But Vespasian was merciful only from prudence, and not by nature or from magnanimity; and he sent Sabinus to execution. Eponina asked that she might die with her husband, saying, “Caesar, do me this grace; for I have lived more happily beneath the earth and in the darkness than thou in the splendor of thy empire.” Vespasian fulfilled her desire by sending her also to execution; and Plutarch, their contemporary, undoubtedly expressed the general feeling, when he ended his tale with the words, “In all the long reign of this emperor there was no deed so cruel or so piteous to see; and he was afterwards punished for it, for in a short time all his posterity was extinct.”
In fact the Caesars and the Flavians met the same fate; the two lines began and ended alike; the former with Augustus and Nero, the latter with Vespasian and Domitian; first a despot, able, cold, and as capable of cruelty as of moderation, then a tyrant, atrocious and detested. And both were extinguished without a descendant. Then a rare piece of good fortune befell the Roman world. Domitian, two years before he was assassinated by some of his servants whom he was about to put to death, grew suspicious of an aged and honorable senator, Cocceius Nerva, who had been twice consul, and whom he had sent into exile, first to Tarenturn, and then in Gaul, preparatory, probably, to a worse fate. To this victim of proscription application was made by the conspirators who had just got rid of Domitian, and had to get another emperor. Nerva accepted, but not without hesitation, for he was sixty-four years old; he had witnessed the violent death of six emperors, and his grandfather, a celebrated jurist, and for a long while a friend of Tiberius, had killed himself, it is said, for grief at the iniquitous and cruel government of his friend. The short reign of Nerva was a wise, a just, and a humane, but a sad one, not for the people, but for himself. He maintained peace and order, recalled exiles, suppressed informers, re-established respect for laws and morals, turned a deaf ear to self-interested suggestions of vengeance, spoliation, and injustice, proceeding at one time from those who had made him emperor, at another from the Praetorian soldiers and the Roman mob, who regretted Domitian just as they had Nero. But Nerva did not succeed in putting a stop to mob-violence or murders prompted by cupidity or hatred. Finding his authority insulted and his life threatened, he formed a resolution which has been described and explained by a learned and temperate historian of the last century, Lenain de Tillemont (Histoire des Empereurs, &c., t. ii. p. 59), with so much justice and precision that it is a pleasure to quote his own words. “Seeing,” says he, “that his age was despised, and that the empire required some one who combined strength of mind and body, Nerva, being free from that blindness which prevents one from discussing and measuring one’s own powers, and from that thirst for dominion which often prevails over even those who are nearest to the grave, resolved to take a partner in the sovereign power, and showed his wisdom by making choice of Trajan.” By this choice, indeed, Nerva commenced and inaugurated the finest period of the Roman empire, the period that contemporaries entitled the golden age, and that history has named the age of the Antonines. It is desirable to become acquainted with the real character of this period, for to it belong the two greatest historical events—the dissolution of ancient pagan, and the birth of modern Christian society.
Five notable sovereigns, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius swayed the Roman empire during this period (A.D. 96-150). What Nerva was has just been described; and he made no mistake in adopting Trajan as his successor. Trajan, unconnected by origin, as Nerva also had been, with old Rome, was born in Spain, near Seville, and by military service in the East had made his first steps towards fortune and renown. He was essentially a soldier—a moral and a modest soldier; a friend to justice and the public weal; grand in what he undertook for the empire he governed; simple and modest on his own score; respectful towards the civil authority and the laws; untiring and equitable in the work of provincial administration; without any philosophical system or pretensions; full of energy and boldness, honesty and good sense. He stoutly defended the empire against the Germans on the banks of the Danube, won for it the province of Dacia, and, being more taken up with the East than the West, made many Asiatic conquests, of which his successor, Hadrian, lost no time in abandoning, wisely no doubt, a portion. Hadrian, adopted by Trajan, and a Spaniard too, was intellectually superior and morally very inferior to him. He was full of ambition, vanity, invention, and restlessness; he was sceptical in thought and cynical in manners; and he was overflowing with political, philosophical, and literary views and pretensions. He passed the twenty-one years of his reign chiefly in travelling about the empire, in Asia, Africa, Greece, Spain, Gaul, and Great Britain, opening roads, raising ramparts and monuments, founding schools of learning and museums, and encouraging among the provinces, as well as at Rome, the march of administration, legislation, and intellect, more for his own pleasure and his own glorification than in the interest of his country and of society. At the close of this active career, when he was ill and felt that he was dying, he did the best deed of his life. He had proved, in the discharge of high offices, the calm and clear-sighted wisdom of Titus Antoninus, a Gaul, whose family came originally from Nimes; he had seen him one day coming to the senate and respectfully supporting the tottering steps of his aged father (or father-in-law, according to Aurelius Victor); and he adopted him as his successor. Antoninus Pius, as a civilian, was just what Trajan had been as a warrior—moral and modest; just and frugal; attentive to the public weal; gentle towards individuals; full of respect for laws and rights; scrupulous in justifying his deeds before the senate and making them known to the populations by carefully posted edicts; and more anxious to do no wrong or harm to anybody than to gain lustre from brilliant or popular deeds. “He surpasses all men in goodness,” said his contemporaries, and he conferred on the empire the best of gifts, for he gave it Marcus Aurelius for its ruler.
It has been said that Marcus Aurelius was philosophy enthroned. Without any desire to contest or detract from that compliment, let it be added that he was conscientiousness enthroned. It is his grand and original characteristic that he governed the Roman empire and himself with a constant moral solicitude, ever anxious to realize that ideal of personal virtue and general justice which he had conceived, and to which he aspired. His conception, indeed, of virtue and justice was incomplete, and even false in certain cases; and in more than one instance, such as the persecution of the Christians, he committed acts quite contrary to the moral law which he intended to put in practice towards all men; but his respect for the moral law was profound, and his intention to shape his acts according to it, serious and sincere. Let us cull a few phrases from that collection of his private thoughts, which he entitled For Self, and which is really the most faithful picture man ever left of himself and the pains he took with himself. “There is,” says he, “relationship between all beings endowed with reason. The world is like a superior city within which the other cities are but families. . . . I have conceived the idea of a government founded on laws of general and equal application. Beware lest thou Caesarze thyself, for it is what happens only too often. Keep thyself simple, good, unaltered, worthy, grave, a friend to justice, pious, kindly disposed, courageous enough for any duty. . . . Reverence the gods, preserve mankind. Life is short; the only possible good fruit of our earthly existence is holiness of intention and deeds that tend to the common weal. . . . My soul, be thou covered with shame! Thy life is well nigh gone, and thou hast not yet learned how to live.” Amongst men who have ruled great states, it is not easy to mention more than two, Marcus Aurelius and Saint Louis, who have been thus passionately concerned about the moral condition of their souls and the moral conduct of their lives. The mind of Marcus Aurelius was superior to that of Saint Louis; but Saint Louis was a Christian, and his moral ideal was more pure, more complete, more satisfying, and more strengthening for the soul than the philosophical ideal of Marcus Aurelius. And so Saint Louis was serene and confident as to his fate and that of the human race, whilst Marcus Aurelius was disquieted and sad— sad for himself and also for humanity, for his country and for his times: “O, my sole,” was his cry, “wherefore art thou troubled, and why am I so vexed?”
We are here brought closer to the fact which has already been foreshadowed, and which characterizes the moral and social condition of the Roman world at this period. It would be a great error to take the five emperors just spoken of—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—as representatives of the society amidst which they lived, and as giving in a certain degree the measure of its enlightenment, its morality, its prosperity, its disposition, and condition in general. Those five princes were not only picked men, superior in mind and character to the majority of their contemporaries, but they were men almost isolated in their generation; in them there was a resumption of all that had been acquired by Greek and Roman antiquity of enlightenment and virtue, practical wisdom and philosophical morality: they were the heirs and the survivors of the great minds and the great politicians of Athens and Rome, of the Areopagus and the Senate. They were not in intellectual and moral harmony with the society they governed, and their action upon it served hardly to preserve it partially and temporarily from the evils to which it was committed by its own vices and to break its fall. When they were thoughtful and modest as Marcus Aurelius was, they were gloomy and disposed to discouragement, for they had a secret foreboding of the uselessness of their efforts.
Nor was their gloom groundless: in spite of their honest plans and of brilliant appearances, the degradation, material as well as moral, of Roman society went on increasing. The wars, the luxury, the dilapidations, and the disturbances of the empire always raised its expenses much above its receipts. The rough miserliness of Vespasian and the wise economy of Antoninus Pius were far from sufficient to restore the balance; the aggravation of imposts was incessant; and the population, especially the agricultural population, dwindled away more and more, in Italy itself, the centre of the state. This evil disquieted the emperors, when they were neither idiots nor madmen; Claudius, Vespasian, Nerva, and Trajan labored to supply a remedy, and Augustus himself had set them the example. They established in Italy colonies of veterans to whom they assigned lands; they made gifts thereof to indigent Roman citizens; they attracted by the title of senator rich citizens from the provinces, and when they had once installed them as landholders in Italy, they did not permit them to depart without authorization. Trajan decreed that every candidate for the Roman magistracies should be bound to have a third of his fortune invested in Italian land, “in order,” says Pliny the Younger, “that those who sought the public dignities should regard Rome and Italy not as an inn to put up at in travelling, but as their home.” And Pliny the Elder, going as a philosophical observer to the very root of the evil, says, in his pompous manner, “In former times our generals tilled their fields with their own hands; the earth, we may suppose, opened graciously beneath a plough crowned with laurels and held by triumphal hands, maybe because those great men gave to tillage the same care that they gave to war, and that they sowed seed with the same attention with which they pitched a camp; or maybe, also, because everything fructifies best in honorable hands, because everything is done with the most scrupulous exactitude. . . . Nowadays these same fields are given over to slaves in chains, to malefactors who are condemned to penal servitude, and on whose brow there is a brand. Earth is not deaf to our prayers; we give her the name of mother; culture is what we call the pains we bestow on her . . . but can we be surprised if she render not to slaves the recompense she paid to generals?”
What must have been the decay of population and of agriculture in the provinces, when even in Italy there was need of such strong protective efforts, which were nevertheless so slightly successful?
Pliny had seen what was the fatal canker of the Roman empire in the country as well as in the towns: slavery or semi-slavery.
Landed property was overwhelmed with taxes, was subject to conditions which branded it with a sort of servitude, and was cultivated by a servile population, in whose hands it became almost barren. The large holders were thus disgusted, and the small ruined or reduced to a condition more and more degraded. Add to this state of things in the civil department a complete absence of freedom and vitality in the political; no elections, no discussion, no public responsibility; characters weakened by indolence and silence, or destroyed by despotic power, or corrupted by the intrigues of court or army. Take a step farther; cast a glance over the moral department; no religious creeds and nothing left of even Paganism but its festivals and frivolous or shameful superstitions. The philosophy of Greece and the old Roman manner of life had raised up, it is true, in the higher ranks of society Stoics and jurists, the former the last champions of morality and the dignity of human nature, the latter the last enlightened servants of the civil community. But neither the doctrines of the Stoics nor the science and able reasoning of the jurists were lights and guides within the reach and for the use of the populace, who remained a prey to the vices and miseries of servitude or public disorders, oscillating between the wearisomeness of barren ignorance and the corruptiveness of a life of adventure. All the causes of decay were at this time spreading throughout Roman society; not a single preservative or regenerative principle of national life was in any force or any esteem.