I have dwelt on this point at some length in order to show what a singular creation this principate of Augustus was. To proclaim monarchy outright would probably have been fatal; to take the whole work on himself would be to leave the old governing families idle and discontented; on the other hand, to do the necessary work as a yearly elected magistrate, according to the old practice, was plainly impossible. Election by the people of the Roman city would have little force in the eyes of the Empire, and it was this Empire as a whole that Augustus wished to represent. The course he took shows him a shrewd, observant, tactical diplomatist, if ever there was one. He is not a man on whose character we dwell with sympathy or enthusiasm; he does not kindle our admiration like C. Gracchus or Cæsar; but he was essentially the man for the hour.
To him we owe in large measure the glories of “the Augustan age,” with its poets, historians, and artists; it was the “Augustan peace,” and the encouragement and patronage of Augustus, that enable Horace to write his perfect lyrics and his good-natured comments on human life, Ovid to pour forth his abundant stream of beautiful versification, Tibullus and Propertius to sing of the Italian country and its deities and festivals, and Livy, the greatest of Roman historians, to do in noble prose what Virgil had done in noble verse—to inspire Romans and Italians with enthusiasm for the great deeds of their ancestors. But the world owes Augustus a still greater debt than this; for he laid securely the foundations of an imperial system strong enough to save for us, through centuries of danger, the priceless treasures of Græco-Roman civilisation.
CHAPTER IX
LIFE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Now that we have seen the Empire made comparatively secure by Augustus, and set in the way of development on what seem to be rational principles, let us pause and try to gain some idea of the social life going on within it: excluding that of the city of Rome, which is no longer of the old paramount importance. How did the inhabitants of the Empire live and occupy themselves during the first two centuries of our era?
The first point to make quite sure of is that this life was in the main a life in towns. Roman policy had always favoured the maintenance of existing towns, except in the very rare cases where they were deemed too dangerous. Carthage and Corinth had been destroyed by Rome on this pretext, but they had been founded afresh by Julius Cæsar, and were now beginning a long and vigorous city life. In the East, where city-states abounded, Rome retained and adorned them, or built new ones, as Pompey did after crushing Mithradates and Tigranes. In the West, in Gaul and Spain, where they did not exist at all, she founded some, and by a wonderfully wise policy favoured the natural growth of others. The people of these western provinces lived chiefly in some kind of villages, scattered over a district which we may call a canton, often, perhaps, as big as an English county of to-day. The Roman policy was either to found a city to serve as the centre of the canton, and to endow it with magistrates and senate on the Roman model: or to give the canton its senate and magistrates, and leave it to develop its own town-centre.
This policy shows extremely well the genius of Rome for civilising, or Romanising, without destroying the grouping and the habits of the people to be civilised, or Romanised. The old tribal (or cantonal) system remained, and its officers were the chiefs of the old population; but they now bore Roman names, duoviri, quæstores, and so on, and sat in an assembly called ordo—i.e. senate. If a town were not founded at once, in which the business of the canton could be carried on, it was certain to grow of itself. A purely rural region, where the people live in villages only, was contrary to Roman interests and traditions; it was inconvenient for raising taxes, and it did not give those opportunities of culture and amusement which the Roman looked for when he travelled or settled in a province. The provincials, too, were in this way made more happy and contented; town life greatly helped in civilising them, attracting the better or richer people from the villages.
To help us in realising this urban character of Roman provincial life, we may compare it with that of our fellow-subjects in India at the present day. India is in the main a rural country, and by far the great majority of its inhabitants live on the land and support themselves by agriculture. Only about 30,000,000 live in towns, as against 235,000,000 in the rural districts, and the few great cities are rather industrial and commercial centres than homes of culture and amusement. The economic unit of India is the village, and this simple fact is enough to explain why India never has been Anglicised. Instinctively the Romans perceived that if a province were to be Romanised, the process could not be set going in villages; and where there were only villages, they gave the districts the opportunity of developing towns in their midst. The opportunity, we may reasonably suppose, was rarely missed, for at all times in their history the Romans had a wonderful power of making their subjects eager to imitate their own institutions. Thus Spain, Gaul, and even Britain, became rich in towns after the Roman model—towns which served to humanise the people, while making them obedient subjects.
Let us now see, with the help of a few striking examples, how, by the second century of our era, the Empire was covered with towns. For Italy and Greece we do not need illustrations—we are already well aware of the fact. But even far away in the East, in regions where the Greeks had never settled, if the Romans came to stay they left cities behind them. Look, for example, at a map of Syria or Palestine, and note the great caravan route leading from Damascus southwards on the east side of the Jordan, a road important to Rome because it carried the merchandise of the Far East to Damascus and the Mediterranean by way of the Persian Gulf and Petra. Before the traveller of to-day has gone far south from Damascus he will come on the splendid ruins of two successive cities built by the Romans in this period, Gerasa and Philadelphia, where the sheep now graze among the ruins of temples, theatres, and baths. A famous English traveller[15] wrote of them long ago that they enabled him to form some conception of the grandeur and might of the Roman Empire: “That cities so far removed from the capital, and built almost in the desert, should have been adorned with so many splendid monuments, afforded one of the most striking proofs of the marvellous energy and splendid enterprise of that great people who had subjected the world.”
The mention of Damascus may remind us of a traveller of the first century A.D. whose journeys are fortunately recorded and admirably illustrate the fact that in Asia Minor and Greece the life of the people was centred in the great cities. St. Paul went from city to city, choosing by preference for his missionary work the most populous ones, such as Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth and Athens.
Passing westwards, and leaving out of account the many cities of Egypt, we shall find that what has been so far said holds good of the Roman province of Africa. This province eventually became one of the most highly cultured as well as populous, mainly owing to its numerous towns. Of many of these the remains still astonish the traveller. A photograph lies before me of one of them which still stands almost in the desert, silent and abandoned, with temples, streets, and all the belongings of a great city as perfect as at the excavated Pompeii, which was overwhelmed in this period by the great eruption of Vesuvius. An inscription tells us that Thamugadi was founded in the year A.D. 100, and built with the help of a legion of Roman soldiers to guard civilisation against the marauders of the desert. Another of these towns is a good example of the way in which the army contributed to the policy of creating town-centres; Lambæsis, now called Djebel-Aures, was the permanent station of a military force, round which there grew up a civil population of traders and camp-followers. Great roads, here as everywhere in the Empire, connected these towns with each other and with the capital of the province, in this case Carthage.