The result of this was, according to the traditional story, that once at least, if not twice, they actually struck; they left their work and went off in a body, threatening to found a new city some miles farther up the Tiber. They knew well that they were indispensable to the State as soldiers, and the patricians knew it too. Fortunately, the plebeians also knew that the State, with all its traditions of religion and government, of duty and discipline, was indispensable to themselves. They knew nothing of the forms and formulæ which were deemed necessary for the maintenance of peace with gods and men. They could not carry away with them the gods of the city, under whose protection they and their forefathers had lived. They would simply be adrift, without oars or rudder, and such a position was absolutely unthinkable. So they returned to the city—so the story runs—and the result was a compromise, the first of a long series of compromises which finally made Rome into a compact and united commonwealth, and enabled her to tide over three centuries of continual struggle and endeavour. The story of these compromises is too long and complicated to be told in this book, but the successive stages can briefly be pointed out.

Soon after the strike, or secession, the plebeians were authorised to elect magistrates, or more strictly officers, of their own, to protect them from any arbitrary use of the imperium; these were called Tribunes, because the assembly that chose them was arranged according to tribes, local divisions in which both patricians and plebeians were registered for taxpaying purposes. The good-will of the patricians in making this concession is seen in the fact that the tribunes of the plebs (as they were henceforward called), were placed under the protection of the gods (sacrosancti), so that any one violating them was made liable to divine anger. As the plebeians grew more numerous and indispensable, their assembly and officers became steadily more powerful, and eventually won the right to pass laws binding the whole State.

Again, it was not long before their ignorance of the customary law and its methods of procedure found a remedy. A code of law was drawn up in twelve tables, containing partly old customs now for the first time written down, partly new rules, some of them perhaps imported from Athens. Of this code we still possess many fragments, which show plainly that it was meant for all citizens, whatever their social standing. “The idea of legislating for a class ... is strikingly absent. The code is thoroughly Roman in its caution and good sense, its respect for the past, which it disregards only when old customs violate the rules of common sense, and its judicious disregard of symmetry.”[4] As the historian Tacitus said of it long afterwards, it was “the consummation of equal right.” And it was the source of the whole mighty river of Roman law, ever increasing in volume, which still serves to irrigate the field of modern European civilisation.

There was to be a long and bitter contest before the plebeians forced their way into the central patrician stronghold of the imperium, but even this was accomplished without civil war or bloodshed. We hear of a series of evasive manœuvres by the patricians, who naturally believed that all would go wrong if the duty of keeping “the peace of the gods” were committed to men whom the gods could not be supposed to take count of. But these patrician consuls and senators were responsible for the State’s existence, and it could not exist without the plebeians; the two classes were authorised by law to intermarry, which (strange to say) had been unlawful hitherto, and then the old class-feeling and prejudice, far exceeding in force any such feeling known to us now, gradually subsided. By the middle of the fourth century B.C., not only could a plebeian be consul, but one of the two consuls must be a plebeian. And before that century was over the old patrician nobility was beginning to disappear, giving way to a new one based on the leading idea of good service done for the State. If a man had held the consulship, no matter whether he were patrician or plebeian, he became nobilis—i.e. distinguished—and so, too, did his family. The great Roman aristocracy of later times consisted of the descendants of men who had thus become distinguished.

I will conclude this chapter with a few words about one remarkable institution which well illustrates the Roman instinct for duty and discipline. It was in this period, 443 B.C., according to the traditional date, that a new magistracy was established, intended at first merely to relieve the consuls of difficult duties for which in that warlike age they had no sufficient leisure, but destined eventually to become even a higher object of ambition than the consulship itself. The Roman love of order made it necessary to be sure that every citizen was justly and legally a citizen, that he fulfilled his duties in the army, and paid his taxes according to a right estimate of his property. Every four or five years an inquiry had to be made with this object in view, and two censors, holding office for a year and a half, were now elected to undertake it. These censors, though they had no imperium, were irresponsible; their decisions were final, and they could not be called to account for any official act. They were almost always—in later times invariably—reverend seniors who had held the consulship, men in whose justice and wisdom the people could put implicit confidence. And such confidence was needed; for their power of examination easily became extended from details of registration to the personal conduct of the citizen in almost every relation of life. All heads of families might be questioned about their performance of family duties, and any shameful cruelty to a slave, or injustice to a client, or neglect of children, might be punished by removal from the list of tribesmen; and this meant loss of civil rights, and infamia (civic disgrace), a terrible word, greatly dreaded by the Roman. Neglect of land or other property, useless luxury, bad faith in contracts or legal guardianship—all came in course of time to be taken count of by the censors. A senator might have his name struck off the list of the Senate, and a cavalry soldier might be removed from the roll, if the horse provided him by the State were ill cared for, or if in any other way he were deemed unworthy of his position.

It may be hard for us to understand how such a power of inquisition can have been submitted to in a free State. But apart from the age and standing of the holders of this office, and the Roman habit of obedience to constituted authority, there are two facts that will help us to understand it. One is simple: the censors were collegæ like the consuls; each had a veto on the action of the other, and if that veto were not used, if they were unanimous in condemning a citizen, the authority of their decision was naturally irresistible. The other fact is harder for a modern to understand. There was a religious element in the work of the censors; the final act of a censorship was the religious “purification” (lustratio) of the whole citizen body, with sacrifice and prayer, in the field of Mars outside the walls of the city. What exactly a Roman of that day believed, or rather felt, to be the result of this rite, we can only guess; but we can be sure that he was convinced that the life of the State would be imperilled without it, and that this conviction was strong enough to compel him to submit to the whole process of which it was the consummation.

CHAPTER IV
THE STRUGGLE WITH CARTHAGE AND HANNIBAL

In these days sober students of history wisely leave the oft-told stories of war and battle, and busy themselves rather with questions of social life, public and private economy, and the history of religion, morals and scientific inquiry. But there are a few wars, great struggles of nation against nation, which will always have an absorbing interest: partly because of their dramatic character, partly because of their far-reaching consequences; and the long fight between Rome and Carthage is assuredly one of these. On the Carthaginian side it produced two of the most extraordinary men, father and son, of whom history has anywhere to tell; and on the Roman side it gives us a vivid picture of the most marvellous endurance during long years of extreme peril that we can find in the annals of any people. And probably no war was ever so pregnant of results for good and ill alike. It welded the whole of Italy south of the Alps into a united country under the rule of Rome, and launched the Romans on a new career of conquest beyond the sea; it laid the foundations of the Roman Empire as we now think of that great system. Yet it left Italy in a state of economic distress from which it is hardly untrue to say that she has never fully recovered, and it changed the character of the Roman people, rich and poor alike, for the worse rather than the better.

In order to see clearly how it came about, we must once more look at the map of Italy; a map of modern Italy will do well enough. Let the reader remember that as yet Rome had control only over the central and southern parts of the whole of what is now the kingdom of Italy, and that two other parts of that kingdom, which every Italian now regards as essential to its unity, were in other hands. These were: first, the great alluvial plain of the river Po (Padus); secondly, the island of Sicily: strategically speaking, these lie on the two flanks of the Roman dominion, to north and south respectively. Any power holding central Italy, to be safe from invasion, must be in possession of these two positions, as a long series of wars has clearly shown, beginning with the two now to be sketched. The magnificent plain of the Po, stretching from the great Alpine barrier to the Apennines which look down on the Gulf of Genoa, the richest land in all Italy, was then in the hands of warlike Gallic tribes, who had settled there before the time when they struck southward and captured Rome itself; these might again become a serious danger, as indeed they proved to be in this very war. The island of Sicily was, and had long been, a bone of contention between the Greek settlers who had long ago built cities on the most favourable points of its coast, and the traders of the Phœnician city of Carthage just opposite to it on the coast of Africa. Sicily was rich in harbours, and like the plain of the Po, also rich in corn, olive, and vine; and the Greeks had held on to it so persistently that with the recent help of Pyrrhus they had for a moment been in almost complete possession of the island. But they foolishly deserted Pyrrhus at the critical moment, and now again the Carthaginians had recovered it, all but the kingdom of Hiero of Syracuse, stretching along the eastern coast under Mount Etna. Carthaginian fleets cruised round the island, and were often seen off the coasts of Italy as well. For Carthage was the mistress of the seas in all the western part of the Mediterranean basin.

Carthage was a daughter of the Canaanite city of Tyre, belonging to that seafaring people known in history as Phœnicians, whom the Israelites had pushed down to the coast of Palestine without subduing them. The genius of the Phœnicians was for trade, and the splendid position of Carthage, near the modern Tunis, with a rich corn-growing country in the rear, had helped her merchant princes to establish by degrees what may loosely be called an empire of trading settlements extending not only along the African coast, but over that of Sardinia and southern and eastern Spain, and including Sicily, as we have seen. To maintain this empire she had to keep up great fleets, and huge docks in her own port; but as her Phœnician population was largely occupied with trade, she had to rely for her crews and also for her land forces largely on the native Africans whom she had subdued, or on mercenaries hired from other races with whom she came in contact. Though this was a weak point in her armour, she was far the greatest power in the western seas, and any other people ambitious of power in that region would have to reckon with her. So far she had been on friendly terms with Rome, and we still have the text of three treaties between the two states; but the latest of these shows signs of mutual distrust, and Rome had now risen so high that a collision was all but inevitable. A people ruling in Italy cannot afford to have a rival in Sicily and also in undisputed command of the sea.