Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

The line was drawn, under the pressure of a stern necessity, between civil and military life, and between the rights and duties of each. The power of the magistrate, jealously limited in the city, was enlarged to absolutism for the preservation of discipline in the field. But the distinction between the king or magistrate and the general, and between the special capacities required for the duties of each, is everywhere of late growth. We may say the same of departmental distinctions altogether. The executive, the legislative, the judicial power, civil authority and military command, all lie enfolded in the same primitive germ. The king, or the magistrate who takes his place, is expected to lead the people in war as well as to govern them in peace. In European monarchies this idea still lingers, fortified no doubt by the personal unwillingness of the kings to let the military power go out of their hands. Nor in early times is the difference between the qualifications of a ruler and those of a commander so great as it afterwards became; the business of the State is simple, and force of character is the main requisite in both cases. Annual consulships must have been fatal to strategical experience, while, on the other hand, they would save the Republic from being tied to an unsuccessful general. But the storms of war which broke on Rome from all quarters soon brought about the recognition of special aptitude for military command in the appointment of dictators. As to the distinction between military and naval ability, it is of very recent birth: Blake, Prince Rupert, and Monk were made admirals because they had been successful as generals, just as Hannibal was appointed by Antiochus to the command of a fleet.

At Preston Pans, as before at Killiecrankie, the line of the Hanoverian regulars was broken by the headlong charge of the wild clans, for which the regulars were unprepared. Taught by the experience of Preston Pans, the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden formed in three lines, so as to repair a broken front. The Romans in like manner formed in three lines— hastati, principes, and triarii—evidently with the same object. Our knowledge of the history of Roman tactics does not enable us to say exactly at what period this formation began to supersede the phalanx, which appears to have preceded it, and which is the natural order of half-disciplined or imperfectly armed masses, as we see in the case of the army formed by Philip out of the Macedonian peasantry, and again in the case of the French Revolutionary columns. We cannot say, therefore, whether this formation in three lines is in any way traceable to experience dearly bought in wars with Italian highlanders, or to a lesson taught by the terrible onset of the Gaul. Again, the punctilious care in the entrenchment of the camp, even for a night's halt, which moved the admiration of Pyrrhus and was a material part of Roman tactics, was likely to be inculcated by the perils to which a burgher army would be exposed in carrying on war under or among hills where it would be always liable to the sudden attack of a swift, sure-footed, and wily foe. The habit of carrying a heavy load of palisades on the march would be a part of the same necessity.

Even from the purely military point of view, then, the She-wolf and the Twins seem to us not appropriate emblems of Roman greatness. A better frontispiece for historians of Rome, if we mistake not, would be some symbol of the patroness of the lowlands and their protectress against the wild tribes of the highlands. There should also be something to symbolize the protectress of Italy against the Gauls, whose irruptions Rome, though defeated at Allia, succeeded ultimately in arresting and hurling back, to the general benefit of Italian civilization which, we may be sure, felt very grateful to her for that service, and remembered it when her existence was threatened by Hannibal, with Gauls in his army. Capua, though not so well situated for the leadership of Italy, might have played the part of Rome; but the plain which she commanded, though very rich, was too small, and too closely overhung by the fatal hills of the Samnite, under whose dominion she fell. Rome had space to organize a strong lowland resistance to the marauding highland powers. It seems probable that her hills were not only the citadel but the general refuge of the lowlanders of those parts, when forced to fly before the onslaught of the highlanders, who were impelled by successive wars of migration to the plains. The Campagna affords no stronghold or rallying point but those hills, which may have received a population of fugitives like the islands of Venice. The city may have drawn part of its population and some of its political elements from this source. In this sense the story of the Asylum may possibly represent a fact, though it has itself nothing to do with history.

Then, as to imperial organization and government. Superiority in these would naturally flow from superiority in civilization, and in previous political training, the first of which Rome derived from her comparative wealth and from the mental characteristics of a city population; the second she derived from the long struggle through which the rights of the plebeians were equalized with those of the patricians, and which again must have had its ultimate origin in geographical circumstance bringing together different elements of population. Cromwell was a politician and a religious leader before he was a soldier; Napoleon was a soldier before he was a politician: to this difference between the moulds in which their characters were cast may be traced, in great measure, the difference of their conduct when in power, Cromwell devoting himself to political and ecclesiastical reform, while Napoleon used his supremacy chiefly as the means of gratifying his lust for war. There is something analogous in the case of imperial nations. Had the Roman, when he conquered the world been like the Ottoman, like the Ottoman he would probably have remained. His thirst for blood slaked, he would simply have proceeded to gratify his other animal lusts; he would have destroyed or consumed everything, produced nothing, delivered over the world to a plundering anarchy of rapacious satraps, and when his sensuality had overpowered his ferocity, he would have fallen in his turn before some horde whose ferocity was fresh, and the round of war and havoc would have commenced again. The Roman destroyed and consumed a good deal; but he also produced not a little: he produced, among other things, first in Italy, then in the world at large, the Peace of Rome indispensable to civilization, and destined to be the germ and precursor of the Peace of Humanity.

In two respects, however, the geographical circumstances of Rome appear specially to have prepared her for the exercise of universal empire. In the first place, her position was such as to bring her into contact from the outset with a great variety of races. The cradle of her dominion was a sort of ethnological microcosm. Latins, Etruscans, Greeks, Campanians, with all the mountain races and the Gauls, make up a school of the most diversified experience, which could not fail to open the minds of the future masters of the world. How different was this education from that of a people which is either isolated, like the Egyptians, or comes into contact perhaps in the way of continual border hostility with a single race! What the exact relations of Rome with Etruria were in the earliest times we do not know, but evidently they were close; while between the Roman and the Etruscan character the difference appears to have been as wide as possible. The Roman was pre-eminently practical and business- like, sober-minded, moral, unmystical, unsacerdotal, much concerned with present duties and interests, very little concerned about a future state of existence, peculiarly averse from human sacrifices and from all wild and dark superstitions. The Etruscan, as he has portrayed himself to us in his tombs, seems to have been, in his later development at least, a mixture of Sybaritism with a gloomy and almost Mexican religion, which brooded over the terrors of the next world, and sought in the constant practice of human sacrifice a relief from its superstitious fear. If the Roman could tolerate the Etruscans, be merciful to them, and manage them well, he was qualified to deal in a statesmanlike way with the peculiarities of almost any race, except those whose fierce nationality repelled all management whatever. In borrowing from the Etruscans some of their theological lore and their system of divination, small as the value of the things borrowed was, the Roman, perhaps, gave an earnest of the receptiveness which led him afterwards, in his hour of conquest, to bow to the intellectual ascendency of the conquered Greek, and to become a propagator of Greek culture, though partly in a Latinized form, more effectual than Alexander and his Orientalized successors.

In the second place, the geographical circumstances of Rome, combined with her character, would naturally lead to the foundation of colonies and of that colonial system which formed a most important and beneficent part of her empire. We have derived the name colony from Rome; but her colonies were just what ours are not, military outposts of the empire, propugnacula imperii. Political depletion and provision for needy citizens were collateral, but it would seem, in early times at least, secondary objects. Such outposts were the means suggested by Nature, first of securing those parts of the plain which were beyond the sheltering range of the city itself, secondly of guarding the outlets of the hills against the hill tribes, and eventually of holding down the tribes in the hills themselves. The custody of the passes is especially marked as an object by the position of many of the early colonies. When the Roman dominion extended to the north of Italy, the same system was pursued, in order to guard against incursions from the Alps. A conquering despot would have planted mere garrisons under military governors, which would not have been centres of civilization, but probably of the reverse. The Roman colonies, bearing onwards with them the civil as well as the military life of the Republic, were, with the general system of provincial municipalities of which they constituted the core, to no small extent centres of civilization, though doubtless they were also to some extent instruments of oppression. "Where the Roman conquered he dwelt," and the dwelling of the Roman was, on the whole, the abode of a civilizing influence. Representation of dependencies in the sovereign assembly of the imperial country was unknown, and would have been impracticable. Conquest had not so far put off its iron nature. In giving her dependencies municipal institutions and municipal life, Rome did the next best thing to giving them representation. A Roman province with its municipal life was far above a satrapy, though far below a nation.

Then how came Rome to be the foundress and the great source of law? This, as we said before, calls for a separate explanation. An explanation we do not pretend to give, but merely a hint which may deserve notice in looking for the explanation. In primitive society, in place of law, in the proper sense of the term, we find only tribal custom, formed mainly by the special exigencies of tribal self- preservation, and confined to the particular tribe. When Saxon and Dane settle down in England side by side under the treaty made between Alfred and Guthurm, each race retains the tribal custom which serves it as a criminal law. A special effort seems to be required in order to rise above this custom to that conception of general right or expediency which is the germ of law as a science. The Greek, sceptical and speculative as he was, appears never to have quite got rid of the notion that there was something sacred in ancestral custom, and that to alter it by legislation was a sort of impiety. We in England still conceive that there is something in the breast of the judge, and the belief is a lingering shadow of the tribal custom, the source of the common law. Now what conditions would be most favourable to this critical effort, so fraught with momentous consequences to humanity? Apparently a union of elements belonging to different tribes such as would compel them, for the preservation of peace and the regulation of daily intercourse, to adopt some common measure of right. It must be a union, not a conquest of one tribe by another, otherwise the conquering tribe would of course keep its own customs, as the Spartans did among the conquered people of Laconia. Now it appears likely that these conditions were exactly fulfilled by the primaeval settlements on the hills of Rome. The hills are either escarped by nature or capable of easy escarpment, and seem originally to have been little separate fortresses, by the union of which the city was ultimately formed. That there were tribal differences among the inhabitants of the different hills is a belief to which all traditions and all the evidence of institutions point, whether we suppose the difference to have been great or not and whatever special theory we may form as to the origin of the Roman people. If the germ of law, as distinguished from custom, was brought into existence in this manner, it would be fostered and expanded by the legislative exigencies of the political and social concordat between the two orders, and also by those arising out of the adjustment of relations with other races in the course of conquest and colonization.

Roman law had also, in common with Roman morality, the advantage of being comparatively free from the perverting influences of tribal superstition. [Footnote: From religious perversion Roman law was eminently free: but it could not be free from perverting influences of a social kind; so that we ought to be cautious, for instance, in borrowing law on any subject concerning the relations between the sexes from the corrupt society of the Roman Empire.] Roman morality was in the main a rational rule of duty, the shortcomings and aberrations of which arose not from superstition, but from narrowness of perception, peculiarity of sphere, and the bias of national circumstance. The auguries, which were so often used for the purposes of political obstruction or intrigue, fall under the head rather of trickery than of superstition.

Roman law in the same manner was a rule of expediency, rightly or wrongly conceived, with comparatively little tincture of religion. In this again we probably see the effect of a fusion of tribes upon the tribal superstitions. "Rome," it has been said, "had no mythology." This is scarcely an overstatement; and we do not account for the fact by saying that the Romans were unimaginative, because it is not the creative imagination that produces a mythology, but the impression made by the objects and forces of nature on the minds of the forefathers of the tribe.

A more tenable explanation, at all events, is that just suggested, the disintegration of mythologies by the mixture of tribes. A part of the Roman religion—the worship of such abstractions as Fides, Fortuna, Salus, Concordia, Bellona, Terminus—even looks like a product of the intellect posterior to the decay of the mythologies, which we may be pretty sure were physical. It is no doubt true that the formalities which were left—hollow ceremonial, auguries, and priesthoods which were given without scruple, like secular offices, to the most profligate men of the world—were worse than worthless in a religious point of view. But historians who dwell on this fail to see that the real essence of religion, a belief in the power of duty and of righteousness, that belief which afterwards took the more definite form of Roman Stoicism, had been detached by the dissolution of the mythologies, and exerted its force, such as that force was, independently of the ceremonial, the sacred chickens, and the dissipated high priests. In this sense the tribute paid by Polybius to the religious character of the Romans is deserved; they had a higher sense of religious obligation than the Greeks; they were more likely than the Greeks, the Phoenicians, or any of their other rivals, to swear and disappoint not, though it were to their own hindrance; and this they owed, as we conceive, not to an effort of speculative intellect, which in an early stage of society would be out of the question, but to some happy conjunction of circumstances such as would be presented by a break-up of tribal mythologies, combined with influences favourable to the formation of strong habits of political and social duty. Religious art was sacrificed; that was the exclusive heritage of the Greek; but superior morality was on the whole the heritage of the Roman, and if he produced no good tragedy himself, he furnished characters for Shakespeare and Corneille.