After the first Punic war, the number of the tribes had been raised to five and thirty, as a great part of the Sabines had acquired the full right of citizenship, and had formed two new tribes, the Quirina and Velina. This was nearly sixty years after the last increase, and thus, there were considerable signs already of a state of political stagnation. At the same time, perhaps as early as before the first Punic war, many towns were made præfectures with Cærite rights. During the second Punic war, there were four prætors; and while it yet lasted, their number was increased to six. Like Sicily, Spain now became a province; or rather, it was divided into two provinces, Citerior and Ulterior, to which two prætors were sent. Southern Italy had likewise taken the form of a province, owing to the war with Hannibal, and it continued as such for some time after: the prætor there was most likely in Tarentum or Bruttium. But Gaul was not yet reduced in provinciæ formam, and there was, of course, no prætor there. The greatest change, which reached deepest, and had the most lasting consequences, had been caused by the falling away of many peoples to Hannibal: they were punished, and the places which had belonged to them lost all the privileges of Italian allies; some were treated as conquered, their lands being either confiscated, or merely left to them on sufferance; others, who had submitted, had but met with forbearance. This was the fate of a great many places in Samnium and Apulia, which were severed from their communities. Those which had remained faithful, kept indeed their ancient constitution. As the Lucanians, in the war with Hannibal, had their own prætor whom they elected themselves, they may have still enjoyed this privilege; but all their subject towns which had revolted, were detached from them. The Bruttians, who had persisted the longest in their revolt, were altogether deprived of their constitution: they were mere dediticii, no more allies at all; they had some of them to become serfs, and the whole of their land was confiscated. It is uncertain, whether they had been formerly on the same footing with the Samnites and Lucanians: as being of Greek descent, they were most likely treated as foreigners, yet they had still held an honourable position, which was now gone. Tarentum lost all its rights, and lingered on forsaken within its own walls, until little by little it fell to nothing. This change among the allies, made it more difficult for those who remained to fulfil their engagements to Rome than before; and owing to the rebellion likewise, a bitter and long-lived hatred had grown up between Rome and many of the Italian peoples. And what had much exhausted the allies, was the drain upon their citizens, many of whom had taken advantage of the isopolity, to settle in Rome or in the colonies. Some of the Latin colonies, moreover, had neglected their duty, twelve out of thirty having furnished no contingent during the expedition of Hasdrubal; and now, when circumstances allowed of it, their rights were abridged. The traces of the war with Hannibal had never been done away: the Samnites, Apulians, and Lucanians had already been hardly dealt with before; Etruria alone found herself in a state of high prosperity. Many colonies were planted in the south of Italy, not so much for security’s sake, as thus to provide for the poorer Romans. The veterans of Scipio’s army were rewarded by a special grant of land in Apulia and Lucania, which is the first example known to us of a provision made for veterans on a large scale; if we had the second decade of Livy, we might perhaps discover some earlier instances, but indeed they can only have been single cases. The condition of Italy must have been one of extreme distress: the price of every thing was unnaturally high, and, owing to the heavy war-taxes, the middle classes must have been utterly impoverished. In the latter periods of the war, we meet with a public debt, which was repaid in three instalments; but the Macedonian war had so drained the exchequer, that the third instalment was made in public lands. The Roman people itself was affected in its very life’s blood. The war had cost an immense host of men; and if notwithstanding the census now gives a like number, we have only a proof that in the meanwhile a crowd of foreigners, especially freedmen, had been received as citizens, and that thus the body of the Roman commonalty had become quite a different thing from what it had been before: those who had stood the war, were for the most part grown wretchedly poor. All this misery is not to be detected in Livy’s narrative; but we know from other sources, that in Rome almost continual famine and epidemics were raging; many families had their estates in the Falernian country and in Campania, which districts were entirely laid waste; others which had possessed landed property in the revolted provinces, had lost their all; so that this struggle quite destroyed the wealth of the nation. The Greek towns, Croton and others, were never able to recover. Another consequence was, that the soldiers remained for years under arms; that the legions, which had been composed of men enlisted for a campaign, were converted into a standing army. This continued to be the case after the war; and the soldiers became accustomed to look upon themselves as a permanent order, which they had never been before, as the legions were disbanded every year, and newly raised the next. This condition of the preservation of republican freedom was now changed by the war with Hannibal, and thus were the seeds here sown of the later troubles. Owing to the great confiscations, immense landed estates had been gained, the possession of which was divided between the great men among the patricians and plebeians, as there was no one now to control them, and the Licinian law had become a dead letter.
At that time, not a soul actually thought of danger; yet the beginning of dissolution most decidedly existed already. It is said that, owing to the victories in Asia, luxury and its concomitant vices had spread; but this was an accidental symptom, the real cause lay deeper. After such long, savage, and destructive wars, in which so many deeds of outrage and ferocity had been wrought; in which the poor had become poorer and poorer, and the middle classes had gone down more and more, whilst the rich were crammed with wealth; many things must have changed for the worse. The same soldiers who formerly had earned glory under Scipio, and then as hungry plunderers went to Asia, enriched themselves immensely, and returned with ill-gotten treasures: they had no real wants, and did not know how to use their suddenly acquired riches. Even in the character of the great men, as in every thing else, we everywhere meet with a great alteration: the dismal spectacle of an utter degeneracy is already preparing itself. The generals appear like robbers; they carry on wars merely for the sake of pillage and booty, and the exceptions among them are few, and far between. The men of high rank are overbearing towards the allies: in former times a Roman magistrate, when travelling through Italy, would put up at the house of his own guest-friend, but it was now customary for such travellers to be everywhere received with pomp. The games were got up in a style and on a scale which required an immense fortune; in 580, there were at one funeral no less than a hundred and fifty gladiators: in the forum, banquets were given to the people. It was already the fashion to seek for choice specimens of art and luxury; the officers and the nobles filled their houses with furniture, tapestry, and plate of every description. A brutal expenditure of wealth got in vogue, a judicious and liberal use of riches being one of the most difficult things in the world. Thus, when several years ago, the inhabitants of Dittmarsch all at once made a great deal of money, it immediately gave rise to a sluttish wastefulness, until, before long, they were reduced again. The cooks, who hitherto had been the most despised of slaves at Rome, now became the most highly valued: in earlier times, the consul lived like the peasant; only the pontiffs, whose bills of fare we may still read in Macrobius,[37] were held to keep as good a table as the most dignified of canons. With the Athenians it was quite different. The Greek is naturally very temperate, and the Italian can be so too; but when the latter has an opportunity of feasting, he makes a beast of himself. Moreover, although the constitution was most democratical in appearance, yet we already see the overweening pride of the nobles on the increase: the rich were almost above punishment. L. Quinctius Flamininus, the brother of Titus, to amuse his catamite, caused a man who was either a convict, or a Gallic hostage, to be beheaded; for which Cato expelled him from the senate. And though fifty years afterwards, Polybius conscientiously places the Romans above the Greeks, peculation and extortions from the allies were notwithstanding very common, as we may see from an excellent fragment of Cato de sumtu suo, the gem of the collection of Fronto: it shows that towards the end of the sixth century, it was the general belief that the servants of the state seized upon every opportunity of feathering their own nests. All distinctions between the different orders had entirely ceased; the only thing looked to, was whether a man were noble or not, the patricians, as an order, having quite lost their importance. The last of their privileges, that one consul should always belong to one of the two orders, was done away with at the time of the war with Perseus, as the patrician houses were nearly extinct: for the ædiles only, this was still the rule, but in the case of the prætorship it was altogether abolished. It was, however, extremely difficult for a plebeian to rise, who was not of high rank: for only a few novi homines, like Cato, could make their way, and the whole of the nobility seem to have been in a league to check such intrusion.
On the other hand, the city was very much embellished. Stately buildings were erected, and instead of the courts of justice being held any longer with no other covering but heaven, as was done by our (German) forefathers, basilicæ were built. This name was derived from the στοὰ βασιλική under which the βασιλεύς at Athens used to sit: it was a triple portico in which the judges assembled in the open air, though not under the open sky. Cato was the first who built a basilica (Porcia) in the forum; by and by several others followed. They were afterwards enclosed with walls; and when the Christian religion was introduced into Rome, this form was deemed to be the one best suited to the Christian worship, as the different stoæ might be assigned as separate places, the men and the matrons being in the aisles on each side, and the clergy in the middle; at the tribunal, was the high altar, and the throne of the bishop. Hence the name of basilica was applied to all Christian churches, even when they were no longer in this form. The material of the buildings was still the old, simple one; the style, the ancient Doric or Tuscan: marble was not yet to be seen.
M. Porcius Cato is the most remarkable man of that age, he is quite a man of the old times: (the surname Priscus, however, merely indicates his Latin origin from Tusculum.) The account of him in Plutarch is excellent, as his life may be understood without any knowledge of the constitution, or deep insight into politics: nothing else was needed but a keen perception of individual character, which was Plutarch’s strong point. Perhaps Rome never again gave birth to so original a genius as his. Whilst all around him had their science and erudition from Greece, Cato had it from himself; he learned Greek only late in life; his language, his style, his knowledge, were altogether Roman. A more versatile mind than his, the world has never known: he was a great statesman,—his censorship was a distinguished one,—an excellent agriculturist, an active man in every business of life, gifted with remarkable eloquence, which was pure nature, and not at all formed after artificial rules; and he was also a very eminent scholar, indefatigable in research, an excellent prose-writer in his own way, although harsh and uncouth. Livy, who otherwise is fond of him, applies to him in jest the phrase, qui vivo eo ALLATRARE ejus (Scipionis) magnitudinem solitus erat. His peculiarities were those of a man of low birth, who, being endowed with immense energy, had worked his way by dint of it through countless difficulties: all his life long, he kept up a feud with the nobles and the rich; he abhorred their manners from the bottom of his heart,—there was no affectation in it. The only one like him in feeling, was his colleague in the censorship and the tribunate, L. Valerius Flaccus. Cato was a fanatical Roman: he bore a hatred against every thing that was polished and elegant, his nationality therefore led him to dwell fondly on the past; he looked upon the men of his day as quite degenerate; his ideal dated a hundred years back, and with him the height of happiness was in simplicity, thriftiness, and stern morality. His constitution was of iron strength: in his eighty-sixth year, he still carried on a troublesome lawsuit; and even as late as in his ninetieth, he impeached Servius Sulpicius Galba. He stood up without flinching for Rome’s supremacy; but at the same time he had an extraordinary sense of justice: though he did not like the Greeks, he yet defended the Rhodians, as he likewise did the Lusitanians against the perjury and the extortions of Galba. On the whole, he is very like the great German characters of the sixteenth century, in whom what is called coarseness by no means deserves that name.
Whilst Cato was almost the only really great man, virtue was then on the wane, and genius becoming more and more rare. The moneyed interest also in those days was already of great importance. Since the acquisition of Sicily, there had been a wide field opened for employment of capital; people went into the provinces to make their fortunes. In Rome, as by canon law, it was forbidden to take interest; yet the prohibition was unavailing, as ways and means were sought out of evading it. As in the middle ages business was done through the Jews, so in Rome it was carried on by means of foreigners and freedmen; and it was still more easily managed in the provinces, where there were none of these checks. And when the property (publicum) of the Roman state had grown immensely great, it became the custom to lease it out in single lots, such as the mines of Spain, the tithes of Sicily or Illyricum, or the tunny-fisheries on the Sardinian coast; so that those who farmed them made enormous profits, and many suddenly found themselves rich, as people now do by stock-jobbing. If a war-contribution were laid on a state, there was immediately a publicanus at hand, who advanced the money at twelve per cent. at the very lowest, but often at twenty-four, and even at thirty-six per cent.: the governors of the provinces then helped him to get paid. Thus a reckless circulation of money began, of which there had never been a trace before. The first signs of the class of the publicani are to be met with in Livy as early as in the war with Hannibal, and there are rather more in the decade which follows; these men did not, however, gain their extraordinary influence until nearly a hundred years afterwards, when in the nature and extent of their wealth they form a counterpart to the fortunes of the eighteenth century.
P. Scipio and Hannibal, according to the common account, died in the year 569, the latter by his own hand, as the Romans had basely called upon Prusias, the king of Bithynia, to yield him up. It happened that the extensive and wealthy state of Eumenes, who was in a sort of thraldom to the Romans, was so unwarlike, that the small kingdom of Bithynia was formidable to him; and the latter had spread, and had wrested from him a great part of Phrygia on the Hellespont. In this war, Hannibal directed the undertakings of Prusias, and forthwith Roman ambassadors demanded his surrender. The king was loth to arrest him; but he ordered his house to be surrounded by soldiers, that he might secure him until he had made up his mind whether he should give him up. When Hannibal saw that every way of escape was shut out from him, he swallowed poison and died. This demand of the Romans is one of the infamies of that age. But even in their brightest times, they would not have been more generous to an enemy like Hannibal, as is shown by the case of C. Pontius in the Samnite war. Hannibal had been unaccountably overlooked by the Romans for some years. T. Quinctius Flamininus lent himself to the office of getting him to be delivered up.
LITERATURE OF THE ROMANS AT THIS PERIOD. ATELLANÆ, PRÆTEXTATÆ; LIVIUS ANDRONICUS; NÆVIUS; ENNIUS; PLAUTUS. ROMAN HISTORIANS IN GREEK.
We are by no means to fancy that the Romans, before they were acquainted with the Greeks, knew as little of Greek literature, as, for instance, our forefathers did at the time of the revival of learning, or that indeed they had had no literature whatever. The class of scholars and writers was then unknown; but the Romans, and all the Italian nations in general, were very well versed in Greek poetry. This is shown by their pictures and monuments of every kind, by the many representations of Greek fables on the vases of the Etruscans and other peoples, and by the idiomatic names of Grecian heroes which were current in Italy; for instance, Ulixes,[38] instead of Odysseus; Catamitus, instead of Ganymedes; Alumentus, instead of Laomedon, and so forth; which are proofs that they really were in the mouths of the people. The religion of the Romans was not mythological, but a regular theology; their deities were νοούμενα, the myths referring but to the gods of lesser rank: they were therefore wanting in that which gives so much life to the Greek poetry. This of course applies rather to the Sabine element in the Roman population; the Pelasgian one was evidently more akin to the Grecian. By the other element, as well as by the Sibylline books and by the oracle of Apollo, they were familiarized with the mythology, and, therefore, likewise with the poetry of the Greeks: that mythology, there can be no doubt, was perfectly intelligible to the Romans. In Rome, after the end of the first Punic war, Greek poetry became still more known through the medium of the Latin language: it is true, however, that it awakened less interest there than in other Italian towns. The theatre at Tusculum, which, if we may judge from the bases found in the orchestra, dates at latest from the war with Hannibal, presupposes the performance of native or Greek pieces.
The Atellan plays, which are mentioned even before the end of the fourth century, are to us a distinct sign of a national literature. The statement that they were extemporised, is surely correct. Thus, before the great change of manners in Italy, there was often some improvisation interwoven with the pantomimes. As in the Atellanæ they possessed a sort of comedy, so in the prætextatæ, they had not only a native, but also a most ancient national tragedy. I believe that there is no mistake in connecting with the prætextatæ, the solemn processions at funerals, in which the masks of deceased men, who had curule ancestors (jus imaginum), were represented in the dress of their rank by men of similar size; yet even without any reference to this, we may ascribe to them a very great antiquity. The first poet whom we know to have treated them according to the rules of art, was Attius: earlier prætextatæ than his are not mentioned; yet this is no proof that they did not exist a long time before.
The translation of Greek poetry into the Latin tongue was a step of immense consequence. That Livius Andronicus had been taken prisoner at Tarentum, may be a mistake, as he is perhaps confounded with M. Livius Macatus; Livius Andronicus could at that time have been but a mere child. The accounts of him are very uncertain; in the earlier ages, little heed was bestowed upon the lives of the first poets, and their sayings and doings were only gathered afterwards: thus it still happened with Plautus and Terence. As far as we can judge from his fragments, he seems not even to have attained to the Greek form at all. The Odyssey, which, from its reference to the native country of the Romans, went indeed nearer home to their hearts, and had greater attraction for them than the Iliad,[39] he seems not to have translated at full length, but to have made an abridgment of it, which was also in the homely Italian measure. The great poem of Nævius was likewise in the saturnian rhythm. Besides the Odyssey, there are only tragedies mentioned of Livius, which, however, like the Atellanæ, were not acted in the theatre, but on a stage in the circus.