LECTURE II.
ROME THE HEAD OF EUROPE.
In my last lecture I strove to draw a picture of the Mediterranean lands at the moment when the Greek world, as the Greek world had been shaped by Macedonian conquest, a world of kingdoms, federations, and single cities, a busy and intricate system full of the deepest political lessons at every step, was suddenly startled by the invasion of a power from the West. That power had already slowly risen to the first place in its own Western world; it now sprang as in a moment to the first place in the East; but, having thus sprung to the first place, it was content to fall back on its former slow and piecemeal course. Generations had to pass away before the paramount influence in the Greek world which Rome won at a single grasp was fully changed into immediate dominion over every land and city to which its influence had spread. Very early in the second century B.C. Rome was already the paramount power in the Greek world. She had not a single province east of Hadria; but cities, confederations, kingdoms, all knew that she was practically their mistress. Late in the first century A.D. Rome had many provinces east of Hadria; her immediate dominion had become the rule, and even nominal independence was the exception; but there were still free Greek cities which Vespasian deemed it prudent to bring under his immediate dominion, and there were not a few other free Greek cities which Vespasian left to give Trajan an opportunity of respecting the faith of treaties. The first step in short was sudden and swift; every later step was slow; but the first step carried every later step with it as its necessary consequence. In the interval between the First and Second Punic Wars, Rome appeared east of the Hadriatic as the deliverer of Greek cities from the pirates of Illyricum. That was in truth the first step in that eastward march by which, five hundred and fifty years later, Rome herself, in her own person, followed in the wake of her dominion, and transferred her seat from the seven hills by the Tiber to the seven hills by the Bosporos. Or shall we say that the first step was taken at a far earlier time? The position of Rome as an Italian state, ruling over Greek allies and subjects, but in return deeply affected by Greek influences of every kind, had begun while Rome still dwelled in her own peninsula. Before she crossed the Hadriatic, she had begun to put on the character of that compound power, politically Roman, intellectually Greek, whose calling it was to leaven the world. The extension which was marked, in the later half of the third century, by the Roman alliance with Apollônia, Epidamnos, and Korkyra, was an extension only geographical. The ally or mistress, whichever name we choose, of Naples, Tarentum, and Syracuse, the undoubted mistress of the greater half of Sicily, had already begun to put on the character of a Greek power before she drew sword for or against any city of the elder Greece. Rome had entered the ranks of the Hellênismos before Corinth admitted her citizens to strive in the games of the Isthmos, before Athens honoured them with initiation into the holiest rites of Dêmêtêr and her Child.
In a lecture of my former course I pointed out some of the physical conditions which made it possible for Rome to rise to the headship of the world. The course of all history, I then ventured to say, had been determined by the geological fact that certain hills by the Tiber were lower and nearer together than the other hills of Latium. If I were lecturing on Roman history as such, instead of taking a glance of a moment, a glance of a mere thousand years or so, at Rome in her œcumenical position, I might carry out this thought into great detail. For my present purpose it is enough to say that the central spot of the central peninsula was naturally called to headship. We might point out that the process which made Lugubalium and Nisibis bulwarks of Rome began when the Palatine and the Capitoline hills were girded by a single wall. But it is enough for us to mark the great steps in the advance of the Roman power, the steps which made her the head of Latium, the head of Italy, the head of the West, the head, and in the end the mistress, of the Mediterranean world. In all these stages we must ever bear in mind that the rule of Rome was in the fullest sense the rule of a city, a rule of essentially the same kind as the rule of other ruling cities before and after. It was distinguished from the rule of Athens, Sparta, Carthage, Bern, and Venice only by the vastness of the scale to which the rule of the Roman city extended, and by the process, unparalleled in the history of any other city, by which the franchise of the ruling commonwealth was gradually extended to all its allies and subjects. Latium, Italy, the Mediterranean world, were merged bit by bit, not only in the Roman dominion but in the Roman city, till every Italian ally, every Greek confederate, even every barbarian provincial, had become a citizen of Rome. It is true that the last stage of the process did not take place till to be a citizen of Rome simply meant to be a subject of Rome’s master. It has been doubted, with no small show of reason, whether the edict of Antoninus Caracalla was not an immediate loss rather than an immediate gain to those whom it admitted to the full honours of the Roman name. But the eye of universal history looks at the change in another light. The edict of Antoninus, whatever its immediate motives, whatever its immediate results, did in the end create an artificial Roman nation throughout the Roman dominion, at any rate from the Ocean to Mount Tauros. Every freeman throughout the Empire had now a right in the name and traditions of Rome. We see the results of this change in the men of the fifth and sixth centuries, in those Romans of Gaul and Spain who knew no national name, no national being, save that of the city to which their forefathers had bowed. We see its yet more lasting results in the Romans and the Romania of the East, in the Greek-speaking folk from whom the Roman name has not yet wholly passed away, in the Latin-speaking folk to whom in our own day the Roman name has again become the living badge of their regenerate being.
On Rome then, as head of Europe in a sense in which no other among the powers of Europe ever reached that headship, the two duties of a great European power were laid in a fulness in which they were never laid on any other. Rome was called on, before all others, to be the teacher of nations of her own European stock, to be the champion of Europe against the inroads of barbarians from without. In the former character her teaching had sometimes to be sharp; she had often to wield the rod of as stern a discipline as that with which Gideon taught the men of Succoth. It was the mission of Rome to make the Gaul the partaker of her tongue and culture. It was her mission to make the Teuton the heir of one half of her political power. She was to frame out of his stores and her own a third state of things distinct from either of the elements that went to frame it. Of the union of Teuton and Roman sprang the world of modern Europe. But for that union the nations had to bide their time; as in the games of Hellas, they that rose before the happy moment were scourged back again. They who came as invaders only had to be dealt with as invaders and not as disciples. The Gaul who came before his time had his scourging at Sentinum; the Teuton who came before his time had his scourging at Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. But how well the work was done with Gauls and Teutons who better knew their time and place, we see when the Gaul Sidonius paints in his Roman speech the portrait of one Theodoric, Gothic lord of a Roman realm; we see it when a greater Theodoric, Gothic lord of a mightier Roman realm, legislates from his throne at Ravenna for the welfare of Rome’s earliest Gaulish province. Here was one side of the mission of the head of Europe, the teacher of the kindred nations. Her other side as European champion, as foremost representative of the Eternal cause, stands forth in her long warfare with the Carthaginian, the Persian, the Arab, and the Turk. And both sides stand forth together when Rome, lady of the nations, marches forth with her Teutonic comitatus round her to meet the hosts of Attila. The work was well in doing when Anianus looked from the walls of Orleans on the banners of deliverance, Roman and Gothic, flocking side by side, in the strife when Roman, Goth, and Frank, Catholic, Aryan, and heathen, joined to deal the final blow for the common European soil on the day of slaughter in the Catalaunian fields.
How the Latin city of Rome marched to the headship of Latium, how the head of Latium marched to the headship of Italy, are matters of Roman rather than of universal history. The œcumenical calling of Rome comes upon her as soon as she has become the head of Italy, perhaps more strictly in the very moment of her becoming such. She is not fully head of Italy till she has beaten back the invader from Epeiros from the shores of her peninsula. But her war with Pyrrhos had brought her into the thick of the Greek world and all its complications. Unless we accept the tales of her earlier dealings with Massalia, Rome has not yet sought either Greek allies or Greek enemies beyond the bounds of Italy. But Greece, in the person of her foremost champion, had come to seek out Rome within those bounds. The fight of Beneventum ruled that Italy should be Italian; it ruled that no Greek power should arise in Western Europe to balance the realms of Ptolemy and Seleukos in the East. It ruled in short that the head of Italy should be Rome. The wars which Rome had waged against the Samnite and the Gaul had made her beyond all comparison the first power in Italy. The war with Pyrrhos, the war that threatened to make Italy, like Asia or Egypt, part of a Greek dominion, made her the undoubted head.
The head of Italy now stood forth as one of the great powers of the world. It marks one of the differences between the political state of those days and that of our own that Rome had no sooner undoubtedly risen to this position than she found herself engaged in a struggle, a struggle well nigh for life and death, with the other great power of the Western Mediterranean. In the modern world, whatever jealousies, controversies, wars, may arise between any of the great powers of Europe, none seeks the utter destruction of any other, none seeks the abiding weakening of any other, its degradation from the rank of a great power. But the establishment of Rome as the undoubted head of Italy, as one of the two greatest powers of the West, at once condemned her to abiding rivalry with the other power, a rivalry which might be salved over by this or that interval of peace, but which meant that, sooner or later, either Rome or Carthage must perish. We must remember that, while between any other two of the great wars of Rome there was some slight interval of peace, the war with Pyrrhos and the Italian allies of Pyrrhos was followed without any break whatever by the first war with Carthage. That war was the War for Sicily. On any theory of natural boundaries, a power that was the head of Italy might reasonably, so far as there is reason in such matters, expect to spread its dominion over the lands within the Alps, and over the three great islands which look like natural appendages to the peninsula of Italy. And a power which spread itself over the lands within the Alps, a power which from its own shores could look out on the mountains of Illyricum, could hardly expect to keep itself wholly unentangled by the affairs of the lands on the other side of Hadria. Rome then had hardly become the head of Italy before two fields of action were opened for her without a breathing-space. She had to strive with the other great power of the West, and signs were not wanting that before long her destiny would call her to mingle in the strifes of Eastern Europe also.
The Western call was the earlier and the nearer. Close on the war with Pyrrhos followed the War for Sicily, the war of more than twenty years waged mainly on the waters by the fleets of Rome and Carthage. As a war for Sicily, as one of the greatest of the many wars for Sicily, it takes its place in the long range of cycles which make up the history of that illustrious island. Rome now for the first time buckled on her harness to play her part in dealing with the Eternal Question. Was the greatest of Mediterranean islands to be a part of Europe or of Africa, to be a possession of Aryan or of Semitic man, to be the home of the gods of Alba and Olympos or of the Moloch and Baalim of the men of Canaan? The Greek had waged the warfare for ages; the fates had gone against him; the realm of Hierôn was but a small survival of the days when Sicily had come so near to being a purely Hellenic island. The calling for which Syracuse was too weak passed on to the stronger hand of Rome. Panormos, won for Europe for eleven hundred years, was no mean first-fruits of the strife. After well nigh a generation of warfare, Rome stood forth victorious, mistress of Sicily, presently mistress of Sardinia and Corsica, seized of her first provincial dominion, rich in the faithful alliance of the first and worthiest of her long line of dependent kings. The rival power came out of the strife, not crushed, hardly weakened, but driven to transfer her energies to a new sphere, to seek in a new land the means of dealing a blow at Rome in the heart of her own Italy.
The choice of that new sphere of Carthaginian energy, the exploits of the house of Hamilkar, the line of the sons of Thunder, of itself opens a new and important, though as yet a secondary, page in the history of Europe. The time has come for the most western of her three peninsulas to play its part in the general affairs of the world. But the peninsula which was not wholly Mediterranean, which had two of its three sides washed by the outer Ocean, was never to play such a part as the elder peninsulas which felt only the waters of the inland sea. A day was to come in ages still far distant when Spain should be a ruling power in Italy and in Greece. But Spain never was to be what Italy or what Greece had been, nor what Italy was to be again. For several centuries her fate was to be a great and flourishing dependency of Rome, which, when it had once fully accepted the dependent relation, was to be less disturbed either by civil wars or by foreign invasion than any other province of the West. And now her fate was a strange one, but a fate which the wonderful cycles of history brought back again after more than nine hundred years. Spain was to be as Sicily. One phase of the Eternal Question was twice to be whether the most western land of Europe should be a part of the Western or the Eastern world. Rome had to win the land from the grasp of the Phœnician; its own sons had in after ages to win it back from the grasp of the Saracen. For the moment the third of the great peninsulas was to be in turn the stronghold of either side, to be the arsenal where Carthage first gathered up her strength for the attempted overthrow of Rome, and where Rome then gathered up her strength for the more than attempted overthrow of Carthage.
The Punic Wars form a kind of episode in the history of Europe, just as the presence of a Punic people in the Western Mediterranean is of itself an anomaly and in some sort an episode. The existence of the Carthaginian power hindered what we might have looked on as the natural course of history for the three great European peninsulas. When Rome had become the undisputed head of Italy, the next growth of her power might have been looked for in the direction of the Gaul and of the Greek. The headship of Italy had been won by driving back a Greek invasion, an invasion from a Greek land within sight of Italy, and that headship might be looked on as imperfect till it was further spread over Sicily at one end and Cisalpine Gaul at the other. Sicily was at once fought for, and in the end won; but it had to be won from the intruding Carthaginian. When the first Punic War was over, the eyes of Rome were again drawn beyond the Po and beyond the Hadriatic. The conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was begun; the Illyrian wars led to the first establishment of Rome as an influence, as a power, in the Eastern peninsula. Protector, mistress in all but name, of Korkyra, Epidamnos, and Apollônia, Rome has become an element in the affairs of Greece herself as well as in those of Greek colonies in Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Gaul. She has won the jealousy of Macedonia, the good will of the free states of Greece. That is, she has taken the first steps towards bringing Greek friends and Greek enemies alike, first under her influence and then under her dominion.