But it was now too late to take such a step. News of it spread over all Italy, and it was construed as a deliberate attempt to exclude Italians from the citizenship. Five years later another vain attempt was made by a noble tribune to do as Gracchus had wished to do, to extend the citizenship and to enlarge the Senate: but he was assassinated before his laws were passed, and then at last there followed the inevitable outbreak, perhaps long meditated. The social war, as it is called, in reality a civil war, was a crisis in the history of European development. When it was over, the ancient city-state of the Greeks and Italians had vanished in Italy, and in its place arose a new form of polity, for which there was then no name.
The sturdy peoples of central Italy entered on the desperate venture of setting up a rival power against Rome; a plan which, if successful, would have paralysed Rome’s work in the world whether for good or evil. They chose the city of Corfinium, in the heart of the Apennines, some hundred miles east of Rome, gave it the new significant name Italica, and made it, as Washington is now, the city-centre of a federation, where deputies from the various members should meet and deliberate under the presidency of consuls. But now was seen the value of the strategical position of Rome. She could strike in any direction from inner lines, while safe from attack or blockade by sea; but Corfinium had no such natural strategic advantage, nor any unifying power. Yet the Italians were for some time successful in the field, and Rome was for a whole year in the utmost peril. At the end of that year (90 B.C.) the Etruscans and Umbrians to north and east joined the confederates, and then for the first time Rome was likely to be put on the defensive, with enemies on her left flank, as well as on her right and in front. So a law was hastily passed giving the precious citizenship to all who had not taken up arms; and this was the beginning of a process by which, in some few years, the whole of Italy became Roman in the eye of the law, while, on the other hand, it might be said not untruly that Rome became Italian. Henceforward we have to think of the whole peninsula as forming the material support of Mediterranean civilisation.
With this great change one might have expected that peace and harmony would return to Italy. But, on the contrary, she is now about to enter on the most terrible time that she has ever known; even her miserable feuds of the late Middle Ages never quite reached the horror of those of Marius and Sulla. It is hard to explain this; but looking back at what was said in the last chapter about the causes of demoralisation, it is possible to make a guess. We have to think of a vast slave State, worn out in the struggle with dangers within and without, enfeebled by constant warfare, and now given over into the hands of powerful military masters, with hosts of veterans at their beck and call. The State seemed to have lost its claim to loyalty, even to consideration: and in its place were rival generals, leaders also of political factions—in these years two, Marius the self-seeking champion of the Italians and the Roman plebs, and Sulla the self-seeking champion of the old aristocracy. All principles were lost on either side in the intensely bitter hatred of the parties and the personal rivalry of the leading men. It happened that a war was threatening in the East, of which we shall hear more in the next chapter; and the command in this war, the great prize of the moment, became a bone of contention outweighing all interest of the State.
The prize fell to Sulla; but no sooner was his back turned on Italy than the Marian faction fell on their political enemies and sought to destroy them by wholesale murder. Compromise was utterly forgotten; all the brutality of unbridled human nature was let loose. And when Sulla returned from the East, after driving the enemy out of Roman territory, the massacres were revenged by more massacres. The loss to Italy of many thousands of her best men, and among them scores who might have done good work in the world, was a calamity never to be repaired.
Where, one may ask, was the old Roman gravitas and pietas, the self-restraint and sense of duty that had won an empire? It would seem as if the capacity for discipline were entirely lost, except in the long-service army. But the mere fact that in the army this survived is one not to be neglected, even if it were exercised less on behalf of the State than in the interest of the individual commander. For if there could be found a statesman-soldier who could identify himself with the true interest of the State, and so bring back not only the army, but the people to a right idea of Rome’s position and duty in the world, the Empire and civilisation might yet be saved. Without the army these could not be defended; and the one thing wanting was to make the army loyal to the State as well as to its general. Only the general himself could secure this loyalty, by making himself the true servant of the State.
But the man into whose hands Rome had now fallen was one who could not possibly identify himself with the best interests of the State, because an unsympathetic nature had denied him the power of discerning what those interests were. Sulla has been compared to Napoleon, and in one or two points the comparison holds good; but the two were utterly unlike in the main point, the power of sympathetic discernment. Napoleon, cruel and unscrupulous as he often was, showed plainly, when he organised the institutions of France, or Switzerland, or Egypt, that he understood the needs of those nations: he divined what would enable them to advance out of stagnation to some better form of life, social and political. But Sulla, though he saw that the call of the moment was for order at almost any price, for peace, strong government, and reform, went about his work in a way which proved that he did not delight in it, or care for the people for whom he was legislating. He did what was necessary for the moment, but did it with force ill concealed under constitutional forms. So no wise man rejoiced in his work, and the Roman people as a whole felt no loyalty towards him. He provided in many State departments an excellent machinery, but not the motive force to work it.
Nothing in history shows better how much in remedial legislation depends on the spirit in which it is undertaken. Sulla saw that the great council, the Senate, must be the central point and pivot of government, unless indeed there were a master at hand, like himself, to undertake it; that the popular assemblies, untrained in discussion and affairs, could not do the work of administration. Though the theory of the constitution had always been that the people were sovereign, he contrived that the Senate, which had so long practically governed under an unwritten constitution, should now rule without let or hindrance on a basis of statute law; and here we see an unwritten constitution growing into a written one, as with us Britons at this moment. By a great law of treason, the first on the Roman statute book, he made it almost impossible to defy the Senate without the risk of political effacement.
This may be called reactionary, but under the circumstances it was not a reaction to be complained of. The pity was that this master legislator had really none to be grateful or loyal to him but his own army and followers. His constitutional legislation was for the most part swept away soon after his death, and there was no one to lament. On the other hand, all that he did that was not strictly political, and in particular his reorganisation of what we may call the civil service, and of the criminal law and procedure, was so obviously progressive and valuable that no one ever attempted to destroy it; and some of his laws of this kind held good throughout Roman history.
Sulla attained his power in 81 B.C., resigned it in 79, and died next year at his villa on the warm Campanian coast, where he had gone to enjoy himself in self-indulgence and literary dilettantism. Here he wrote that autobiography of which some few fragments have come down to us in Plutarch’s Life of him—a life which will repay the reader, even in translation. One of these fragments has always seemed to me to throw real light on the man’s strange nature, and on the imperfection of his work. “All my most happy resolutions,” he wrote, “have been the result, not of reasoning, but of momentary inspiration.” In other words, Sulla did not believe in thinking over a problem, and herein he was a true Roman. He hoped to do the right thing on the spur of the moment. Thus it was that no one ever knew what he would do; no one could trust him nor believe in him. Like so many in that and succeeding ages he believed profoundly in Fortune: he called himself Sulla the Fortunate, and gave like names to his two children. What exactly he meant by Fortuna we cannot say; but we may be sure that it was no such conception of a power ruling the world as might guide a statesman’s feet out of the path of self-seeking into a more bracing region of high endeavour.