In another way the soldiers played an important part in Romanizing newly conquered territory. Near every important garrison canabae, or settlements of merchants and camp-followers, sprang up. Many of the auxiliaries married native women, who made their homes in these villages. At the end of their term of service these foreign soldiers were made Roman citizens. Their marriages with native women were legalized, and they settled down in these communities on the frontier, to introduce Roman ideas and Roman institutions in the surrounding country. When we remember that there were probably 200,000 auxiliary troops in the second century, we can readily understand what a great influence their settlement in the provinces must have had. In this connection it is convenient to speak of the “organizations of Roman citizens,” or the conventus civium Romanorum, as they were called. As soon as a new province had been acquired, Roman bankers, merchants, ship-owners, and publicans went to it and settled in the important cities. They quickly formed an organization of their own in the community where they lived, because it was natural for Romans to form a political or social organization, and because certain rights and privileges which they had set them off from the rest of the community. They made up the aristocracy of the towns where they lived, and many natives must have been spurred on to accept Roman ideas and attain Roman citizenship for the sake of being enrolled in the conventus. The trade which these merchants carried on, and which a fine system of roads made possible, had a levelling influence throughout the Empire. Italy and Gaul sent their pottery and bronze utensils, Syria its silk and linen, Egypt its cotton goods and ivory, and Arabia its gums and spices to all the great centres of the world. The articles of everyday use and many articles of luxury were, therefore, the same in all the provinces, and must have had a great influence in making the daily life of all the people under Roman rule uniform. Trade usually “followed the flag,” but in some cases enterprising Roman merchants went in advance of it. Trajan found them in the capital of Parthia when he took that city, and there was an “organization of Roman citizens” in Alexandria long before Rome established a protectorate over Egypt.
In his Ancient and Modern Imperialism Lord Cromer remarks: “Modern Imperialist nations have sought to use the spread of their language in order to draw political sympathy to themselves. This has been notably the case as regards the French in the basin of the Mediterranean, and—though perhaps less designedly—as regards the English in India. I do not think that either nation is likely to attain any great measure of success in this direction. They will certainly be much less successful than the Romans. Neither in French, British, nor, I think I may add, Russian possessions is there the least probability that the foreign will eventually supplant the vernacular languages.” Elsewhere he says: “(My) conclusion is that the great proficiency in some European language often acquired by individuals amongst the subject races of the modern Imperialist Powers in no way tends to inspire political sympathy with the people to whom that language is their mother tongue.... Indeed, in some ways, it (i.e., language) rather tends to disruption, inasmuch as it furnishes the subject races with a very powerful arm against their alien rulers.” This frank confession by a competent authority that the languages of the dominant nations are not making much progress among the subject races, and that proficiency in them tends often to alienate the conquered people from their rulers, a fact which we have seen illustrated lately in the case of the leaders of the revolutionary movements in India, brings into striking relief not only the remarkable success which the Romans had in making Latin the common language of the western world but also the effective use which they made of it in unifying the Empire. In two chapters of my book on The Common People of Ancient Rome I have tried to show what the nature of this language was and how it spread through the Empire.[27] In Dacia, or modern Roumania, for instance, a province beyond the Danube, which the Romans held for only one hundred and seventy-five years, Latin was so firmly established that it has persisted in its modern form to the present day. In his Romanization of Roman Britain Haverfield has shown for this remote province from a study of the ephemeral inscriptions on bricks and tiles that “Latin was employed freely in the towns of Britain, not only on serious occasions or by the upper classes, but by servants and work-people for the most accidental purposes.” The missionaries who carried it throughout the ancient world were the soldier, the colonist, the trader, and the official. It surprises one to find out, also, that all classes could not only speak Latin, but could read and write it. Across the Empire from Britain to Dacia it is the same story. On the tombstones of the petty merchant and the freedman, as well as on the bronze tablets which contain laws and decrees, the language is Latin, and essentially the same Latin as one would hear in the city of Rome. It is clear that modern Imperialist states have much to learn from the methods which Rome employed so successfully in furthering the use of her language by subject races. Lord Cromer regrets the fact that acquaintance with the tongue of the ruling people often becomes in modern times a weapon which is turned against that people. In the Roman provinces it conferred distinction, opened the way to fuller rights and privileges and made the possessor of it a stronger supporter of the Roman régime.
Nothing brings out better the great contrast between the individualism of modern times and the solidarity of the Roman commonwealth than a comparison of the methods followed now and two thousand years ago in settling an undeveloped country.[28] Reports of the great resources of Alaska come to Oregon and Colorado and New York. Men from all quarters hurry there indiscriminately. On some promising location a village grows up, almost over night. It has no magistrates, no common council. Some of the more public-spirited citizens gradually band themselves together to preserve order and dispense a rude justice. In time a municipal government is organized. The Roman method of occupying a new territory was far different from this. It consisted primarily in the establishment of colonies in the new region. The most desirable locations for strategic and commercial reasons were picked out, and a law was passed in the popular assembly authorizing the establishment of a colony, and providing for commissioners to found it. From three hundred to several thousand colonists were then enrolled, and marched out in military order to the chosen site. The commissioners assigned the allotments, drew up a charter for the new community, and appointed its first magistrates and the members of the local senate. This compact and highly organized community of Romans served as a military outpost and a centre for the extension of Roman civilization. The complete pacification and Romanization of Italy was largely due to the influence of these colonies. More than four hundred and forty such communities were established in Italy and the provinces. Modern empires have much to learn from this feature of Roman policy, and it would almost seem as if we were beginning to appreciate its value. The State of California has in late years adopted a system of colonization closely resembling the Roman. It selects a site, appoints experts to subdivide the land, chooses the colonists carefully, and sends the colony out under a board of directors. Under a measure proposed by the United States Secretary of the Interior, Secretary Lane, a year or two ago, but not yet adopted by the Congress, similar settlements were to be established on government land by the coöperation of the federal and state governments. An interesting experiment along Roman lines, but under private auspices, was made in July, 1921, when an organized band of selected colonists set out from Brooklyn to found a settlement in Idaho, with the coöperation of that state.[29] The advantages which the Roman plan has over our ordinary method of settling a new region are apparent at once.
A discussion of this feature of the policy which the Romans followed in a newly acquired territory naturally leads us to speak of their attitude toward native communities. Lord Cromer remarks that the Roman provinces did not have self-government. It is true that Spain and Gaul did not have their own legislatures and chief magistrates, but the real administrative units with which Rome dealt in making her arrangements were the city-states of Spain and Gaul, and they had a large measure of self-government conferred on them by their charters. In a province like Spain one finds communities in all the different stages of advancement from the position of a dependent village to a free city or a Roman colony, and one may well ask if the Roman system was not a more practical one than ours. We treat Porto Rico, for instance, as a unit. All the villages or cities in the island are put on the same legal basis, no matter what the state of civilization of the different towns may be. The Romans would have granted the full rights of citizenship to one or two of them, and advanced the others from their more lowly state as they became more civilized and prosperous. In this way they held before native communities a prize which those communities were always eager to attain, and from the first century of our era we find one town after another advancing to a fuller enjoyment of civic rights. The same policy was applied to individuals. Roman citizenship was often granted to selected persons in a community. Such a grant identified the interests of these provincial leaders with those of Rome, and enlisted their support for the Roman régime.
The agencies which the Empire used so successfully in Romanizing the provinces, that is to say the establishment of law and order, the retention of local self-government, the liberal grants of citizenship to qualified individuals and cities, the development of a good civil service, the building of roads, the construction of public works, the introduction of the Latin language and of Roman law, and the unifying influence in the later period of the Church, engendered a feeling of solidarity throughout the Western World, which was one of the most valuable legacies handed down by the Romans to later times. Even Claudian, the last important Roman poet, writing after the crushing defeat of Valens by the barbarians at Adrianople, saw clearly that, in spite of all the disasters which had overtaken Rome, the sense of unity still persisted throughout the Western World. He writes in sorrow of the goddess, Roma:
“Her voice is weak, and slow her steps; her eyes
Deep sunk within; her cheeks are gone; her arms
Are shrivelled up with wasting leanness,”
but at another moment he cries triumphantly: “We who drink of the Rhone and the Orontes are all one nation.” The feeling which Claudian expresses persisted throughout the Middle Ages. The German states in Italy recognized it by putting the portrait of the Eastern Emperor on their coins. As Poole remarks in his Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought: “The Empire of Charlemagne was no mere resuscitation of the extinct empire of the West. It was the continuation of that universal empire, whose seat Constantine had established at Byzantium, but whose existence there was now held to have terminated by the succession of a woman, the empress Irene.... The empire, therefore, went back to its rightful seat, and its title devolved on Charlemagne.” All the minor rulers also throughout the civilized parts of Europe thought of their authority as coming to them from the Roman Empire. This feeling of unity was kept up by the use of the old Roman highways of commerce, by the employment of the Latin language as the lingua franca of Europe, by the Church, and by the continued use of Roman law. Roman law in particular was a stabilizing influence for many centuries after the dissolution of the Empire. In the East and in the portions of Italy controlled by Justinian’s successors the Code of Justinian was in force. Roman law entered largely also into the Breviary of Alaric, the laws of the Burgundians, the edict of Theodoric, and the French capitularies. The law of Justinian was taught in the schools of Rome and Ravenna without much interruption from the sixth to the eleventh century, and with the revival of commerce which followed the Crusades, there was a vigorous development of Roman mercantile law. After the tenth century “the trend was toward unity within certain areas and the political separation of these great areas from each other.” This drift toward nationalism reached its climax at the time of the Reformation. The spirit of a larger unity, which earlier centuries had taken over from the Roman Empire, disappeared in great measure, but the longing for it and the need of it and the knowledge that it once existed and may be called to life again, find expression today in the organization of the League of Nations. How disastrous has been its displacement by the present intense nationalistic spirit is recognized on all sides. It would almost seem as if Philip Kerr, who had served as Confidential Secretary of Lloyd George at the Peace Conference in Paris, was thinking of the irreparable loss which Europe has suffered in this respect, when he said in his address at the Williamstown Conference in 1922: “What is the fundamental cause of war? I do not say the only cause of war, but the most active and constant cause. It is not race or religion or color or nationality or despotism, or progress, or any of the causes usually cited. It is the division of humanity into separate states. The proposition which I am concerned to establish today is the division of humanity into separate states, each owing loyalty to itself, each recognizing no law higher than its own will, each looking at every problem from its own point of view, which is the fundamental cause of war.” Rome welded the particularism of the ancient Mediterranean world into the unity of her Empire. Only by a similar recognition of the solidarity of the interests of all civilized peoples can we hope to emerge from the conditions which threaten us today.
III. SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS COMMON TO THE ROMANS AND TO MODERN PEOPLES
The political and social problems which confronted Rome are those which America, England, and France face today, and nothing brings out more clearly the close relation which our civilization bears to hers than the identity of these ancient and modern problems. In no respect may we profit more by a study of her history than in contemplating the means which Rome employed in solving them. Her successes may guide us, and her failures warn us. Some of the difficulties which beset her have come to the surface in discussing certain topics in the two preceding chapters, and of the others we can speak briefly of only a few, and mainly by way of illustration.