Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ

by David Francis Bacon

The efforts of the conquerors did not cease with the mere military subjugation of a country, but were extended far beyond the extinction of the hostile force. The Roman soldier was not a mere fighter, nor were his labors, out of the conflict, confined to the erection of military works only. The stern discipline, which made his arms triumphant in the day of battle, had also taught him cheerfully to exchange those triumphant arms for the tools of peaceful labor, that he might insure the solid permanency of his conquests, by the perfection of such works as would make tranquillity desirable to the conquered, and soothe them to repose under a dominion which so effectually secured their good. Roads, that have made Roman ways proverbial, and which the perfection of modern art has never equaled in more than one or two instances, reached from the capital to the farthest bounds of the empire. Seas, long dangerous and almost impassable for the trader and enterprising voyager, were swept of every piratical vessel; and the most distant channels of the Aegean and Levant, where the corsair long ruled triumphant, both before and since, became as safe as the porches of the capitol. Regions, to which nature had furnished the indispensable gift of water, neither in abundance nor purity, were soon blessed with artificial rivers, flowing over mighty arches, that will crumble only with the pyramids. In the dry places of Africa and Asia, as well as in distant Gaul, mighty aqueducts and gushing fountains refreshed the feverish traveler, and gave reality to the poetical prophecy, that

“In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.”

Roads.——I was at first disposed to make some few exceptions to this sweeping commendation of the excellence of Roman roads, by referring simply to my general impressions of the comparative perfection of these and modern works of the same character; but on revising the facts by an examination of authorities, I have been led to strike out the exceptions. Napoleon’s great road over the Simplon, the great northern road from London to Edinburgh, and some similar works in Austria, seemed, before comparison, in extent, durability, and in their triumphs over nature, to equal, if not surpass, the famed Roman WAYS; but a reference to the minute descriptions of these mighty works, sets the ancient far above the modern art. The Via Appia, “regina viarum,” (Papinius Statius in Surrentino Pollii,) stretching three hundred and seventy miles from Rome to the bounds of Italy, built of squared stone, as hard as flints, and brought from a great distance, so laid together that for miles they seemed but a single stone, and so solidly fixed, that at this day, the road is as entire in many places as when first made,——the Via Flaminia, built in the same solid manner,——the Via Aemilia, five hundred and twenty-seven miles long,——the Via Portuensis, with its enormous double cause-way,——the vaulted roads of Puzzuoli and Baiae, hewn half a league through the solid rock, and the thousand remains of similar and contemporaneous works in various parts of the world, where some are in use even to this day, as far better than any modern highway,——all these are enough to show the inquirer, that the commendation given to these works in the text, is not over-wrought nor unmerited. The minute details of the construction of these extraordinary works, with many other interesting particulars, may be much more fully learned in Rees’s Cyclopædia, Articles Way, Via, Road, Appian, &c.

Aqueducts.——The common authorities on this subject, refer to none of these mighty Roman works, except those around the city of Rome itself. Those of Nismes and Metz, in Gaul, and that of Segovia, in Spain, are sometimes mentioned; but the reader would be led to suppose, that other portions of the Roman empire were not blessed with these noble works. Rees’s Cyclopædia is very full on this head, in respect to the aqueducts of the great city itself, but conveys the impression that they were not known in many distant parts of the empire. Montfaucon gives no more satisfactory information on the subject. But a reference to books of travels or topography, which describe the remains of Roman art in its ancient provinces in Africa and Asia, will at once give a vivid impression of the extent and frequency of these works. Shaw’s travels in northern Africa, give accounts of aqueducts, cisterns, fountains, and reservoirs, along through all the ancient Roman dominions in that region. The Modern Traveler (by Conder) will give abundant accounts of the remains of these works, in this and various other countries alluded to in the text; and some of them, still so perfect, as to serve the common uses of the inhabitants to this day.

All these mighty influences, working for the peace and comfort of mankind, and so favorable to the spread of religious knowledge, had been further secured by the triumphant and firm establishment of the throne of the Caesars. Under the fitful sway of the capricious democracy of Rome, conquest had indeed steadily stretched east, west, north and south, alike over barbarian and Greek, through the wilderness and the city. A long line of illustrious consuls, such as Marcellus, the Scipios, Aemilius, Marius, Sylla, Lucullus and Pompey, had, during the last two centuries of the republic, added triumph to triumph, in bright succession, thronging the streets of the seven-hilled city with captive kings, and more than quadrupling her dominion. But while the corruption of conquest was fast preparing the dissipated people to make a willing exchange of their political privileges, for “bread and amusements;” the enlightened portion of the citizens were getting tired of the distracting and often bloody changes of popular favoritism, and were ready to receive as a welcome deliverer, any man who could give them a calm and rational despotism, in place of the remorseless and ferocious tyranny of a brutal mob. In this turn of the world’s destiny, there arose one, in all points equal to the task of sealing both justice and peace to the vanquished nations, by wringing from the hands of a haughty people, the same political power which they had caused so many to give up to their unsparing gripe. He was one who, while, to common eyes, he seemed devoting the flower of his youth and the strength of his manhood to idleness and debauchery, was learning such wisdom as could never have been learned in the lessons of the sage,——wisdom in the characters, the capabilities, the corruption and venality of his plebeian sovrans. And yet he was not one who scorned the lessons of the learned, nor turned away from the records of others’ knowledge. In the schools of Rhodes, he sat a patient student of the art and science of the orator, and searched deeply into the stored treasures of Grecian philosophy. Resplendent in arms as in arts, he devoted to swift and deserved destruction the pirates of the Aegean, while yet only a raw student; and with the same energy and rapidity, in Rome, attained the peaceful triumphs of the eloquence which had so long been his study. The flight of years passed over him, alike victorious in the factious strife of the capital, and in the deadly struggle with the Celtic savages of North-western Europe. Ruling long-conquered Spain in peace, and subjugating still barbarous Gaul, he showed the same ascendent genius which made the greatest minds of Rome his willing and despised tools, and crushed them when they at last dreamed of independence or resistance. In the art military, supreme and unconquered, whether met by the desperate savage of the forest or desert, or by the veteran legions of republican Rome,——in the arts of intrigue, more than a match for the subtlest deceivers of a jealous democracy,——as an orator, winning the hearts and turning the thoughts of those who were the hearers of Cicero,——as a writer, unmatched even in that Ciceronian age, for strength and flowing ease, though writing in a camp, amid the fatigues of a savage warfare,——in all the accomplishments that adorn and soften, and in all the manly exercises that ennoble and strengthen, alike complete,——in battle, in storm, on the ocean and on land, in the collected fury of the charge, and the sudden shock of the surprise, always dauntless and cool, showing a courage never shaken, though so often tried,——to his friends kind and generous,——to his vanquished foes, without exception, merciful and forgiving,——beloved by the former, respected by the latter, and adored by the people,——a scholar, an astronomer, a poet, a wit, a gallant, an orator, a statesman, a warrior, a governor, a monarch,——his vast and various attainments, so wonderful in that wonderful age, have secured to him, from the great of his own and all following ages, the undeniable name of THE MOST PERFECT CHARACTER OF ALL ANTIQUITY. Such a man was CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR. He saved the people from themselves; he freed them from their own tyranny, and ended forever, in Rome, the power of the populace to meddle with the disposal of the great interests of the consolidated nations of the empire. It was necessary that it should be so. The empire was too vast for an ignorant and stupid democracy to govern. The safety and comfort of the world required a better rule; and never was any man, in the course of Providence, more wonderfully prepared as the instrument of a mighty work, than was Julius Caesar, as the founder of a power which was to last till the fall of Rome. For the accomplishment of this wonderful purpose, every one of his countless excellences seems to have done something; and nothing less than he, could have thus achieved a task, which prepared the way for the advance of a power, that was to outlast his throne and the Eternal city. Under the controlling influence of his genius, the world was so calmed, subjugated and arranged, that the gates of all nations were opened for the peaceful entrance of the preachers of the gospel. So solidly did he lay the foundation of his dominion, that even his own murder, by the objects of his undeserved clemency, made not the slightest change in the fate of Rome; for the paltry intrigues and fights of a few years ended in placing the power, which Caesar had won, in the hands of his heir and namesake, whose most glorious triumphs were but straws on the mighty stream of events, which Julius had set in motion.

Caesar.——Those who are accustomed merely to the common cant of many would-be philanthropists, about the destruction of the liberties of Rome, and the bloody-minded atrocity of their destroyer, will doubtless feel shocked at the favorable view taken of his character, above. The truth is, there was no liberty in Rome for Caesar to destroy; the question of political freedom having been long before settled in the triumphant ascendency of faction, the only choice was between one tyrant and ten thousand. No one can question that Caesar was the fair choice of the great mass of the people. They were always on his side, in opposition to the aristocracy, who sought his ruin because they considered him dangerous to their privileges, and their liberty (to tyrannize;) and their fears were grounded on the very circumstance that the vast majority of the people were for him. This was the condition of parties until Caesar’s death, and long after, to the time of the final triumph of Octavius. Not one of Caesar’s friends among the people ever became his enemy, or considered him as having betrayed their affection by his assumptions of power. Those who murdered him, and plunged the world from a happy, universal peace, into the devastating horrors of a wide spread and protracted civil war, were not the patriotic avengers of an oppressed people; they were the jealous supporters of a haughty aristocracy, who saw their powers and dignity diminished, in being shared with vast numbers of the lower orders, added to the senate by Caesar, whose steady determination to humble them they saw in his refusal to pay them homage by rising, when the hereditary aristocracy of Rome took their seats in senate. It was to redeem the failing powers of their privileged order, that these aristocratic assassins murdered the man, whose mercy had triumphed over his prudence, in sparing the forfeited lives of these hereditary, dangerous foes of popular rights. Nor could they for a moment blind the people to the nature and object of their action; for as soon as the murder had been committed, the universal cry for justice, which rose at once from the whole mass of the people, indignant at the butchery of their friend, drove the gang of conspirators from Rome and from Italy, which they were never permitted again to enter. Those who thronged to the standards of the heir and friend of Caesar, were the hosts of democracy, who never rested till they had crushed and exterminated the miserable faction of aristocrats, who had hoped to triumph over the mass of the people, by the death of the people’s great friend. Now if the people of Rome chose to give up their whole power, and the disposal of their political affairs, into the hands of a great, a talented, a generous and heroic man, like Caesar, who had so effectually vindicated and secured their freedom against the claims of a domineering aristocracy, and if they afterwards remained so well satisfied with the use which he made of this power, as never to make the slightest effort, nor on any occasion to express the least wish, to resume it, I would like to know who had any business to hinder the sovran people from so doing, or what blame can in any way be laid to Caesar’s charge, for accepting, and for nobly and generously using the power so freely and heartily given up to him.

The protracted detail of his mental and physical greatness, given in the sketch of his character above, would need for its full defense and illustration, the mention of such numerous particulars, that I must be content with challenging any doubter, to a reference to the record of the actions of his life, and such a reference will abundantly confirm every particular of the description. The steady and unanimous decision of the learned and the truly great of different ages, since his time, is enough to show his solid claims to the highest praise here given. Passing over the glory so uniformly yielded to him by the learned and eloquent of ancient days, we have among moderns the disinterested opinions of such men as the immortal Lord Verulam, from whom came the sentence given above, pronouncing him “the most perfect character of all antiquity;” a sentiment which, probably, no man of minute historical knowledge ever read, without a hearty acquiescence. This opinion has been quoted with approbation by our own greatest statesman, Alexander Hamilton, than whom none knew better how to appreciate real greatness. Lord Byron (Note 47 on Canto IV. of Childe Harold,) also quotes this sentence approvingly, and in the same passage gives a most interesting view of Caesar’s versatile genius and varied accomplishments, entering more fully into some particulars than that here given. The sentence of the Roman historian, Suetonius, (Jure caesus existimetur,) seems to me to refer, not to the moral fitness or actual right of his murder, but to the common law or ancient usage of Rome, by which any person of great influence, who was considered powerful enough to be dangerous to the ascendency of the patrician rank, or to the established order of things in any way, might be killed by any self-constituted executioner, even though the person thus murdered on bare suspicion of a liability to become dangerous, should really be innocent of the charge of aspiring to supreme power. (“Melium jure caesum pronuntiavit, etiam si regni crimine insons fuerit.” Livy book iv. chapter 48.) The idea, that such an abominable outrage on the claim of an innocent man to his own life, could ever be seriously defended as morally right, is too palpably preposterous to bear a consideration. Such a principle of policy must have originated in a republicanism, somewhat similar to that which sanctions those exertions of democratic power, which have lately become famous under the name of Lynch law. It was a principle which in Rome enabled the patrician order to secure the destruction of any popular man of genius and intelligence, who, being able, might become willing to effect a revolution which would humble the power of the patrician aristocracy. The murder of the Gracchi, also, may be taken as a fair manifestation of the way in which the aristocracy were disposed to check the spirit of reform.

The work of Caesar, then, was twofold, like the tyranny which he was to subvert; and well did he achieve both objects of his mighty efforts. Having first brought down the pride and the power of an overbearing aristocracy, he next, by the force of the same dominant genius, wrested the ill-wielded dominion from the unsteady hands of the fickle democracy, making them willingly subservient to the great purpose of their own subjugation, and acquiescent in the generous sway of one, whom a sort of political instinct taught them to fix on, as the man destined to rule them.

Thus were the complicated and contradictory principles of Roman government exchanged for the simplicity of monarchical rule; an exchange most desirable for the peace and security of the subjects of the government. The empire was no longer shaken with the constant vacillations of supremacy from the aristocracy to the democracy, and from the democracy to the demagogues, alternately their tyrants and their slaves. The solitary tyranny of an emperor was occasionally found terrible in some of its details, but the worst of these could never outgo the republican cruelties of Marius and Sylla, and there was, at least, this one advantage on the side of those suffering under the monarchical tyranny, which would not be available in the case of the victims of mob-despotism. This was the ease with which a single stroke with a well-aimed dagger could remove the evil at once, and secure some chance of a change for the better, as was the case with Caligula, Nero, and Domitian; and though the advantages of the change were much more manifest in the two latter cases than in the former, yet, even in that, the relief experienced was worth the effort. But a whole tyrannical populace could not be so easily and summarily disposed of; and those who suffered by such despotism, could only wait till the horrible butcheries of civil strife, or the wasting carnage of foreign warfare, had used up the energies and the superfluous blood of the populace, and swept the flower of the democracy, by legions, to a wide and quiet grave. The remedy of the evil was therefore much slower, and more undesirable in its operation, in this case, than in the other; while the evil itself was actually more widely injurious. For, on the one hand, what imperial tyrant ever sacrificed so many victims in Rome, or produced such wide-wasting ruin, as either of those republican chiefs, Marius and Sylla? And on the other hand, when, in the most glorious and peaceful days of the aristocratic or democratic sway, did military glory, literature, science, art, commerce, and the whole common weal, so flourish and advance, as under the imperial Augustus, the sage Vespasian and the amiable Titus, the heroic Trajan, the polished Adrian, or the wise and philosophic Antonines? Never did Rome wear the aspect of a truly majestic city, till the imperial pride of her long line of Caesars had filled her with the temples, amphitheaters, circuses, aqueducts, baths, triumphal columns and arches, which to this day perpetuate the solid glory of the founders, and make her the wonder of the world, while not one surviving great work of art claims a republican for its author.

To such a glory did the Caesars raise her, and from such a splendor did she fade, as now.