Rome

by W. Warde Fowler

There was still, indeed, a gap in the line of frontier; how was the eastern end of the Alps to be protected from invasion? There, as we saw, the great rampart was lowest, and beyond it the barbarians were an unknown quantity. Here the river Danube eventually became the frontier, and was carefully connected with that of the Rhine; but this completion of the great work had to wait for half-a-century, and in the meantime luckily no inroad was made or threatened. It was Tiberius, afterwards emperor, another great soldier, with an army almost as devoted to its general as that of Cæsar who after long steady effort planted the Roman power firmly in this region. From a military point of view the Roman Empire, and therefore Western civilisation as a whole, owed its very existence for centuries to Pompey, Cæsar and Tiberius, with their splendidly trained armies and their skilful engineers.

All this work of conquest and settlement was not the work of the State, or due to the old civic sense of duty and discipline; it was the work of the armies, due to their good discipline, and to their loyalty to their leaders. This being so, it was of course only natural that the armies and their leaders should claim to control the action and policy of an enfeebled State, as Sulla had already claimed it. This is really, put in a very few words, the secret of the Roman imperial system that was to come; so, too, in England, in Cromwell’s time, the State passed into the hands of the army, because that army (though in our case but for a short time) represented the best instincts and purposes of the nation. But the question of the moment was whether the commander of one of these Roman armies could so identify himself and his soldiers with the State and its true interests, as to become the means of establishing a sound and efficient government for the Mediterranean world. Sulla had failed so to identify himself: he had neither knowledge enough nor sympathy enough. The chance had been open to Pompey when he returned from the East in 62, but he had disbanded his army and declined it; he was in many ways a valuable man, but he was not the stuff that real statesmen are made of. After the long war in Gaul the chance was open to Cæsar, and he accepted it without hesitation.

He accepted it, but in truth he had to fight for it. For years his operations in Gaul had been looked on at Rome with suspicion, especially by a clique of personal enemies led by the famous Cato, a descendant of the old Cato whom we met in the previous century. These men looked on Cæsar as dangerous to the State—and dangerous indeed he was, to that old form of State which neither they nor he could make vigorous and efficient. They clung to the worn-out machinery of the constitution, to the checks, the vetoes, the short tenure of office, to the exclusive right of the Senate to deal with the ever-increasing administrative business of the Empire. Knowing, or guessing, that Cæsar, like Gaius Gracchus, would force his personal will on the State if he judged it necessary, they were determined to prevent his becoming a political power, and they brought Pompey to the same view, and armed him with military force to be used against Cæsar—against the man, that is, who had spent the best years of his life in indefatigable work for the Empire and civilisation. The result was civil war once more; civil war that might unquestionably have been averted by a wider outlook, a more generous feeling, a spirit of compromise, on the part of the high aristocrats who, like Cato, believed themselves to be struggling for liberty. The liberty they were struggling for was in reality the liberty to misgovern the Empire, and to talk without acting efficiently.

It is plain, as we may learn from the abundant correspondence of the time,[11] that they did not know the man they had to deal with. Cæsar took them completely by surprise; in a few weeks he had cleared Pompey and Senate and their army out of Italy, had provided for the government, and gone off to Spain to secure the West by turning the Pompeian armies out of that peninsula also. After a brilliant campaign of six weeks, admirably described by himself in his work on the Civil War, he forced those armies to surrender and then let them go, as he had done just before in Italy. His clemency took the world by surprise as much as his generalship.

But the worst was not over for him. Pompey was gathering all the resources of the East against him, and concentrating them in Epirus with a view to the re-conquest of Italy. Again Cæsar’s rapidity saved him; he was just in time to strike the first blow by crossing the sea from Brindisi—a rash expedient—and hampering Pompey before his concentration was effected. Here, however, in his eagerness to bring the campaign to an issue, he made a serious blunder, and had to pay for it by defeat and a retreat to the corn-growing plain of Thessaly. Pompey unwisely followed him, instead of invading Italy; and here, in August 48, was utterly beaten at the battle of Pharsalia. The worn-out old soldier fled to Egypt, where he was treacherously murdered by one of the king’s generals. He was an estimable man with many excellent qualities, and in a more tranquil age might have well become what Cicero wished to make him, the presiding genius of the Roman State.

Cæsar had yet much war before him—war in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Africa and in Spain, against the supporters of the old régime, for nothing he could do in the way of conciliation would persuade them to forgive him the crime of seeking to identify himself with the State. In doing so they deprived him of the time which he might have spent to far better purpose at Rome on the work of efficient government. As it was, he had been able to spend but a few months in all at home, when on March 15, 44 B.C., he was murdered at a meeting of the Senate, at the feet of Pompey’s statue, by a small group of assassins, some of whom were intimate friends of his own. They thought he was on the point of assuming a visible despotism, and they had some justification for the suspicion, though it was probably a delusion. To kill a tyrant, they thought, was to do a noble work in true old Roman fashion. So did the murderers of the Gracchi.

From what little we know about such work of reform as Cæsar had time for, we may take it as certain that these deluded assassins made a sad blunder. Cæsar’s legislative work was fragmentary, but every item of it shows intelligence and political insight. He did not attempt to turn out a new constitution in black and white; he did the work of government mainly himself for the time being, and we do not know how he meant to provide for it after his death. In the most important matter of all, the adjustment of the Empire to the home government, and especially the subordination of the provincial governors to a central authority, he forestalled the imperial system of the future: he made himself the central authority, to whom the governors were to be responsible. The other most important question of government, that of the power and composition of the Senate, he answered by raising the number of Senators to 900, as Gaius Gracchus had wished to do, and thus destroying the power of the old narrow oligarchical cliques. But perhaps his practical wisdom is best seen in his economic legislation for Rome and Italy. He was the first statesman to try and check the over-abundance of slave-labour; the first, too, to lay the foundation of a reasonable bankruptcy law. He regulated the corn-supply in the city, and brought down the number of recipients of corn-doles to less than one-half of what it had lately been. Again, he laid down general rules for the qualification of candidates for municipal office in Italy, and arranged for the taking of a census in all the cities every five years, the records of which were to be deposited at Rome. It would seem as if he meant to work out the enfranchisement of Italy to its natural conclusion: for he not only completed it by extending it to the Alps, which had never yet been done, but went beyond the bounds of Italy, offering the citizenship freely both to Gauls and Sicilians.

Attempts have been made to depict Cæsar as almost more than human; and of late again there has been a reaction against him of no less absurdity, holding him up to contempt as a weak but lucky opportunist. As we have his own military writings, a life by Plutarch, a few letters written by or addressed to him, and innumerable allusions to him in contemporary literature, we ought to be able to form some just idea of him. As one who has been familiar with all these materials, and many others of less value, during the greater part of a lifetime, I say without hesitation that Cæsar was the one man of his time really gifted with scientific intelligence—with the power of seeing the facts before him and adjusting his action to them. This intelligence, combined with great strength of will, made him master of the Roman Empire; and though his character was by no means perfect, he seems to have used his mastership, not like a capricious Oriental despot, but with a real sense of responsibility. A man who combines the qualities of an intelligent statesman in bad times with a generous temper, good taste and good scholarship, surely deserves to be thought of as one altogether out of the common. In Shakespeare’s picture of him, derived from Plutarch’s biography, and representing only the last two days of his life, he seems weak in body and overweening in spirit, and is probably meant to seem so by the dramatist for his own purposes. But no sooner have the murderers done with him than the true greatness of the man begins to make itself felt, and is impressed on us in page after page to the end of the play, of which the action may be said to be pivoted on the idea of the horror and the uselessness of their deed.

So far in this chapter and the last I have been treating of this age as one of action. It is indeed filled full of human activity, in spite of the laziness of the governing class as a whole. But this activity was shown not only in war and politics; this is also an age of great poets and real men of letters. I must say a word about the two greatest poets, Lucretius and Catullus; but among the men of letters there stands out one far above the rest whose life and genius it would take a long chapter to explain. Cicero’s pre-eminence is not easy to understand even after long study of his voluminous works: yet I must try to make it clear that he was, in fact, one of the greatest of all Romans.

Of Lucretius it is our fate to know nothing except his poem in six books on “The Nature of Things.” But his name is Roman, and the poem has the true Roman characteristic of being essentially practical in its object. That object will seem a singular one to those who are unacquainted with the Greek and Roman culture of this age. What roused a poet’s passion in this man’s mind was simply the desire to free others, as he had freed himself, from the fetters of superstition, or, as he calls it, religion; to make them abandon the delusive dream of a life after death, to repudiate the old stories of torment in Hades, and all foolish legends of the gods, who in his view took no interest whatever in human life. All this was, of course, derived from Greek philosophy, the doctrine of the Epicurean school, but no Greek had ever put such passion into a creed as Lucretius. His poetry at times almost reminds us of the grandeur and authority of the Hebrew prophets, so ardently did he believe in his own creed, and in his mission to enforce it on others. Uncouth and dry as much of it is—for he has to explain that Epicurean theory of the universe known still to science as the atomic theory—he breaks out now and again into strains of magnificent verse which reveal a mind all burning within. Here is a specimen: it must be in prose, for no verse translation seems adequate—