Character of the Gothic wars.We may not assign to these Gothic and Scythian expeditions by land and by sea, which fill up the twenty years 250–269, such significance, as if the hordes moving forth had been minded to take permanent possession of the countries which they traversed. Such a plan cannot be shown to have existed even for Moesia and Thrace, to say nothing of the more remote coasts; hardly, moreover, were the assailants numerous enough to undertake invasions proper. As the bad government of the last rulers, and above all the untrustworthiness of the troops, far more than the superior power of the barbarians, called forth the flooding of the territory by land and sea robbers, so the re–establishment of internal order and the energetic demeanour of the government of themselves brought its deliverance. The Roman state could not yet be broken if it did not break itself. But still it was a great work to rally the government again as Claudius had done it. We know somewhat less even of him than of most regents of this time, as the probably fictitious carrying back of the Constantinian pedigree to him has repainted his portrait after the tame pattern of perfection; but this very association, as well as the numberless coins struck in his honour after his death, show that he was regarded by the next generation as the deliverer of the state, and in this it cannot have been mistaken. These Scythian expeditions were at all events a prelude of the later migration of peoples; and the destruction of cities, which distinguishes them from the ordinary piratic voyages, took place at that time to such an extent that the prosperity as well as the culture of Greece and Asia Minor never recovered from it.
The Danubian wars to the end of the 3d century.On the re–established frontier of the Danube Aurelian consolidated the victory achieved, inasmuch as he conducted the defensive once more offensively, and, crossing the Danube at its mouth, defeated beyond it not only the Carpi, who thenceforth stood in client–relation to the Romans, but also the Goths under king Canabaudes. His successor Probus took, as was already stated, the remains of the Bastarnae, hard pressed by the Goths, over to the Roman bank, just as Diocletian in the year 295 took the remnant of the Carpi. This points to the fact that beyond the river the empire of the Goths was consolidating; but they came no further. The border–fortresses were reinforced; counter–Aquincum (contra Aquincum, Pesth) was constructed in the year 294. The piratic expeditions did not entirely disappear. Under Tacitus hordes from the Maeotis appeared in Cilicia. The Franks, whom Probus had settled on the Black Sea, procured for themselves vessels, and sailed home to their North Sea, after plundering by the way on the Sicilian and African coasts. By land, too, there was no cessation of arms, as indeed all the numerous Sarmatian victories of Diocletian, and a part of his Germanic, would fall to the regions of the Danube; but it was only under Constantine that matters again came to a serious war with the Goths, which had a successful issue. The preponderance of Rome was re–established after the Gothic victory of Claudius as firmly as before.
Illyrising of the military force and of the government.The war–history which we have just unfolded did not fail to react with general and lasting effect upon the internal organisation of the Roman political and military system. It has already been pointed out that the corps of the Rhine, holding in the early imperial period the leading position in the army, yielded their primacy already under Trajan to the legions of the Danube. While under Augustus six legions were stationed in the region of the Danube and eight in that of the Rhine, after the Dacian wars of Domitian and Trajan in the second century the Rhine–camps numbered only four, the camps of the Danube ten, and after the Marcomanian war even twelve, legions. Inasmuch as since Hadrian’s time the Italian element, apart from the officers, had disappeared from the army, and, taken on the whole, every regiment was recruited in the district in which it was quartered, the most of the soldiers of the Danubian army, and not less the centurions who rose from the ranks, were natives of Pannonia, Dacia, Moesia, Thrace. The new legions formed under Marcus proceeded from Illyricum, and the extraordinary supplemental levies which the troops then needed were probably likewise taken chiefly from the districts in which the armies were stationed. Thus the primacy of the Danubian armies, which the war of the three emperors in the time of Severus established and increased, was at the same time a primacy of Illyrian soldiers; and this reached a very emphatic expression in the reform of the guard under Severus. This primacy did not, properly speaking, affect the higher spheres of government, so long as the position of officer still coincided with that of imperial official, although the equestrian career was accessible to the common soldier through the intervening link of the centurionate at all times, and thus the Illyrians early found their way into that career; as indeed, already, in the year 235, a native Thracian, Gaius Julius Varus Maximinus, in the year 248 a native Pannonian, Trajanus Decius, had in this way attained even to the purple. But when Gallienus, in a distrust certainly but too well justified, excluded the class of senators from serving as officers, what had hitherto held good as to the soldiers became necessarily extended to the officers also. It was thus simply a matter of course that the soldiers belonging to the army of the Danube, and mostly springing from Illyrian districts, played thenceforth the first part also in government, and, so far as the army made the emperors, these were likewise as to the majority Illyrians. Thus Gallienus was followed by Claudius the Dardanian, Aurelianus from Moesia, Probus from Pannonia, Diocletianus from Dalmatia, Maximianus from Pannonia, Constantius from Dardania, Galerius from Serdica; as to the last named, an author writing under the Constantinian dynasty brings into prominence their descent from Illyricum, and adds that they, with little culture but good preliminary training by labour in the field and service in war, had been excellent rulers. Such service as the Albanians for a long time rendered to the Turkish empire, their predecessors likewise rendered to the Roman imperial state, when this had arrived at similar disorder and similar barbarism. Only, the Illyrian regeneration of the Roman imperial order may not be conceived of as a national reorganisation; it was simply the propping up, by soldiers, of an empire utterly reduced through the misgovernment of rulers of gentler birth. Italy had wholly ceased to be military; and history does not acknowledge the ruler’s right without the warrior’s power.
CHAPTER VII.
GREEK EUROPE.
Hellenism and Panhellenism.With the general intellectual development of the Hellenes the political development of their republics had not kept equal pace, or rather the luxuriant growth of the former had—just as too full a bloom bursts the calyx that contains it—not allowed any individual commonwealth to acquire the extent and stability which are preliminary conditions for the thorough formation of a state. The petty–state–system of individual cities or city–leagues could not but be stunted in itself or fall a prey to the barbarians. Panhellenism alone guaranteed alike the continued existence of the nation and its further development in presence of the alien races dwelling around it. It was realised by the treaty which king Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander, concluded in Corinth with the states of Hellas. This was, in name, a federal agreement, in fact, the subjection of the republics to the monarchy, but a subjection, which took effect only as regards external relations, seeing that the absolute generalship in opposition to the national foe was transferred by almost all towns of the Greek mainland to the Macedonian general, while in other respects freedom and autonomy were left to them; and this was, as circumstances stood, the only possible realisation of Panhellenism and the form regulating in substance the future of Greece. It subsisted in presence of Philip and Alexander, though the Hellenic idealists were reluctant, as they always were, to acknowledge the realised ideal as such. Then, when the kingdom of Alexander fell to pieces, all was over, as with Panhellenism itself, so also with the union of the Greek towns under the monarchic supremacy; and these wore out their last mental and material power in centuries of aimless striving, distracted between the alternating rule of the too powerful monarchies, and vain attempts, under cover of their quarrels, to restore the old particularism.
Hellas and Rome.When at length the mighty republic of the west entered into the conflict, hitherto in some measure balanced, of the monarchies of the east, and soon showed itself more powerful than each of the Greek states there striving with one another, the Panhellenic policy became renewed as the position of supremacy became fixed. Neither the Macedonians nor the Romans were Hellenes in the full sense of the word; it is indeed the sad feature of Greek development that the Attic naval empire was more a hope than a reality, and the work of union could not emanate from the bosom of the nation itself. While in a national respect the Macedonians stood nearer to the Greeks than the Romans did, the commonwealth of Rome had politically far more of elective affinity to the Hellenic than the Macedonian hereditary kingdom. But—what is the chief matter—the attractive power of the Greek spirit was probably felt more permanently and deeply by the Roman burgesses than by the statesmen of Macedonia, just because the former stood at a greater distance from it than the latter. The desire to become at least internally Hellenised, to become partakers of the manners and the culture, of the art and the science of Hellas, to be—in the footsteps of the great Macedonian—shield and sword of the Greeks of the East, and to be allowed further to civilise this East not after an Italian but after a Hellenic fashion—this desire pervades the later centuries of the Roman republic and the better times of the empire with a power and an ideality which are almost no less tragic than that political toil of the Hellenes failing to attain its goal. For both sides strove after the impossible: to Hellenic Pan–hellenism there was refused duration, and to Roman Hellenism solid intrinsic worth. Nevertheless it has essentially influenced the policy of the Roman republic as well as that of the emperors. However much the Greeks, particularly in the last century of the republic, showed the Romans that their labour of love was a forlorn one, this made no change either in the labour or in the love.
The Amphictiony of Augustus.The Greeks of Europe had been comprehended by the Roman republic under a single governorship named after the chief country Macedonia. When this was administratively dissolved at the beginning of the imperial period, there was at the same time conferred on the whole Greek name a religious bond of union, which attached itself to the old Delphic Amphictiony introduced for the sake of “a peace of God” and then misused for political ends. Under the Roman republic it had been in the main brought back to the original foundations; Macedonia as well as Aetolia, both of which had intruded as usurpers, were again eliminated, and the Amphictiony once more embraced not all, but most, of the tribes of Thessaly and of Greece proper. Augustus caused the league to be extended to Epirus and Macedonia, and thereby made it in substance the representative of the Hellenic land in the wider sense alone suited to this epoch. A privileged position in this union alongside of the time–honoured Delphi was occupied by the two cities of Athens and Nicopolis, the former the capital of the old, the latter, according to Augustus’s design, that of the new imperial, Hellenic body.[146] This new Amphictiony has a certain resemblance to the diet of the three Gauls ([p. 93]); just like the altar of the emperor at Lyons for this diet, the temple of the Pythian Apollo was the religious centre of the Greek provinces. But, while to the former withal a directly political activity was conceded, the Amphictions of this epoch, in addition to the religious festivals proper, simply attended to the administration of the Delphic sanctuary and of its still considerable revenues.[147] If its president in later times ascribed to himself “Helladarchy,” this rule over Greece was simply an ideal conception.[148] But the official conserving of the Greek nationality remained always a token of the attitude which the new imperialism occupied towards it, and of its Philhellenism, far surpassing that of the republic.