Thirdly, Rome was now beginning to learn the art of securing the conquered country by means of military roads and fortresses (coloniæ): an art to which she held firmly throughout her history, and to which the geography even of Roman Britain bears ample testimony. My readers will do well to fix their attention for a moment on three of these colonies which were founded during this long war; they are by no means the only ones, but they serve well to show the extent of the Roman power in Italy at this time, as well as the means taken to secure it. The first is Narnia, far up the Tiber valley (founded 299 B.C.) on a military road afterwards known as the Flaminian Way: this was an outpost, with quick communication with Rome, against both Etruscans and Gauls. The second, Fregellæ, a city with a sad future, was some seventy miles to the south-east of Rome, on a road called the Latin Way, but beyond the limits of Latium proper, commanding, in fact, the passes between Latium and Campania; it was in a beautiful situation near the junction of two rivers, and became in time a most prosperous city. For the third colony we must look much further south on the map, at the south-eastern end of the mass of the Samnite highlands: this was Venusia, with 20,000 colonists, destined to separate the Samnites from the Greeks and other inhabitants of the heel and toe of Italy. It stood on the most famous of all the great roads, the Via Appia, which after leaving Rome ran nearer the coast than the Latin Way, but joined it in Campania, and then ran across the hilly country to Venusia, and eventually to Brundisium (Brindisi), which also became a colony fifty years later.
These three advantages, duly considered, will help the reader to understand to some extent how the prize of Italian presidency fell to Rome and not to another city: and they will also explain why Rome emerged safe and stronger than ever from another peril that was now to threaten her existence.
The great colony of Venusia, as we saw, was meant to separate the Greeks of southern Italy from the highlanders of Samnium. Of the Greek cities by far the most powerful was Tarentum, then ruled by a selfish and ill-conditioned democracy, apt to be continually worrying its neighbours. That Rome should sooner or later come into collision with Tarentum was inevitable; but the Senate tried to avoid this, knowing that the Tarentines would appeal to some Greek power beyond sea to help them. Now just across the Adriatic, in Epirus, there was a king of Greek descent who was looking out for a chance of glory by imitating Alexander the Great; for Alexander’s marvellous career had stirred up a restless spirit of adventure in the free-lances of the generation that succeeded him. Pyrrhus seems to have fancied that he could act the part of a knight-errant in freeing the Greeks of the west from the barbarians—from the Romans that is, and the Carthaginians, who were at the moment in alliance. When the inevitable quarrel with Rome came, and Tarentum invited him, he crossed the sea with a small but capable force, determined to put an end to this new power that was threatening to swallow up the Greek cities. But he had to learn, and through him the Greek world had to learn as a whole, that the new power was made of sterner stuff than any that had yet arisen in the Mediterranean basin.
Pyrrhus began with a victory, not far from Tarentum; it was won chiefly by some elephants which he had brought with him to frighten the Roman cavalry. This shook the loyalty of many Italian communities, but the Senate was unmoved. The ablest diplomatist in Pyrrhus’s service made no impression on that body of resolute men, trained by long experience to look on a single defeat as only a “regrettable incident” in a long war. “Rome never negotiates while foreign troops are on Italian soil;” so, according to the story, the aged Appius Claudius told the Greek envoy in the Senate-house. Then Pyrrhus tried a march on Rome; but he had to learn, like another invader after him, that the nearer he drew to the city the more difficult his task became. A second victory was far less decisive and almost fruitless, and Pyrrhus most unwisely evacuated Italy. Tarentum had turned against him, unwilling to submit to his discipline, and now that wayward city fell a victim to the Roman power. The king crossed to Sicily to deliver the Sicilian Greeks from Carthage, and this he did brilliantly, but there, too, the fickle Greeks grew tired of him. Returning to Italy, he fought one more battle with the Romans, at Beneventum in Samnium, and lost it. Foiled everywhere, he left Italy, with Rome more firmly established than ever in the supremacy of the whole peninsula: for Tarentum, with its fine harbour, its almost impregnable citadel, and its fleet, fell soon afterwards into the hands of the Romans.
Almost the whole Italian peninsula was now Roman; or perhaps it is truer to say that Rome had become an Italian state. It was a wonderful work: perhaps the most wonderful that Rome ever achieved. The military part of it was the result mainly of constantia, steady perseverance and refusal to accept defeat; the political organisation was the result of good sense and good temper combined with an inflexible will, and a shrewd perception of the real and permanent interests of Rome. In the third century B.C., at which we have now arrived, Italy may be described as a kind of federation, in which each city has its own alliance with the leading one, and no alliance with any other. Each has its own government and administers its own law, but places all its military resources at the disposal of the Roman government. The fighting power of the future was to be Italy under Roman leadership, and all questions of foreign policy were decided by Rome alone. There was no general council of the whole confederacy. The Roman Senate controlled an ever-increasing mass of detailed and varied business, having to deal with Latins, Italians of the old stocks, Etruscans, Greeks and Gauls. How the business was done we cannot tell: not a single contemporary record of it is left. One glimpse of that wonderful Senate at work would be worth all descriptions of the battles of that century.
Before the close of the third century B.C. that Senate, instead of directing a further steady advance, had been forced to defend the State against an invader, in the most terrible life and death struggle ever experienced by any people. But in the next chapter I must pause to try and explain wherein consisted the nerve-power, the mental and material fibre, of the people destined to rule the world.
CHAPTER III
THE TRAINING OF THE ROMAN CHARACTER
I have mentioned some outward circumstances which gave Rome an early training in war and diplomacy, and in particular her geographical position, exposing her to constant attack, and yet giving her good chance of striking back and advancing. But to accomplish all that was told of her in the last chapter, more than this was surely needed. There must have been a quality in this people, individually and as a whole, fitting them to withstand so much storm and stress, and to emerge from disaster with renewed strength to take in hand the work of conquest and government. We need not, indeed, assume that the people of this one city were naturally of stronger character than others, than their kinsfolk of the Latin cities or other Italians of the same great race. All these immigrating stocks, which spread themselves, long before history begins, over a primitive population of which we know little or nothing, were probably much the same in physical and mental build; a fact which will help us to understand how they all came eventually to be able to unite together as the centre of a great empire. But the quality or character, which I am to try and explain in this chapter, was more strongly stamped upon the citizens of Rome than on those of other cities, owing to the more continual call for them in her case; for all our qualities and habits can be made more sure and lasting by constant exercise.
Discipline and duty are the two words which best explain, if they do not exactly express, the quality here meant; the habit of obedience to authority, which is the necessary condition of the power of governing, and that sense of duty which lies at the root of the habit and the power. This aptitude for discipline and this sense of duty can be traced both in the private and the public life of early Rome, in the life of the family and in the life of the State. Let us be clear at once that the individual as such was not as yet an important item of society; society was based on a system of groups, and the individual played no part in it in these early times except as the member of a group, either a group of kin (gens), or a local and administrative group (pagus, curia). But the only group with which we are concerned in this little book, the smallest of all, was the familia, another of those immortal words which we have inherited from the Latin language. This shall be explained first, in order to find the discipline and duty of that family life: then we will take the State, and follow out the same habits reproducing themselves in a more complicated social and political union.
This word familia did not mean exactly what we mean by family; household would perhaps come nearer to it, if we understand by household a group of individuals supporting itself on the land. It meant not only father, mother, and children, but also their dependents, whether bond or free. These, if bond, were slaves (servi), prisoners of war and the children of such prisoners, or persons who had forfeited their liberty by debt: if free, they were clients, who for some reason had become attached to the familia in an inferior position, and looked to it for subsistence and protection. And our picture is not complete unless we take into account also the divine members of the group, dwelling in the house or on the land, to whom the human members looked for protection and prosperity in all the walks of life. Chief among these were the spirit of the hearth-fire, Vesta; Penates, the spirits of the store-closet and its contents: the Lar, the guardian spirit of the cultivated land, or, as some think, of a departed ancestor; and the Genius of the head of the family, which enabled him to beget children and so continue the collective life of the group. Though these spirits—they are hardly yet deities—naturally seem to us mere fancies of the primitive Roman mind, they were to that mind itself as real and active as any human member of the group, and we must try to think of them as such, for they played a very important part in the development of the quality we wish to realise.