CHAP. PAGE [I Introductory] 7 [II The Advance of Rome in Italy] 28 [III The Training of the Roman Character] 55 [IV The Struggle with Carthage and Hannibal] 84 [V Dominion and Degeneracy] 111 [VI The Revolution: Act I.] 136 [VII The Revolution: Act II.] 161 [VIII Augustus—The Revival of the Roman Spirit] 187 [IX Life in the Roman Empire] 212 [X The Empire under the Antonines—Conclusion] 229 [ Bibliography] 253 [ Index] 255

ROME

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

Let us suppose an ordinary Englishman, with no special knowledge of classical history, to be looking at a collection of Roman antiquities in the cases of a museum. He will probably not linger long over these cases, but will pass on to something more likely to attract his interest. The objects he is looking at are, for the most part, neither striking nor beautiful, and the same are presented for his inspection over and over again as collections from various Roman sites. They are chiefly useful things, implements and utensils of all kinds, and fragments of military weapons and armour. In the coins he can take no delight, because, apart from the fact that, uninterpreted, they have no tale to tell him, they do not excite his admiration by beauty of design and workmanship. If, indeed, he were visiting a museum at Rome, he would find plenty of beautiful things in it; but these are works of Greek artists, imported by wealthy or tasteful Romans in the later ages of Rome’s history. A typical collection of genuine Roman antiquities would probably have the effect I describe. Utility, not beauty, would seem to have been the motive of the people who left these things behind them.

The same motive will also be suggested to us if we visit any of the larger Roman works either in this country or on the Continent. Most of us know the look of a Roman road running straight over hill and valley, and meant mainly for military purposes, to enable troops to move rapidly and to survey the country as they marched. In the towns which have been excavated, we usually find that the most spacious and striking buildings must have been the meeting-halls (basilicæ), in which business of all kinds was transacted, and especially business connected with law and government. Very often, though not in the comparatively poor province of Britain, this characteristic of utility is combined with another—solidity and imposing size. In this well-watered island the Romans did not need aqueducts to bring a constant supply of water to their towns, but in Italy and the south of France these great works are sometimes unnecessarily huge and imposing. Even when they left the path of strict utility, as in their triumphal arches and gateways, for which we must go to Trier in Germany, or to Orange in the south of France, or to Italy itself, they held strongly to the principles of solidity and imposing size. A writer who knew their art well has said that their notion of the highest of all things, their summum bonum, was not the beautiful, but the powerful, and that they thought they had as a people received this notion from heaven.

It would, indeed, be wrong to say that there is no beauty in Roman art; but it is quite in accordance with what has just been said, that even in the best of it there is a strong tendency to realism, to matter of fact. In their sculpture they were especially strong in portraiture, and in depicting scenes of human life they never or rarely idealise. A battle scene, or a picture on stone of life in a city, is crowded with figures, just because it really was so, and the work is without that restfulness for the eye which the perfect grouping of a Greek artist so often supplies. So, too, in literature; all their greatest poetry has a strictly practical object, and bears directly on human life. The great philosophical poem of Lucretius was meant to rescue the Romans from religious superstition; the object of the Æneid of Virgil, of which I shall have more to say in another chapter, was to recall the degenerate Roman of that day to the sense of duty in the home and in the State. Their one original invention in literary form was satire, by which they meant comment, friendly or hostile, on the human life around them. Their myths and legends, of which there was no such abundant crop as in Greece, dealt chiefly with the founding of cities, or with the heroic deeds of human beings.[1] On the whole they excelled most in oratory and history; and their prose came to perfection earlier than their poetry.

One other feature of their character shall be mentioned here, which is entirely in keeping with the rest, and often escapes notice. If in the works of their hands and their brains they were not an imaginative people, we can well understand that they had not this gift in practical life. Imagination in action takes the form of adventurousness, as we may see in our own history; the literary imaginativeness of Elizabethan England has its counterpart in the adventurous voyages of Elizabethan seamen. The Romans were not an adventurous people; they were not imaginative enough to be so. They penetrated, indeed, into unknown countries; Cæsar reached Britain and bridged the Rhine, but that great man, a true Roman born, had a temperament rather scientific than romantic. He did as almost all conquering Romans had done before him, and were to do after him—he advanced solidly, making his way safe behind him and feeling carefully in front of him. His book about his wars in Gaul was written without a touch of imagination, and for strictly practical purposes. There is, indeed, in the generation before Cæsar, an exception so striking that it may be said to prove the rule; he who reads Plutarch’s charming life of Sertorius, an Italian from the mountains of central Italy, will find both romance and adventure in his story.

It is plain, then, that we have to do in this volume with a people not of imagination, but of action: a people intensely alive to the necessities and difficulties of human life. The Romans were, in fact, the most practical people in history; and this enabled them to supply what was wanting to the civilisation of the Mediterranean basin in the work of the Greeks. They themselves were well aware of this quality, and proud of it. We find it expressed by the elder Cato quite at the beginning of the best age of Roman literature; his ideal Roman is vir fortis et strenuus—a man of strong courage and active energy. Tacitus, in the later days of that literature, says that all designs and deeds should be directed to the practical ends of life (ad utilitatem vitæ). Midway between these two, we have the great Latin poets constantly singing of the hardihood and the practical virtues which had made Rome great, and Italy great under Rome’s leadership. “A race of hardy breed, we carry our children to the streams and harden them in the bitter, icy water; as boys they spend wakeful nights over the chase, and tire out the whirlwind, but in manhood, unwearied by toil and trained to poverty, they subdue the soil with their mattocks, or shake towns in war” (Virg., Æn. ix. 607 foll.). These lines, though applied to an Italian stock, were meant to remind the Roman of a life that had once been his. The words in which the Romans delighted as expressing their national characteristics, all tell the same tale: gravitas, the seriousness of demeanour which is the outward token of a steadfast purpose; continentia, self-restraint; industria and diligentia, words which we have inherited from them, needing no explanation; constantia, perseverance in conduct; and last, not least, virtus, manliness, which originally meant activity and courage, and with ripening civilisation took on a broader and more ethical meaning. Quotations might be multiplied a thousandfold to prove the honest admiration of this people for their own nobler qualities. As exemplified in an individual, Plutarch’s life of the elder Cato, which can be read as well in English as in the original Greek, will give a good idea of these.

But it is essential to note that this hard and practical turn of the Roman mind was in some ways curiously limited. It cannot be said that they excelled either in industrial or commercial pursuits. Agriculture was their original occupation, and trade-gilds existed at Rome very early in her history; but the story of their agriculture is rather a sad one, and Rome has never become a great industrial city. Their first book about husbandry was translated from the Carthaginian, and their methods of commerce they learnt chiefly from the Greeks. It was in another direction that their genius for practical work drew them: to the arts and methods of discipline, law, government.

We can see this peculiar gift showing itself at all stages of their development: in the agricultural family which was the germ of all their later growth, in the city-state which grew from that germ, and in the Empire, founded by the leaders of the city-state, and organised by Augustus and his successors. It is seen, too, in their military system, which won them their empire; they did not fight merely for spoil or glory, but for clearly realised practical purposes. As Tacitus says of a single German tribe which possessed something of this gift, the Romans did not so much go out to battle as to war. True, they constantly made blunders and suffered defeat; they often “muddled through” difficulties as we do ourselves; but they refused to recognise defeat, and profited by adverse fortune. Listen once more to a few words of old Cato; in his Origins of Rome, written for his son, he wrote: “Adversity tames us, and teaches us our true line of conduct, while good fortune is apt to warp us from the way of prudence.” Thus they went on from defeat to victory, conquest, and government. It is worth while not only to lay to heart, but to learn by heart, the famous lines in which Virgil sums up the Roman’s conception of his own work in the world—