[81-79 B.C.]
Slowly and with many a painful struggle the Roman commonwealth had outgrown the narrow limits of a rustic municipality. The few hundred families which formed the original nucleus of her citizenship, and which in her earliest and simplest days had sufficed to execute all the functions of her government, had been compelled to incorporate allies and rivals in their own body, to enlarge their views, and to expand their institutions. The main object of Sulla’s policy was to revive at least the spirit of the old restrictions. The old families themselves had perished almost to a man; he replaced them by a newer growth; but he strove to pare away the accretions of ages, and restore the government of the vast empire of Rome to a small section of her children. The attempt was blind and bigoted; it was not less futile than unjust. It contravened the essential principle of national growth; while the career of conquest, to which the Romans devoted themselves, required the fullest expansion and the most perfect freedom of development.
Nevertheless the legislation of Sulla was undoubtedly supported by a vast mass of existing prejudice. He threw himself into the ideas of his time, as far as they were interpreted by history, by tradition, and by religious usage. The attempt to enlarge the limits of the constitution was in fact opposed to every acknowledged principle of polity. It was regarded equally by its opponents and its promoters as anomalous and revolutionary. It had as yet no foundation in argument, or in any sense of right, as right was then understood. Society at Rome was in a highly artificial state; and Sulla with many of his ablest contemporaries, mistook for the laws of nature the institutions of an obsolete and forgotten expediency. But nature was carrying on a great work, and proved too strong for art. Ten years sufficed to overthrow the whole structure of this reactionary legislation, and to launch the republic once more upon the career of growth and development. The champions of a more liberal policy sprang up in constant succession, and contributed, perhaps unconsciously, to the great work of union and comprehension, which was now rapidly in progress. The spirit of isolation which had split Greece and Italy into hundreds of separate communities was about to give way to a general yearning for social and moral unity. The nations were to be trained by the steady development of the Roman administration.
But though Sulla’s main policy was thus speedily overthrown, he had not lived in vain. As dictator he wasted his strength in attempting what, if successful, would have destroyed his country; but as proconsul he had saved her. The tyranny of the Roman domination had set the provinces in a blaze. Mithridates had fanned the flame. Greece and Asia had revolted. The genius of the king of Pontus might have consolidated an empire, such as Xerxes might have envied, on either shore of the Ægean Sea. But at this crisis of her fate, hardly less imminent than when Hannibal was wresting from her allies and subjects within the Alps, Rome had confided her fortunes to the prowess of Sulla. The great victory of Chæronea checked the dissolution of her empire. The invader was hurled back across the Ægean; the cities of Greece returned reluctantly to their obedience, never more to be tempted to renounce it. Sulla followed Mithridates into Asia; one by one he recovered the provinces of the republic. He bound his foe by treaties to abstain from fomenting their discontents. He left his officers to enforce submission to his decrees, and quartered the armies of Rome upon the wretched populations of the East. The pressing danger of the moment was averted, though it took twenty years more to subdue the power of Mithridates, and reduce Asia to passive submission. Rome was relieved from the last of her foreign invaders; and this was the great work of Sulla, which deserved to immortalise his name in her annals.[100]
Nevertheless this rolling back of the tide of aggression, and the return of the legions of the republic to the limits of her former conquests, had no effect in healing the internal sickness of which the irritation of the provinces was only symptomatic. The triumph of her arms and the sense of security it engendered only served to redouble her oppressions and to aggravate the misery of her subjects. The course of events will lead us on some future occasion to trace the remains of resentment and hatred towards Rome, which lingered long in some regions of Italy itself: but for the most part the Italians were now satisfied; they were content to regard the city of Romulus as their own metropolis; and while they enjoyed the fruits of her wide-wasting domination, gradually learned to take a pride in her name. But beyond the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian seas the same ardent vows were formed for enfranchisement which had precipitated upon Rome the Marsians and the Samnites; in more than one quarter the old struggle of the Social Wars was about to be renewed on wider and more distant theatres: but the elements of strife were now more complicated than before; the parties engaged were more thoroughly alien from each other; the hostility of Rome’s new enemies was the more inveterate as they had less sympathy with her institutions, and were ambitious of overthrowing rather than of sharing them. The second period of the civil wars of Rome opens with the revolt of the Iberians in the west, and the maritime devastations of the pirates in the east.
THE ROMAN PROVINCES
Italia, the region to which the privileges of the city had been conceded by the Plautian law, was bounded, as we have seen, by a line drawn across the neck of the peninsula from the Rubicon on the Adriatic, to the Isère on the Tyrrhenian Sea. To the north and south lay two provinces which held the first rank in political importance: on the one hand Gallia, or Gaul within the Alps; on the other the island of Sicily. The Gaulish province was divided into two districts by the Padus, or the Po, from whence they derived their denominations respectively, according as they lay within or beyond that river.
But the whole of this rich and extensive territory was placed under the command of a single proconsul, and the citizens soon learned to regard with jealousy a military force which menaced their own liberties at the same time that it maintained the obedience of their subjects. Sicily, on the other hand, though tranquil and generally contented, and requiring but a slender force to control it, was important to the republic from the abundance of its harvests, to which the city could most confidently look for its necessary supplies of grain. Next among the provinces in proximity to Rome were the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, of which the former also furnished Italy with grain; but both were rudely and imperfectly cultivated, and the unhealthiness of the larger island especially continued to keep it below many far remoter regions in wealth, population, and intelligence. The first province the Romans had acquired beyond their own seas was Spain, where their arms had made slow but steady progress from the period of their earliest contests with the Carthaginians, although the legions had never yet penetrated into its wildest and most distant fastnesses. The connection between Rome and her Iberian dependencies was long maintained principally by sea, while the wide territory intervening between the Alps and Pyrenees was still occupied by numerous free and jealous communities. But in the course of the last half-century the republic had acquired the command of the coast of the Gulf of Lyons; her roads were prolonged from Ariminum to Barcino and Valentia, while the communications of her armies were maintained by numerous fortified positions in the Further Gaul, and a secure and wealthy province extending from the Var to the Garonne.
The Adriatic and the Ionian straits separated Italy from her eastern acquisitions. The great provinces of Illyricum and Macedonia comprised the whole expanse of territory from the Adriatic to the Ægean Sea, and were divided from one another by the long mountain ridges of Boion and Scardus. Ancient Greece, from Thermopylæ to Cape Malea, constituted a single command under the title of Achaia. With Asia, Rome communicated principally by sea, the route of the Hellespont being insecure, and the barbarous tribes of Thrace but imperfectly subjected. The province of Asia, recovered by Sulla, was held by an imperator with a numerous army, destined to control the dependent potentates of Bithynia, Cilicia, and Cappadocia. The eastern proconsul watched the movements of Mithridates, and unravelled his intrigues with every court from the Halys to the Tigris. He intruded himself into the affairs of Cyprus, Palestine, and Egypt, hunted down the mountaineers of Crete, and menaced with the vengeance of the republic the buccaneers who swarmed in every harbour of the eastern Mediterranean. On the southern coasts of the great inland sea the domain which once belonged to Carthage, limited on either side by the lesser Syrtis and the river Bagradas, formed the proconsular province of Africa; while the five cities of the Pentapolis acknowledged their entire dependence on the will of the republic. The extent of her empire under Sulla was hardly one-half of that which it attained under Augustus and Trajan.
The various relations in which the different classes of the provincial population stood to the ruling city, have been compared with the constitution of a Roman household. The colonies of Roman citizens planted in the provinces, enjoying the full exercise of their national rights, and presenting a miniature of the metropolis herself, held the position of the son towards the paterfamilias. The conquered races, which had thrown themselves on the victor’s mercy, were subjected to his dominion as unreservedly as the slave to that of his master. Those among them to whom the state had restored their lands and institutions, occupied a place analogous to that of freedmen. Some cities or nations had voluntarily sought a connection with Rome on terms of alliance, but with acknowledged inferiority. Others again stood on a more independent footing, offering a mutual interchange of good offices and citizenship; and lastly, there were some which entered into confederacy with the republic with perfect equality of rights on either side. All these had their prototypes respectively in the clients, the guests and the friends of the Roman noble. Within the limits of each Roman province there were generally some states which stood in these several relations to the republic; and the strictness of the military and civil administration was maintained or relaxed towards them according to their respective claims. But after all the mass of the provincial population belonged to the class of dediticii, that is, of those who had originally submitted without conditions, the slaves, as they may be termed, of the great Roman family. These were subjected to the severest fiscal and other burdens, enhanced by the rapacity of their rulers, who, from the consul or prætor to the lowest of their officers, preyed upon them without remorse and without satiety.