The Philosophy of History, Vol. 1 of 2

by Friedrich von Schlegel

LECTURE IX.

Character of the Romans.—Sketch of their conquests.—On strict law, and the law of equity in its application to History, and according to the idea of divine justice.—Commencement of the Christian dispensation.

Instead of that astonishing variety in the states, the races, the political constitutions, the manners, styles of art and modes of intellectual cultivation, which divided from its very origin the social existence of Greece—a division which gave a more rich and diversified aspect to Greek civilization—the ancient history of Italy shews us, on the contrary, how every thing merged more and more in the one, eternal, imperishable, ever-prosperous, ever-progressive, and at last all-devouring, city—Rome. The first ages, indeed, of Italy—the primitive nations that settled that country—such as the Pelasgi, whose early historical existence is attested by those Cyclopean, or more properly, Pelasgic walls and constructions still extant there—the Etruscans, (according to some authors, descended from the more northern race of Rhoelig;tians) from whom the Romans borrowed so many of their idolatrous rites and customs—the Sabines and Samnites, the Latins and the Trojans—lastly the Celts in Northern, and the Greeks in Southern, Italy—all in their several relations to one another, and in the various commixture of their origin and progress, open a wide field of intricate investigation and perplexing research to the historical enquirer. But from the general point of view taken in universal history, all this antiquarian learning soon falls into the back-ground, in the presence of that great central city which quickly absorbs into itself all the ancient states of Italy, and Italy itself, and which, though originally composed of many heterogeneous elements—Latin, Sabine and Etruscan—still was very early moulded into an unity of character—and whose ulterior growth and progress, slow indeed at first, but soon as fearfully rapid as it was immeasurably great, principally attracts the notice of the historical observer. In the later, and still more in the early, ages of Rome, the national idolatry was less poetically wrought and adorned than that of the Greeks—it was altogether much simpler, ruder and more serious than the latter. Even the word religio, to take it in its first signification as a second tie, corresponds to a far more definite and serious object than can be found in the gay mythology of the popular religion of the Greeks. Idolatrous rites were closely interwoven into the whole life of the ancient Romans. As the twins of Mars, Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by the she-wolf, were called the founders of the city; so Mars himself was honoured by the Romans as their real progenitor, and principal national divinity—particularly under the name of Gradivus, that is to say the swift for battle, or the strider of the earth. The sacred shields of brass which, on certain appointed festivals, were borne in the military dances, the Palladium, the sceptre of the venerable Priam, formed, together with similar relics of antiquity, the seven holy pledges of the eternal duration and ever flourishing increase of the seven-hilled city, which was honoured under three different names; one whereof was ever kept secret—while the other two referred to its blooming strength and ever enduring power. The ancient cities of the Greeks, those of the Italian nations, whether akin to them, or otherwise, possessed indeed their tutelary deities, their particular sanctuaries, their highly revered Palladium, some ancient oracles, and certain religious rites and festivals consecrated to their honour. But it would not be easy to find another example where the traditionary reverence, we might almost say, the old hereditary deification of the city, had from the earliest period, taken such deep root in the minds of men; and where such a formal worship was so intimately interwoven with manners, customs, and even maxims of state, as among the Romans. And when an universal monarchy had sprung out from this single city, it was still that city—it was still eternal Rome that was ever regarded, not merely as the centre, but as the essence of the whole—the personified conception of the state—the grand idea of the empire. The early traditions of the Romans which, though from the commencement of the city they assume the garb of authentic history, (as in the pages of Livy for instance,) yet are for a long time to be regarded mostly as mere traditions,—evince a fact well entitled to our consideration,—as it serves to show how that strong, inflexible, but harsh, Roman character, such as the later records of history display, manifested itself even in the earliest infancy of this people;—it is this, that among no other nation, did historical recollections even of the remotest antiquity exert such a powerful influence on life, or strike so deep a root in the minds of men. Nearly five hundred years had elapsed since the time of the elder Brutus, when, in the Roman world now so mightily changed, a citizen appealed to the second Brutus in these words—"Brutus, thou sleepest"—as if to urge him to that deed which the first had perpetrated on the proud Tarquin, and by which that celebrated name had become identified with the idea of a bold deliverer. An ardent hatred towards all kings, and towards royalty itself, which from that period remained ever deeply fixed in the Roman mind, characterised this people even in the most ancient period of their history. Not only in the remarks and reflections of the later Roman historians on the first ages of Rome, but in facts themselves, as in the case of Spurius Cassius, we may trace the natural concomitant of this hatred—a passionate jealousy of all powerful party-chiefs, and democratic leaders, who were, perhaps suspected, or probably convicted of aspiring to supreme power in the state, and aiming at the establishment of tyranny—as if the Romans had even then a clear presentiment of the inevitable fate that awaited an empire like theirs, and of the quarter whence their ruin would proceed. Even in the first ages, the Patricians and Plebeians appear on the historical arena, not only as separate classes, such as existed in almost all ancient states, and between whom no matrimonial ties could be formed originally at Rome; but as political parties, in a state of mutual hostility, each of which strove to obtain the ascendancy in the forum and in the state.

The old Romans of these early times were strangers to those various systems of legislation, those rhetorical treatises of jurisprudence, conceived mostly on democratic principles, or to those opposite political theories composed in an aristocratic spirit, which the Greeks then possessed in such abundance. On the contrary, the Romans manifested even then, in the primitive period of their existence, a deep, perspicacious, practical sense, and a mighty political instinct, which showed itself in their first institutions of state. Even in the first idea of the Tribunate—as a regular mode of popular representation—an element of opposition introduced into the very constitution of the state—there was contained the germ of that mighty political power and action, which afterwards a man of energetic character, like Tiberius Gracchus, knew how to exert. This power, had it been kept within due limits, might have proved most beneficial to the community; and a single man, endowed with such a character, and animated by the same spirit of a true patriotic opposition, has often accomplished more at Rome, than whole parliaments in modern free states. The authority of the Censor, negative and restrictive in itself, but still not merely judicial—and which over the conduct of persons was very extensive—the exceptional institution of the Dictatorship, in the early ages of Rome by no means so dangerous—were so many just, and practical political discoveries of the Romans, which evince their statesman-like genius, and which even in later times, among other nations, and under various forms, have served as real and effectual elements in the constitution of states.

The interest of those two parties—the Plebeians and the Patricians—concurred fully but in one point—the desire which both had of constantly invading the neighbouring nations, and obtaining landed possessions for themselves, in the conquests they made for the state. The Plebeians ever and again cherished the hope of being able to obtain for their profit, and that of the poorer citizens, a sort of distribution of the state-lands won in war. But as the Patricians were mostly invested with all the high offices and dignities in war as well as peace, they knew how to turn all the opportunities of conquest to their best advantage, however much they might on particular occasions postpone their private interests as individuals to the general interests of the state. Although, so long as their ancient principles remained unchanged, the Romans were distinguished for the utmost disinterestedness in regard to their country, and for great simplicity of manners, and even frugality in private life, they were in all their foreign enterprises, even in the earliest times, exceedingly covetous of gain, or rather of land; for it was in land, and the produce of the soil, that their principal, and almost only wealth consisted. The old Romans were a thoroughly agricultural people; and it was only at a later period that commerce, trades and arts were introduced among them; and even then they occupied but a subordinate place. Agriculture was even highly honoured by the Romans; and while almost all the celebrated, and in general, most of the proper, names among the Greeks were derived from gods and heroes, and had a poetical lustre, and glorious significancy, it is a circumstance characteristic of the Romans, that the names of many of their most distinguished families, such as Fabius, Lentulus, Piso, Cicero and many others were taken from agriculture, and from vegetables; while others again, as Secundus, Quintus, Septimus, and Octavius, are tolerably prosaic, and are derived from the numbers of the old popular reckoning. The science of agriculture forms one of the few subjects on which the Romans produced writers truly original. That of jurisprudence, in which they were most at home, which they cultivated with peculiar care, and which they very considerably enlarged, had its foundation in the written laws of the primitive period of their history; and in their elder jurisprudence, the Agrarian system very evidently prevails. As a robust, agricultural people, they were eminently fitted for military service; and in practised vigour and constancy under every privation, the Roman infantry with the vigorous masses of its legion, surpassed all military bodies that have ever been organized.

The Roman state from its origin, and according to its first constitution, was nothing else than a well organized school of war, a permanent establishment for conquest. Among other nations, as among the Persians and Greeks, the desire of military glory and the lust of conquest was only a temporary enthusiasm, called forth by some special cause, or some mighty motive—a sudden sally—the thought of a moment. Among the Romans it is precisely the systematically slow and progressive march of their first conquests, their inflexible perseverance, their unremitting activity, the vigilant use of every advantageous opportunity, which strike the observer, and explain the cause of their mighty success in after-times. That unshaken constancy under misfortune, which ever characterised the Romans, they displayed even at this early period during the conquest of their city by the Gauls; though this misfortune, like that people itself, was but a transient calamity. In general, the Romans never evinced greater energy than when they were overcome, or when they met with an unexpected resistance. Sometimes in a moment of extreme urgency, their generals, like the Consul Decius Mus, taking a chosen body of troops, invoked the national Gods, devoted themselves to death, and rushed on the superior forces of the enemy, whereby though they fell the victims of their zeal, they saved the army from the menaced ignominy of defeat, and achieved a signal victory. With such a character, such unshaken fortitude and perseverance under misfortune, we can well conceive that in a state so constituted like theirs, the Romans, by their indefatigable activity in war, should in no very great space of time have conquered and subdued all the surrounding nations and states of Italy. It was thus they successively overcame the kindred and confederated tribes of Latium, and the rude Sabines; that, after a long and obstinate siege of the Tuscan city of Veii, they became masters of the Etrurian League, lords of the beautiful Campania, and vanquished the warlike Samnites on the Apennine range, and on the coast of the Adriatic. They now cast their eyes on the rich provinces of Magna Græcia. In the war against Tarentum, which was in alliance with Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, they came for the first time in contact with the great extra-Italic Greek powers, and had to encounter, in the ranks of the enemy, the unwonted spectacle of war-elephants, which were there employed according to the Asiatic custom. After the loss of the first battles, they were victorious; and they now added Apulia and Calabria to their conquests. Each step in the career at victory drew after it new embarrassments, new occasions, and new matter for future wars. The inhabitants of Syracuse, who had been for some time governed by tyrants, formed on the retreat of Pyrrhus, an alliance with the Carthaginians, then masters of half of Sicily, and sought their protection against the Romans, who were confederated with their enemies, another party in the island. This brought on the first Punic war with that Republic, then mistress of the sea. In this warfare against Pyrrhus and the Carthaginians, the Romans, who had been hitherto confined within the secluded circle of the petty states of Italy, appeared for the first time on the great historical theatre of the then political world. In that age which was immediately subsequent to the time of Alexander the Great, the different Macedonian and other Greek powers of importance formed, together with Egypt and Carthage, a variously connected system of states, in one respect, not unlike the political system of modern Europe, at the end of the 17th and during the greater part of the 18th century. For, according to a principle of the balance of power, each state sought to strengthen itself by alliances, and to repress an overwhelming ascendancy, without on that account at all relaxing its efforts for its own aggrandizement. That on one hand, the fluctuating condition and internal troubles of those countries, and on the other, the fresh youthful vigour, the steady perseverance and constancy of the Roman people, would soon put an end to this system of equilibrium—to these political oscillations between the different states, and bring about the complete triumph and decided ascendancy of the Romans, might indeed have been easily foreseen, and was in the very nature of things. After the first Punic war, the Romans to the conquest of Sicily added that of Corsica and Sardinia; and they next subdued the Cisalpine Gauls in the North of Italy. When even Hannibal, the most formidable enemy the Roman Republic ever had to encounter, and the one who had the most deeply studied its true character, and the danger threatening the world from that quarter; when even he, after the many great victories which, in a long series of years, he had obtained over the Romans, in the second Punic war; though he shook the power, was unable to break the spirit of this people;—when this was the case, one might regard the great political question of the then civilized world as settled; and it could no longer be a matter of doubt that that city justly denominated Strength, and which even from of old had been the idol of her sons, (who accounted every thing as nought in comparison with her interests); that that city, I say, was destined to conquer the world, and establish an empire, the like whereof had never yet been founded by preceding conquerors. The second Punic war terminated under the elder Scipio before the walls of Carthage, and it completed the destruction of that rival of Rome, at least as a political power. The Princes and states that while it was yet time, should have formed a firm and steadfast league against the common foe, fell now separately under the sword of the victors, and the yoke of conquest. In the further progress of their triumphs, the conquerors knew how to assume a certain character of generosity, and give a certain colour of magnanimity to their acts, in the eyes of a gazing and terrified world. Thus, for instance, after the defeat of Philip, King of Macedon, they declared to deluded Greece that she was free; and again, Antiochus the Great, whose arrogance had given offence to many, and whose overthrow was in consequence the subject of very general joy, was compelled to cede the Lesser Asia as far as Mount Taurus; and the victors gave away the conquered provinces and kingdoms to the Princes in their alliance, and affected not to have the intention of subduing and keeping all for themselves. For it was yet much too soon to let the unconquered states and nations perceive that all, without distinction, were destined, one after the other, to become the provinces of the all-absorbing empire of Rome. Thus now overpassing the limits of Greece, the Romans had obtained a firm footing in Asia; and this first step was soon enough to be succeeded by other and still further advances. Historians have often remarked the decisive moment when Cæsar, after an instant's reflection and delay, crossed the Rubicon; but we may ask now, when Rome herself had passed her Rubicon, where was that historical limit—that last boundary-line of ambition, after passing which no return, no halt were possible; if now, when all right, all justice, every human term and limit to ambition were lost sight of, if now idolized Rome in the fulness of her Pagan pride, and in her rapid career of destruction, marching from one crime against the world to another, descending deeper and deeper into the abyss of interminable, foreign and domestic bloodshed, was, from the summit of her triumphs, to sink beyond redemption, down to Caligula and Nero?—We might point out, as an instance of this ever growing and reckless arrogance, the moment when the last king of Macedon,[64] not more than a century and a half from the death of Alexander the Great, was led in triumph into the city of the conquerors, a captive and in chains, to sate the eyes of the Roman populace. It entered into the high designs of Providence in the government of the world, during this middle and second period of universal history, that each of the conquering nations should receive its full measure of justice from another worse than itself, emerging suddenly from obscurity, and chosen as the instrument of its annihilation or subjection. But a still more decisive example of the spirit of Roman conquests was the cruel destruction of Carthage in the third Punic war, begun without any assignable motive and from pure caprice. In this case no other resistance could be expected than the resistance of despair, which here indeed showed itself in all its energy. For seventeen days the city was in flames, and the numbers that were exterminated amounted to seven hundred thousand souls, including the women and children sold into slavery; so that this scene of horror served as an early prelude to the later destruction of Jerusalem. The wiser and more lenient Scipios had been against this war of extermination, and had had to contend with the self-willed rancour of the elder Cato; yet a Scipio conducted this war, and was the last conqueror over the ashes of Carthage. And this was a man universally accounted to be of a mild character and generous nature; and such he really was in other respects and in private life. But this reputation must be apparently estimated by the Roman standard, for whenever Rome and her interests were at stake, all mankind and the lives of nations were considered as of no importance. Besides, it is really not in the power of a General to do away with the cruelty of any received system of warfare.

The example of the first great re-action of nations, too late aroused, was set by Greece in the war of the Achaian league. It terminated like all the preceding wars;—Corinth was consumed, and its destruction involved that of an infinite number of noble and beautiful works of art, belonging to the better ages of Greece. Among the nations of the North and West that lived under a yet free and natural form of government, the Spaniards distinguished themselves by a peculiar obstinacy of resistance. Scipio was unable to conquer Numantia; the people who defended their liberty behind this rampart, set fire to the city, and the remaining defenders devoted themselves to a voluntary death. In the public triumph which the Romans celebrated on this occasion, they were able to exhibit only a few brave Lusitanians of a gigantic size. Now commenced the civil wars:—the first was occasioned by Tiberius Gracchus, then leader of the popular party at Rome. To undertake the complete justification of any one of the leading men in the Roman parties, would be an arduous, not to say impracticable task; yet we may positively assert of the elder Gracchus, that he was the best man of his party; as the same observation will apply to the Scipios in the opposite party of the Patricians. The proposal of Gracchus was this—that the rights of Roman citizens should be extended to the rest of Italy. It was in the very nature of things that such a change, or at least one very similar, should now take place, as in fact it did somewhat later; for after the conquest of so many provinces, the disproportion between the one all-ruling city and the vast regions which it had subdued, was much too great to continue long. The armed insurrection of all the Italian nations that occurred soon after, sufficiently proves of what vital importance this measure was considered. But the pride of the ruling Patricians was extremely offended at this claim—they regarded it as an attempt to subvert the ancient constitution of the country—and, in the revolt that ensued, Tiberius Gracchus lost his life. From that time forward the principles apparently contended for on both sides were mere pretexts—whether it were the maintenance of the law, and of the ancient constitution, as asserted by the Patricians—or the just claims of the people, and the necessary changes which the altered circumstances of the times demanded, as alleged by the opposite party. It was now an open struggle for ascendancy between a few factious leaders and their partisans—a civil war carried on between fierce and formidable Oligarchs.

The effusion of blood was still greater in the troubles which the younger Caius Gracchus occasioned, and which had the same motive and the same object as the preceding commotions, though conducted with more animosity, and stained by greater crimes; and in the Patrician party, the noble Scipio, the hero of the third Punic war, fell a victim of assassination. Murders and poisoning were now every day more common; and it became the practice to carry daggers under the mantle. On this occasion we may cite an observation, made not by any father of the church, or any Christian moralist; but by a celebrated German historian, who was in other respects an enthusiastic admirer of the Republican heroism of the ancients: "Rome, the mistress of the world," says he, "drunk with the blood of nations, began now to rage in her entrails." Of Marius and Sylla, on whom next devolved the conduct of the Patrician and Plebeian parties in the civil war, now conducted on a more extended scale, it is difficult to decide which of the two surpassed the other in cruelty and blood-thirstiness. Marius was indeed of a ruder, and more savage character—but Sylla evinced perhaps a more systematic and relentless ferocity. Both were great generals; and it was only after obtaining splendid victories over foreign nations that they could think of turning their fury against their native city, after having spent their rage on the rest of mankind. The victories of Marius had delivered Rome from the mighty danger with which she had been menaced, by the irruption of the powerful tribes of the Cimbri and Teutones—the first fore-runner of the Great Northern migration. Danger served but to arouse the Roman people to more triumphant exertions; and every effort of hostile resistance, when once overcome, tended only to confirm their universal dominion. The greatest and most formidable of these efforts of resistance was made by Mithridates, King of Pontus—it began by the murder of eighty thousand Romans in his dominions, and the simultaneous revolt of all the Italian nations against the Roman sway. No enemy of the Romans, since Hannibal, had formed such a deep-laid plan as Mithridates, whose intention it was to unite in one armed confederacy against Rome all the nations of the North, from the regions of Mount Caucasus, as far as Gaul and the Alps. By his victories over this enemy, Sylla prepared to return to Rome, torn and convulsed by civil war; and on his entry into the city, he treated it with all the infuriated vengeance of a conqueror, proscribed, gave full loose to slaughter, and perpetrated the most execrable atrocities. We may cite as a strange instance of the still surviving greatness of the Roman character, the fact, that Sylla, immediately after all this immense bloodshed, as if every thing had passed in perfect conformity to law and order, laid down the Dictatorship, retired peacefully to his estate, and there prepared to write his own history. In one respect, however, he was a flatterer of the multitude—he seems to have thoroughly understood the Roman people, for he was the first to introduce the games of the circus, those bloody combats of animals, those cruel Gladiatorial fights, which afterwards, under the Emperors, became like bread, one of the most indispensable necessaries to the Roman people, and one of the most important objects of concern to its rulers. For these games, where the Roman eye delighted to contemplate men devoted to certain death contend and wrestle with the most savage animals, Pompey on one occasion introduced six hundred lions on the arena, and Augustus, four hundred panthers. Thus did a thirst for blood, after having been long the predominant passion of the party-leaders of this all-ruling people, become an actual craving—a festive entertainment for the multitude. And yet the Romans of this age, when we consider their conduct in war—in the battles and victories they won, or the strength of character they evinced, whether on the tented field, or on the arena of political contests, displayed an admirable, we might sometimes say a super-human, energy; so that we are often at a loss how to reconcile our admiration with the detestation which their actions unavoidably inspire. It was as if the iron-footed God of war, Gradivus, so highly revered from of old by the people of Romulus, actually bestrode the globe, and at every step struck out new torrents of blood; or as if the dark Pluto had emerged from the abyss of eternal night, escorted by all the vengeful spirits of the lower world, by all the Furies of passion and insatiable cupidity, by the blood-thirsty demons of murder, to establish his visible empire, and erect his throne for ever on the earth. There can be no doubt that if the Roman history were divested of its accustomed rhetoric, of all the patriotic maxims and trite sayings of politicians, and were presented with strict and minute accuracy in all its living reality, every humane mind would be deeply shocked at such a picture of tragic truth, and penetrated with the profoundest detestation and horror. The licentiousness of Roman manners, too, was really gigantic; so that the moral corruption of the Greeks appears in comparison a mere infant essay in the school of vice.

The civil wars that next followed had in all essential points the same character with the first, though the fearful recollection, which still dwelt in men's minds, of the times of Marius and Sylla, tended to introduce at first a certain caution in all external proceedings; but in the course of their progress, these wars resumed the sanguinary character of the earlier civil contests. The proper circle of the Roman conquests, whose natural circumference was now marked out by all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, was, in the second period of the civil wars, pretty well filled up by Cæsar and Pompey—by Pompey on the side of Asia, and by Cæsar on the side of the incomparably more formidable and more warlike nations of the North-western frontier. The conquest of Gaul was achieved by an uncommon effusion of human blood, even according to a Roman estimation; and in the fifty battles related by Cæsar to have been fought in the Gallic war, in the complete subjugation of Spain, in the first wars on the Germanic frontiers and in Britain, as well as in the North of Africa against Juba, and against the son of Mithridates, the number of men left on the field is computed at twelve hundred thousand; and it is to be observed that as Cæsar is his own historian, these estimates have in part been given by himself. Yet was he praised for his goodness and the mildness of his character; but this praise must be measured by the Roman standard, and it is so far true that Cæsar was by no means vindictive, nor in general subject to passion, nor cruel without a motive. But, whenever his interest required it, he was careless what blood he spilled. The war between Cæsar and Pompey extended over all the provinces and regions of the Roman world; but, when conqueror, Cæsar formed and followed up the plan of completing and consolidating his victory by a system of lenity and conciliation. With all his indefatigable activity and consummate wisdom, with all the equanimity, prudence and energy of his character, he appears to have been still weak enough to imagine that the laurels he had acquired, in a way unequalled by any, were insufficient without the diadem—at least he gave occasion for such a suspicion. And so the second Brutus perpetrated on his person the act, for which the elder had been so highly commended by all Roman historians. To relate the subsequent civil war of Brutus and Cassius, the reconciliation between Antony and Octavius, which involved the death of Cicero, the new rupture and war between the latter rivals, would serve only to swell this account of Rome and her destinies. These contests terminated in the establishment of monarchy, when the bloody proscriptions and civil wars of preceding times were forgotten, and Octavius, under the name of Augustus, appeared as the restorer of general peace, and the first absolute monarch of the Roman world;—a monarch whose long reign was on the whole very happy, when compared with previous times, and who during his life was half-deified by his subjects. Unlimited power was still clothed and half veiled in the old republican forms and expressions; and the recollection of Cæsar's fate was too present to the mind of the cautious Augustus, for him ever to neglect those forms and usages. It would really appear as if the world were destined to breathe for a time in peace, and to repose awhile from those earlier wars, before another and a higher peace descended, and became visible on the earth—and along with that other, higher and divine peace, a new and spiritual combat, waged not with the warlike parties of old, nor even with external and earthly power, but with the secret and internal cause of all those agitations, and all that injustice in the world.