On the whole, we may conclude that this life of the towns was a happy one, so long as the frontiers were well guarded and no sudden raid or invasion by an enemy was likely; so long, too, as person and property were securely protected under Roman law administered without corruption, and amusements and conveniences were to be had for little or nothing. But undoubtedly something was wanting; there was mischief in the social system somewhere, though it was not easy to lay finger upon it. The sap was running in the plant too feebly; there was a lack of keen industrial energy and of the instinct of self-help. As time went on, the central government grew too paternal, interfered too much in the life of these towns, and so encouraged the tendency to “slackness.” And more and more, as pressure came on the Empire from without, the play of life in these once happy cities became an automatic movement of machinery, the central wheel of which was the Cæsar at Rome.
Another aspect of the life of the provincial towns must be mentioned here, which suggests that the trend of the time was not entirely healthy. I said at the beginning of this book that the great monuments left behind her by Rome were mainly of a useful and practical kind, e.g. roads, aqueducts, places of business. This is true, but it is now necessary to add that some of the most imposing of these fabrics were, in the period we have now reached, entirely devoted to amusement, and amusement of a kind neither educating nor humane. The taste had long been growing at Rome for spectacles of bloodshed—combats of gladiators, and the hunting of wild beasts in a confined space; and from Rome this degraded taste passed only too rapidly into the provinces. Most large provincial towns had their amphitheatre, in imitation of the huge one at Rome, which we know as the Coliseum; and the more fully Romanised a province was, the more of these homes of inhumanity were to be found in it. The most magnificent one still standing outside Italy, that at Nismes, dates, strange to say, from the mild and enlightened age of the Antonines, to which we are coming in the next chapter. The Greeks, indeed, never took much interest in such shows; but in the western provinces, where the best and most virile populations of the Empire were now to be found, their effect was beyond doubt pernicious, for they encouraged not only inhumanity, but idleness. Day after day the greater part of the population of a city might sit and watch lazily these bloody entertainments, on which, perhaps, some wealthy citizen was wasting his capital to his own ruin.
As may, perhaps, be said of ourselves in this present age, the Romans of the Empire were being encouraged to live too much in the enjoyment of the present, without anxiety for the future. So, too, the cultured classes gradually came to look back at the past, to the great achievements of Rome in war and literature, as all in all to them, and lost the desire to strike out new lines, to make new discoveries, to try new experiments. “Over all, to our eyes, there broods the shadow which haunts the life that is nourished only by memories, and to which the future sends no call and offers no promise.”[16]
CHAPTER X
THE EMPIRE UNDER THE ANTONINES—CONCLUSION
The chief work of Rome in the world, as has often been said in this little book, was the defence of Mediterranean civilisation against external enemies. That work was of a double nature. It could not be done simply by marking out and holding lines of frontier; it was also necessary so to organise the Empire within its frontiers that the whole should contribute to the common object, with men, money and public spirit. The last two chapters will have shown that from the time of Julius and Augustus Roman rulers fully recognised this twofold nature of their task. Augustus in particular, while gradually settling the frontiers on a system well thought out, and adapted to his means and experience, also spent much time and pains on internal organisation. He found the Empire a loose collection of subject territories, each governed, well or ill as it might happen, by an officer almost independent of the central authority; he left it, at the end of his long life, in the way of becoming a well-compacted whole, in which every part felt more or less the force of a just central government; a civilised State “standing out in clear relief against the surrounding barbarism.”
In such an empire there must, of course, be differences of race and language—differences, too, of habits, feelings, modes of thought; but under just and wise rule such differences need be no hindrance to the political unity of the whole. There is a book of this period, within the reach of every one, which illustrates better than any other this unity in diversity of the Roman Empire—I mean the Acts of the Apostles. It should be studied carefully, with maps and such other helps as may be available, down to the last chapter, where it leaves St. Paul at Rome, living in his own hired house, in the centre of Mediterranean life and government.
Under the immediate successors of Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, his policy was, on the whole, maintained with good faith and discretion; and at the close of the first century A.D. Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, did little more than improve the working of the machinery of his government. More and more, it is true, the constitution became a real monarchy; the part played in it by the Senate of the free State was getting steadily narrowed; but this was all in the interest of efficiency, and, so far as we can see, it was necessary to the internal development of the Empire. The Cæsars of the first century must have the credit of ruling wisely, with the help of their advisers, on the Augustan principles. True, the great literary genius of the age, the historian Tacitus, by drawing brilliant and lurid portraits of some of them, has diverted our attention from their work as agents of a great system; but to tell their story as Tacitus has told it is neither possible nor necessary here. I may pass them over and go on to the second century and the age of the Antonines, which has rightly been judged by historians to be the most brilliant and the happiest in all Roman history.
That four men of what seems to us “right judgment in all things” should succeed each other in power at this critical time, is one more example of the wonderful good fortune of Rome. All were men of capacity and education, hard workers and conscientious, and they seem to have communicated their good qualities to their subordinates, for they never wanted for loyal helpers. The Senate, indeed, was now of little avail for actual work, and the greater part of the business had long been done by Cæsar[17] and his own “servants,” freedmen for the most part, often ambitious and unscrupulous Greeks; but in this period, as we shall see directly, the civil service, as we may call it, was placed on a sound and honourable basis. It would seem as if the ideas of duty and discipline were once more to prevail throughout the Roman official world.
The first of the four rulers, Ulpius Trajanus, known to us all as Trajan, was not of Roman or even Italian birth, but came from the province of further Spain: a fact which marks the growth of the idea that every part of the Empire may now be turned to account for the common good. Trajan was a soldier by breeding and disposition, and his contribution to the work of this period was mainly a military one. The frontier along the Danube, the last (as we have seen) to be settled, had always been the weakest; and yet here henceforward was to be the most dangerous point in the Empire’s line of defence. Along the whole length of the lower Danube a great mass of barbarian tribes was already pressing, pressed themselves from behind by others to north and east. And here, to the north of the river, a great kingdom had been founded by a king of the Dacian people, which corresponds roughly with the modern Roumania. A glance at a map of the Empire will show that such a kingdom would be a standing menace to Italy, to Greece, and even to the peninsula of Asia Minor, and from the Roman point of view Trajan was quite justified in his determination to conquer and annex it. He carried out this policy in two successive wars, with consummate daring and skill. Dacia became a Roman province, and lasted as such long enough (about 200 years) to be an effectual help to imperial defence in this quarter. The story of the two wars is told in the marvellous series of sculptures forming a spiral round the column of Trajan, which stood and still stands at Rome in the forum built by him and called by his name.
Towards the end of his life Trajan embarked on a new policy in the East, and failed to carry it out. The shrewd Augustus, as we saw, had trusted here to his prestige, knowing that war in this region was both perilous and expensive. Since then both peril and expense had been incurred here under Nero, and no definite results had been gained. Trajan, however, provoked by a move of the Parthian king, made up his mind to seize Armenia, the old bone of contention between Rome and Parthia, and not only did this, but added by conquest two other provinces, Mesopotamia and Assyria. Some historians have thought his judgment as good here as it was on the Danube. The best way of deciding the question is to look carefully at a map of the Empire and then to ask oneself whether these territories were really needed for the protection of Mediterranean civilisation. For myself I unhesitatingly answer in the negative; but there is no need to dispute the point here, as Trajan died before he had made his conquests secure. The Jews dispersed all over these regions, urged by their implacable hatred of Rome, stirred up rebellion in Trajan’s rear with alarming ferocity, and in the middle of this turmoil he died on his way back to Rome. His successor Hadrian at once renounced any attempt to keep the new provinces.