Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

We are judging the opponents of Caesar, it seems to me, under the dominion of exaggerated notions of the beneficence of the Empire which Caesar founded, of its value as a political model, of its connection with the life of modern civilization, and of the respect, not to say devotion, due to the memory of its founder. Let us try to cast off for an hour the influence of these modern sentiments, and put the whole group of ancient figures back into its place in ancient history.

The Empire was a necessity at the time when it came—granted. But a necessity of what sort? Was it a necessity created by an upward effort, by an elevation of humanity, or by degradation and decline? In the former case you may pass the same sentence upon those who opposed its coming which is passed upon those who crucified Christ, or who, like Philip II., opposed the Reformation in the spirit of bigoted reaction. But in the latter case they must be charged, not with moral blindness or depravity, but only with the lack of that clearness of sight which leads men and parties at the right moment, or even in anticipation of the right moment, to despair; and such perspicacity, to say the least, is a highly scientific quality, requiring perhaps, to make it respectable and safe, a more exact knowledge of historical sequences than we even now possess. Even now we determine these historical necessities by our knowledge of the result. It was a necessity, given all the conditions— the treachery of Ephialtes included—that the Persians should force the pass of Thermopylae. But the Three Hundred could not know all the conditions. Even if they had, would they have done right in giving way? They fell, but their spirits fought again at Salamis.

To me it appears that the Empire was a necessity of the second kind; that it was an inevitable concession to incurable evil, not a new development of good. The Roman morality, the morality which had produced and sustained the Republic, was now in a state of final and irremediable decay. That morality was narrow and imperfect, or rather it was rudimentary, a feeble and transient prototype of the sounder and more enduring morality which was soon to be born into the world. It was the morality of devotion to a single community, and in fact consisted mainly of the performance of duty to that community in war. But it was real and energetic after its measure and its own time. It produced a type of character, which, if reproduced now, would be out of date and even odious, but which stands in history dignified and imposing even to the last. Nor was it without elements of permanent value. It contributed largely to the patriotism of the seventeenth century, a patriotism which has now perhaps become obsolete in its turn, and is superseded in our aspirations by an ideal with less of right and self-assertion, with more of duty and of social affection, yet did good service against the Stuarts. The Roman morality, together with dignity of character, produced as usual simplicity of life. It produced a reverence for the majesty of law, the voice of the community. It produced relations between the sexes, and domestic relations generally, far indeed below the ideal, yet decidedly above those which commonly existed in the pagan world. It produced a high degree of self-control and of abstinence from vices which prevailed elsewhere. It produced fruits of intellect, some original, especially in the political sphere, others merely borrowed from Greece, yet evincing on the part of the borrower a power of appreciating the superior excellence of another, and that a conquered nation, the value of which, as breaking through the iron boundary of national self-love, has perhaps not received sufficient notice. What was of most consequence to the world at large and to history, it produced, though probably not so much in the way of obedience to recognised principle as of noble instinct, a signal mitigation of Conquest, which was then the universal habit, but from being extermination and destruction, at best slavery or forcible transplantation, became under the Romans a supremacy, imposed indeed by force, and at the cost of much suffering, yet, in a certain sense civilizing, and not exercised wholly without regard for the good of the subject races. Thus that political unity of the nations round the Mediterranean was brought about, which was the necessary precursor and protector of a union of a better kind. A measure of the same praise is due to Alexander, who was a conqueror of the higher order for a similar reason—namely, that though a Macedonian prince, he was imbued with the ideas and the morality of the Greek republics. But Alexander was a single man, and he could not accomplish what was accomplished in a succession of generations by the corporate energies and virtues of the Roman Senate.

The conditions under which this morality had maintained itself were now gone. It depended on the circumstances of a small community, long engaged in a struggle for existence with powerful and aggressive neighbours, the Latin, the Etruscan, the Samnite, and the Gaul; entering in turn, when its own safety had been secured, on a career of conquest, still in a certain sense defensive, since every neighbour was in those days an enemy; and continuing to task to the utmost the citizen's devotion to the State, the virtues of command and obedience necessary to victory, and the frugality necessary to supply the means of great national efforts; while luxury was kept at bay, though the means of indulging it had begun to flow in, by the check of national danger and the counter-attraction of military glory. But all this was at an end when Carthage and Macedon were overthrown. National danger and the necessity for national effort being removed, self-devotion failed, egotism broke loose, and began to revel in the pillage and oppression of a conquered world. The Roman character was corrupted, as the Spartan character was corrupted when Sparta, from being a camp in the midst of hostile Helots, became a dominant power and sent out governors to subject states; though the corruption in the case of Sparta was far more rapid, because Spartan excellence was more exclusively military, more formal and more obsolete. The mass of the Romans ceased to perform military duty, and there being no great public duty except military duty to be performed, there remained no school of public virtue. Such public virtue as there was lingered, though in a degraded form round the eagles of the standing armies, to which the duties of the citizen-soldier were now consigned; and the soldiery thus acquired not only the power but the right of electing the emperors, the best of whom, in fact, after Augustus, were generally soldiers. The ruling nation became a city rabble, the vices of which were but little tempered by the fitful intervention of the enfranchised communities of Italy. Of this rabble, political adventurers bought the consulships, which led to the government of provinces, and wrung out of the unhappy provincials the purchase money and a fortune for themselves besides. These fortunes begot colossal luxury and a general reign of vice. Violence mingling with corruption in the elections was breeding a complete anarchy in Rome. Roman religion, to which, if we believe Polybius, we must ascribe a real influence in the maintenance of morality, was at the same time undermined by the sceptical philosophy of Greece, and by contact with conflicting religions, the spectacle of which had its effect in producing the scepticism of Montaigne.

The empire itself was on the point of dissolution. In empires founded by single conquerors, such as those of the East, when corruption has made the reigning family its prey, the satraps make themselves independent. The empire of Alexander was divided among his generals. The empire of the conquering republic of Rome, the republic itself having succumbed to vices analagous to the corruption of a reigning family, was about to be broken up by the great military chiefs. Pompey had already, in fact, carved out for himself a separate kingdom in Spain, which with its legions he had got permanently into his own hands. Thus the unity of the civilized portion of humanity, so indispensable to the future of the race, would have been lost. Nor was there any remedy but one. Representation of the provinces was out of the question. Supposing it possible that a single assembly could have been formed out of all these different races and tongues, the representation of the conquered would have been the abdication of the conqueror, and abdication was a step for which the lazzaroni of the so-called democratic party were as little prepared as the haughtiest aristocrat in Rome. A world of egotism, without faith or morality, could be held together only by force, which presented itself in the person of the ablest, most daring, and most unscrupulous adventurer of the time. If faith should again fail, and the world again be reduced to a mass of egotism, the same sort of government will again, be needed. In fact, we are at this moment rather in danger of something of the kind, and these revivals of Caesarism are not wholly out of season. But in any other case to propose to society such a model would be treason to humanity.

The abandonment of military duty by the Roman people had, among other things, made slavery more immoral than ever, because there was no longer any semblance of a division of labour: the master could no longer be said to defend the slave in war while the slave supported him by labour at home. Becoming more immoral, slavery became more cruel. The six thousand crosses erected on the road from Capua to Rome after the Servile War were the terrible proof.

As to the existence of an oligarchy in the bosom of the dominant republic, this would in itself have been no great evil to the subject world, to which it mattered little whether its tyrants were a hundred or a hundred thousand; just as to the unenfranchised in modern communities it matters little whether the enfranchised class be large or small. In fact, the broader the basis of a tyranny, the more fearless and unscrupulous, generally speaking, the tyranny is.

We need not overstate the case. If we do we shall tarnish the laurels of Caesar, who would have shown no genius in killing the republic had the republic been already dead. There was still respect for the law and the constitution. Pompey's hesitation when supreme power was within his grasp, Caesar's own pause at the Rubicon, are proofs of it. The civil wars of Marius and Sulla had fearfully impaired, in the eyes of Romans, but they had not utterly destroyed, the majesty of Rome. There were still great characters—characters which you may dislike, but of which you can never rationally speak with contempt—and there must have been some general element of worth in which these characters were formed. If the recent administration of the Senate had not been glorious, still, from a Roman point of view, it had not been disastrous: the revolt of the slaves and the insurrection in Spain had been quelled; Mithridates had been conquered; the pirates, though for a time their domination accused the feebleness of the government, had at length been put down. The only great military calamity of recent date was the defeat of Crassus, whose unprovoked and insane invasion of Parthia was the error, not of the Senate, but of the Triumvirate. Legions were forthcoming for the conquest of Gaul, and a large reserve of treasure was found in the sacred treasure-house when it was broken open by Caesar. Bad governors of provinces, Verres, Fonteius, Gabinius, were impeached and punished. Lucullus, autocrat and voluptuary as he was, governed his province well. So did Cicero, if we may take his own word for it. We may, at all events, take his own word for this, that he was anxious to be thought to have ruled with purity and justice, which proves that purity and justice were not quite out of fashion. The old Roman spirit still struggled against luxury, and we find Cicero suffering from indigestion, caused by a supper of vegetables at the house of a wealthy friend, whose excellent cook had developed all the resources of gastronomic art in struggling with the restrictions imposed by a sumptuary law. There was intellectual life, and all the civilized tastes and half-moral qualities which the existence of intellectual life implies. In spite of the sanguinary anarchy which often broke out in the Roman streets, Cicero, the most cultivated and the least combative of men, when in exile or in his province, sighs for the capital as a Frenchman sighs for Paris. In short, if we consider the case fairly, we shall admit, I believe, that, besides the force of memory and of old allegiance, there was enough of worth and of apparent hope left, not only to excuse republican illusions, but probably to make it a duty to try the issue with fate. I say probably, and, after all, how can we presume to speak with certainty of a situation so distant from us in time, and so imperfectly recorded?

The great need of the world was public virtue—the spirit of self- sacrifice for the common good. This the empire could not possibly call into being. The public virtue of the ancient world resided in the nationalities which the conquering republic had broken up, and of which the empire only sealed the doom. The empire could never call forth even the lowest form of public virtue, loyalty to the hereditary right of a royal family, because the empire never presented itself as a right, but merely as a personal power. The idea of legitimacy, I apprehend never connected itself with these dynasts who were, in fact, a series of usurpers, veiling their usurpation under republican forms. When the spirit which leads man to sacrifice himself to the good of the community appeared again it appeared in associations and notably in one great association formed not by the empire but independently of it in antagonism to its immorality, and in spite of its persecutions. Accidentally the empire assisted the extension of the great Christian association by completing the overthrow of the national religions, but the main part of this work had been done by the republic and it was the merit neither of the republic nor of the empire.

It is said with confidence that the empire vastly improved the government of the provinces, and that on this account it was a great blessing to the world. I do not believe that any nation had then attained, I do not believe that any nation has now attained, and I doubt whether any nation ever will attain, such a point of morality as to be able to govern other nations for the benefit of the governed. I will say nothing about our Christian policy in India, but let those who rate French morality so highly, consider what French tutelage is to the people of Algeria. But supposing the task undertaken, the question which is the best organ of imperial government—an assembly or an autocrat—is a curious one. I am disposed to think that, taking the average of assemblies and the average of autocrats, there is more hope in the assembly, because in the assembly opinion must have some force. The autocrat is in a certain sense, raised above the dominant nation and its interests, but, after all, he is one of that nation, he lives in it, and subsists by its support. Even in the time of Augustus, if we may trust Dion Cassius Licinius the Governor of Gaul, was guilty of corruptions and peculations curiously resembling those of Verres, from whom he seems to have borrowed the device of tampering with the calendar for the purpose of fiscal fraud, and when the provinces complained, the Emperor hushed up the matter, partly to avoid scandal, partly because Licinius was cunning enough to pretend that his peculations had been intended to cut the sinews of revolt, and that his spoils were reserved for the imperial exchequer. The rebellions of Vindex and Civilis seem to prove that even Caesar's favourite province was not happy. Spain was misgoverned by the deputies both of Julius and Augustus. In Britain, the history of the revolt of the Iceni shews that neither the extortions of Roman usurers, nor the brutalities of Roman officers, had ended with the republic. The blood tax of the conscription appears also to have been cruelly exacted. The tribute of largesses and shows which the empire, though supposed to be lifted high above all partialities, paid to the Roman populace, was drawn almost entirely from the provinces. Emperors who coined money with the tongue of the informer and the sword of the executioner, were not likely to abstain from selling governorships; and, in fact, Seneca intimates that under bad emperors governorships were sold. Of course, the tyranny was felt most at Rome, where it was present; but when Caligula or Caracalla made a tour in the provinces, it was like the march of the pestilence. The absence of a regular bureaucracy, practically controlling, as the Russian bureaucracy does, the personal will of the Emperor, must have made government better under Trajan, but much worse under Nero. The aggregation of land in the hands of a few great land-holders evidently continued, and under this system the garden of Italy became a desert. The decisive fact, however, is that the provinces decayed, and that when the barbarians arrived, all power of resistance was gone. That the empire was consciously levelling and cosmopolitan, surely cannot be maintained. Actium was a Roman victory over the gods of the nations. Augustus, who must have known something about the system, avowedly aimed at restoring the number, the purity, the privileged exclusiveness of the dominant race. His legislation was an attempt to regenerate old Rome; and the political odes of the court poet are full of that purpose. That the empire degraded all that had once been noble in Rome is true; but the degradation of what had once been noble in Rome was not the regeneration of humanity. The vast slave population was no more elevated by the ascendency of the freedmen of the imperial household than the female sex was elevated by the ascendancy of Messalina.