provinces, leaving a share in the profits to such members of the knightly class only as came forward in the character of publicani or negotiatores, and to them not enough to satisfy their cupidity—that the tribunate of the plebs assumed the character of an opposition pure and simple, a character which became more strongly marked after the time of the Gracchi. It developed a legislative activity which, however we may judge of the objects that individual statesmen had in view—as to ameliorate the condition of the poorer citizens by the allotment of arable land or the distribution of corn at reduced prices, to limit the arbitrary power of the magistrates or of the senate, to prevent the excessive concentration of government influence and authority, to promote the movement in favour of equal rights among the members of the confederacy, to appoint particular persons for the conduct of public affairs especially in the case of military command—could not but have a pernicious effect, because, forcibly dissociated from the senate, it was by its very nature in the hands of individuals distinguished by the accident of an official tenure liable to annual change and dependent on popular favour.

After a series of conflicts and violent political measures (inaugurated by the Gracchi, Saturninus, and others) and a short-lived victory of the democratic party under Marius and Cinna, a reaction in favour of aristocracy combined with the military dictatorship of an individual set in under Sulla, the ancient boundary lines of state and people having been swept away by the outcome of the Social War. The cardinal points of this reaction were the abolition of the initiative of the tribunate, and the strengthening of senatorial influence by appointing none but senators to magisterial office.

But this reaction, though carried through with ruthless severity, was the less capable of holding its ground from the fact that the old forms in which it was embodied were absolutely unsuited to the dimensions of the state and the geographical distribution of the people under the radical change of conditions brought about by the Social War. After the lapse of ten years the rights of the tribunate were restored. But from that time forth it placed itself at the head of the democratic and turbulent elements in the capital and its immediate neighbourhood, and so became a mere instrument in the hands of individual despots who attempted (sometimes by wealth, but more generally by deeds of arms and popularity with the soldiery) to build up a personal sway before which the tottering authority of the senate was forced to bow, in spite of the resistance offered by the aristocrats who (like Catulus and Hortensius) maintained the principles of Sulla, and of men who (like Cicero) based their influence on services of a peaceful character.

At length, having endured a civil war between the leaders of opposing factions, weary of discord and of struggles in which all political institutions had sunk to the level of empty and impotent forms liable to perpetual violation and abuse, the state found under an autocracy the repose and external order which the vast majority of the inhabitants of Italy were not unwilling to accept in exchange for a political life from participation in which they must have been virtually excluded, to a great extent, by the inadequacy of the forms in which it was embodied.[b]

We have now traced the progress and decline of the Roman constitution through its several stages. We have seen it pass from a monarchy into a patrician oligarchy, from a patrician oligarchy into a limited republic, from a limited republic into an oligarchy of wealth; and now, after a century of civil war, in which the state swayed from one extreme to the other, we close with the contemplation of an absolute despotism.[137] Every page of the latter portion of our narrative shows how inevitably events were tending to this issue. The Roman world had long been preparing for it. At no time had such authority been altogether alien from the minds of the people of Rome. Dictatorships were frequent in their earlier history. In later times the consuls were, by the will of the senate, raised to dictatorial power to meet emergencies, military or civil. The despotic commands conferred upon Sulla and Pompey, the powers seized first by Cæsar, and after him by the triumvirate, were all of the same form as the authority conferred upon Octavian—that is, all were, in form at least, temporary and provisional. The disorders of the state required the intervention of one or more persons of absolute authority. And whether power was vested in a dictator, such as Sulla and Cæsar; in a sole consul, such as Pompey; in a commission of three, such as the triumvirate of Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus; or in an imperator, such as Octavian alone, the constitutional principle was the same. These despotic powers were in every case, except in the cases of Sulla and Cæsar, granted for a definite term; even Cæsar’s first dictatorships were conferred for limited periods. The triumvirate was renewed at intervals of five years, the imperial rule of Octavian at intervals of ten. In theory these powers were conferred exceptionally, for a temporary purpose; and when the purpose was served, the exception was to yield to the rule. Even in the reign of Octavian there were some persons credulous enough to expect a restoration of the republic.

Octavian’s adroitness has often been commended. But he had many examples to warn and to guide him. Above all, the precedent of his uncle, the great dictator, proved that the Romans were not prepared to accept even order and good government at the price of royalty; and he dexterously avoided the danger. The cruelties of the triumviral proscription he was able to throw chiefly upon Antony. But these very cruelties stood him in stead; for they induced men to estimate at more than its real worth the clemency which distinguished his sole government. He avoided jealousy by assuming a power professedly only temporary.

The title by which he liked to be known was that of “prince”; for he revived in his own person the title princeps senatus, which had slept since the death of Catulus. But in fact he absorbed all the powers of the state. As imperator he exercised absolute control over the lives of all Roman citizens not within the limits of the city. As pontifex maximus, an office for which he waited patiently till the death of Lepidus, he controlled the religion of the state. He assumed the censorial power without a colleague to impede his action; thus he was able to revise at pleasure the register of the citizens and the list of the senate, promoting or degrading whom he pleased. He appropriated also the tribunician power; and thus the popular assembly was by a side blow deprived of vitality, for without its tribunes it was naught. Consuls were still elected to give name to the year; and the assembly of the centuries still met for the empty purpose of electing those whom the prince named. Often, indeed, several pairs were elected for one year, after a practice begun by the great dictator.

The name of Italy now at length assumed the significance which it still bears; for all free inhabitants of Cisalpine Gaul obtained the rights of Roman citizens. But little was done to repair the losses and decays of which we have spoken in former chapters. The military colonies planted by Sulla and Octavian had lowered its condition even beyond its former misery. Ancient and respectable citizens made way for reckless and profligate soldiery—such as the centurion who would have slain the poet Virgil. Our pity for the ejected inhabitants is somewhat lessened by the thought that all the civilised world was open to them, for all the world was Roman. Gaul, and Spain, and Sicily, and the provinces of the East, depopulated by long wars, gratefully received families of Italian citizens, who brought them their habits of civilised life, industry, and such property as they had saved from the ruin of their homes. Great as was the injustice of expelling these persons, the actual loss and suffering, after the pain of leaving home was over, must have been incalculably less than we, in the present condition of Europe, are apt to imagine. After the settlement of these colonies, it is probable that what could be done for the welfare of Italy was done by Augustus and his able ministers, Agrippa and Mæcenas. But the evils were too great and too recent to admit of palliation; and Italy probably never recovered from the effects of the Roman wars of conquest, till she received a new population from the north.

The provinces were gainers by the transference of power from the senate to a single man. The most important provinces were governed by deputies appointed by the prince himself;[138] the rest were left to the rule of senatorial proconsuls. The condition of the imperial provinces was preferred; for the taxes exacted were lighter, and the government was under severer control. Instances occur of senatorial provinces requesting as a favour to be transferred to the rule of the emperor. But even the senatorial government was more equitable than of old. The salaries of the proconsuls were fixed; greedy men were no longer left to pay themselves by extortion; and the governors held power for several years, so that they had more temptation to win the good opinion of their subjects. The examples of Pilate and Felix show, indeed, that glaring injustice was still perpetrated; but these very cases show that the governors stood in awe of those whom they governed—for in both cases the iniquity was committed through fear of the Jews, whom these men had misgoverned and whose accusations they feared. It may be added that both these men were severely punished by the Romans for their misgovernment.

The world, therefore, on the whole, was a gainer by the substitution of the imperial rule for the constitution falsely named republican. For nearly two centuries the government was, with two intervals, administered by rulers of great abilities and great energy; and though, no doubt, there was enough of oppression and to spare, yet there was much less than had been common in the times of senatorial dominion.

But if the provinces—that is, the empire at large—continued to be content with a central despotism, in comparison with the old senatorial rule of “every man for himself,” this was not the case at Rome. The educated classes at least, and the senatorial nobility, soon began to regret even the turbulent days of Marius and Pompey. The practice of oratory, in which Romans excelled and took chief delight, was confined to mere forensic pleadings, and lost all that excitement which attached to it when an orator could sway the will of the senate, and calm or rouse the seething passions of the Forum. We cannot wonder at Cicero, notwithstanding his hatred for commotion, throwing himself into the conflict against Antony with the fervid energy which is revealed in the Philippics. He felt that this was the last chance of supporting the old freedom of the Forum, which, with all its turbulence, he loved, partly as the scene of his own glories, partly as a barrier against the crushing force of military despotism. And though the slaughter of the proscription and of the Civil War removed many of the leading senators, men of independent will revolted against the deadening weight of despotic government, as is revealed in the pages of Tacitus.

For a time, however, there was a general disposition, even at Rome, to welcome the tranquillity ensured by the rule of Octavian, and nothing can more strongly show the security that men experienced, even before the battle of Actium, than the sudden burst with which literature and the polite arts rose from their slumbers.

LITERATURE

Since the close of the period of conquest literary pursuits had languished—the natural effect of political excitement and perilous times. Oratory indeed had flourished, as every page of our history indicates; and oratory may be called the popular literature of Rome, as truly as journalism may be called the popular literature of to-day. Cicero, a master of his art both in theory and practice, has left us an account of a host of orators whom he thought worthy of being placed in a national catalogue. Of the Gracchi, of Antonius, of Crassus, of Sulpicius, we have spoken. After their time Cotta was the chief favourite, and then Hortensius rose to be “king of the courts.” He was what we may call an advocate by profession, taking little part in politics till he had made a large fortune by the presents which at that time stood in the place of regular fees; and even in the hot conflicts that distinguished the rise of Pompey’s popularity he took but a languid part. His style of speaking was what Cicero styles Asiatic—that is, florid and decorated beyond what even the liberal judgment of his critic could approve. Cicero considered his own youthful manner to partake of this character, and refers to the brave speech in which he defended Sext. Roscius of Ameria as an example of this style. But that elaborate phraseology and copious flow of language remained with him to the last. It was only when his feelings were strongly excited, or when his time was limited, as when he defended old Rabirius or assailed Catiline in the senate, that he displayed anything of that terrible concentration of speech with which Demosthenes smote his antagonists. So far as we can judge from the scanty remnants preserved, C. Gracchus, more than any other Roman, possessed this fierce earnestness.

A Roman Urn

The example and criticism of Cicero lead to the conclusion that Roman oratory generally had a tendency to be redundant, if not wordy. This tendency may be ascribed to the prevailing mode in which the young orators of the day sought to acquire skill in speaking. The schools of the rhetorical teachers were thronged by them; and here they were taught to declaim fluently on any subject, without reference to passion or feeling or earnestness of purpose. The Romans of a former generation endeavoured to crush such schools; and it was not at Rome that the most celebrated teachers were to be found. Athens and Rhodes were the fashionable universities, as we may call them, to which the young Romans resorted, when they had finished their schooling at Rome. After learning grammar and reading Latin and Greek poets in their boyhood, they repaired to the more famous haunts of Grecian learning to study a little geometry and a little philosophy; but it was to rhetoric or the acquirement of a facile power of speaking on any given subject that the ambitious youth devoted their chief efforts.

Education in Greek literature led many persons in this period to compose Greek memoirs of the stirring scenes in which they had lived or acted. Examples of this kind had been set as early as the Second Punic War by Cincius and Fabius. It now became very common; but many began to employ the vernacular language. C. Fannius Strabo, who mounted the walls of Carthage by the side of Ti. Gracchus, and his contemporary L. Cælius Antipater, wrote Latin histories famous in their time. Both were thought worthy of abridgment by Brutus. The former is commended by Sallust, the latter was preferred to Sallust by the emperor Hadrian. Even Cicero commended Antipater as an improver of Latin composition; his follower Asellio, says the orator, returned to the meagre dullness of the ancient annalists. Then came L. Cornelius Sisenna, who witnessed the bloody scenes of the Social and First Civil wars and wrote their history. Cicero commends his style; Sallust speaks with praise of his diligence, but hints at his subserviency to Sulla and the senate. But the great men who made history at this epoch also took up the pen to write history. Q. Lutatius Catulus, the colleague of Marius, left an account of the Cimbrian War. The good Rutilius Rufus employed his leisure in penning an historical work. Sulla composed a memoir of his own political life, to which Plutarch often refers; but from the specimens which he gives the dictator seems not to have been scrupulously impartial in his narrative. Lucullus composed similar memoirs. Cicero drew up a Greek notice of his consulate with his own ready pen, and endeavoured to persuade L. Lucceius to undertake a similar task. Even the grim Marius wishes his deeds commemorated.

The Commentaries of Cæsar have been already quoted as illustrating one characteristic of the great dictator’s mind. His pen was taken up by several of his officers—A. Hirtius, who completed the narrative of the Gallic War, C. Oppius, to whom the memoirs of the dictator’s wars in Egypt, Africa, and Spain are often attributed, L. Cornelius Balbus, and others. But the most remarkable prose writer of the late republican era is C. Sallustius Crispus, familiarly known to us as Sallust. The two works that remain to us from the pen of this vigorous writer, the account of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the Jugurthine War, are rather to be styled political pamphlets than histories. Sallust was, as we have mentioned, an ardent partisan of the Marian and Cæsarian party. He had been expelled from the senate. Dislike of the reigning oligarchy appears at every turn, notwithstanding the semblance of impartiality assumed by a man who practised the profligacy which he indignantly denounces. But Sallust’s writings are valuable in a literary point of view, because they disclose the terse and concentrated energy of which the Latin language was capable, qualities little favoured by the oratorical tendencies of the day, but used with marvellous effect in a later age by Tacitus.

Other writers now first endeavoured to hand down in Latin a history of Rome from her foundation, or from early periods of her existence. Such were C. Licinius Macer, Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, and Q. Valerius Antias, all born about the beginning of the last century before the Christian era. The works of these and other annalists were used and swallowed up by the history of Livy, who was born, probably at Padua, in the year 59 B.C., and belongs to the imperial era of Augustus.

Some few writers in this same period began to cultivate grammatical and philological studies. The founder of these pursuits at Rome is reputed to be L. Ælius Stilo, the friend of Q. Metellus Numidicus and his companion in exile. He was closely followed by Aurelius Opilius, a freedman, who attended Rutilius Rufus into exile, as Stilo had attended Metellus. But the man whose name is in this department most conspicuous is M. Terentius Varro of Reate. He was born in 116 B.C., ten years later than Cicero, whose friendship he cultivated to the close of the great orator’s life. Varro was a laborious student, and earned by his successful pursuit of all kinds of knowledge a reputation not deserved by his public life. From the first he adhered to the cause of Pompey. After Pharsalia, Cæsar received him with the same clemency that he had shown to all his foes, and employed him in promoting the plans which he had formed of establishing a public library at Rome. After the death of Cæsar he retired to the country, and confined himself to literary pursuits; but this did not save him from being placed on the proscription list. He escaped, however, to be received into favour by Octavian, and continued his studies in grammar, philology, and agriculture, till he reached the great age of eighty-eight, when he died in peace. Of his great work on the Latin language, originally consisting of twenty-four books, six remain to attest the industry of the man and the infantine state of philological science at the time. His work on agriculture in three books, written when he was eighty years old, is still in our hands, and forms the most accurate account we possess from the Romans of the subject. Fragments of many other writers on all kinds of topics have been handed down to justify the title given to Varro—“the most learned of the Romans.”

We will close this sketch of the prose literature of the last age of the republic with a notice of Cicero’s writings. Of his oratory and of his epistles something has been said in former pages; and it is to these productions that we must attribute the great orator’s place in the commonwealth of letters. Of his poems it were better to say nothing. Of his memoirs and historical writings little is known, unless we count the fragments of The Republic in this class. But his rhetorical and philosophical essays each fill a goodly volume; and the writings have been the theme of warm admiration for ages past. Yet it is to be doubted whether the praises lavished upon them are not chiefly due to the magic influence of the language in which they are expressed. The Brutus doubtless is extremely interesting as containing the judgment of Rome’s greatest orator on all the speakers of his own generation and of foregoing times. The dialogues on The Orator are yet more interesting as furnishing a record of his own professional experience. But the philosophical works of Cicero are of little philosophical value. They were written not so much to teach mankind as to employ his time at moments when he was banished from the city. Their highest merit consists in that lucid and graceful style which seduced the great Italian Latinists at the end of the fifteenth century to abjure all words and phrases which did not rest on Ciceronian authority, and which led Erasmus himself, who resisted this pedantry, to “spend ten years in reading Cicero.”

THE DRAMA

Roman Terra-cotta Statuette of a Comedian

The dramatic art fell more and more into dishonour. We hear, indeed, of two illustrious actors, Æsopus and Roscius, who were highly honoured at Rome, and died in possession of large fortunes. But it was from the great families that their honours and the means of making money came. The theatres, as we have before observed, remained mere temporary buildings till the second consulship of Pompey, when the first stone theatre at Rome was erected by one of his wealthy freedmen. The pieces represented were more of the nature of spectacles. Those in which Roscius and Æsopus acted must have been old plays revived. In this period hardly one name of a dramatic author occurs. It was not in theatres, but in amphitheatres, that Rome and Roman towns sought amusement. Not only is the Flavian amphitheatre the most gorgeous of the remains of imperial Rome, but at all places where Roman remains are preserved, at Verona in Transpadane Gaul, at Arles and Nismes in “the Province,” at Treves on the distant Moselle, it is the amphitheatre that characterises the Roman city, as it is the theatre that marks the Greek.

During this period, indeed, a new kind of dramatic representation was introduced, which enjoyed a short-lived popularity. This was the mime. The name at least was borrowed from the Greeks of Sicily. The Greek mime was a kind of comic dialogue in prose, adapted to the purposes afterwards pursued by the Roman satire. But while the Greek mime in the hands of Sophron assumed a grave and dignified character, so that Aristotle classes him among poets though he wrote in prose, the Roman mime was generally coarse and licentious. Sulla was particularly fond of these productions and their authors. After his time, Dec. Laberius, a knight, strove to give them greater dignity. His mimes, as the fragments show, were in iambic verse, and differed from comedy chiefly in their absence of plot and their relation to the topics of the day. The fame of Laberius was rivalled by Publilius Syrus, a freedman who acted in his own mimes, whereas the knighthood of Laberius forbade this degradation. Cæsar, however, on the occasion of his quadruple triumph, thought fit to order Laberius to enter into a contest with Syrus; and the knight, though a man of sixty years, dared not refuse. His sense of the indignity was strongly marked by a fine passage in the prologue, still preserved:

“The Gods themselves cannot gainsay his might;

And how can I, a man, think to gainsay it?

So then, albeit I’ve lived twice thirty years

Free from all taint of blame, I left my house

At morn a Roman knight and shall return

At eve a sorry player. ’Faith, my life

Is one day longer than it should have been.”

In the course of the dialogue he expressed himself with freedom against the arbitrary power of the great dictator:

“And then, good people, we’ve outlived our freedom.”

And in another line almost ventured to threaten:

“It needs must be

That he fears many, whom so many fear.”

Cæsar, however, took no further notice of these caustic sallies than to assign the prize to Syrus.

POETRY

In poetry, the long period from the death of Lucilius to the appearance of Virgil and Horace—a period of about sixty years—is broken only by two names worthy of mention. But it must be admitted that these names take a place in the first ranks of Roman literature. It is sufficient to mention Lucretius and Catullus.

T. Lucretius Carus was a Roman of good descent, as his name shows. All we know of him is that he was born about 95 B.C., and died by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age. But if little is related of his life, his great poem on The Nature of the Universe is known by name at least to all. It is dedicated to C. Memmius Gemellus, a profligate man and an unscrupulous politician, who sided now with the senatorial party, now with Cæsar, and ended his days in exile at Mytilene. But Memmius had a fine sense in literature, as is evinced by his patronage of Lucretius and of Catullus.

The poem of Lucretius seems to have been published about the time when Clodius was lord of misrule in the Roman Forum, that is, about 58 B.C. Memmius took part against the demagogue, and to this the poet probably alludes in the introduction to the first book, where he regrets the necessity which involved his friend in political struggles.

Roman Terra-cotta Statuette of a Comedian

The attempt of Lucretius in his great poem is to show that all creation took place and that all nature is sustained, without the agency of a creating and sustaining God, by the self-operation of the elemental atoms of which all matter is composed and into which all matter may be resolved. The doctrine is the doctrine of Epicurus; but his arguments are in great part borrowed from the early Greek philosophers, who delivered their doctrines in heroic verse of the same majestic kind that extorts admiration from the reader of Lucretius. He professes unbounded reverence for the name of Empedocles; and doubtless if the works of this philosopher, of Anaxagoras, and others were in our hands, we should see, what their fragments indicate, the sources from which Lucretius drew. Mingled with the philosophic argument are passages of noble verse; but here also it may be doubted how far we can believe in his originality. One of the most magnificent passages—the sacrifice of Iphigenia—is taken in every detail from the famous chorus in the Agamemnon of Æschylus. When we see this, and know that the almost universal habit of Latin poets was not to create but to adapt and borrow, we must pause before we give Lucretius credit for originality.

Yet none can rise from the perusal of Lucretius without feeling that he was a true poet. The ingenuity with which he employs Latin, a language unused to philosophical speculation, to express in the trammels of metre the most technical details of natural phenomena, is itself admirable. But more admirable are those majestic outbursts of song with which the philosophical speculations are diversified. The indignant and melancholy passion with which he attacks the superstitious religion of his time cannot but touch us, though we feel that his censure falls not upon superstition only, but upon the sacred form of religion herself. But he was little appreciated at Rome. Cicero speaks of him with that cold praise which is almost worse than censure. Horace never makes mention of his name. Virgil alone showed the true feeling of a poet by his value for Lucretius. He scrupled not to borrow whole lines from his poem; many passages in the Georgics bear witness to the faithful study which he had bestowed on the works of his great predecessor, and in one often-quoted place he confesses his inferiority to the great didactic poet. On the whole, it may be affirmed that Lucretius possessed the greatest genius of all Roman poets.

In striking contrast to the majestic gravity of Lucretius appears the second poet whom we have named. C. or Q. Valerius Catullus (for his first name is variously given) was a native of Verona, or its neighbourhood. He was born about 97 B.C., and is known to have been alive in the consulship of Vatinius (47 B.C.). He was then fifty years of age, and we hear of him no more. His father was a friend of Cæsar, and left his son in the possession of some property. He had a house on the lovely peninsula of Sirmio, at the foot of Lake Benacus, well known from his own description; he had a villa near Tibur, and many of his poems indicate the licentiousness of the life which he led at Rome. He endeavoured to mend his broken fortunes by attending Memmius, the friend of Lucretius, when he went as prætor into Bithynia, but was little satisfied with the result, and bitterly complained of the stinginess of his patron. When he was in Asia, his brother died, and he addressed to Hortalus, son of the orator Hortensius, that beautiful and affecting elegy which alone would entitle him to a foremost place among Roman poets. Fearless of consequences, he libelled Cæsar in language too coarse for modern ears. The great man laughed when he heard the libel, and asked the poet to dinner the same day.

The poems of Catullus range from gross impurity to lofty flights of inspiration. The fine poem called the Atys is the only Latin specimen which we possess of that dithyrambic spirit which Horace repudiated for himself. The elegy to Hortalus is perhaps the most touching piece of poetry that has been left us by the ancients. The imitation of Callimachus is a masterpiece in its way. The little poems on passing events—pièces de circonstance, as the French call them—are the most lively, natural, and graceful products of the Latin muse. To those who agree in this estimate it seems strange that Horace should only notice Catullus in a passing sneer. It is difficult to acquit the judge of jealousy. For Catullus cannot be ranked with the old poets, such as Livius, Ennius, and others, against the extravagant admiration of whom Horace not unjustly protested. His lyric compositions are as finished and perfect as the productions of Horace, who never wrote anything so touching as the elegy to Hortalus, or so full of poetic fire as the Atys.

With Catullus may be mentioned his friend C. Licinius Macer, commonly called Calvus, whom Horace honours by comprehending him in the same condemnation. He was some fifteen years younger, and was probably son of Licinius Macer the historian. He was a good speaker, and a poet (if we believe other authors, rather than Horace) not unworthy to be coupled with Catullus. He died at the early age of thirty-five or thirty-six.

Another poet highly praised by Catullus was C. Helvius Cinna, supposed to be the unlucky man torn to pieces by the rabble after Cæsar’s funeral by mistake for L. Cornelius Cinna.

At the time that the battles of Philippi secured to Italy somewhat of tranquillity, many others began to devote themselves to poetry. Among these were L. Varius Rufus, celebrated by Horace as the epic poet of his time, and the few fragments from his pen which remain do much to justify the praise. He was the intimate friend both of Horace and Virgil.

Furius Bibaculus also may be mentioned here as an epic poet, who attempted to commit to verse the campaign of Cæsar in Gaul. Horace ridicules his pretensions in two well-known passages; but there is reason to think that in the case of Furius also the satirist was influenced by some personal feeling.

But the fame of all other poets was obscured by the brightness which encircled the names of Virgil and Horace. Properly their history belongs to the Augustan or imperial era. But as they both published some of their best works before the battle of Actium, a slight notice of them may be permitted here.

P. Virgilius (or Vergilius) Maro was born at Andes, a village near Mantua, in the famous year 70 B.C., so that he was entering manhood about the time when Lucretius put an end to his own life. From his father he inherited a small estate. After the battle of Philippi, he was among those whose lands were handed over to the soldiery of the victorious triumvirs. But what seemed his ruin brought him into earlier notice than otherwise might have been his lot. He was introduced to Mæcenas by Asinius Pollio, himself a poet, who had been made governor of Cisalpine Gaul, and was reinstated in his property. This happy event, as everyone knows, he celebrates in his first Eclogue. But it appears that when he tried to resume possession he was nearly slain by the rude soldier who had received a grant of the land, and it was some months before he was securely restored. In company with Horace, Varius, and others, he attended Mæcenas in the famous journey to Brundusium (probably in 37 B.C.). He had already (in the year 40 B.C.) written the famous eclogue on the consulship of Pollio, of which we have before spoken; and soon after this he began the Georgics, at the special desire of Mæcenas. They seem to have been published in their complete form soon after the battle of Actium. For the rest of his life, which he closed at Brundusium in the fifty-first year of his age (19 B.C.), he was occupied with his Æneid, which with modest self-depreciation he ordered to be destroyed. But it was revised by his friends Varius and Plotius, and published by order of the emperor, whom he had accompanied in a tour through Greece just before his death.

The character of Virgil was gentle and amiable, his manners simple and unobtrusive, and we hear little from himself of the great men with whom he was associated in friendship. His health was feeble, and his life passed away in uneventful study, of which his poems were the fruit and are the evidence. Nothing can be more finished than the style and versification of Virgil. His phraseology is so idiomatic as often to defy translation; his learning so great, that each page requires a commentary. He bestowed the greatest labour in polishing his writings; his habit being, as is said, to pour forth a vast quantity of verses in the morning, which he reduced to a small number by continual elaboration, after the manner (as he said) of a bear licking her cubs into shape.

It may be said that Cicero, Horace, and Virgil himself, completed the hellenising tendency which had begun with Ennius. Lucretius, though he borrowed his matter from the old Greek philosophers, is much more Roman in his style. Catullus is more Roman still. But Virgil, except in idiom, is Greek everywhere. His Eclogues are feeble echoes of the Doric grace of Theocritus. His Georgics are elaborately constructed from the works of Hellenic writers, tempered in some of the noblest poetic passages with the grave majesty of Lucretius. In his Æneid almost every comparison and description is borrowed from Homer, Apollonius, and other Greek poets. In strength of character his epic fails entirely. No one person in the Æneid excites awe, love, sympathy, or any other strong feeling, unless we except the untimely end of Nisus and Euryalus, the fates of young Lausus and young Pallas, and the death of the heroine Camilla. But, notwithstanding all this, such is the tender grace of his style, such the elaborate beauty of his descriptions, that we read again and yet again with renewed delight.

To give any adequate account of the gay Horace in a page is impossible. Q. Horatius Flaccus was born in the colony of Venusia in the year 65 B.C., two years before the consulship of Cicero. He was therefore nearly six years younger than Virgil, and two years older than Octavian. He died in the fifty-seventh year of his age (8 B.C.), following his friend and patron Mæcenas, who died a month or two before, according to his own prophetic promise. His father was a freedman by birth, and by profession a tax-collector, a good and tender parent, caring above all things for the education of his son. He was at the expense of taking the promising boy to Rome, probably when he was about twelve years old, where he attended the school of Orbilius, known to others besides Horace for his belief in the maxim that the “sparing of the rod spoils the child.” There he learned Greek as well as Latin, by reading Homer and the old Roman poets. About the age of eighteen he went to complete his education at Athens, where Q. Cicero was his fellow-student. He was at Athens when Cæsar was murdered, and became an officer in the army of Brutus. After the battle of Philippi he returned to Rome, and was thrown entirely upon the world. He obtained, we know not how, a clerkship in the treasury, on the proceeds of which he contrived to live in the most frugal manner; vegetables and water formed his truly poetic diet.

But he was not left to languish in poverty. He became acquainted with Varius and Virgil, and was by them introduced to Mæcenas; and we have from his own pen a pleasing narrative of the introduction. For several months, however, he received no sign of the great man’s favour; but before the journey to Brundusium he was evidently established in intimacy as great as Virgil’s. Soon after this he published the first book of the Satires. The second book and the Epodes followed; but in the interval he had received a substantial reward from his patron in the present of the Sabine farm, so prettily described by himself. At a latter period he became master of a cottage at Tibur, distant about fifteen miles from his Sabine villa. But it must be said that, notwithstanding his dependence upon patrons, Horace always maintained a steady determination not to be subservient to any one, emperor or minister. The Epistle to Mæcenas deserves especial notice; for it is written in a tone equally creditable to the poet who would not condescend to flatter the patron, and to the patron who tolerated such freedom in the poet.

Hitherto he had declined the name of poet. But the publication of the three books of his Odes in rapid succession indicated his title to this name, though still he declined to approach subjects of epic grandeur. Before this he had been introduced to Agrippa, and somewhat later to Octavia. The first book of his Epistles seems to have been completed in 21 B.C., when the poet was beginning his forty-fifth year. Then followed the Carmen Seculare, which may be fixed, by the occasion to which it belongs, to the year 17 B.C. After this came the fourth book of Odes and the second book of Epistles, works in great part due to the express request of Augustus.

The popularity of the Odes of Horace has ever been great. He disclaims the title of poet for his other writings; and of the odes he says that he wrote poetry only under the sharp compulsion of poverty. Much is borrowed from the Greek, as we know; and if the works of the Greek lyric poets remained to us in a less fragmentary form, we should doubtless find far more numerous examples of imitation. But the style of Horace is so finished, his sentiments expressed with so much lively precision, and in words so happily chosen, that he deserves the title which he claims of “Rome’s lyric minstrel.” No doubt his poetry was the result of great labour, and every perusal of his odes strengthens the belief that he spoke literally when he compared himself to “the matine bee,” rifling the sweets of many flowers, and finishing his work with assiduous labour. It is in the first book of the Epistles that we must seek the true genius of Horace—the easy man of the world, popular with his great patrons, the sworn friend of his brother poets, good-natured to every one, except the old poets of Rome, whom he undervalued partly (as in the case of Livius) from dislike for a rude and imperfect style, partly (as we must suspect in the case of Catullus and Calvus) from an irrepressible emotion of jealousy.

The elegiac poets, Tibullus and Propertius, with their younger and more famous compeer Ovid, and many writers of lesser note, belong to the imperial era of Augustus.

THE FINE ARTS

A few words may be added on the subject of art generally. With the great fortunes that had been amassed first by senatorial rulers and afterwards by the favourites of the triumvirs, it is natural that art in some shape should be cultivated. But Greek masters still ruled at Rome; and a taste began for collecting ancient works, such as resembles the eagerness with which the pictures of the old masters are sought in modern Europe. In the oration of Cicero against Verres we have an elaborate exposure of the base and greedy arts by which that wholesale plunderer robbed the Sicilians of their finest works of art. It was, no doubt, an extreme case; but Verres would not have dared to proceed to extremities so audacious, unless he had been encouraged by many precedents.

The arts also of the builder and engineer grew with the growing wealth of Rome. It was one of the chief and favourite occupations of C. Gracchus, during his brief reign, to improve the roads and the bridges. The great dictator Cæsar had many projects in view when he was cut off—as, for instance, the draining of the mountain lakes by tunnels, of the Pontine marshes by canal. Many of these works were afterwards executed by Agrippa, who also (as we have said) constructed the Julian harbour, by uniting the Lucrine and Avernian lakes with the sea. In the year 33 B.C. he condescended to act as ædile, and signalised his magistracy by a complete repair of the aqueducts and sewers.

Before this time, also, had begun the adornment of the city with noble buildings of public use. A vast basilica was laid out and begun by M. Æmilius Paulus, consul in 50 B.C. This magnificent work was said to have been erected with money received from Cæsar as the price of the consul’s good services. But the Basilica Æmilia was eclipsed by the splendid plans of the dictator Cæsar. A great space had lately been cleared by the fire kindled at the funeral of Clodius. Other buildings were pulled down, and the Basilica Julia extended on the south of the Forum along the frontage formerly occupied by the Tabernæ Veteres. The great work was completed by Octavian. Still more magnificent edifices were the Thermæ or hot-baths of Agrippa, and the noble temple erected by the same great builder, which still remains under the name of the Pantheon. In this structure the arch, that instrument by which Rome was enabled to give that combination of stability and magnitude which distinguishes all her works, achieved its greatest triumph; and here was seen the first of those great vaulted domes which became the distinctive attribute of the Christian architecture of modern Italy. By these and many other works—politic both because they increased the magnificence and the health of the capital, and also gave constant employment to workmen who might otherwise have been turbulent—the emperor Augustus was enabled to boast that he had “found Rome of brick, and left it of marble.”

But it was not to Rome alone that Augustus, Agrippa, and others confined their labours. Nothing more excites our wonder than to stumble upon costly works, built with a solidity that seems to imply immortality, in the mountain districts of Italy or in remote valleys of Gaul or Asia Minor or Africa. Wherever the Roman went he carried with him his art of building. The aqueduct which was constructed by Agrippa to supply Nemausus (Nismes), a colony of no great note, with water, is a proof of this assertion. The largest modern cities can hardly show a work of public utility so magnificent as the structure which is known to thousands of modern travellers under the name of the Pont du Gard.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS; RELIGION

It is needless here to repeat the dismal tale of corruption and vice which was presented in the life of most of the eminent Romans of the time. Even the rich who were not vicious in their pleasures, such as Lucullus and Hortensius, showed less of taste and good sense in their expenditure than a desire of astonishing by display. The old religion had lost its hold upon the public mind, though superstitious practices lingered among the uneducated classes. Philosophy did little to supply the void. The practical tendencies of the Roman mind attached it to the most practical doctrines of the Hellenic teachers. The moral philosophy of Zeno and Epicurus divided the Roman world; for here were to be found broad and positive principles of action, comprehensible by all. The finer speculations of the academic and peripatetic schools found few votaries among men who were equally downright in their purposes of virtuous or vicious living. In earlier times the stoic doctrines had found a response in the hearts of men who revived the stern simplicity of the old Roman life.

Some of the best men, in the times that followed the Punic Wars, were stoics by practice as well as in profession. Such were Æmilius Paulus and his son the younger Scipio. Notwithstanding the pride and self-sufficiency which was the common result of Zeno’s discipline, there was something ennobling in the principle that a man’s business in life is to do his duty, regardless of pleasure or pain, riches or poverty, honour or disgrace. But nature is too strong for such a system to prevail for many years or over many men. The popular philosophy of the later times was borrowed from the school of Epicurus, but it was an easy and fashionable modification of the morality of that philosopher. Epicurus taught that human happiness could not exist without pleasure, but he added that without the practice of virtue real pleasure could not exist. The former precept was adopted by the sensualists of Rome; the latter was set aside.

Nothing more strongly proves the vicious state of society than the neglect of the marriage tie and the unblushing immorality of the female sex. Cæsar and Octavian, though their own practice was not such as to set example to society, both saw the danger of this state of things, and both exerted themselves to restore at least outward decency. Lawful marriage they endeavoured to encourage or even to enforce by law.

But if religion had given way, superstition was busy at work. Men in general cannot entirely throw aside those sentiments which are unfolded with more or less of strength in every mind and in every state of social existence. There will still be cravings after spiritual things and the invisible world. The ancient oracles had fallen into disrepute, and soon after the fall of the republic (as is well known to Christian students) shrank into ignoble silence. But behind the Hellenic, a new world was now opened to Rome. She became familiar with the mystic speculation and the more spiritual creeds of the East. The fanatical worship of the Egyptian divinities, Isis and Serapis, became common even in Rome, notwithstanding the old feeling against Cleopatra, and notwithstanding many attempts to crush this worship. It became a common practice to seek for revelations of the future by means of the stars. The grim Marius carried about with him a Syrian soothsayer. To consult Babylonian star readers was familiar to the friends of Horace. Magi were the companions of Roman magistrates. One of Juvenal’s most striking pictures is that of the gloomy voluptuary Tiberius sitting in his island palace surrounded by a host of Chaldean astrologers. Nor could the purer and sublimer images of the Hebrew scriptures be unknown. Jews abounded in every populous city of the empire long before they were scattered by the fall of their Holy City, and wherever they went they must soon have made their influence felt. Others sought the presence of God in nature, and confounded the divinity with his works. Man seemed to them such a mass of contradictory meannesses, that they tried to solve the riddle of evil by supposing that he, like the animals and the whole creation, was but a machine animated by the universal and pervading spirit of the deity. Such was the idea of the elder Pliny, who forfeited a life spent in the study of nature to the curiosity which led him to brave the fires of Vesuvius.

Out of this seething mass of doubts and fears, uncertain belief and troubling disbelief, rose an eagerness to find and a readiness to receive the principles of that religion which took root a few years later in Galilee and Judea, and which extended itself with marvellous rapidity over every province of the empire. The purity of its morality attracted those whose hearts were still craving for something better than could be found in the religions or philosophies of the day. Its aspirations offered great attractions to those who were looking with doubt and fear upon all that lay before or behind. The breaking up of national distinctions, the union of all the Mediterranean shore under one strong and central government, the roads and canals which connected countries and provinces under the magnificent rule of the first Cæsars, were potent instruments in assisting the rapid march of the new religion. All things, moral and physical, internal and external, concurred to promote the greatest, but most silent, revolution that has ever passed over the mind of the civilised portion of the world.[c]