The finest of all his portraits is that of the Roman people. Each speech, each oratorical narrative revises and perfects it, and it is easily seen that Livy has not taken it from the ancient authors but that it is entirely his own. In the combat of Horatius Cocles, what pride and what vigour! It is not likely that the Romans in one year had become such unruly republicans. But how well the fable is hidden under a noble passion! Throwing towards the chiefs of the Etruscans savage and threatening glances, sometimes provoking them one after another, sometimes insulting them collectively.“Slaves of insolent kings, forgetting your own liberty, you come to attack that of others!” If this passage is theatrical, it is grand, and eloquence nobly adorns “the beginning of this liberty.”
Dionysius makes Mucius an ingenious Greek, who terrifies good Porsenna and saves himself by a stratagem with a double result. In Livy Mucius is a hero. “Seized by the guards and brought before the king’s court, even then, in the midst of such dangers, he was more to be feared than to be frightened. ‘I am a Roman citizen,’ he said, ‘I am called C. Mucius, enemy. I wished to kill an enemy, and I am as ready to die as to kill. A Roman can dare all and suffer all. I am but the first to bring against thee their courage; behind me is a long train of men who seek the same honour. Prepare thyself if thou wilt, for the struggle. At each hour, thou wilt fight for life and thou wilt have a dagger and an enemy in the vestibule of thy palace. We young men declare this kind of war against thee. Fear neither army nor combat, this affair is between each of us and thee alone.’
“The king, at the same time excited by anger and terrified by fear, ordered him to be surrounded by flames, if he did not at once explain these ambiguous threats of conspiracy. ‘Look,’ said Mucius, ‘in order to understand what a small thing the body is to those who behold a great glory.’ He put his hand in a brasier lighted for the sacrifice, and left it there, as if unconscious of the pain.” In Dionysius, Clœlia asks the guards permission to bathe, requests them to withdraw a little whilst she disrobes herself, and then quietly crosses the Tiber. In reading the inventions of clever poltroonery, one respects Livy for having written as a Roman.
It is pride and not interest which makes the Roman people revolt against a master. See in what manner Cincinnatus judges tyranny. Does Livy forget that he lived under Augustus? When Melius was stretched out on the market-place, “He has been justly killed,” says the dictator; “a man should not be treated as a citizen, who, born of a free people, in the centre of privileges and laws, conceived the hope of ruling, knowing that kings had been driven from that city; that the same year, the king’s nephews, sons of the consul who liberated the country, being denounced for having plotted to re-establish kings, had been beheaded with an axe by their father; and that the Consul Tarquinus Collatinus, in hatred of his very name, had been obliged to leave his magistracy to go into exile.”
All these arguments are derived from the dignity of the Roman people, issue of the gods, exultant master-elect of the world, whose high self-esteem is its dominating passion. This people kills a tyrant, not in the cause of justice, but in order that it may become a tyrant itself for love of empire. This need of commanding is so natural to the Romans that it seems to them to be a divine right. When the Latins, who for over two hundred years made up half of the army and achieved half the victories, claimed the equal rights they deserved, the Roman people were as indignant as if it were sacrilege. The consul frankly says that if the Roman senators were mad enough to obey a man of Setia, he would come, sword in hand, into the senate, and that he would kill every Latin he saw in the curia with his own hand. Then turning towards Jupiter’s statue, he cries: “Listen to these crimes, Jupiter, hear them, Right and Justice! Foreign consuls, a foreign senate, inaugurated in Jupiter’s temple, thyself captive and oppressed, that is what thou wouldst see.”
This sublime insolence proves that these men had souls worthy of kings. A government like a man has its own personality. One feels in the orations of Demosthenes the generous indignation and eloquent pain of an artistic and philosophical people, which appeals to the gods and to men against brutal strength, envelops itself in its own glory before falling. The decrees of the Roman senate are the verdicts of a judge who overwhelms the heart by his imperious hardness before crushing the enemy with his armies.
When Popilius, tracing a circle around the king of Syria, ordered him to answer him before stepping over it, he did nothing very extraordinary. All the Romans treated foreigners as subjects.
From this public and private pride, born with the foundation of Rome, nourished by a succession of victories and by habitual domination, there resulted a particular kind of courage. The Romans do not fight through an outburst of bravery and of imagination, as the Athenians, or for the need of action and activity like the barbarians, but by maxims of pride and obstinacy. Their defeats are admirable. At Lake Trasimenus, battalions of soldiers charge through the victorious army by which they are surrounded. At Cannæ, ranged in a circle, fifty thousand men die to the last man, those in front ceaselessly falling and those behind taking their place.
The Romans fight for honour and duty, incapable of yielding, because the heart of men revolts against the slightest approach and appearance of pardon, because humiliation is worse than ruin, because it is better to lose everything than to yield an inch. That is why Rome becomes prouder in reverse and only consents to treat in order to pardon, why she will only suffer around her protégés, suppliants, and subjects, and “carries her empire as far as the earth and her courage as high as the sky.” Pride renders one calm. The man who aims at being worthy remains serious, and the Romans without emotion or enthusiasm accomplished the greatest results. Pride sanctifies the fatherland because the citizen gets from it glory and ascendency, without which he cannot exist. Pride sacrifices the family because it considers as weakness the affections on which it is founded.
Livy shows in his speeches how simple, quiet, and deliberate self-sacrifice is in Rome. Q. Fabius presided over the comitia; the first hundred nominate his nephew Otacilius consul. He stops the voting and coldly says, “We have tried thee, Otacilius, in lesser posts, and thou certainly hast done nothing which justifies us giving thee more important ones. For three reasons did we equip the fleet you commanded this year; in order to lay the African coast, in order to protect the shores of Italy, and above all that no reinforcements, food, or money be sent through from Carthage to Hannibal. Name Otacilius consul, if he has rendered to the state—I don’t say all these services, but a single one. It matters more to thee, Otacilius, than to any one else that a burden under which you would be crushed be not laid on your shoulders. Herald, recall to the vote the century of the young men of Anio.” As Otacilius cries out with rage that Fabius himself wishes to remain in the consulship and throws himself upon him, the consul orders the lictors to approach, and he informs Otacilius that, not having entered the city, his arms and arrows have been carried on in advance. Fabius is so sure of his disinterestedness that he does not fear appearing ambitious and tyrannical, and the people judging the same, at once elect him consul.