UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE
BY J. C. STOBART, M.A.
SOME OPINIONS OF THE PRESS

“Mr. Stobart does a real service when he gives the reading but non-expert public this fine volume, embodying the latest results of research, blending them, too, into as agreeable a narrative as we have met with for a long while.... There is not a dull line in his book. He has plenty of humour, as a writer needs must have who is to deal with men from the human standpoint.... It is beautifully produced, and the plates, both in colour and monochrome, are as numerous and well-chosen as they are striking and instructive.”—The Guardian.

“Mr. Stobart has produced the very book to show the modern barbarian the meaning of Hellenism. He exhibits the latest discoveries from Cnossus and elsewhere, the new-found masterpieces along with the old. He criticises and appraises the newest theories, ranging from the influence of malaria to the origins of drama. He has something for everybody.... The book is nobly illustrated ... no such collection of beautiful things of this kind has yet been placed before the English public.”—THE Saturday Review.

“He really helps to make ancient Greece a living reality; and the illustrations, a conspicuous feature of the book, are good and well selected, the photographic views gaining much from the reproduction on a dull-surfaced paper.”—Times.

“A more beautiful book than this has rarely been printed.... The pictures of Greek scenery, sculpture, vases, etc., are exceptionally good.”—Evening Standard.

“No better guide through the labyrinth of things Hellenic has appeared in our day, and both brush and camera yield of their choicest to make the book an enduring joy.”—Daily Chronicle.

THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME

Augustus

THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS
R O M E

A Survey of Roman Culture
and Civilisation: by
J. C. Stobart, M.A.
LATE LECTURER IN HISTORY
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

LONDON
SIDGWICK & JACKSON LTD.
3 Adam Street, Adelphi
1912

All rights reserved
Printed by
BALLANTYNE & COMPANY LTD
AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
Tavistock Street Covent Garden
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PREFACE

This book is a continuation of “The Glory that was Greece,” written with the same purpose and from the same point of view.

The point of view is that of humanity and the progress of civilisation. The value of Rome’s contribution to the lasting welfare of mankind is the test of what is to be emphasised or neglected. Hence the instructed reader will find a deliberate attempt to adjust the historical balance which has, I venture to think, been unfairly deflected by excessive deference to literary and scholastic traditions. The Roman histories of the nineteenth century were wont to stop short with the Republic, because “Classical Latin” ceased with Cicero and Ovid. They followed Livy and Tacitus in regarding the Republic as the hey-day of Roman greatness, and the Empire as merely a distressing sequel beginning and ending in tragedy. From the standpoint of civilisation this is an absurdity. The Republic was a mere preface. The Republic until its last century did nothing for the world, except to win battles whereby the road was opened for the subsequent advance of civilisation. Even the stern tenacity of the Roman defence against Hannibal, admirable as it was, can only be called superior to the still more heroic defence of Jerusalem by the Jews, because the former was successful and the latter failed. From the Republican standpoint Rome is immeasurably inferior to Athens. In short, what seemed important and glorious to Livy will not necessarily remain so after the lapse of nearly two thousand years. Rome is so vast a fact, and of consequences so far-reaching, that every generation may claim a share in interpreting her anew. There is the Rome of the ecclesiastic, of the diplomat, of the politician, of the soldier, of the economist. There is the Rome of the literary scholar, and the Rome of the archæologist.

It is wonderful how this mighty and eternal city varies with her various historians. Diodorus of Sicily, to whom we owe most of her early history, was seeking mainly to flatter the claims of the Romans to a heroic past. Polybius, the trained Greek politician of the second century B.C., was writing Roman history in order to prove to his fellow-Greeks his theory of the basis of political success. Livy was seeking a solace for the miseries of his own day in contemplating the virtues of an idealised past. Tacitus, during an interval of mitigated despotism, strove to exhibit the crimes and follies of autocracy. These were both rhetoricians, trained in the school of Greek democratic oratory. Edward Gibbon, too (I write as one who cannot change trains at Lausanne without emotion), saw the Empire from the standpoint of eighteenth-century liberalism and materialism. Theodor Mommsen made Rome the setting for his Bismarckian Cæsarism, and finally, M. Boissier has enlivened her by peopling her streets with Parisians. It is, in fact, difficult to depict so huge a landscape without taking and revealing an individual point of view. There is always something fresh to see even in the much-thumbed records of Rome.

Although a large part of this book is written directly from the original sources, and none of it without frequent reference to them, it is, in the main, frankly a derivative history intended for readers who are not specialists. Except Pelham’s Outlines, which are almost exclusively political, there is no other book in English, so far as I am aware, which attempts to give a view of the whole course of ancient Roman History within the limits of a single volume, and yet the Empire without the Republic is almost as incomplete as the Republic without the Empire. As for the Empire, although nothing can supersede or attempt to replace The Decline and Fall, yet the scholar’s outlook on the history of the Empire has been greatly changed since Gibbon’s day by the discovery of Pompeii and the study of inscriptions. Therefore while I fully admit my obligations to Gibbon and Mommsen (as well as to Dill, Pelham, Bury, Haverfield, Greenidge, Warde Fowler, Cruttwell, Sellar, Walters, Rice Holmes, and Mrs. Strong, and to Ferrero, Pais, Boissier, Seeck, Bernheim, Mau, Becker, and Friedlander) this book professes to be something more than a compilation, because it has a point of view of its own.

The pictures are an integral part of my scheme. It is not possible with Rome, as it was with Greece, to let pictures and statues take the place of wars and treaties. Wars and treaties are an essential part of the Grandeur of Rome. They should have a larger place here, were they less well known, and were there less need to redress a balance. But the pictures are chosen so that the reader’s eye may be able to gather its own impression of the Roman genius. When the Roman took pen in hand he was usually more than half a Greek, but sometimes in his handling of bricks and mortar he revealed himself. For this reason—and because I must confess not to be a convinced admirer of “Roman Art”—there is an attempt to make the illustrations convey an impression of grand building, vast, solid, and utilitarian, rather than of finished sculpture by Greek hands. Pictures can produce this impression far more powerfully than words. Standing in the Colosseum or before the solid masonry of the Porta Nigra at Trier, one has seemed to come far closer to the heart of the essential Roman than ever in reading Vergil or Horace. The best Roman portraits are strangely illuminating.

I have to acknowledge with gratitude the permission given me by the Director of the Königlichen Messbildanstalt of the Royal Museum at Berlin to reproduce four of the magnificent photographs of Dr. O. Puchstein’s discoveries at Ba’albek. I am indebted also to Herr Georg Reimer, of Berlin, for allowing me to reproduce four of the complete series of Reliefs from Trajan’s Column published by him in heliogravure under the care of Professor Cichorius. The coloured plate of the interior of the House of Livia is reproduced by permission of the German Archæological Institute from Luckenbach’s Kunst und Geschichte (grosse Ausgabe, erster Teil); and from the same work I have been allowed to reproduce the reconstruction of the Roman Forum in the time of Cæsar. Professor Garstang has kindly supplied a photograph, with permission to reproduce of the bronze head of Augustus discovered by him at Meroe and recently presented to the British Museum. The Cambridge University Press has allowed me to give two pictures from Prof. Ridgeway’s Early Age of Greece; and the photograph of the Alcántara Bridge was kindly supplied by Sr. D. Miguel Utrillo, of Barcelona. The majority of photographs have been supplied by Messrs. W. A. Mansell and Co.; but for many subjects, especially of Roman remains outside Italy, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to a number of amateur photographers, who not only avoid the hackneyed point of view but also achieve a high level of technique. Sir Alexander Binnie has kindly permitted the inclusion of eight photographs and Mr. C. T. Carr of four; while I must also make acknowledgment to Miss Carr, Mr. R. C. Smith, and Miss K. P. Blair.

As before, I am much indebted to Mr. Arnold Gomme for his assistance with the proofs.

J. C. S.

Canterbury, 1912

CONTENTS

NOTE

The cameo on the front cover of this volume is from a sardonyx head of Germanicus in the Carlisle collection.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

INTRODUCTION

questa del Foro tuo solitudine
ogni rumore vince, ogni gloria,
e tutto che al mondo è civile,
grande, augusto, egli è romano ancora.
Carducci.

The Perspective of Roman History

THENS and Rome stand side by side as the parents of Western civilisation. The parental metaphor is almost irresistible. Rome is so obviously masculine and robust, Greece endowed with so much loveliness and charm. Rome subjugates by physical conquest and government. Greece yields so easily to the Roman might and then in revenge so easily dominates Rome itself, with all that Rome has conquered, by the mere attractiveness of superior humanity. Nevertheless this metaphor of masculine and feminine contains a serious fallacy. Greece, too, had had days of military vigour. It was by superior courage and skill in fighting that Athens and Sparta had beaten back the Persian invasions of the fifth century before Christ, and thus saved Europe for occidentalism. Again it was by military prowess that Alexander the Great carried Greek civilisation to the borders of India, Hellenising Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, Egypt, Phœnicia and even Palestine. This he did just at the moment when Rome was winning her dominion over Latium. Instead, then, of looking at Greece and Rome as two coeval forces working side by side we must regard them as predecessor and successor. Rome is scarcely revealed as a world-power until she meets Greek civilisation in Campania near the beginning of the third century before Christ. The physical decline of Greece is scarcely apparent until her phalanx returns beaten in battle by the Roman maniples at Beneventum. Moreover, in addition to this chronological division of spheres there is also a geographical division. Greece takes the East, Rome the West, and though by the time that Rome went forth to govern her Western provinces she was already pretty thoroughly permeated with Greek civilisation, yet the West remained throughout mediæval history far more Latin than Greek. When Constantine divided the empire he was only expressing in outward form a natural division of culture.

The resemblances between Rome and Greece even from the first are very clearly marked. In many respects they are visibly of the same family, and, though we no longer speak as confidently of “Aryan” and “Indo-European” as did the ethnologists and philologists of the nineteenth century, yet there remains an obvious kinship of language, customs, and even dress. Many of the most obvious similarities, such as those of religion, are now seen to be the result of later borrowing, but there remains a distinct cousinship, whether derived from the conquest of both peninsulas by kindred tribes of northern invaders, as Ridgeway holds, or from the existence of an aboriginal Mediterranean face, as Sergi believes—or from both.

But with all these resemblances, one of the most interesting features of ancient history lies in the psychological contrast between Greece and Rome, or rather between Athens and Rome. Athens is rich in ideas, full of the spirit of inquiry, and hence fertile in invention, fond of novelty, worshipping brilliance of mind and body. Rome is stolid and conservative, devoted to tradition and law. Gravity and the sense of duty are her supreme virtues. Here we have the two types that succeed and conquer, set side by side for comparison. To which is the victory in the end?

To the Englishman of to-day Rome is in some ways far more familiar than Greece. Apart from obvious resemblances in history and in character, Rome touches our own domestic history, and any man who has marked the stability of old Roman foundations or the straightness of old Roman roads has already grasped a fundamental truth about her. He is surely not far wrong in the general sense of irresistible power, of blind energy and rigid law, which he associates with the name of Rome. Thus, there is not as there was in the case of Greece any radical misconception of the Roman character to be combated.

But there is, it appears, a widely prevalent false perspective in the common view of Roman history. The modern reader, especially if he be an Englishman, is a very stern moralist in his judgment of other nations and ages. In addition to this he is a citizen of an empire now extremely self-conscious and somewhat bewildered at its own magnitude. He cannot help drawing analogies from Roman history and seeking in it “morals” for his own guidance. The Roman empire bears such an obvious and unique resemblance to the British that the fate of the former must be of enormous interest to the latter. For this reason alone we are apt to regard the fall of Rome as the cardinal point of Roman history. To this must be added the influence of Gibbon’s great work. By Gibbon we are led to contemplate above all things (with Silas Wegg) her Decline and Fall. Thus Rome has become for many people simply a colossal failure and a horrible warning. We behold her first as a Republic tottering to her inevitable ruin, and then as an Empire decaying from the start and continuing to fester for some five hundred years. This is one of the cases which prove that History is made not so much by heroes or natural forces as by historians. It is an accident of historiography that the Republic was not described by any great native historian until its close, when amid the horrors of civil war men set themselves to idealise the heroes of extreme antiquity and thus left a gloomy picture of unmitigated deterioration. As there was no great historian in sympathy with the imperial regime, the reputation of the early Empire was left mainly in the hands of Tacitus and Suetonius, the former of whom riddled it with epigrams while the latter befouled it with scandal. Nearly all Roman writers had a rhetorical training and a satirical bent: all Romans were praisers of the past. Thus it is that Roman virtue has receded into an age which modern criticism declares to be mythological. It is a further accident that the genius of Rome’s greatest modern historian was also strongly satirical. It was a natural affinity of temper which led Gibbon to continue the story of Tacitus and to dip his pen into the same bitter fluid.

Thus Rome has found few impartial historians and hardly any sympathetic ones. But is it possible to be sympathetic? While every true scholar feels a thrill at the name of Greece, scarcely any one loves Ancient Rome. At the first mention of her name the average man’s thoughts fly to the Colosseum and the Christian martyr “facing the lion’s gory mane” to the music of Nero’s fiddle. His second thought is to formulate his explanation of her decline and fall. The explanations are as various as political complexions. “Luxury,” says the moralist, “Heathendom,” says the Christian, “Christianity,” replies Gibbon. The Protectionist can easily show that it was due to the Importation of free corn, while the Free Trader draws attention to the enormous burdens which Roman trade had to bear. “Militarism,” explains the peace-lover; “neglect of personal service,” replies the conscriptionist. The Liberal and the Conservative can both draw valuable conclusions from Roman history in support of their respective attitudes of mind. “If it had not been for demagogues like Marius and the Gracchi,” says the Conservative, “Rome might have continued to exhibit the courage and patriotism which she displayed under senatorial guidance in the war against Hannibal, instead of rushing to her doom by way of sedition and disorder.” With equal justice the Liberal points to the stupid bigotry with which that corrupt oligarchy, the senate, delayed necessary reforms. That, he says, was the cause of the downfall of Rome. That was the writing on the wall.

Plate I. GENERAL VIEW OF ROMAN FORUM

Whether it is or is not possible to love Ancient Rome, I would suggest that this attitude of treating her merely as a subject for autopsies and a source of gloomy vaticinations for the benefit of the British Empire is a preposterous affront to history. The mere notion of an empire continuing to decline and fall for five centuries is ridiculous. It is to regard as a failure the greatest civilising force in all the history of Europe, the most stable form of government, the strongest military and political system that has ever existed.

It is just at this point that our own generation can add something of great importance to the study of Roman history. Whatever may be said for its faith, hope is the great discovery of our age. By the help of that blessed word “Evolution” we have learnt not to put our Golden Ages in the past but in the future. In many instances we have discovered that what our fathers called decay was really progress. May it not be so with Rome?

The destiny or function of Rome in world-history was nothing more or less than the making of Europe. The modern family of European nations are her sons and daughters, and some of her daughters have grown up and married foreign husbands and given birth to offspring. For this great purpose it was necessary that the city itself should pass through the phases of growth, maturity and decay. In political terms, it was part of the Roman destiny to translate the civilisation of the city-state into that of the nation or territorial state. Having evolved the Province it was necessary that the City should expire. Conquest on a colossal scale was part of the programme, absolute centralised dominion was another part. For this purpose the change from republic to autocracy was necessary.

Plate II. THE ROMAN COMPAGNA

Greece, as we have seen elsewhere, by her system of small states enclosed and protected by city walls, had been able, long before the world at large was nearly ripe for it, to develop a civilised culture with habits of thought and speech which are now called European or Occidental. It was in a highly concentrated social life and under artificial conditions that Athens had laid the foundation of all our arts, sciences and philosophies. It was, however, as we saw, impossible for the civic democracy to expand naturally. She could hold a little empire for a few years by means of precarious sea-power. She could throw off a few daughter cities made in her own likeness. But for missionary work on a large scale the city-state was not adapted. Something much larger than a city and much more single-minded than a democracy was necessary for that purpose. The genius of Alexander the Great, an autocrat and a semi-barbarian, enabled him to do much towards propagating Hellenism in the eastern part of the Mediterranean littoral. But his early death prevented the fulfilment of his task and the half of him that was Greek made him consider the planting of new Greek cities the only means for fulfilling it.

Here then was the part which Rome had to play. She had to do for the West what Alexander had attempted for the East. In some respects her task was harder, for her work lay among warlike barbarians, but easier in that she had not to face the corrupting influence of a rival and more ancient civilisation.

Rome too began as a city-state and it was while she was still in that condition that Greek civilisation came to her and took her by storm. It was the new wine that burst the old bottle when Rome attempted to transform herself into a Greek democracy, and failing became a monarchy once more. It was not, therefore, a case of “decline and fall” when Rome ceased to be a republic. No liberal need heave a sigh for the departed republic. It was an oligarchy that had for a century deserved to be replaced by something better, and the change was even an upward step in liberty for all but a few hundreds of Roman nobles. If we can but turn our minds away from the gossip of the court and the spite of the discontented aristocracy to a just survey of that majestic and enduring system of provincial government, we shall be able to discern progress where historians would have us lament decay.

It was progress again when Rome gradually ceased to be a city-state with a surrounding territory and became successively the capital of an empire and then one of half a dozen great centres of government. Finally it was progress, as we ought by now to be able to see, when the artificial ramparts on the Rhine and Danube broke down and the new nations came into their inheritance. By that time Rome had accomplished her work and the phase of the city-state was over.

Some such convictions as these are, I think, inevitable to any one who views European history as a whole in the light of any theory of historical evolution. Rome has long been the playground of satirists and pessimists. Unfortunately at this date it is difficult if not impossible to shake their verdict and to read Roman history in the new light. To do so you cannot follow the authorities, for they were all on the side of deterioration. The idea of progress was unknown to the ancient world, and above all others the Romans believed that their Golden Age was behind them. It becomes necessary therefore to extract truth from unwilling witnesses, always a precarious and suspicious undertaking. All the Roman men of letters believed with Horace:

damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
ætas parentum peior auis tulit
nos nequiores, mox daturos
progeniem uitiosiorem.[1]

Unless we are prepared to accept the rank of progenies vitiosissima we are compelled to discount this whole tendency of thought and read our authorities between the lines. They were all rhetoricians, all bent on praising the past at the expense of the present and the future; none of them were over-scrupulous in dealing with evidence. If all the historians had perished and only the inscriptions remained we should have a very different picture of the Roman empire, a picture much brighter and, I think, much more faithful to truth.

Latinism

Hellenism we know and understand; every true classical scholar is a Hellenist by conviction. But what is Latinism and who are our Latinists? The altar fires are extinct and the votaries are scattered. Except for a small volume of the choicest Latin poetry of the Augustan age, what that is Latin gives us pleasure to-day? Greek studies seem to attract all that is most brilliant and genial in the world of scholarship: Latin is mainly relegated to the dry-as-dusts. Who reads Lucan out of school hours? Who would search Egypt for Cicero’s lost work “De Gloria”? Who would recognise a quotation from Statius?

It has not always been so. Once they quoted Lucan and Seneca across the floor of the House of Commons. The eighteenth century was far more in sympathy with Ancient Rome than we are. In those days it would not have seemed absurd to argue the superiority of Vergil over Homer. Down to that day Latin had remained the alternative language for educated people, the medium of international communication, even for diplomacy, until French gradually took its place. Only if you specifically sought to reach the vulgar did you write in English. Though Dr. Johnson could write a very pretty letter in French, he used habitually to converse with Frenchmen in Latin; not that it made him more intelligible, for, in fact, no foreigner could understand the English pronunciation of Latin; but that he did not wish to appear at a disadvantage with a mere Frenchman by adopting a foreign jargon. As for public inscriptions, though half the literary men in London signed a round-robin entreating the great autocrat to write Oliver Goldsmith’s epitaph in English, Johnson “refused to disgrace the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English inscription.”

Plate III. VIEW OF SPOLETO

What is the cause of the eclipse which Latin studies are still suffering? One cause, perhaps, is to be found in the misuse of the language by the pedagogues and philologists of the past in the school and the examination-room. But another cause is the recent discovery of the true Greek civilisation, whereby scholars have come to realise that Latin culture is in the main only secondary and derivative. At the present moment we are passing through a stage of revolt against classicism, convention, and artificiality. We know that Greek culture, truly discerned, is neither “classic” nor conventional nor artificial, but Latinism is still apparently subject to all these terms. The Latinity of Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, Horace, Lucan, and the greater part of the giants, in fact all the Latin of our schools is—what Greek is not—really and truly classical. They were not writing as they spoke and thought. They had studied the laws of expression in the school of rhetoric, and on pain of being esteemed barbarous they wrote under those laws. Style was their aim. Their very language was subject to arbitrary laws of syntax and grammar. The English schoolboy who approaches Cicero by way of the primer’s rules and examples is entering into Latin literature by much the same road as the Romans themselves. The Romans were grammarians by instinct and orators by education. Thus Latin is fitted by nature for schoolroom use, and for all who would learn and study words, which after all are thoughts, Latin is the supremely best training-ground. The language marches by rule. Rules govern the inflexions and the concords of the words. The periods are built up logically and beautifully in obedience to law. Latin, of all languages, least permits translation. You have only to translate Cicero to despise him.

In the world of letters, as in that of politics, there are the virtues of order and the virtues of liberty. Our own eighteenth century was logical in mind because it had to clothe its thoughts in a language of precision. But even Pope and Addison are rude barbarians compared with Vergil and Cicero. De gustibus non est disputandum—let some prefer the plain roast and others the made dish. Latin may be an acquired taste, but no sort of excellence is mortal. Latin will come into its own again along with Dryden and Congreve, along with patches and periwigs. Meanwhile it must be a very dull soul who is unmoved by the grandeur of Roman history, the triumphant march of the citizen legions, the dogged patriotism which resisted Hannibal to the death, and the pageantry and splendour of the Empire. One must be blind not to admire the massive strength of her ruined monuments, arches, bridges, roads, and aqueducts. And one must be deaf indeed not to enjoy the surges of Ciceronian oratory or the rolling music of the Vergilian hexameter. Greece may claim all the charm of the spring-time of civilisation, but Rome in all her works has a majesty which must command, if not love, wonder and respect. Mommsen justly remarks that “it is only a pitiful narrow-mindedness that will object to the Athenian that he did not know how to mould his State like the Fabii and Valerii, or to the Roman that he did not learn to carve like Phidias and to write like Aristophanes.”

Under the flowing toga of Latinism the natural Roman is concealed from our view. It is possible that the progress of research and excavation may to some extent rediscover him and distinguish him, as it has already done for his Hellenic brother, from the polished courtiers of the Augustan age who have hitherto passed as typical products of Rome.

It is astonishing how little we really know of Rome and the Romans after all that has been said and written about them. The ordinary natural Roman is a complete stranger to us. It is certain that he did not live in luxury like Mæcenas, but how did he live and what sort of man was he? We can discern that his language was not in the least like that of Cicero. It appears that he neither dreaded nor disliked emperors like Nero, as did Tacitus and Juvenal. As for his religion, much has already been done, and more still remains to be done, to show that he did not really worship the Hellenised Olympians who pass in literature for his gods. Recent scholarship has done something to reveal to us the presence of a real national art in Rome, or at any rate of an artistic development on Italian soil which made visible steps of its own out of Hellenic leading-strings. Thus there is some hope that the real Roman will not always elude us. But for the present in the whole domain of art, religion, thought, and literature, Greek influence has almost obliterated the native strain. For the present, therefore, we must be content to regard Roman civilisation as mainly derivative, and our principal object will be to see how Rome fulfilled her task as the missionary of Greek thought. This object, together with the unsatisfactory nature of the records, must excuse the haste with which I have passed over the earlier stages of Roman republican history. It is obvious that the first three centuries of our era will be the important part of Roman history from this point of view. Also, if the progress of civilisation be our main study, nothing in Roman history before the beginning of the second century B.C. can come directly under our attention. When the Romans first came into contact with the Greeks they were still barbarians, with no literature, no art, and very little industry or commerce. The earlier periods will only be introductory.

Italy and the Roman

The pleasant land of Italy needs no description here. Our illustrations[2] will recall its sunny hill-sides, its deep shadows, its vineyards and olive-yards. But there are one or two features of its geography which have a bearing upon the history of Rome.

To begin with, the geographical unity of the Italian peninsula is more apparent than real. The curving formation of the Apennines really divides Italy into four parts—(1) the northern region, mainly consisting of the Po valley, a fertile plain which throughout the Republican period was scarcely considered as part of Italy at all, and was, in fact, inhabited by barbarian Gauls; (2) the long eastern strip of Adriatic coast, an exposed waterless and harbourless region, with a scanty population, which hardly comes into ancient history; (3) the southern region of Italy proper, hot, fertile, and rich in natural harbours, so that it very early attracted the notice of the Greek mariners, and was planted with luxurious and populous cities long before Rome came into prominence; and (4) the central plain facing westward, in which the river Tiber and the city of Rome occupy a central position. Etruria and Latium together fill the greater part of it. Its width is only about eighty miles, so that there is no room for any considerable rivers to develop, and, in fact, there are only four rivers of any importance in a coast-line of more than 300 miles. We may call the whole of this region a plain in distinction from the Apennine highlands; but it is, of course, plentifully scattered with hills high enough to provide an impregnable citadel, and to this day crowned with huddled villages.

Rome herself on her Seven Hills began her career by securing dominion over the Latin plain which surrounded her on all sides but the north. The Roman Campagna,[3] which is now desolate and fever-stricken, was once all populous farmland. The river Tiber, though its silting mouth and tideless waters now render it useless for navigation, was in the flourishing days of Ancient Rome navigable for small vessels and Ostia was a good artificial harbour at its mouth. Thus it is history rather than geography which has made Rome into an unproductive capital. We may conclude that geography has placed Rome in a favourable position for securing the control of the Mediterranean and especially of the western part of it.

It is worth while also to notice the neighbours by whom she was surrounded when she first struggled forward into the light. Just across the Tiber to the north of her were the Etruscans of whom we shall see more in the next chapter. Their pirate ships scoured the sea while their merchants did business with the Greeks of Sicily, Magna Græcia and Massilia. It was perhaps her position at the tête du pont that led to Rome’s early prominence in war. Across the water on the coast of Africa was the dreaded city of Carthage, which had for centuries been striving to establish itself on the island of Sicily. All these were seafaring, commercial peoples, but it was not by sea that Rome met them. Behind Rome, among the valleys and on the spurs of the Apennines, were a whole series of sturdy highland clans who like all highlanders noticed the superior fatness of the valley sheep. It was against these Umbrians, Marsians, Pelignians, Sabines, and Samnites that the cities of the plain were constantly at feud, and it was mainly her struggles with these that kept the Roman swords bright in early days.

As to the Romans themselves and their origin there is little that we can say for certain. Ancient ethnology is not by any means yet secure of its premises. One thing is clear enough, if we can place any reliance whatever upon literary records—the national characteristics of the ancient Roman were very unlike those of the modern Italian. The one was bold, hardy, grave, orderly and inartistic: the other is sensitive, vivacious, artistic, turbulent and quick-witted. There is not a feature in common between them and yet the modern Italian is surely the normal South European type. As you go southwards through France you find the people approaching these characteristics more and more. The Spaniard and the Greek share them. The Ancient Roman of republican days, unless he is a literary invention, is assuredly no southerner in temperament, though the southern qualities undoubtedly begin to grow clear as Roman history progresses. And then the whole of early Roman history is marked by a strife between the two orders Patrician and Plebeian, which is certainly not simply a struggle between two political parties, nor a mere conflict between rich and poor. There is a division between the two of religion and custom in such matters as burial, for example, and marriage-rites. The patricians fear contamination of their blood if the plebeians are allowed to intermarry with them. These considerations and others like them have led Prof. Ridgeway to formulate for Rome, as he has already done with success for Greece, a theory of northern invasion and conquest in very early days. Probably it is a theory which can never be proved nor disproved, so woefully scanty is our evidence for the earliest centuries of Roman history. But it explains the great riddle of Roman character as no other theory does.

The archæology of the spade does not help us much though it has made some interesting discoveries on the soil of Italy. There is of course at the base a Neolithic culture resembling that of the rest of Europe. Then there is a phase of pile-dwellings widely spread among the marshes of the Lombard plain called the “Terramare” civilisation. As this phase belongs to the bronze age we may infer that civilisation developed later in Italy than in Greece owing to the lack of fortified cities. In this Terramare period the dead were carefully buried whole, often folded up into a sitting posture to fit their contracted graves. Then comes an Early Iron period, called “The Villanova,” where the cremated ashes of the dead are collected in urns and deposited in vaults generally walled with flat slabs of stone. Above these two stages come Etruscan and Gallic remains and then those of the Rome of history. It is probable enough that the Iron Age of the Villanova culture represents a conquest from the north. It is likely that in prehistoric times Italy experienced the same fate as throughout the ages of history. The Alpine passes are easier from north to south than in the reverse direction, and the smiling plains of North Italy have always possessed an irresistible attraction for the barbarian who looks down upon them from those barren snow-clad heights. Whether the invader be an Umbrian or Gaulish or Gothic or Austrian warrior, Italia must pay the price for her “fatal gift of beauty.”

I
THE BEGINNINGS OF ROME

arx æternæ dominationis.
Tacitus.

HAT Rome was not built in a day is the only thing we really know about the origin of Rome. There is, however, nothing to prevent us from guessing. The modern historian of the Economic School would picture to us a limited company of primeval men of business roaming about the world until they found a spot in the centre of the Mediterranean, a convenient depot alike for Spanish copper and Syrian frankincense, handy for commerce with the Etruscans of the north, the Sicilian Greeks of the south, and the Carthaginians of the African coast. They select a piece of rising ground on the banks of the river Tiber, about fifteen miles from its mouth, a spot safe and convenient for their cargo-boats, and there they build an Exchange, found a Chamber of Commerce (which they quaintly term senatus), and institute that form of public insurance which is known as “an army.” Thus equipped they proceed by force or fraud to acquire a number of markets, to which in due course they give the name of “Empire.”

This picture, being modern, is naturally impressionistic and rather vague in its details. From all accounts a good deal of engineering would be required to make the natural Tiber suitable for navigation on a large scale. Not only does its mouth silt up every year and its channel constantly change, but just between the hills on the very floor of Rome every spring made pools and swamps. Nor is there any tide in the Mediterranean to help the rowers up to the city against the stream. The Etruscans, who diversified their commercial operations with systematic piracy, held almost the whole of this western coast in subjection. The Greeks of the south, who have plenty to say about Etruscan and Carthaginian seafarers, have forgotten to mention their early Roman customers. But perhaps that is because the primeval trader from Rome cannot have had anything much to sell, and certainly had no money at all to buy with. In founding his Bourse he seems to have forgotten to provide a Mint; at any rate, long after the Sicilian Greeks had evolved a most exquisite coinage of silver and gold, the Romans were still content with the huge and clumsy copper as. I think we may confidently dismiss external trade from among the causes of the early rise of Rome. The coinage is the surest evidence we possess, no foreign trade could have passed in the Mediterranean on a basis of the copper as, and in Latin the equivalent for “money” is a word denoting “cattle.” Whoever the early Romans were, they were mainly, as all their religion and traditions show, land-soldiers and farmers.

Livy takes a more sensible view. He admits that the current accounts of the foundation of the city are involved in mystery and miracle, but he asserts with justice that if any city deserved a miraculous origin Rome did. Thereupon he proceeds to relate the pleasant tale of her foundation in the year 753 B.C. by Romulus and Remus.

It is surely unprofitable to search very deeply for grains of truth in the sands of legend which cover the early traditions of Rome, but it is sometimes interesting to conjecture how and why the legends were invented. The story of Romulus and Remus, for example, may have taken its rise in a

Roman As (bronze, full size)

Plate IV. THE CAPITOLINE WOLF

“sacristan’s tale” about an ancient work of art representing a wolf suckling two babes. A fairly ancient copy of this motive is preserved in the famous Capitoline Wolf.[4] The wolf at least is ancient, and the children have been added in modern times from representations of the famous group on ancient coins. It is possible that the original statue may go back to days of totemistic religion when the wolf was the ancestor of a Roman clan.

The Seven Kings of Rome are for the most part mere names which have been fitted by rationalising antiquarians, presumably Greek, with inventions appropriate to them. Romulus is simply the patron hero of Rome called by her name. Numa, the second, whose name suggests numen, was the blameless Sabine who originated most of the old Roman cults, and received a complete biography largely borrowed from that invented for Solon. Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Martius were the hostile and martial inventors of military systems. Servius Tullius was a man of servile origin, and on this foundation Freeman built his belief that the Roman kingship was a career open to talent!

As for the two Tarquins, the latter of whom was turned by Greek historians into a typical Greek tyrant and made the subject of an edifying Greek story of tyrannicide closely modelled on the story of Harmodius, their names are said to be Etruscan. There is a recent theory that the saving of Rome by Horatius and his comrades is fable designed to conceal the real conquest of Rome by the Etruscans. As a matter of fact there is a good deal of other evidence for that theory: reluctant admissions in history and literature, records of an ancient treaty of submission, the fact that the ritual and ornament of supreme authority at Rome seems to be of Etruscan origin, and above all the evidence of the stones. There are traces of very early skill and activity in building at Rome, and, unless the Romans afterwards declined very remarkably in the arts and crafts, their early works, such as the walls and some of the sewers, must have been built under foreign influence. That some sort of early kingship at Rome is more than a legend is certain; the whole fabric of the Roman constitution and its fundamental theory of imperium imply the existence of primeval kingship. On the whole, then, we may well believe that at some early period the city of Rome under Etruscan princes formed part of an empire which embraced a number of ports and towns up and down the Italian coast, though it did not necessarily concern itself with the intervening and surrounding territories. During all the early centuries of Rome it must have been a constant struggle between civilised walled towns on or near the coast and warlike hill tribes, quite uncivilised, from the mountainous interior.

These mysterious Etruscans have formed the theme of an internecine war of monographs. On the whole we may pronounce that those scholars who maintain their Lydian origin have completely demolished the arguments of those who aver that they sprang from the Rhætian Alps—and vice versâ. It remains possible, therefore, that the Etruscans came from nowhere in particular but were as aboriginal and autochthonous as any European people. It is true that we cannot make out much of their language, but that is also true of the aboriginal Cretans—and of many other autochthonous peoples. Their earliest remains are of a type familiar to us in the earliest strata of production all over the Mediterranean coast-lands—prehistoric polygonal masonry, a beehive tomb, incised bucchero nero vases and so forth. Their later and finer work shows a distinct cousinship with that of Greece though sometimes curiously debased and uncouth in spirit. In bronze-working they were very skilful.[5] They developed painting to a high pitch in early times, and the British Museum possesses some interesting examples from Cære. It was indeed believed by Pliny that Corinthian painters had settled in Etruria, that being the usual account by which the ancients explained resemblances. But we may believe that the art of painting is indigenous on the soil of Tuscany. Their pottery is very similar to that of Greece.[6] It appears that the flourishing period of Etruscan art coincided with that of the greatest

Etruscan Fresco. Head of Hercules

extent of their empire, namely, the sixth and early fifth centuries B.C. Their plastic work was mostly in terra-cotta, for the native marbles do not seem to have been quarried. Some of their terra-cotta coffins, adorned with conventional portraits of the deceased and finished off by the application of paint, show considerable technical skill, but always that strange grotesque spirit.[7] From all accounts these Etruscans were a superstitious and cruel race. It was from them that the Romans learnt their bloody craft of divination by the inspection of the entrails of newly slain victims, and there is little doubt that the victims had not always been the lower animals. We are told that the insignia of royalty at Rome—the toga with scarlet

Prehistoric Etruscan Pottery

or purple stripes, the toga with purple border, the sceptre of ivory, the curule chair, the twelve lictors with their axes in bundles of rods—were borrowed from the Etruscans. Thus it seems that the ancient garb of the Roman citizen, a tunic covered by a long mantle or toga, a costume which is essentially the same as the chiton and himation of the Greeks, started as a fashion introduced by their more civilised northern neighbours. It seems clear also that the earliest Roman art, the decoration of temples with painted terra-cotta ornaments, was Etruscan in origin. Some of the earliest statues of the gods seem to have been painted, for we hear of a very ancient red Jupiter. Thus there is some probability that Rome passed through a period, perhaps in the sixth century, of alien rule and alien civilisation. Remembering the cousinship between Greece and Etruria we shall find that Rome had been prepared for the reception of Greek culture in very early times.

Plate VI. ETRUSCAN VASE

The Roman Toga

The fifth century seems to have been a period of decline for the Etruscan power. The Greek republics, with, as I hope we agreed, their northern stiffening, had advanced far beyond their Etruscan kinsmen in intelligence, and the tyrant Hiero of Syracuse defeated them in a great sea-fight in 474 B.C. It is agreeable to the historian to have a fact so certain and a date so well attested in all the wilderness of legend that surrounds the early history of Italy. Then the warlike hill tribes of the Southern Apennines began to press upon their southern colonies, and finally the Gauls from the north swept down upon Etruria at the beginning of the fourth century and broke up their declining empire for ever. It was probably during this period that the Romans expelled their Etruscan princes, and replaced royalty by a pair of equal colleagues sharing most of the royal power and regal emblems except crown and sceptre. So we get to the Rome of the earliest credible tradition—a Rome governed by two consuls and a senate of nobles. It is a city composed of farm-houses and in each house the head of the family rules in patriarchal majesty.

The Growing Republic

Thus it is necessary to throw overboard a great mass of edifying and famous history in the interest of youth. There were no contemporary records, the annals and fasti upon which Livy’s immediate predecessors relied in the first century B.C. are demonstrably of late concoction. Everywhere we can see the influence of Greek artists importing fragments of Greek history, rationalising names and customs, antedating and reduplicating later constitutional struggles, writing appropriate speeches for early parliamentarians who never existed, and generally demonstrating the power of Greek invention to flatter Roman credulity. The great families of 200 B.C. and onwards found themselves as rich and powerful as nabobs; they had great historic names, and when there was a funeral in the family they sent out a long procession of waxen images to represent the noble ancestors of the deceased. At such times there would be funeral orations recounting the deeds of those heroic ancestors. Every family had its traditions, as glorious and as authentic as those of the descendants of Brian Boru. When literature came into fashion and needy Greek scribes offered a plausible stilus to any rich patron, Roman history began to exist, sometimes bearing respectable Roman names but always written in Greek. It is thus that we get the series of heroic actions attributed to Fabii and Horatii and deeds of wicked pride ascribed to ancestral Claudii. Whatever it may cost us in pangs for the fate of pretty tales I fear we must not scruple to use the knife freely in this region of literary history. A glance at the following coincidences will help to allay our scruples: Tarquin the Roman tyrant was driven out in the same year as Hippias the Athenian tyrant (510 B.C.); the Twelve Tables at Rome were drawn up in the same year as the code of Protagoras at Thurii (451 B.C.); 300 Fabii died to a man in the battle of Cremera just about the same time as 300 Spartans died to a man with Leonidas at Thermopylæ in 480 B.C. To put it briefly: Nothing anterior to the Gallic invasion of 390 B.C. and very little for nearly another century can be accepted on literary evidence alone.

Plate VII. ETRUSCAN TOMB, IN TERRA-COTTA

So far as we can read the stones, the earliest Rome consisted of a settlement on the Palatine Hill, with a citadel and a temple on the Capitol, and with a forum or market on the low ground between them. On the Esquiline Hill was a plebeian settlement. It was a pastoral and agricultural community, expressing wealth in terms of cattle, ploughing and reaping so much of the Campagna as their farmers could reach in a day or their armies protect. From the very earliest times the community consisted of a few great houses of patrician blood with numerous clients and slaves. In every house the father was king absolute, with power of life and death over his sons, daughters, and slaves. Daughters passed from the hand of the father to the hand of the husband, like any other property, by a form of sale. Out of remote antiquity comes a piece of genuine Latin:

SI PARENTEM PVER VERBERIT AST OLE PLORASIT PVER
DIVIS PARENTVM SACER ESTO

—“If a boy beats his father and the father complains let the boy be devoted to the gods of parents,” i.e. slain as a sacrifice. It was a commonwealth of such parents—no republican lovers of liberty, be sure—whose chiefs met to discuss policy in the temple, as the Senate, and who themselves assembled in a body, fully armed, as the comitium, to vote upon the Senate’s decrees conveyed by the consuls.

Grim and despotic in peace these Roman aristocrats were fierce and tenacious in war. As soon as she was free, if not earlier, Rome appeared as a member of the Latin League which ruled over the Plain of Latium under the presidency of Alba Longa. This piece of tradition is attested by many survivals in ritual. Her earliest wars were against neighbours like Gabii, whose very name made the later Romans smile, so insignificant a village it was. It was in these little contests that the early Romans learnt their trade as warriors, and if any one seeks to know the causes of Rome’s victorious career the answer is, I suppose, that she fought very bravely and obeyed her generals better than her enemies obeyed theirs. Discipline was her secret, and discipline came, no doubt, from the strict patriarchal system in her homes, a system assuredly not of Mediterranean birth.

Whether the geese who cackled were authentic or merely ætiological fowls I know not, but it is certain that Rome did not suffer so severely from the Gallic invasion as did her neighbours across the Tiber. Probably it was only the last wave of a great invasion which reached as far as Rome, burnt the Palatine settlement and the humble wattled dwellings of the poor on the Esquiline, and failed to storm the Capitol. At any rate the Gallic invasion of 390 B.C. seems to have started the Romans on their career of conquest, mainly at the expense of the Etruscans. But there were incessant wars with all her neighbours; every summer the army marched out as a matter of course. If it was not a decaying Etruscan town to be taken by siege it was a Latin neighbour, or failing them a Volscian or Sabine community from the hills. Summer, while the corn could be left to do its own growing, was the time for battle. To have been at peace in summer would have been slackness, to wage war in winter a grave solecism. So in short space Rome became an important little town, head of the Latin League and probably the strongest unit in Central Italy. It appears that she began about now to emerge into international notice by the great powers, for we have a treaty of 348 B.C., which may probably be accepted as genuine though the actual date is not so certain, between Rome and Carthage, wherein the Romans, in consideration of promising not to trade in Carthaginian waters, are permitted to do business with the Carthaginian ports in Sicily and acknowledged as suzerains of the Latin League. Thus Rome has apparently by this time some overseas traffic.

If no other art, diplomacy seems always to have been at home on Roman soil, and in all her works Rome shows a genius for statecraft. It must have been at some very early date that she discovered her great secret of divide et impera. She had already become so far the greatest power in the Latin League, that she had equal rights with all the others combined. The allies, it seems, claimed to supply the general of the allied army on alternate days and to have a half-share of the plunder. Against these very modest demands Rome was firm. She fought the League and beat it in 338; then she divided and ruled the cities. With each she made a separate treaty, granting to each two of the rights of citizenship—the right to trade and the right to marry with her citizens. But she allowed no such rights between the other members of the League, however close neighbours they might be. In this way Rome became the staple market of all Latium; all traffic passed through her hands and her wealth and population increased.

These city-states had no means of ruling otherwise than tyrannically. Their whole constitution forbade it. We have seen elsewhere[8] that citizenship in a city-state implied membership of a corporate body, a close partnership in a company of unlimited liability with very definite privileges and responsibilities. Full citizenship at Rome meant a vote in electing the city magistrates and a vote in the comitium, which decided matters like peace and war. It was obvious that you had to be very jealous about extending these rights to outsiders. But Rome went part of the way, granted parts of the citizen rights, and thereby showed finer imperial statecraft than any Greek state had yet discovered. Her first offshoot was Ostia, the town she planted at the mouth of her river only fifteen miles off, her first Colonia. The men of Ostia remained citizens of Rome, and might vote in the elections if they thought it worth while, but were exempt from the duty of serving in the army because their own town formed a standing garrison in the Roman service. Then when the Romans made conquests in Etruria or Campania or any region where the natives spoke a foreign language and therefore could not fight in the legions under Roman officers, they would receive the “citizenship without vote,” which enabled them simply to trade and marry like Romans. Thirdly, some of the Latin towns became merely municipia, that is, country towns enjoying full Roman citizenship if they came to the city, but at home a local constitution with considerable powers of self-government and a magistracy modelled on that of Rome, namely, senators and consuls under other names. All this granting of rights—without any tribute—was, according to the ways of ancient city-states, surprising generosity or the deepest statesmanship. Already Rome begins to show the genius of empire-building: she was relentless and unscrupulous in conquering, but generous and broad-minded in governing. Such was the wisdom of her council of despots—the Senate.

Nevertheless these “allies” were more sensible of the liberties they had lost than of the rights they had gained by coming under the expanding wing of Rome. The latter part of the fourth century shows the growing state embarked upon a terrific struggle which lasted on and off from summer to summer for nearly fifty years. Her principal foes were the warlike Samnites of the Southern Apennines, closely akin, it seems, to the dominant race at Rome. This tremendous conflict is clearly the turning-point of Roman history. At various stages nearly all the peoples of Italy rose and enrolled themselves among the enemy, the Latins, the Etruscans, the Umbrians, the Marsi, the Gauls (for they too were brought in again by the Etruscans in their last efforts for freedom) and the Samnites themselves, a race of born fighters under competent generals. Once, in 321 B.C., both consuls and the entire army of Rome were entrapped at the Caudine Pass, but Rome never thought of surrender. Doggedly her Senate refused to know when it was beaten and continued the struggle. Fortunately it was one purpose against many, and Rome beat her enemies in detail until she was able to emerge victorious.

The history of that great conflict has come down to us in an incomplete state full of fairy-tales and omissions, but it is clear that the Roman Senate showed extraordinary resolution and tenacity, as it did in the next century against foreign enemies. Beaten to its knees again and again it refused any terms of peace short of victory. That is a marvellous thing, if Rome was really one among many towns of Latium. It is to be noted that this was the war in which she learnt the new system of fighting whereby she was fated to conquer the world. Hitherto in ancient warfare a battle array had meant a solid line in which the men stood shoulder to shoulder in several ranks, pressing on with spear and shield against a similar line of the enemy. It was largely a question of weight in the impact. You tried to make your line deep enough to prevent yielding and long enough to envelop the enemy’s flank: once you could turn or break the enemy’s line victory was yours. But the Romans, either because they were often outnumbered on the field of battle, or, as some say, in fighting the Gallic warriors with their long swords, found it necessary to fight not shoulder to shoulder but in open order—not in a solid phalanx but in open companies or “maniples.” This had a far-reaching effect: it made every Roman soldier a self-reliant unit, who could fence skilfully with his favourite weapon, the sword, instead of merely pushing a long pike as his neighbours did. It is clear that only an army of natural soldiers could have adopted such an innovation successfully. Once established, it made the Roman soldier invincible. The maniple of 200 men was not only far more mobile than a solid phalanx, but it covered a length of ground equal to that of three times its own numbers. Formerly only the front rank—the principes—had required a full suit of armour and it was only the richest who could afford it. Now the whole army had to be properly equipped, and this reacted upon the social and political system of the city.

The Constitution

In ancient times a man’s rights as citizen depended entirely upon his duties as a soldier. The comitium was the army, and the preponderance of voting power went to the rich who could afford a panoply. Now the soldiers were equalised and therefore the citizens claimed equality. We cannot put much faith in Livy’s story of the struggle between the two orders for political equality; the details, which include elaborate reports of the speeches delivered, are clearly free compositions based upon much later controversies between the republicans and democrats of Livy’s own earlier days. There is a great deal of confusion and contradiction in the accounts of the various legislative measures by which the plebeians were gradually admitted to equality with the patricians. But the story of the Secession of the Plebs—there are two such stories, but probably that is the result of duplication—is so distinctive and peculiarly Roman that it scarcely seems like an invention. To put it shortly, the plebeians won their rights by means of that very modern weapon—a strike. Being refused the rights for which they were agitating, they refused to join the citizen levy, but marched out under arms to the neighbouring Sacred Mount, and threatened to set up a new Rome of their own there. The political instinct was healthy and strong among them: the plebeians formed themselves into a second corporation organised like the patricians. Where the patricians had their two consuls with two prætors under them, the plebeians had their two tribunes and two ædiles. Where the patrician army had its comitium meeting in groups called “curies,” the plebeians had their assembly meeting in tribes. So the new magistracies and the new meetings became part and parcel of the Roman republic. The tribunes were protected not so much by laws as by an oath: their persons were declared sacred, and they had the right to thrust their sacred persons between the plebeian offender and the consul’s lictor who came to arrest him, thus expressing the ultimate sovereignty of the army of Roman citizens. That is, in broad outline, how the story of political equality at Rome has come down to us. But it must not be supposed that even now the Roman republic was in anything but externals like the Greek democracy. The Roman comitia never debated like the Athenian ecclesia. They assembled to listen to such speeches as the magistrates or their invited friends might choose to make upon topics which had previously been selected, discussed and decreed by the senate; they were there to ratify the senate’s decisions with “Yes” or “No.” Even then they did not vote as individuals; each “century,” each “cury,” or each “tribe,” according to the form of meeting summoned, was a single voting unit. Everything in the system tended to put real power into the hands of the executive. When you get the executive able to control policy you get efficiency, but if you want liberty you must adopt other means. The senate at Rome gradually came to consist entirely of retired magistrates, and so to exhibit all the knowledge, competence, experience, and bigoted self-confidence which we expect from retired functionaries.

The republican constitution had invented two devices to save itself from tyranny, and, according to tradition, had invented them at the very beginning of republicanism. One was the collegial system by which every magistracy was held in commission by two or more colleagues. There were two consuls from the first, sharing between them most of the royal prerogatives, heads of the executive in peace and supreme generals in war, with power of life and death, or full imperium, at any rate on the field of battle. There was at first only one prætor, for he was then merely the consuls’ lieutenant in time of war; but when, as soon happened, the prætor became a judge in time of peace, that office, too, was given to a pair of colleagues. There were, it is said, at first two tribunes of the plebs, principally charged with the protection and leadership of their own order; but as the city grew their numbers were increased to ten. So there were two ædiles, who principally looked after affairs of police in the city. There were two censors, ranking highest of all in the hierarchy of office because their sphere was so largely connected with religion. Their duty was to number the people and to expiate that insult to heaven with a solemn rite of purification. In numbering they also had to assess every man’s property for the purpose of fixing his rank in the army and in the state. All these magistrates had powers of jurisdiction in various spheres. All the priests and prophets, too, of whom there were many varieties, were formed into colleges. Only the pontifex maximus stood alone without a colleague—and he had an official wife. We are too familiar with the working of “boards” and “commissions” to misunderstand the purpose of this system. Theory required unanimity in each board, each member of it had power to stop action by the others, one powerful weapon to that end being the religious system whereby nothing could be attempted without favourable omens. You had only to announce unpropitious auspices to stop any action whatever.

The other great check against official tyranny was the system of annual tenure. All magistrates, except the censors, who had a lengthy task before them and therefore held office for five years, were annual. While this was some safeguard for liberty, it told heavily against efficiency, especially in the case of military leadership by the consuls. It also meant the gradual creation of a great number of office-holders, past and present. It was not quite so effective as the corresponding Athenian system of balloting for office in checking personal eminence, but it certainly succeeded in putting a great number of nonentities and failures into high office—even the supreme command of the legions.

The Early Roman

It is only very dimly that we can trace the outlines of public history as Rome grew to be a power in Italy. We can scarcely hope to trace the lineaments of the individual Roman even in outline. It is sometimes said that even if the earliest history of the city is admitted to be apocryphal, we can draw valuable deductions as to the Roman character from the sort of actions which were regarded as praiseworthy in the earliest times. There is some truth in that view, though it might be objected that most of these stories took literary shape only in the second and first centuries B.C. It might be added that men often admire qualities just because they feel that they themselves cannot claim them. But, on the whole, I think we can get from this period of legendary history some insight into Roman character. There is a remarkable difference between the Roman hero and the Greek. Greek mythology busies itself very largely with stories of cleverness—how Heracles outwitted his foes, smart équivoques by the oracles, ingenious devices of Themistocles, wise sayings of Thales and Solon. It is mainly the intellectual virtues that Greek history of the borderland admires. But the Roman of the same historical area is not clever. Most of the old Roman stories are in praise of courage—for example, the contempt of pain shown by Scævola, who held his right hand in the flames to demonstrate Roman fortitude; the courage of the maiden Clœlia, who swam the river, or of Horatius, who held the bridge against an army; the devotion to his country of Quintus Curtius, who leapt in full armour into the chasm which had opened in the Forum. Many of them celebrate the true Roman virtue of sternness and austere devotion to law, as when the Roman fathers condemned their sons to death for breaking the law under most excusable circumstances. The love of liberty is extolled in Brutus, the love of equality in Valerius and Cincinnatus, called from the plough-tail to supreme command. Austere chastity in females and the strict demand for it in their proprietors is praised in the stories of Lucretia and Virginia. All these we may well set down as the virtues admired and, we hope, practised in early Rome; they form a consistent and quite distinctive picture.

But the early Roman had few accomplishments to embellish his virtues. Art and civilisation either did not exist or have perished without leaving any traces. It is likely enough that all the city’s energies were occupied with the one business of fighting. Some hints of civilising reform hang about the name of Appius Claudius, who was censor about 318-312 B.C. In his time we date some of the military changes mentioned above, and they seem to have accompanied economic changes which point to growing wealth at Rome. Copper gave place to silver as the standard of exchange, and therewith the copper as depreciated in value, so that the Roman unit of historical times, the sestertius of 2½ as value, was a coin worth about 2d. Land was no longer the sole basis of property; it became possible for a man to become rich by trade, and accordingly landless citizens were now drafted into the ancient tribes for the first time. To this great censor also belongs the first of the famous Roman military roads, the Appian Way, which led southwards to the Greek cities of Campania. Even to-day the Via Appia, flanked with its ruined tombs—for the Romans often buried their dead along the highways—running like a dart across the barren Campagna, is one of the most striking spectacles which modern Rome has to offer.[9]

Of anything which can be dignified with the name of literature we have scarcely a relic. What there is seems ludicrously rustic and uncouth. Consider, for an example, the ancient hymn of the Salii, the jumping priests of Mars. There were twelve of them, all men of patrician family; they dressed in embroidered tunics, with the striped toga, a breastplate of bronze, a conical cap with a spike; they carried each a sacred shield, and as they made their annual processions through the city at the beginning of each campaigning year, they leaped into the air and thumped their shields with sticks; trumpeters preceded them, and they sang this ghostly chant:

ENOS LASES IVVATE (ter)
NEVE LVE RVE MARMAR SINS INCVRRERE IN PLEBES (ter)
SATVR FV FERE MARS. LIMEN SALI. STA. BERBER (ter)
SEMVNIS ALTERNEI ADVOCAPIT CONCTOS. (ter)
ENOS MARMOR IVVATO (ter)
TRIVMPE (quinquies)

which is probably to be translated:

Help us, O Lares (thrice)
And, O Mars, let not plague or ruin attack our people (thrice)
Be content, fierce Mars. Leap the threshold. Halt. Strike (thrice)
In alternate strain call upon all the heroes. (thrice)
Help us, Mars (thrice)
Leap (five times).

Early Religion

In our quest for the essential Roman we shall find nothing more illuminating than religion. With some people culture takes the place of religion, but it is far commoner to find religion taking the place of culture: it did so with the Hebrews, and it does so to a great extent among the English. The Romans were never a really religious people. Probably they lacked the imagination to be really devout. They had scarcely any native mythology. But they were ritualists and formalists to the heart’s core. If those Salii had jumped only four times at the word “Triumpe,” the whole value of the rite would have been lost: if no worse thing befell them they would have had to begin again from the beginning. Thus religion, always conservative, and generally the richest hunting-ground for the antiquarian in search of prehistoric history, is almost our only source of information as to the mind of the early Roman. Of course, Roman religion is so deeply overlaid with Greek mythology that it takes some digging to discover the real gods of old Rome. But that is being done by the patience and insight of such scholars as Mr. Warde Fowler and Dr. J. G. Frazer, so that we now have a good deal of information about the original Roman religion.

Mr. Warde Fowler makes two important conclusions about the early Romans from his study of the twofold character of Mars, who, in spite of the later primacy of Jupiter, is undoubtedly the true Roman male god: “(1) that their life and habits of thought were those of an agricultural race, and (2) that they continually increased their cultivable land by taking forcible possession in war of that of their neighbours.” This was the Roman method of making agriculture pay. The spring of the year and the month which still bears the name of Mars was not only the season of returning life to nature, but it was also the time when the god and his worshippers buckled on their armour to seek fresh ploughlands, just as did the primitive Germans. It was Europe’s first method of extensive farming, and the habit clung to the Romans long after they had ceased to be farmers. In the spring it was time to look about you and consider where and with whom you should begin to fight this year.

Some of these old Roman festivals are worth a brief description, for they and they alone are the authentic history of the early Romans. For example, on the Ides of March the lower classes streamed out to the Campus Martius on the banks of the river and spent the day in rustic jollity with wine and song in honour of Anna Perenna—the recurring year. On another day there was a ceremony like that of the Hebrew scapegoat. Two dates in the calendar are marked for the king to dissolve the comitia. The assembly had to be summoned by the blast of special trumpets of peculiar un-Italian shape (some say Etruscan), and the trumpets had to be purified by a special service on the previous day. Although the Romans abolished their political kingship, religion required the retention of the title for numerous ceremonial purposes. Then there were the Parilia in honour of the old shepherd god Pales, when sheepfolds were garlanded with green, the sheep were purified at the dawn, and rustic sacrifices were paid to avert the wrath of the deity in case you had unwittingly disturbed one of the mysterious powers who dwell in the country—the nymphs and fauns of pool and spring and tree. There was a prayer to this effect of which Ovid has given us the substance, and “this prayer,” adds Mr. Warde Fowler, “must be said four times over, the shepherd looking to the east, and wetting his hands with the morning dew. The position, the holy water, and the prayer in its substance, though now addressed to the Virgin, have all descended to the Catholic shepherds of the Campagna.” There were other primitive agricultural deities, such as Robigus (the red rust on the corn), on whose festival you sacrificed red puppies; Terminus (the boundary god), to whom you slaughtered a sucking-pig on the boundary stone; or Ops Consiva, the deity who protected your buried store of corn. Such names and their attributes indicate a certain poverty of religious imagination. There were more abstract, or, rather, less tangible powers, such as Lares, the spirits of the dead ancestors who figured as guardian angels of the home; the Penates, the spirits who watched over the store-cupboard; the Genius, a man’s luck; the Manes, the kindly dead; or the Lemures, dangerous ghosts of the unburied. The house, like the fields, was full of unseen presences to be appeased with appropriate ritual, which had to be most punctiliously performed. Every year at the Lemuria the master of the house would rise at midnight and, with clean hands and bare feet, walk through the house, making a special sign with his fingers and thumbs to keep off the ghosts. He fills his mouth with black beans and spits them out as he goes, carefully keeping his eyes averted, and saying, “With these I redeem me and mine.” Nine times he speaks these words without looking round, and the ghosts come behind him unseen to gather up the beans. Then the father washes himself again, and clashes the pots together to frighten the spirits away. When he has repeated the words “Depart, ye kindly spirits of our ancestors” nine times, he looks round at last and the ceremony is complete.

The history of Rome, as Mr. Warde Fowler discerns it in religion, begins with an extremely simple rustic worship of natural forms, meteoric stones, sacred trees and animals such as the Mother Wolf or Mars’ woodpeckers; to this stage belong many of the curious spells and charms against ghosts. This sort of worship is not distinctively Roman, but common to the greater part of Central Europe. From these savage local cults we pass to the more centralised worship which belongs to the household, and that household an agricultural one. The father is the priest, and his principal deity is Janus, the god of the doorway; his sons are the subordinate flamines; and his daughters have special charge of Vesta, who presides over the family hearth-fire. Their agricultural activities are reflected in the more orderly rural ceremonies in honour of Saturn, Ops, and Vesta. Thirdly, we have a series of cults which indicate the beginnings of a community with the king for chief priest, supported by State Vestals and flamines. The Latin Festival marks the participation of Rome in the Latin League, whose presiding deity was Jupiter. In these three stages it is mainly an affair of formless powers or “numina,” deities very scantily realised, with little or no personality, scarcely to be termed anthropomorphic at all. Instead of temples there was nothing but altars, chapels, groves.

If we view these changes in the light of ethnology we shall probably agree that the first of them is the common ground of prehistoric Mediterranean worship. It is what we find in Crete at the earliest period. But we have come to regard the strict monogamous patriarchal family as especially the contribution of the north to the civilisation of Europe. Unfortunately those deities who are most certainly plebeian, such as Ceres, Flora, and Diana, do not seem to belong to the earlier strata of religion.

However that may be, it seems that we can trace in the next succeeding stage a period of public worship connected with clearly anthropomorphic deities who have temples, priests, and probably images of their own. Towards the end of the monarchic period we find those distinctly Etruscan characteristics of which I have already spoken. Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva are an Etruscan trinity. Now begins the pre-eminence of greater gods more or less personified and closely resembling those of the Greeks—such as Mercury, Ceres, and Diana. It is now that the important priestly colleges, pontifices, and augurs are founded, largely replacing, as being more important politically, the old agricultural brotherhood of the Fratres Arvales and the martial fraternity of the Salii.

Thus in religion as in art the Romans were prepared by their Etruscan connections for their subsequent capture by Greek civilisation. It was inevitable that a Greek should recognise Diana as Artemis, Minerva as Pallas, Mercury as Hermes, and Juno as Hera. It was equally inevitable that the Romans should be willing to clothe these bare and chilly abstractions with the charming fabric of Greek mythology. That process, and the simultaneous reception at Rome of Oriental cults, form still later stages in the progress of that strange medley which passed in the Rome of literature for religion.

There is little to elevate or inspire in Roman religion. The only virtue belonging to it was reverence and the strict sense of duty which a Roman called pietas, explaining it as “justice towards the gods.” “Religion” meant “binding obligation” to the Romans; its source was fear of the unseen, its issue was mainly punctilious formalism. No doubt the gods would punish disrespect to a parent or rebellion against the state, no doubt a fugitive or a slave had altars and sanctuaries where he might claim mercy; but there is little more than that to connect virtue with religion at Rome. On the other hand, we are not to suppose that when the lascivious rites of Isis and Ashtaroth or the Paphian Venus came to Rome in later days they came to corrupt a race of pious puritans. True Roman deities like Flora, Fortuna Virilis, and Anna Perenna had a native bestiality of their own. The simple rustic is seldom a natural puritan, and we must beware of idealising our Early Roman as a Scottish Covenanter. There was savage cruelty in many of the early rites, such as the Ver Sacrum when all the offspring of men and cattle within a specified period was devoted to the gods, or the Fordicidia when unborn calves were burnt. Human sacrifice looms large in the early religion, and it was probably only a later refinement which limited it to criminals or volunteers.

Mommsen has drawn our attention to the business-like relation between worshipper and god, for that is also typical of the old Roman character. “The gods,” he says, “confronted man just as a creditor confronted a debtor.... Man even dealt in speculation with his god: a vow was in reality as in name a formal contract between the god and the man by which the latter promised to the former for a certain service to be rendered a certain equivalent return.” Nay, he might venture to defraud his god. “They presented to the lord of the sky heads of onions or poppies, that he might launch his lightnings at these rather than at the heads of men. In payment of the offering annually demanded by father Tiber, thirty puppets plaited of rushes were annually thrown into the stream.” It may be true, as Mr. Warde Fowler argues, that the bargain sometimes took the form of a lively sense of favours to come, but a votum was essentially a business transaction.

The deity was very dimly visualised: the cult was everything, the god nothing. The true Latin god does not marry or beget children—did not, at least, till the Greek theologians came over and married them all suitably and provided them with families. Before history began the Romans had forgotten the little they had ever known about their most ancient deities. The rite, perhaps the altar, was preserved, but no one remembered the object of it. This is a typical Roman prayer as we have it in old Cato: “This is the proper Roman way to cut down a grove. Sacrifice with a pig for a peace-offering. This is the verbal formula:

Plate VIII. THE APPIAN WAY

Whether thou art a god or a goddess to whom that grove is sacred, may it be justice in thine eyes to sacrifice a pig for a peace-offering in order that the sanctity may be restrained. For this cause, whether I perform the sacrifice or any one else at my orders, may it be rightly done. For that cause in sacrificing this pig for a peace-offering I pray thee honest prayers that thou mayest be kind and propitious to me and my house and my slaves and my children. For these causes be thou blessed with the sacrifice of this pig for a peace-offering.” To misplace a word in this formula would have been fatal. The vagueness of the address is typical: the wood is sacred, no doubt, to some invisible numen; the woodman must guard himself against addressing the wrong power. Much of the Roman worship is thus offered “to the Unknown God.”

Law

It was this quality of precision and formalism which made Rome the lawgiver of Europe. In the battle between law and sentiment the Roman sword has been thrown with decisive effect into the scale of law. All Roman law was originally a series of formulæ, and like all ancient law a part of religion. First the king and then the priests were the only people who knew these formulæ. Thus the king was the sole judge both in private and public right; he might summon a council of advisers or he might delegate his powers to an inferior officer, such as the prætor or the prefect of the city, or the trackers of murder. Both these rights, that of choosing a consilium and of delegating authority, with, however, a right of appeal from the lower to the higher functionary, remained inherent in the Roman magistracy. In all cases, private or public, the king or the magistrate who replaced him had to pronounce the jus first: that is, to state the proper formula for the case in question; then he would send the case for trial of fact, or judicium, before judge or jury. The formula would run “if it appears that A. B. has been guilty of—— condemn him to ——; if not, acquit him.” Jus, human right, was inseparably connected with fas, divine right: no layman could properly interpret either. For a long time it was necessary for one of the priests to be present in court to see that the proper formularies of action were observed with strict verbal accuracy. This was, of course, an enormously powerful weapon in the hands of the patricians.

Then in the course of the struggle between the orders came the usual demand for written laws. The famous story of the Decemviri and their commission to Athens in 451 B.C. is unfortunately very dubious history. It is full of romantic elements, it is part of that systematic depreciation of the Claudii in Roman history which Mommsen has traced to its probable source, it has elements which look as if they were borrowed from the story of the thirty tyrants at Athens, and there is no confirmation from the Athenian side. Professor Pais believes that the fifth century is much too early for such a code. There are, it is true, in the fragments of the Twelve Tables which have come down to us, some enactments closely resembling those of the Greek codes—regulations, for example, limiting the expense of funerals—but we find such laws in other codes than that of Solon. One would like to have fuller details about that later Appius Claudius, the famous censor of 312 B.C. It is said that he desired to reduce the now complicated bulk of legal formulæ to writing simply for the benefit of the priests, but that a low-born scribe, one Flavius, whom he employed for the purpose as his clerk, fraudulently revealed these judicial secrets to the public. The whole tendency of the Claudian falsifications is to make out that the Claudii were tyrannical and anti-democratic. It certainly looks as if the dishonesty of the freedman had been put into the story for the purpose of robbing the famous censor of his credit for helping the people to a knowledge of law.

The whole fabric of Roman law was supposed to rest upon the foundation of the Twelve Tables. Only fragments of them have come down to us. They are undoubtedly very ancient and primitive, more so, it would seem, than the Athenian law of 451 B.C. Fines are to be paid in metal by weight. A creditor has the right to carve up the body of his debtor. Plebeian may not intermarry with patrician. But they also carried something of a charter of liberties for the citizens in that capital punishment could not be inflicted without right of appeal to the assembly, and no law could be proposed against an individual. The language of this famous code is of a rugged simplicity and directness that is truly Roman. On the whole Roman law is merciful, considering its strict character: though much of Roman pleading, as we have it in the mouth of Cicero, is full of appeals to sentiment, Roman law itself allows no appeal to anything so vague as abstract justice. The written letter stands, and there can be no pleading without a legal formula.

The character of the ancient Roman is best described by his favourite virtue of gravitas. In that word is implied serious purpose, dignified reserve, fidelity to one’s promise, and a sense of duty. Levity is its opposite, and among the things repugnant to true Roman gravity were art, music, and literature. It is on the battlefield, in the senate-house, and the law-courts that the old Roman is most truly at home.

II
CONQUEST

quæ neque Dardanus campis potuere perire
nec quom capta capi, nec quom combusta cremari,
augusto augurio postquam incluta condita Roma est.
Ennius.

HE great Samnite wars, which had lasted on and off from 343 to 290 B.C., had been the school of Roman valour. In her citizen legions Rome had evolved a fighting machine unequalled, probably, until the Musketeers of Louis XIV. and Marlborough. Also she was learning politics and the art of government. She was now mistress over the greater part of Italy; all, in fact, except the Gallic plain in the north and the Greek cities of the south. The Pyrrhic war which followed after a short breathing-space forms the transition between domestic expansion and foreign conquest. Our business here is not with wars and battles for their own sake, but it will be important to observe in what manner Rome was launched on her career of empire-making. Seeley has shown how the British Empire grew up in a haphazard manner, without any wise policy to direct its growth, with continual neglect of opportunities, and often in contemptuous ignorance of the work that private citizens were undertaking for its honour and advancement. We shall see that it was very much the same with the Roman Empire. One responsibility leads to another, one conquest leads to many entanglements: if the coast is to be held the hinterland must be conquered. Thus power follows capacity, and the doctrine which seems so unjust, “To him that hath shall be given, from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have,” is fulfilled in all the dealings between Providence and imperial peoples. By coming into contact with the Greeks of the south Rome was brought definitely to deal with a superior but declining civilisation. The career of Agathocles, the brigand tyrant of Sicily, had lately shown how easy a thing it was to make empires among the opulent and luxurious cities of the Calabrian and Bruttian shores.

One summer’s day in 282 B.C. the people of Tarentum were seated in their open-air theatre, watching the performance of a tragedy. They looked out above the stage over the blue waters of the Gulf of Calabria, and there they saw a small detachment of the Roman fleet sailing into their harbour. The ships were on a voyage entirely peaceful, but there was an old treaty forbidding the Romans to pass the Lacinian Promontory, and these barbarians had lately been interfering in the affairs of their Greek neighbours, always in favour of oligarchy against democracy. The mob was seized with a sudden access of fury; they rushed down to the harbour, butchered or enslaved the sailors, and put the admiral to death. The Roman Senate met this atrocious insult with calm, even with generosity. But the Tarentine mob would have no peace. Looking abroad for a champion they invited the Prince of Epirus to their aid. Pyrrhus was a young man of charm, ability, and ambition almost equal to that of Alexander the Great, whose career he longed to emulate in the West. He was called the first general of his day, and he brought with him 20,000 infantrymen of the phalanx, 2000 archers, 500 slingers, and 3000 cavalry. Moreover he had twenty Indian war elephants. The boastful Greeks had offered to provide 350,000 infantry, but when it came to the point they would do nothing but hire a few mercenaries. However, Pyrrhus was victorious in the first battle near Heraclea. The victory was won, it is said, by the final charge of the elephants. The simple Romans had never seen an elephant before; they called them “snake-hands” and “Lucanian cows,” and their horses were even more alarmed than they. But the next time the Romans had to meet elephants they provided themselves first with wonderful machines, in which chariots were mysteriously blended with chafing-dishes, and then when these failed, with fiery darts, which converted this heavy cavalry into engines of destruction for their owners. That is rather typical of the simple Roman and his way of encountering monsters.

After the victory of Heraclea, Pyrrhus sent to Rome with overtures of peace a smooth-tongued courtier named Cineas, who was much impressed with the incorruptibility of the political chiefs and their wives. It was he who described the Senate as a “council of kings,” so grave and majestic was their bearing and discourse. Nevertheless the Roman Senate would have made terms if it had not been for the great Censor Appius Claudius, now blind and infirm, who laid down for the first time the celebrated doctrine that Rome never listened to terms while there were foreign troops on Italian soil. Therefore, although the Romans had lost 15,000 men, fresh conscripts eagerly enrolled themselves to make a new army.

Meanwhile Pyrrhus, after another incomplete “Pyrrhic” victory, was proceeding unchecked over the island of Sicily. There he drove the Carthaginians from point to point until they concentrated in their great stronghold of Lilybæum in the west. But all the time his position was desperate. The coalition on which he depended was composed of faithless and useless allies. While his stiff Epirot phalanx was depleted at every victory, fresh levies of Roman citizens seemed to spring from the soil to replace the losses of every defeat. So at length it came to the battle of the Arusine Plain, near Beneventum, in which the Romans were completely victorious. Thus Pyrrhus leaves to history the reputation not of a conqueror but of an adventurer. The Romans had thus faced and overthrown the Greek phalanx at its best, and were now masters of Italy from Genoa to Reggio, with Sicily obviously inviting their next advance. That Rome was now formally accepted among the great powers of the Mediterranean world is shown by an embassy offering alliance with Ptolemy of Egypt.

She had a breathing-space of eleven years before the first of her two great conflicts with the Carthaginians. Carthage, a colony of the Phœnicians of Tyre, had grown rich and prosperous on the fertile soil of the modern Tunis. She was an aristocracy wholly devoted to trade, and living uncomfortably amid a surrounding population of dangerous native subjects. War was not her main business, but when she sought fresh markets she was apt to fight with horrible ferocity, sacrificing her prisoners in hundreds to hideous gods when she was victorious, and impaling her generals when she was not. As a military power she varied greatly: the comparatively puny Greek states of Sicily had been maintaining a fairly equal struggle against her for centuries. But she used the British system of sepoy troops, and thus everything depended on the general. Had it not been for the inexperience of the Romans at sea and the extraordinary genius of Hannibal, Carthage would never have come as near victory as she did. We have no history of the struggle from the Punic side, and Carthage herself must remain somewhat of a mystery even when illuminated by the brilliant imagination of the author of Salammbô.

In entering upon this war, which Rome did ostensibly in response to an appeal from a parcel of ruffianly outlaws for whom she had no sympathy whatever, we can for once discover no motive but desire of conquest. Messina, the home of the said ruffians, was for her merely the tête du pont which led from Bruttium into Sicily. The conquest of that rich Greek island was plainly the objective, but she plunged into war without foreseeing the immensity of her undertaking. The chief interest of the First Punic War, which lasted from 264 to 241, lies in the creation of a Roman navy which occurred in the course of it. Although we may agree with Mommsen that “it is only a childish view to believe that the Romans then for the first time dipped their oars in water,” yet tradition says that the Romans constructed a fleet in a great hurry, taking for model a stranded Carthaginian galley. It was at any rate her first war-fleet worth mentioning. The tradition is proved by the lack of seamanship displayed by the Romans, for every storm cost her enormous losses by shipwreck. The device by which she overcame the Punic ships—a sort of grappling gangway on pulleys affixed to her masts, so that her soldiers could fight the enemy as if on shore—was a successful but essentially a landlubberly invention, and no doubt accounts for many of her losses by shipwreck. Her annual consuls, transformed for the occasion into annual admirals, had not even as much opportunity as Colonel Blake to learn their trade. And, though Rome launched fleet after fleet until at length she became mistress of the seas, she never treated her navy with respect. The ships were rowed by slaves and manned chiefly by subject allies, but the real business of fighting was done by the 120 legionaries on each vessel, who came into action when the enemy was grappled and the gangway fast in her deck. So the war dragged on for nearly a generation until at length the Carthaginians made peace, and Rome gained the coveted island. Britain is not the only empire in history which wins victories by “muddling through.”

The peace was clearly nothing more than a respite: the command of the Western Mediterranean was not yet settled. Rome spent the interval in making fresh conquests. First she seized the opportunity, while Carthage was involved with her native rebels, to annex the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, alleging with more ingenuity than geographical exactitude that these were some of the islands between Sicily and Africa which Carthage had agreed to surrender. Here we behold the simple Roman as a diplomat. Then she was compelled to intervene in Illyria in order to clear the Adriatic of piracy, and so acquired territory across the water. Soon afterwards the Gauls of the northern plain began under pressure from their kinsmen across the Alps to threaten invasion; and Rome, after failing to gain the favour of heaven by the pious expedient of burying a male and female Gaul alive in her Forum, marched out to meet them, slaughtered them in thousands, and thus rounded off her control over the peninsula. Much of this looks like conscious empire-building.

In the Second Punic War, which lasted from 218 to the end of the century, Rome was not the aggressor. At Carthage by this time the native rebellion had been put down with a heavy hand. It seems that Carthage had its party system, the democracy, as usual in ancient cities, being for war, and the aristocracy of rich merchants for peace. The democracy was led by the celebrated Barca family, who had long supplied the state with famous generals and now occupied a position of unrivalled eminence. Constitutionally a Carthaginian could rise no further than to be one of the two shophets who corresponded to the Roman consuls, but actually the Barcas were more like a family of dictators. From the first Hamilcar Barca foresaw that Rome was still the enemy, and he is said to have made his little son Hannibal swear an oath at the altar that he would prosecute that enmity to the death. But first it was necessary to acquire resources and an army for the purpose. This he resolved to do, as Julius Cæsar did after him, by foreign conquest. Without orders from home he led his army into Spain, and there began to build up a province and a native army under his absolute control. Though Cadiz was already a Carthaginian market and there was already a Greek colony at Saguntum, and the ships of Tarshish were known even to King Solomon, this is the first real appearance of Spain in history. There was metal to be had from the mines, gold, copper, and silver, and there were hardy warriors in the hills who only needed training to become excellent soldiers. So Carthage began to acquire a western substitute for her lost province of Sicily. Hamilcar died; his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, was assassinated; and then the army chose for its leader Hamilcar’s son Hannibal, then a young man of twenty-nine.

This man, though his history was written exclusively by his enemies, stands out as one of the greatest leaders in history. In strategy he was supreme; in statesmanship he had the gift which Marlborough shared of being able by his personal influence to hold unwilling allies together even in adverse circumstances. He was a cultivated man who spoke and wrote Greek and Latin. He is charged by the jealousy of the Romans with cruelty and perfidy, but in fact history has nothing to substantiate these charges: on the contrary his actions are often magnanimous and honourable. His brilliance as a general largely sprang from his power of entering into the mind of his enemy. This was the man who inherited his father’s deep-laid plans of vengeance, and set out, his heart burning with hatred of Rome, to fulfil them.

We cannot dwell upon his wonderful march over the Alps and his brilliant series of victories on the soil of Italy. Hannibal’s whole plan of campaign was, briefly, to invade Italy by land with a compact striking force and raise the unwilling subjects of Rome against her, while the main force of Carthage attacked Sicily and Italy by sea. But it contained three serious miscalculations which brought it eventually to ruin. First, the southern Gauls on whom Hannibal relied for his communications and his base proved fickle and untrustworthy allies; secondly, he found that Rome’s mild imperial system had not produced unwilling subjects such as Carthage possessed in Africa; and thirdly, he hoped for support from Philip of Macedon, but here he was foiled by Roman diplomacy. Moreover, while the Romans showed a tenacity and power of recuperation unexampled in history, Carthage herself, now in the hands of the commercial oligarchs, gave him grudging and uncertain support. The firmness and courage of the Roman senate and people were amazing. Beaten again and again in the field at the Ticino, the Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannæ, Rome never lost her pride. She refused offers of help from King Hiero of Syracuse, she could find time to order the Illyrian chiefs to pay their tribute, she actually summoned Philip of Macedon to surrender her fugitive rebel Demetrius. She kept an army in Spain; a fleet still cruised in Greek waters; she had an army in Sicily, while four legions besieged Capua; she had troops in Sardinia, three legions in North Italy, two legions as a garrison in the capital—no fewer than 200,000 citizens under arms. When the foolish demagogue Varro returned in defeat and disgrace from the awful disaster at Cannæ, the senate thanked him for not having committed suicide—“for not having despaired of the salvation of his country.”

Plate IX. LAKE TRASIMENE

No doubt Rome owed something, but not as much as her poets and orators pretended, to the cautious tactics of Quintus Fabius. At any rate, he gave her time to grow used to the presence of the invader and to recover from the shock of the three disasters with which the war opened. The Romans had never before been called upon to face a consummate strategist. Pyrrhus had been, within the limitations of Greek warfare, a clever tactician; he had even shown the originality to copy the Roman manipular system in his later battles. But Hannibal was more than a strategist; he was a psychologist who knew when the opposing general was rash and when he was wary, who had spies everywhere and could supplement their intelligence by disguising himself to do his own scouting. Scouting was an art that the Romans had yet to learn by bitter experience. At the Trasimene Lake[10] they blundered straight into the most obvious of natural death-traps. But the Romans were always good learners, and, as usually happens, the amateur patriot army steadily improved during the war while the hired professionals steadily deteriorated. The actual strategy by which Hannibal won most of his battles was simple enough. It was the policy of a long weak centre into which the Roman legions buried themselves deep while the two strong wings of the enemy closed round on their flanks and rear. In his Numidian horsemen Hannibal had the finest light cavalry yet known to European warfare.

For a time all went brilliantly for the invader. Italians, Greeks, and Gauls joined his victorious standard. Rome was on the brink of despair. The very gods began to tremble; their statues sweated blood, two-headed lambs were born with alarming frequency, and cows in Apulia uttered prophetic warnings with human voices; the most horrible of omens portended destruction. But the city and the senate never lost heart and gradually as the years passed by Hannibal began to see that his cause was lost. The Latin allies stood firm for Rome. The Romans were able to hold Sicily and even despatch a brilliant and lucky young general named Scipio to reconquer Spain. Thus the longed-for reinforcements were cut off. The stupid aristocracy of Carthage were jealous of their great soldier, and when at last a reinforcing Punic army from Spain managed to slip through into Italy, Nero caught it at the River Metaurus just before the junction was effected. The first news of that battle came to Hannibal when the Romans tossed over the rampart into his camp the bleeding head of the defeated general, his own brother Hasdrubal. Horace has sung of this tragic episode in his noblest manner:

quid debeas, o Roma, Neronibus
testis Metaurum flumen et Hasdrubal
devictus et pulcer fugatis
ille dies Latio tenebris.
. . . . . . . . . .
dixitque tandem perfidus Hannibal:
“cerui, luporum præda rapacium,
sectamur ultro quos opimus
fallere et effugere est triumphus
. . . . . . . . . .
“Carthagini iam non ego nuntios
mittam superbos. occidit, occidit
spes omnis et fortuna nostri
nominis Hasdrubale interempto.”[11]

This was in 207: in 206 Scipio won a decisive victory in Spain and in 205 made a counter-invasion upon the coast of Carthage. It was only “a forlorn hope of volunteers and disrated companies,” but it caused the recall of Hannibal and gained valuable African allies for Rome. The last scene of the duel was the victory of Zama in 202 in which Scipio won his title of Africanus and became the hero and saviour of Rome.[12] Carthage ceded Spain and the Spanish islands, lost her whole war-fleet, came under Roman suzerainty and agreed to pay an enormous indemnity. But her end was not yet. For another fifty years she was permitted to exist on sufferance in humiliation and agony.

Now, frightful as had been the losses of Rome in this seventeen-years’ conflict, and great as was her exhaustion, she proceeded in the very year following the peace with Carthage to enter upon a fresh series of campaigns. The Gauls of the north made a desperate revolt, sacked Piacenza and invested Cremona, but the Romans quickly brought them to reason. The Gauls could not, of course, receive any of the rights of citizenship as yet, but they received back their independence, and were left free of tribute to act as a bulwark against their northern cousins. There was incessant fighting in Spain also. In Sardinia there were perpetual slave-drives, until the market was glutted with slaves, and the phrase was begotten “as cheap as a Sardinian.” How could the senate at such a moment declare a fresh war with the greatest of European powers? Was it under pressure of that greedy commercial party at Rome of which we are beginning to hear so much? The suggestion is absurd. There were hard knocks and little money to be got from Macedon; and it is difficult to conceive how any powerful commercial interests could have arisen at Rome during the seventeen years of the Hannibalic War. If ever there was a nation whose early history declined the economic interpretation it was the Romans. Even when the Romans had conquered Macedon they shut down the famous gold mines because they did not know how to manage them! Nor, I think, was it any large-minded Welt-politik which led Rome into the Second Macedonian War. Doubtless Philip and the Greeks were dangerous and uncomfortable neighbours, and no doubt it was true that Philip of Macedon and Antiochus of Syria had formed a compact to divide up the realms of the boy-king of Egypt. But the war could probably have been postponed for years by negotiation. Philip did not want to fight Rome: he had not even ventured to intervene while she was almost prostrate before Hannibal. The fact is that the Romans were by habits and instinct a fighting people. From the earliest times they had inherited the custom of an annual summer campaign. Peace did not present itself to them, or most of their neighbours, as a desirable condition to be preserved as long as possible. They were soldiers and nought else, and what are soldiers for but for fighting? It is only blind optimism which can believe that nations are even now actuated habitually in their international relations by foresight and policy. “The plain truth is,” said William James, “that people want war. They want it anyhow; for itself, and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life’s fireworks.” That is certainly true of the Romans: the Roman state, as a whole, needed its customary annual campaign. It was the business of her statesmen and diplomats to choose the enemy and prepare a casus belli. To imagine the states of 200 B.C. as always calculating their actions solely on the basis of commercial interest must be unhistorical.

In their attack on Philip the Romans were allied with the most respectable elements in Levantine politics: Rhodes, the commercial republic; Pergamum, the kingdom of the cultivated Attalus; Athens, the ancient home of art and learning; Egypt, the centre of commerce and literature. Elsewhere[13] I have described how the simple Romans comported themselves in this land of higher civilisation. They trod almost reverently into the circle of Greek culture; they were flattered when the Athenians initiated them into the Eleusinian Mysteries, or when the Achæan League permitted them to take part in the Isthmian games. And when they had beaten Philip—not without difficulty, nor without indispensable aid from the Ætolian cavalry—at Cynocephalæ, they made no attempt at annexation. Leaving Philip crippled, they were content. Flamininus, their Philhellenic general, was proud to proclaim the liberty of Greece before he retired. He and many of his officers carried away with them an ineffaceable impression. They were returning to barbarism from a land rich in ancient temples of incredible splendour, crowded with works of art. They had seen the tragedies in the theatres, the runners in the games. They had heard the philosophers disputing in the colonnades, the orators haranguing in the market-place. A world glowing with life undreamt-of, where there were other things to live for than battle, had suddenly flashed upon their eyes.

The next great war was against Philip’s accomplice, Antiochus of Syria. This war was as inevitable as the last. Antiochus, puffed up with the pretensions of an Oriental King of Kings, was eager to match his strength against the parvenus Romans. Rome seemed, and perhaps was, reluctant to undertake the apparently enormous task at this moment, though Pergamum and Rhodes invoked her assistance. One strong cause for war was that Antiochus had given a home to Hannibal, Rome’s hunted but dreaded foe. If the Great King had but had the sense to give Hannibal power over his great host it might yet have gone hard with the Romans. As it was, the battle of Magnesia (190) was one of those tame victories in which Oriental hosts are butchered by superior Western weapons and methods of fighting. But even with the wealth of Syria spread out at her feet, Rome annexed nothing; not out of any spirit of self-denial, for she exacted an indemnity of almost four million sterling, but because she was not prepared to undertake the responsibility of governing regions so vast and so much more civilised than herself.

Actually, of course, the effect of these wars was to give Rome complete command of the Mediterranean coast-lands. Though she did not annex, she accepted suzerainty; that is, she controlled, or attempted to control, foreign policy. Rome is the patron; Macedonia, Syria, Egypt, Pergamum, Rhodes, Bithynia, Athens, the two leagues and all the ancient states of Greece are her clients. The position of policeman and nurse of the Ægean world had been thrust upon Rome because she was strong and just. Even that was a terrific and bewildering responsibility. Every day fresh embassies came to Rome to complain of neighbours and solicit assistance—clever Greeks who would talk your head off with sophistries, and rich Asiatics who would corrupt you with bribes and blandishments. There was no one within reach who would stand up and fight squarely. In the West there were Provinces, in the East allies; it was difficult to know which gave most trouble.

So we come to the next stage, when the Romans began to annex and subjugate. It was the only way. In Macedonia, after Philip had been conquered and pardoned, Perseus arose and rebelled. After Perseus had been crushed and his kingdom dismembered, a bastard pretender arose and headed a revolt, joined by the Greeks. Obviously there was nothing for it but to round off the business by sending a permanent army under a permanent general to Macedonia, and to call it his “province.” Not even yet did the Romans dream of making cities like Athens her subjects. These free cities, however, needed a sharp lesson; and Corinth, as an almost impregnable fortress which had been a centre of Achæan mischief, was selected for destruction and destroyed in 146 B.C.

PlateX. BRONZE STATUE OF AULUS METILIUS “THE ARRINGATORE”

In the same year came the end of Carthage. During the last fifty years there had been incessant trouble there. Rome had left Carthage prostrate before her dangerous African enemies, and refused all her appeals to be allowed to defend herself. All the time Carthage was undoubtedly recovering financially from her defeat, in spite of her large annual tribute. This sight moved the fears and jealousy of the Romans. It was not sufficient to have ordered the expulsion of Hannibal. The Romans who had grown up under the shadow of the great Punic War had sucked in hate and fear of Carthage with their mother’s milk. Intelligent people like Scipio, who had seen Carthage in the dust, might mock at their fears. It was the Old Roman party, with their spokesman Cato and his stupid parrot-cry of delenda est Carthago, who constantly kept their nerves on edge, until at last in sheer panic they obeyed. The long feud between Carthage and the Berber chief Masinissa came to a head in 154. Masinissa appealed to Rome, and Rome ordered Carthage to dismiss her army and burn her fleet. Carthage, now desperate, refused, went to war with Masinissa, and was beaten. Then Rome declared war upon her—the Third Punic War. Two consuls landed with a large army and Carthage offered submission. The consuls demanded complete disarmament. Carthage submitted. Then the consuls demanded that the existing city should be destroyed and the inhabitants settled ten miles inland. That meant not only the destruction of their homes and hearths and temples, but the end of the commerce for which they lived. This preposterous demand shows that Cato’s policy had triumphed. Carthage could not submit to this, and there followed one of those frightful sieges in which the Semitic peoples show their amazing tenacity. Three years it lasted, by favour of the gross incompetence of the Roman generals; until at last a Scipio came to turn the tide once more. Carthage was destroyed utterly with fire and sword, her very site laid bare, and the soil sown with salt, in token that man should dwell there no more.

The destruction of these two cities, Corinth and Carthage, together with other facts such as the unreasonable irritation which Rome displayed against her Greek allies, Rhodes and Pergamum, have been taken by some modern historians to indicate, once more, a policy of commercial jealousy instigating the destruction of rival markets. In the one case, however, it has been proved that Corinth was no longer a great centre of Greek commerce when she was destroyed, and in the case of Carthage it was the party of Cato, who was much more of a farmer than a company-promoter, that urged destruction. A man of business might indeed be foolish enough to want to close the principal markets which bought and sold with him—there are such business men to-day—but he would scarcely be so mad as to have a fine commercial centre with its docks and quays utterly destroyed and cursed for ever. Similarly, when Macedon was conquered her rich gold mines were shut down by order of the senate. The truth is that Rome was tired and exhausted with her colossal wars, irritable and nervous beyond expression with the gigantic task of government which she had found thrust upon her. Surrounded with false friends and secret enemies, she was losing the noble sang froid she had displayed in times of real crisis. Corinth was destroyed as a warning to the Greeks, Carthage as an expiation for the lemures of the unburied Roman dead.

The Provinces

In considering the ancient, imperial, and provincial systems it is necessary for the modern to divest himself of all the geographical notions which spring from the study of maps. The ancients probably had only the most vague notions of territory. Natural frontiers such as mountains, rivers, and coasts were of course familiar to them, from the strategic point of view. Within those were cities great and small, which in the case of civilised people formed the units of life and government. In the case of barbarians there were tribes and nations, seldom sufficiently settled to produce any notion of geographical area. Thus when Rome conquered Sicily she was acquiring not so much one geographical unit, an island, as a collection of states of various types and constitutions. Similarly in the case of Spain; she said and thought that she acquired Spain, although the greater part of the Iberian peninsula remained unconquered for another century and a half. To remember the limitations of ancient geographical knowledge is essential to the understanding of the Roman provincial system. Provincia means in the first instance a sphere of official duty, a man’s provincia might be the feeding of the sacred geese or it might be the control of an army. It was not for a long time that the word came to connote a territorial area. When it did so, the day of the city-state was at an end.

The earliest Roman provinces were Sicily, acquired by conquest in the First Punic War, 241 B.C., then Corsica and Sardinia, annexed in the diplomatic intrigues which followed. Spain, or rather “the Spains.” Further and Hither, were the fruit of the Second Punic War (201). After the Third Punic War (146) the territory of Carthage became a province under the name of Africa. At the same time the Macedonian Wars gave Rome the province of Macedonia. To complete the list so far as the Roman Republic is concerned: Attalus III. bequeathed his kingdom to Rome in 133, and this became the province of Asia. In 121 the conquest of Southern Gaul gave Rome Gallia Narbonensis. In 103 the prevalence of piracy on the southern coasts of Asia Minor compelled the Romans to make Cilicia a province. In 81 a legislative act of Sulla brought the already conquered Cisalpine Gaul into the same category. The King of Bithynia imitated Attalus in bequeathing his kingdom to Rome. Cyrene also was bequeathed to Rome and united in one province with Crete in 63. In 64 Pompeius the Great deposed the King of Syria and annexed his kingdom. About the same time, on the death of Mithradates, Pontus was added to Bithynia as a united province. In 51 Julius Cæsar completed the conquest of Gaul and added it as Gallia Comata to the old province of Narbonensian Gaul. Finally in 31 Octavianus added Egypt to the list.

It was not the Roman way to think a situation out with the logic and directness of a Greek or a Frenchman. More like the Englishman, he took things as they came and made the best of them with as little derangement as possible of his pre-existing system and preconceived ideas. The Roman Empire was not governed on a system as it was not acquired by a policy. When Sicily came into the Roman hands, it came piecemeal in the course of the war. Various cities accepted Roman “alliance” on various terms. Rome had never been able to grant full citizenship to Greek states, because their inhabitants, speaking a foreign language, could not give the equivalent in military service. If Sicily had been Italian it would no doubt have entered the Roman alliance as a collection of municipia; as it was, the sixty-five or so separate Sicilian states continued to enjoy for the most part their previous constitutions under various agreements with Rome. Some were “free,” some were “free and confederate”; similarly of kings who yielded to Rome, some were styled “allies,” some “allies and friends.” The cities would have their charters and the kings would have their personal treaties with Rome which lapsed with their death. But in a region conquered in war most of the tribes or states were simply “stipendiary,” that is, tribute-paying. The stipendium paid was originally, and in theory, an indemnity or a contribution for the maintenance of a military force by people who were unqualified to give personal service. It was generally settled by a commission of ten members of the senate, who went out to organise a newly acquired territory. Even these tributary states had their charters from Rome. The stipendium was by no means extortionate. In Macedonia, for example, the people only paid to Rome half as much as they had previously paid to their kings. In Sicily and Sardinia the tillers of the soil paid a tithe, generally in kind (that is, in corn), to the Roman treasury, and the town-dwellers probably paid a poll-tax. It was an error of the jurists, who confused this tithe with the tenth paid by occupants of Roman public land, which afterwards led to the dangerous legal theory that Rome had acquired the whole soil of the country conquered by her arms and leased it back for a consideration to the original proprietors. As a matter of fact, few of the provinces were remunerative to the Roman state. Spain, where warfare was incessant, was certainly a heavy loss. Macedonia was no source of profit. Sicily, largely owing to the Roman Peace, became the granary of the capital, but Asia alone was a source of great wealth to the treasury. There were, of course, harbour dues for the provinces as for Italy herself.

On the whole, it is fair to say that local autonomy was generally preserved. Either through policy or, more probably, because the Romans habitually took things as they found them, the previous laws and constitutions of conquered units, whether cities or tribes, remained in force. In Syracuse, for example, the law of King Hiero remained, and it was much better for the Sicilians to pay their taxes to Rome than to be subject to the personal extortions of a monster like Agathocles. In law-suits between citizens of one Sicilian state the trial was to be held in that state by a native judge and according to the native laws—possibly with a right of appeal to the Roman governor. In suits between Romans and Sicilians the judge was to be a native of the defendant’s state. So far the Roman sway is the mildest, the most benevolent system of government which has ever been imposed by an empire upon conquered subjects. Athens, it will be remembered, had grown rich and beautiful by misapplying the contributions of allies which she had converted into the tribute of subjects. Sparta had put garrisons into every conquered city. So had Carthage. No modern power allows as much local autonomy to conquered territories as Rome granted to hers.

But in every conquered territory it was necessary to have an armed force, large or small according to circumstances, and for the soldiers a general. As all the Roman magistrates were military in the first instance, but also judicial and executive—as, in fact, the nature of Roman ideas of imperium implied an unlimited competence in every department of rule, the provincial general was also, necessarily, a provincial judge and administrator free from all control during his year of office. No doubt the Romans, if they had possessed the wisdom and retrospective foresight so lavishly displayed by their modern critics, would, in sending officers to distant parts, have revised their notions of imperium and defined the spheres of duty which they entrusted to their generals. If they had studied political science they might have learnt that it is wise to separate the legal functions from the administrative, and both from the military. Or if they had made historical researches, they might have discovered that the Persian administrative system of three independent functionaries in each satrapy was the best that had yet been discovered. But they did none of these things: they simply blundered on in the old Roman way, more maiorum. They did not foresee the demoralising effect of absolute power in an alien and subject land. They did not foresee the necessity for central control in a Roman Colonial Office; there was not even any Latin equivalent for the Franco-Grecian term “bureaucracy.” Thus they were compelled to trust to the honour and sense of justice which was, when this colossal experiment began, still believed to exist in the heart of a Roman officer and gentleman, unaware that corruption was beginning even then to taint the whole body of their aristocracy.

They might, one would think, have realised the super-human temptations in the path of a Roman governor. He went out, with a company of his own friends, chiefly ambitious young men, for a staff, with a senatorial legate chosen by himself, and a juvenile quæstor as his subordinate to keep accounts, if he could: for there was no competitive examination in book-keeping. The governor went for a year only among a people whose traditions, laws, and even language, were probably quite unknown to him. He left an austere and barbarous republic to act as monarch among flattering Greeks or cringing Asiatics. No power on earth could even criticise him while he held the imperium: afterwards he might be impeached, it is true, but before a court of his own friends. He had just completed a civic magistracy, and these were won and held by means of lavish bribes and public entertainments. Opportunities to recoup himself were irresistible.

True to the mos maiorum, the Romans invented no new magistracy for the provinces. Already as early as the Samnite Wars they had found it necessary sometimes to break down the annual system by proroguing a magistrate’s term of office in order that he might finish a campaign. If he were prætor or consul, he continued for another year as proprætor or proconsul. When Sicily was conquered the Romans added another prætor to the two functionaries already existing, another for Sardinia, and two more for Spain; but after that the new provinces were entrusted to proprætors and proconsuls, or, in case of a war, to the consuls themselves during the latter part of their year of office. The senate decided what the magisterial provinces should be, which of them should be consular, and then generally the qualified officers balloted for them.

The same want of elasticity in the Roman system spoilt their good intentions in the matter of finance. As we have seen, the State imposed no crushing burdens upon its vassals. Had the stipendium been honestly collected by official emissaries under proper control, the provincials would have had little cause of complaint. But the Romans here again provided no new functionaries for the new duty. In some cases they allowed the subject communities to collect their own taxes and forward the required aggregate to Rome, and in such cases there was a great deal of peculation on the way. But where this was impossible the senate farmed out the collection of taxes under contract to certain individuals who bought them at auction. The publicani quickly grew into a regular institution, grouping themselves into capitalist syndicates which combined tax-farming with money-lending. Banks were established in every provincial centre. This capitalist class soon established itself as a political body at Rome, where it exerted a powerful and sinister influence over public policy. Just below the senatorial order were the equites. Of old they had been real cavalry, for it was only the rich who could afford to maintain a horse and the necessary equipment; now it was mainly a titular distinction, implying a certain income. It was here that the bankers of Rome and the financial interests were grouped in a single powerful class. For a time these “horsemen” actually secured control of the jury courts which tried charges of extortion. Then the lot of the provincials was wretched indeed: to pay their greedy and extortionate tax-gatherers they had often to borrow from the same individuals in their capacity of usurers, and then, if they ventured to journey to Rome with a complaint, they would meet the same evil class in the very judges who heard their complaints. This was how “publican and sinner” came to be an appropriate conjunction.

The corruption, as we shall see later, began to be serious with the acquisition of Asia. At first the incompetence due to the inexperience of the governors and their staffs was the chief failing of the system. But when Asia with its stored-up capital, its possibilities of exploitation, and its extreme helplessness, fell to Rome, traders and money-lenders swarmed down upon it, so that there were 80,000 Italians there when Mithradates ordered his famous massacre. Thus money poured into the capital, and there was an unseemly scramble for wealth. But for the present we are only concerned with the system of provincial government as it was in the beginning. I think we may conclude that it started with the best intentions, but with two inherent defects, both due to the conservatism of the Roman character. Their constitution was municipal and their outlook parochial. Their empire-building was precisely of the narrow-minded, well-intentioned character that one would expect if the Marleybone Borough Council suddenly found itself presented with Ireland, France, and half Spain, and asked to govern them.

The Imperial City

A poor man cannot become a millionaire without at least altering his way of living, and a little backward provincial town cannot find itself the mistress of a great empire without undergoing very profound modifications. In 208 B.C. Rome was struggling for her life with a foreign enemy raging at her gates. Fifty years later she was mistress in the Mediterranean, and owner of more land than she could conceive.

One of the effects of the change was a prodigious influx of wealth into the city. In war indemnities alone six or seven millions sterling must have flowed into the coffers of a state which had till recently conducted its business with lumps of copper. In loot Rome was said to have gained above two millions in the Syrian War, and about the same in the Third Macedonian. Vast tracts of public land were gained, and there was a steady influx of tributary corn and money: public mines, such as those in Spain, must be added. There never had been regular direct taxation in the city: a Roman paid his dues in the form of personal service, and a tributum was the mark of defeat. But now all taxation ceased at Rome except an indirect tariff on salt and the customs at the ports. Henceforth Rome was living on her empire and growing fat upon it. It is true that expenditure was also increasing. In the earliest days there had been no public finance. A war was conducted by a citizen army, who marched out for a few days’ campaigning in the neighbourhood, wearing their own armour and carrying a commissariat provided by their wives. The only public expense was the religious duty of providing beasts for sacrifice, and even that was largely defrayed by fines paid to the treasury. But now expeditions cost money, armies soldiering for months in distant lands had to be fed and maintained, ships had to be built, equipment and machines provided. Nevertheless, with wise financial administration the treasury ought to have had a decent surplus. But wisdom in finance was lacking: although we are assured that book-keeping was one of the points in which the old Roman paterfamilias especially took pride, yet the public treasury of Rome, which had the temple of Saturn for its bank, was managed by the quæstors, the lowest grade of Roman official life, consisting of young men just beginning a public career. That fact alone will show how far more important the Romans regarded warfare than finance, and how far wrong are those historians who make Roman greatness dependent upon economic advantages. The maladministration of finance was not due to dishonesty at first: Polybius, the Greek historian, who was brought up in the heart of Greek politics under Aratus, the cunning chief of the Achæan League, and came to Rome in the second century as a hostage, was genuinely astonished at Roman honesty. Their financial errors were due to sheer inexperience in the handling of large sums of money.

Little of this vast influx of money was spent upon public works. To begin with, there was not the taste for fine architecture at Rome, nor indeed for art of any sort. The private houses were still mainly built of unbaked bricks or tiles, often with thatched or shingled roofs: the interiors of the bare simplicity of a country farm-house. And then Roman religion, which, as we have seen, was always somewhat cold towards the high Olympian gods, offering its real devotion to obscurer rustic powers, made little claim for temples and stately shrines. Temples had been built under the Etruscan domination in the fifth century B.C. But thereafter for a period of four centuries there is an almost complete blank in the annals of Roman archæology. If anything was built between Tarquin and Sulla it was generally of wood and brick or rubble with no architectural pretensions. Augustus swept it all away with contempt. Of course it was the fashion for Cato and the old Roman party to say they preferred good old Roman temples with the painted terra-cotta ornaments to all the new-fashioned fripperies of Greece; but that is only the spleen of the outraged Philistine. These centuries of growth are empty of art.

What the nouveaux riches of the second century B.C. found to spend their money on it is hard to say. In 218 B.C. the people passed a resolution as the Lex Claudia forbidding senators to engage in foreign commerce. It is very unlikely that the senate would have allowed that if they had already been deeply involved in business. But this enactment checked the only fruitful use of wealth: it turned, and was possibly intended to turn, the money of the great houses into land speculation. This was followed by disastrous results. The Punic Wars had thrown millions of acres out of cultivation. That land which had belonged to rebels passed to the Roman state as public land and the scramble for it was the cause of momentous political conflicts in the succeeding generation. But rich senators acquired enormous estates without any deep interest in their economic productiveness. Like the old English squire the old Roman senator was not a professional nor even a very serious landowner, and moreover he was an absentee. Thus large tracts of Central Italy became the estates of rich men who added park to park and villa to villa rather as a hobby than for any good reason. The common notion of Italy before the Punic Wars as a vast smiling cornfield, dotted with little farm-houses and country cottages full of stalwart husbandmen, is both unhistorical and ungeographical. The Italian farmer lived—like the mediæval European farmer—mostly in townships which he called “cities,” and it was only the plain-land in the vicinity of a town which was regularly ploughed and sown. A glance at the map will show how little of Central Italy is suited for cereal cultivation. But, if the records are true, 400 Italian townships had been destroyed in the great wars and that meant, perhaps, 400,000 acres out of cultivation. And what had become of their inhabitants? Thousands, of course, had left their bones on Roman battlefields, but thousands more, when their term of service was done, went to swell the proletariat of Rome. There they herded in ill-built, ill-drained quarters on the low ground of the city. Physically and morally they declined. What is perhaps worse, they could not perpetuate their breed under the new conditions. It takes generations for the human animal to adapt itself to new conditions. Modern Europe has seen the enormous influx into towns accompanied by a decline in the birth-rates, and the swollen town-populations are only maintained by constant influx from the country. It has truly been said that the future rests with the race which can most readily adapt itself to such new conditions. But the Romans never could. The humbler quarters of the city, though they grew more and more populous, grew, it seems, by immigration and not by natural increase. Thus the populace of Rome became more and more cosmopolitan, less and less Roman. These generalisations are apparently well founded, but it must not be forgotten that we know scarcely anything of the free poor at Rome. A nation of orators generally forgets to speak of the butcher, the baker, and his colleagues. It is as impossible to believe that all trade and industry at Rome was carried on by slaves as that the poor of a city can live by bread alone. “Bread and the circus” is a respectable phrase, as true as epigrams ever are, but it cannot be the whole truth.

Map of Italy, showing ground over 1000 feet high

As we have seen in the case of Greece, all ancient city-states undertook duties which the modern individualistic community regards, up to the present at least, as private and not public. The city-state regarded it as part of its business to see that its shareholders did not starve, therefore the supply of corn and the price of it was always a matter of state supervision. From the earliest days of Roman history there had been officers charged with the duty of securing the city’s corn-supply at reasonable charges. Now the corn was beginning to arrive in the form of tribute from Sicily and Africa. Soon we shall have the agrarian laws and all the disorder that resulted from them. But it is important to observe that the depopulation of the Italian countryside resulted from war and politics as well as from economic causes. Of course economic causes kept it depopulated. Nature never intended Central Italy for a wheat-growing land; the vine, the olive, and the fig are its best products. Now that the seas were open for free imports it no longer paid to plough and sow the stony upland farms.

So the land passed out of cultivation. As in England, grazing was found to be cheaper, easier, and more profitable than agriculture. Oxen were used for ploughing or reserved for sacrifice. The Italians, like the Greeks, seldom ate meat and then little but smoked bacon, but as all Romans wore the woollen toga sheep-farming was profitable. In summer the sheep grazed on the Sabine hills, in winter on the Latin plain among the stubble of the cornfields or beneath the olive-trees. Wild slave-shepherds tended them.

Slavery was the canker at the root of ancient civilisation. It assumed more awful proportions at Rome than in Greece owing to the hard materialism of the Roman character. Of course it had existed from the earliest times as the common lot of the prisoner of war. The sturdy Roman farmer, so dear to Roman rhetoric, was after all little more than a sturdy slave-driver. The actual field labour had always been in the hands of slaves. As early as 367 B.C., if we may believe the records of that age, legislation had attempted to fix a certain proportion of free labour on country estates. From the first, too, the slave had been the merest chattel, a colleague of the dog, a little lower even than the wife or daughter of the Roman house-father. It was cheaper to buy slaves than to let them breed, cheaper to sell them for what they would fetch when they grew old than to keep them. You could dodge the gods, who enjoined holidays even for slaves, by giving your slaves work indoors on feast-days—such are some of the maxims of the venerable Cato, who is the type of the old Roman squire, and who personally attended to the scourging of his slaves after dinner. Now slaves were becoming more numerous and cheaper than ever—you might have to pay as much as £1000 for a pretty boy or girl—but a wild Sardinian or Gaul or Spaniard cost very little. Hence began the really pernicious system of specialised slavery. A wealthy Roman moved neither hand nor foot for himself. To have only ten slaves was contemptible poverty. Each slave was trained simply for one special task—cook, barber, footman, bearer, lacquey, or schoolmaster. The shepherds and gladiators might retain their manhood, as indeed they did, and showed it in frightful revolts during this and the succeeding generation. But the domestic slaves of the capital had no hope but to cringe and wheedle their way into favour by flattering and corrupting their masters. One alleviation of the slave’s lot there was: it was easier for a slave to earn his freedom at Rome than in Greece. But this type of person when liberated, and his children after him, made the worst type of citizen, and tended still further to corrupt the tone of the proletariat. Worse than domestic slavery was the plantation system, which during all this period was growing in the country. At its worst it meant huge slave barracks, in which the slaves lived in dungeons underground and worked by day in gangs, chained night and day. It was a profitable system of agriculture and it rapidly ousted free labour. In the city too, in the merchant ships and the mines, a cruel and vicious system of servitude was destroying free industry. Truly the hollowest of historic frauds was the eighteenth-century view of an idealised Roman republic of citizens, free, equal, and fraternal. It inspired the Convention and coloured the periods of Mirabeau, but so far as the records prove, the virtuous and liberal old Roman never existed.

Equality beyond the name was certainly unknown at Rome. All government was in the hands of a close circle of aristocrats whose stronghold was in the senate. By virtue of the client system the great houses of the Claudii, the Cornelii, the Fabii, the Livii, the Flaminii, the Julii, and a dozen others kept the high offices of state exclusively in their hands. By this time the censors drew up the senate-lists chiefly from the ranks of ex-magistrates, and the magistracies became a graduated course. It required extraordinary pushfulness or wealth or patronage for a new man to insinuate himself into the charmed circle. The old patriciate had gone, politically at least, and only survived for religious purposes, but Rome still remained a thrall to aristocracy of a far more dangerous type, an aristocracy of office. One of the troubles of Rome lay in the fact that this aristocracy was daily becoming less warlike and less competent.

A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the luxury of the Romans as one of the causes of their decline. Even Mommsen relates with shocked emotion that they imported anchovies from the Black Sea and wine from Greece. Two hot meals a day they had and “frivolous articles” including bronze-mounted couches. There were professional cooks, and actually bakers’ shops began to appear about 171 B.C. It is true that all this luxury would pale into insignificance before the modern artisan’s breakfast-table with bread from Russia, bacon from America, tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, sugar from Jamaica, and eggs from Denmark. Cato would have swooned at the sight of our picture-frames coated with real gold, for he publicly stigmatised a senator who had £30 worth of silver plate. The truth is that Rome having grown rich was just beginning to grow civilised. It is the everlasting misfortune of Rome that events occurred in that order.

PlateXI. PUBLIUS SCIPIO AFRICANUS

In conquering Macedon Rome had become acquainted with civilisation. At that date civilisation meant Hellenism slightly tinctured with Orientalism, a culture which, though still alive and still original and creative, was certainly past its prime. The Hellenistic period of Greek art has been unjustly depreciated in comparison with the more youthful and virile age of Pericles. But it could still boast of great scholars, scientists, and philosophers, both at Alexandria and Athens. Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus form a group of original poets who are really great, and an art that could produce the lovely Aphrodite of Melos cannot with justice be termed decadent. Politically, morally, and physically Greece was no doubt long past the vigour of her youth, but intellectually she was still well qualified to play the part of schoolmistress to the lusty young barbarian of the West. We have seen that in very remote times Rome had come under Etruscan influences which were closely akin to Greek. There had been some interchange, if tradition may be trusted, of Greek and Etruscan art and artists. Greek painters had worked in Rome at a very early date. Then came perhaps two centuries of relapse in the cultural sense while Rome was busy with warfare and conquest. In 300 B.C. she was almost entirely destitute of accomplishments, and even, if we may except law, politics, and military skill, of civilisation. The war with Pyrrhus, the conquest of Tarentum and then of Sicily brought in Greek slaves, and semi-Greek South-Italian citizens who were bound to have some influence. Then came direct dealings with Greece in the three Macedonian wars, and every Roman who had fought with Flamininus or Paulus returned to Rome if not an apostle of culture at any rate a man who had seen civilisation with his own eyes and could no longer regard old Roman ways as sufficient for man’s happiness. How could eyes that had seen the Zeus of Pheidias at Olympia glowing with ivory and gold be content with the old vermilion Jove of his native temple?

Nevertheless it was very slowly that culture filtered in. All through the third century and for the first half of the second Rome was still incessantly occupied with war. Her tastes were brutalised and demoralised by it. When drama painfully began, the dramatists sadly lamented that their audiences would desert the theatre for the sight of a rope-dancer or a beast-baiting or, better still, a pair of gladiators. From the first it was vain to attempt the creation of a national drama for a people whose craving was for the sight of blood. Gladiatoral combats are said to have been of Etruscan origin. They first appeared at Rome in the early part of the third century in connection with funeral displays. From every African expedition wild beasts were brought home to be slaughtered in the Roman amphitheatres. These bloody shows indicate the real tastes of the Romans from the earliest times. They are no spurious growth of the so-called “degenerate Empire.” On one occasion, when the music of some Greek flute-players failed to please a Roman audience, the presiding magistrate ordered the unlucky artists to fight one another, and the hoots of the crowd were instantly transformed to rapturous applause.

All the arts were held in contempt, all were entrusted to slaves or the poorest kind of citizens. Thus Hellenic civilisation was transported to Rome under a double disadvantage. Not only was Greek civilisation itself already past its prime, but it was interpreted largely by slaves. Every Roman of position had Greeks among his retinue—not, of course, the citizens of famous cities like Athens or Alexandria, which were still free, but low-caste, half-barbarian wretches from the great market at Delos or from the southern towns of Italy—for clerks, accountants, scribes, jesters, procurers, physicians, pedagogues, flute-players, philosophers, cooks, concubines, and schoolmasters. We may be sure that it was not the most favourable type of Hellenism that would creep into Rome by such channels as these. But it was precisely in this manner that Roman literature began. The noble general M. Livius Salinator brought from Tarentum in about 275 B.C. a Greek slave named Andronikos, as a tutor for his sons. This man received his liberty, and as Livius Andronicus set up a school. For his school he required books, and as there was no other text-book in Latin but the XII Tables, he undertook the translation of Homer’s Odyssey into the native Italian measure of Saturnian verse. His work was, of course, very indifferently performed, but it remained a primer of education down to the schooldays of Horace. Emboldened by this success he proceeded to supply the Roman stage with translations of Greek tragedies.

Such was the beginning; the sequel was not much more promising. Nævius was a Campanian who translated Greek comedies and tragedies. In the former he attempted the old Greek custom of political allusions, but speedily found that there was no such liberty of speech in Rome as had prevailed in the palmy days of Athenian comedy. An allusion to the Metellus family brought the famous and thoroughly old Roman poetical retort:

dabunt malum Metelli Nævio poetæ,

and was fulfilled by the imprisonment of the dramatist. Thus the beginnings of literature at Rome were by no means easy. The dramatists were hampered by severe police restrictions as well as by the barbarity of their public. It is interesting to note that both these poets also attempted the epic style. Livius Andronicus was actually commissioned by the priests to celebrate the victory of Sena in verse, and Nævius wrote an account of the First Punic War.

For comedy the Romans appear to have had some natural taste. It seems that a very rude and barbaric form of dramatic dialogue mixed with buffoonery was native to Italy in the Fescennine Songs, though even these are said to have been of Etruscan invention. So the Romans at their festivals were content to listen to comedies if the humour was obvious enough, if there was plenty of horseplay. The setting was wretched indeed. Instead of the magnificent marble theatres of Greece, wooden booths were temporarily erected in the amphitheatre, and a noisy disorderly audience listened with good-humoured contempt to the efforts of the actors who tried to amuse them. Sometimes the chorus would be sung by trained musicians, while the actors on the stage illustrated the inaudible words by pantomimic gestures. It was utterly crude and inartistic from beginning to end, and in deplorable contrast to the beginnings of Drama in Greece. There it had been a national service of worship to the gods. Here it was a trivial amusement in the hands of slaves and foreigners.

Of the three great comedians, Plautus, though a genuine free Italian of Umbria, had been reduced by poverty to the position almost of a slave; Cæcilius was a prisoner of war from the neighbourhood of Milan, who had been brought to Rome as a slave and then set free; Terence was a Carthaginian by birth, belonging as a slave to the Senator Terentius Lucanus, and subsequently being liberated became a friend of the younger Scipio. Ennius, the “father” of epic verse and tragedy, was a client of the elder Scipio and a Greek-speaking Calabrian by birth. Pacuvius, the best of the early tragedians, was a native of Brundisium, and therefore more Greek than Roman; he too belonged to the Scipionic circle. The activity of these writers belongs mainly to the first half of the second century. Not one of them was a Roman by origin, still less was there anything distinctively Roman in their work. Except from the linguistic point of view there is little to be said about any of them. The comic dramatists were engaged in translating the work of the Greek comedians of the third phase, especially Menander and Philemon. To meet the demand for more plot, more action, with less dialogue and less poetry, they would generally make a patchwork of two or three Greek plays. From the artistic point of view the work was clumsily done. There was little pretence of Romanising the characters or the scenes, generally they were frankly Greek with strange intrusions from Roman life. The source from which they drew was by now a stereotyped comedy of manners with stock characters—the heavy father, either an indulgent debauchee or a stingy curmudgeon; the old woman, generally a procuress; the gay and profligate young hero; the fair heroine, generally a meretrix, and a background of parasites, bullies, pandars, slave-dealers, and scoundrelly slaves, who came in for recurrent beatings to the great entertainment of the audience. The situations are also “taken from stock,” facial resemblances, disguised strangers, mistaken identities, veiled women and so forth. The “love interest,” such as it is, almost invariably centres round the desire of a young profligate for a courtesan. The atmosphere is generally brutal and immoral. There is often a ludicrous want of dramatic imagination in the stage management. Yet the comedies of Plautus and Terence have played a larger part in monasteries and schoolrooms than any other literature in the world, and through Shakespeare and Molière have had a decisive influence in the history of the drama. We do not possess enough of the original Greek sources to say very definitely how much was contributed by the Roman dramatists of their own. Where we do get passages for comparison the Latin version has generally lost a great deal in wit and neatness of expression. The prologues, so far as they are genuine, are at any rate in the case of Plautus extremely bald and crude. “Now I will tell you why I have come forward here and what I intend in order that you may know the name of this play. For so far as the story goes it is a short one. Now I will tell you what I was anxious to inform you of: the name of this play in Greek is Onagos—Demophilus (or Diphilus?) composed it, Maccius turned it into Latin. He wishes it called Asinaria, if you please.” And so he proceeds to unwind his plot and relate how the young spendthrift Argyrripus won the favours of the courtesan Philenium by duping her mother, the procuress, and cheating his mother, a shrew, out of twenty minæ by the co-operation of his immoral old father who hoped to secure the young woman for himself.

It would be wrong, however, to underrate the literary merits of Plautus and Terence. These authors reveal to us something of the natural speech of the Roman—Plautus in particular, for Terence is already far more “classical” in his language. It is not always easy to say how far the amusement which we get from them is legitimate, or how far it is laughter at the expense of their antique artlessness and clumsiness. But Plautus has a rich vein of simple humour and an irresistible sly appeal to his audience which often makes one unconscious of the garbage in which he is dealing. Terence has a polish, a graceful way of putting the obvious, and a purity of diction which sometimes makes his young men seem almost gentlemen and his young women almost virtuous. There is a great deal of sound worldly morality in Terence and some pure sentiment. But it is necessary here to lay stress upon the fact that the literary arts of Rome never possessed the fresh innocence or even the simple coarseness of youth. It was little harm, perhaps, that the gladiators, the rope-dancers, the bear-baiters, and the charioteers won the day in the affections of Roman audiences.

Father Ennius, too, in his tragedies was little more than a translator. He was employed consciously by the great Scipio to educate and broaden the Roman taste. He had learnt of the Greek philosophers to disbelieve in the gods, or rather he had learnt the deadly Euhemerist doctrine that the gods of Olympus are but the memories of long dead human heroes, or that they sit, as Epicurus also taught,

“On the hills ... together careless of mankind.”

“ego deum genus esse dixi et dicam semper cælitum,
sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus,
nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.”

At the age of fifty Ennius set himself to relate the whole of Roman history in eighteen books of epic verse. No one claims for him the rank of a great poet, but he shaped for Vergil’s hand that magnificent instrument the Latin hexameter, and many scholars believe that he vitally affected the literary language of Rome by preserving the terminal inflexions which were dropping out of current speech. All the fragments of Ennius that have survived, though often rough and ugly, yet possess a massive dignity of their own, and often a most solemn majesty of cadence, as in the lines with which I have headed this chapter. But here again we must notice that the rugged father of Latin poetry had already taken over the scepticism of the declining religion of Greece.

For many generations now Roman religion had been losing its native character and becoming cosmopolitan and denationalised. As we have seen, its genuinely native elements were mainly rural and now the Roman was a townsman with a townsman’s light scepticism and craving for novelty and sensation. Jupiter and Minerva and the other high gods had from the first been largely foreigners; at any rate few discernibly Latin ideas appear in the cults or personalities. As early as 204 B.C., that is, in the throes of the Great Punic War, the worship of Cybele—the Great Mother of Phrygian ritual—had been introduced along with its begging eunuch priests. Apollo with appropriate athletic games had arrived a few years earlier. New gods multiplied, old gods became hellenised, Roman priesthoods became more and more political, being simply obtained by popular election like any other public office, or crack dining-clubs for the aristocracy. As the gods multiplied faith declined. In 186 B.C. the Senate discovered a whole system of secret nocturnal orgies which under the name of Bacchic mysteries had spread with extraordinary rapidity throughout Italy. Ten thousand men were arrested and condemned, mostly to death, but the associations flourished unchecked.

Morality, public and private, was equally unsound. Publicly we have sufficient stories of bribery by candidates for office—not to mention the systematic corruption of the electorate by corn-doles and shows—to prove that political uncleanness was of very old standing in Rome. As for private virtue it may be that the world of pimps and prostitutes which flits across the Plautine stage is borrowed from Athens, but it was certainly familiar at Rome and rapidly domesticated itself. Slavery had always existed there, and immorality is inseparable from slavery. Now with a mob of retired soldiers gathered promiscuously and without employment in the capital immorality was multiplied in every class. As early as 234 B.C. there was public complaint of the unwillingness of the Roman men of good family to face the responsibilities of marriage. Already, as in the case of C. Calpurnius Piso, there were horrible domestic tragedies in great houses. Divorce was already common. As usual the Pharisees of the day strove to combat immorality with prudishness. Cato the Censor punished a Roman senator for kissing his wife in the presence of their daughter.

Now, let it be remembered that this very age of which we are speaking, the age of conquest in the Punic and Greek wars, is the heroic age of Roman history, the age to which poets and historians of the empire looked back as golden. We do not rely upon satirists or gossip-dealers for this gloomy picture of Rome in her palmy days. The facts upon which it is based are beyond dispute. What inference are we to draw? Reviewing those facts and especially noticing the dates, we see that all the vicious features of Roman society, the cruelty, the idleness, the debauchery, the political corruption, the lack of artistic taste, the immorality and crime in the noble houses, the injustice and oppression of the poor and helpless, are no products of the Empire, but deeply engrained in the Roman character and entwined about the roots of her history. In our pursuit of old Roman virtue we may go to the furthest bounds of historical record in vain. No doubt, before Rome began to be a city and long before she began to have a history, there were simple laborious rustics on the Latin plains, who possessed, for want of opportunity, the virtuous abstinences of the poor. But it is manifestly false to ascribe degeneration either to the fall of the Republican system of government or to the introduction of civilisation. If one cause more than another is to be assigned for the rapid growth of evil tendencies it is the exhaustion consequent upon incessant warfare and the brutality engendered by continual life in camp. The only thing that could mitigate the latter was surely education and culture. Instead, then, of Greek civilisation being the cause of degeneracy at Rome we may more truthfully assert that it came to save her from ruin at a time when she was threatened with internal decay. Had it come earlier or been accepted more willingly it might have done more to brighten the darker pages of Roman history. It was their starved souls, empty of ideals, devoid even of reasonable occupation for their leisure or harmless use for their wealth, which rendered the aristocracy of Rome so utterly vulgar and debased.

III
THE LAST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC

urbem uenalem et mature perituram si emptorem inuenerit.
Jugurtha in Sallust

HERE is no doubt that many of the disquieting symptoms which we have just noted as afflicting Roman society in the second century B.C. might have been allayed, and possibly even the causes removed, by a wise and foreseeing government. In dealing with the allies and subjects who formed her vast and growing empire any modern politician could have told the senate that they had to choose one of two courses—either centralisation or devolution of power, either a just and firm system of control or a liberal grant of autonomous rights. But the senate had no policy. It left things to shape themselves. Again, the agrarian difficulty of a deserted countryside and an idle, disorderly city proletariat could easily have been solved if it had been taken early, before the habit of city-life grew upon the discharged warriors. Again the senate did nothing till it was too late. Then, having acquired an overseas empire all over the Mediterranean, the senate, if it had not been blind, should have seen that it was necessary to maintain a strong navy and police the seas in the interests of commerce. But again the government neglected its duty. For these and many other sins of negligence there was a heavy reckoning to be paid. It required no oracle to foretell disaster.

While the mass of the senate sat by inert and helpless, allowing the helm of state to sway from side to side in their nerveless fingers, two small parties in the state had policies of their own. There was Cato (it is difficult to find a party for him to lead), who believed that by repeating the mystic words mos maiorum he could put the clock back to the days of Cincinnatus, if not of Numa, mistaking symptoms for diseases and hoping, like many another revivalist, to make people virtuous by making them uncomfortable, a task doomed to failure from the start.

Over against these were set a party who may almost be termed liberals, in that they were prepared to go forward hopefully in company with the spirit of their age. Their foremost representatives were the Scipios, who acted as patrons to many of the literary circle we have just described, and were themselves eager to accept the new culture. Unfortunately there was very little wisdom or foresight among them, and, above all, there was an aristocratic pride which would have rendered them impossible as leaders even if they had had any idea of a destination. As a family the Scipios were by no means uniformly competent, and most of them subsisted on the glamour of the name, which itself had been very largely due to the good luck and opportunity of Scipio Africanus, the Elder and the Younger.

The special feature which distinguishes the age which we have now to consider—that is, roughly, the hundred years from 146 B.C. onwards—is that the historian’s attention now begins to be focussed on a series of personal biographies. One might almost say it is already clear that some individual must dominate this ill-constructed imperial city, and the only question left is who it shall be. In the true polity of the city-state the influence of personality is reduced to a minimum, and various devices, such as the lot at Athens or the double and annual consulship at Rome, are employed to prevent that individual predominance which so easily turns to despotism. It is not due so much to envy as to an instinct of self-preservation that republics are notoriously ungrateful to their great men. But personal eminence, if it is dangerous to the liberty of a republic, is almost essential to the government of a great empire and the control of huge armies. The incompetence of the annual generals, now that warfare was on a large scale and conducted far from the overseeing eye of the administration, became more noticeable. Already in the Third Macedonian War it had been disgracefully apparent. Now the long campaigns against Viriathus in Spain and Jugurtha in Africa reveal pitiful ineptitude, coupled with shameless dishonesty, in the republican generals of the aristocracy. Roman armies are no longer invincible in the field, they are not even disciplined.

The Gracchi

But first we have to recall a futile attempt at reform of the economic distresses of the imperial city. It is not so much the actual schemes of the brothers Gracchus which interest us—for the schemes themselves were unworkable and contained as much folly as wisdom—as the manner in which reform was proposed and defeated. The Gracchi themselves, though of plebeian origin, belonged by numerous ties to the liberal aristocracy. Their famous mother, Cornelia—one of the many Roman women who by their influence help to make Roman history so different from Greek—was the daughter of Scipio Africanus. Tiberius, the elder brother, was married to a Claudia; among his friends were Scævola and Crassus. Thus on all sides he belonged to the circle of progressive nobles. His education had been such as one would expect from such surroundings. As their father had died at an early age, it was Cornelia’s task to make her two “jewels” worthy of her glorious name. Accordingly she employed the most eminent Greeks for their tutors. The boys were trained, no doubt, in Greek oratory to declaim in praise of liberty and tyrannicides, in Greek history and political science to divide constitutions up into monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies, and to believe that in the latter all power belongs to the people. At the same time their military training was not neglected; in horsemanship and feats of arms they outshone all their comrades. Their prospects were in every way brilliant and hopeful. While still a youth of about sixteen, Tiberius was elected augur. The proud aristocrat, Appius Claudius, as it is related by Plutarch, offered him the hand of his daughter, and, having secured it, rushed home to announce her betrothal. As soon as his wife heard of it she exclaimed: “Why in such a hurry unless you have got Tiberius Gracchus for our daughter?” It is the misfortune of rhetorical history that all its good characters appear to be prigs and all its bad ones scoundrels; but it is certain that if Tiberius had been content with the easy road to fame which stretched before him in youth, he might without trouble have had the world at his feet. He accompanied his brother-in-law, the younger Africanus, in the last expedition against Carthage. In camp he was the most distinguished of the young officers, and the first to scale the walls of the city. He served his quæstorship in Spain, and there showed all the diplomatic skill of the Cornelian family. He saved an army of 20,000 men from destruction at Numantia. The Spaniards loved him no less for his name than for his uprightness. Thus at the age of thirty-one he had his future assured. A brilliant orator with distinguished public service behind him, he was obviously destined for the consulship in the near future, and then for a huge province, for wealth, fame, and honour.

Call him a prig and a doctrinaire, if you will, for not being content with that prospect. In passing through, on his way to Spain, he had seen the pleasant lands of Tuscany lying forlorn and desolate, chained gangs of foreign slaves working in the fields or tending the flocks of absentee Roman landlords, while the sturdy peasants who should have been in their place were loafing in the streets of Rome. The public land, conquered in war, had sometimes been simply embezzled by Roman politicians; sometimes granted to veteran soldiers only to fall into the hands of speculators. The old Licinian land-law, which had limited the amount of land which might be held in one hand, was openly flouted, and leases were treated as freeholds.

Seeing these things, the young man was filled with a passion for reform, and deliberately devoted his life to that task. The modern historians who call him prig and demagogue do not deny the awful mischief which he set himself to repair. It is hard to know what he should have done to please them. The senate, by now an entrenched stronghold of property dishonestly acquired and privilege dishonestly maintained, could obviously never be converted. Filled with Greek ideas, Tiberius determined to appeal to the demos. That of course was a mistake. There was no such thing as a demos at Rome, and there never had been. The relation between Senate and Comitia was not in the least the same as that between Council and Assembly in Greece. At Rome the Senate deliberated and the Comitia ratified; at Athens the Council prepared business for the Assembly to discuss and decide. It is not that the letter of the constitution really matters—when people are hungry it does not—but that there was lacking at Rome the very elements of democracy, an articulate commons, an organised will of the people. Failing that, any attempt to pose as champion of the people must be a fraud, conscious or unconscious. But it is grossly unfair to Gracchus to suppose that it was conscious. He thought that he was living in a democracy, he thought that a tribune of the plebs might fairly claim to be champion of the people, unaware that the plebs was now an anachronism, and the tribunate merely a clumsy brake on the wheels of the state. In 133 B.C. Tiberius had himself elected as one of the ten tribunes, and immediately prepared to introduce the millennium by legislative process.

He proposed to enforce the old Licinian laws by which no individual citizen could claim a large holding of public land. Then presently, in his childlike ignorance of the tenacity of property, annoyed at the resistance he encountered, he further proposed to make his measure retrospective, so as to evict thousands of noble land-grabbers. The land thus escheated to the state he proposed to lease on nominal terms as small holdings to the poorer citizens of Rome. The distribution was to be carried out by a commission of three. Very unwisely, but probably because there were no men of standing in the senate whom he could trust, he made this commission a family party consisting of himself, his father-in-law, and his young brother. Property was immediately up in arms against him. The liberal senators discovered, as even liberals are apt to do, that one’s own property has a sanctity far superior to other people’s. Accordingly, they took the Roman constitutional method of putting up another tribune to veto the proposals of Tiberius. Thereupon Tiberius, with his fantastic notions of the people and the people’s rights, declared that a tribune who opposed the people was no tribune, and so had Octavius deposed. The senate’s answer was the only constitutional answer left to them, a threat of prosecution when the tribunate should be over. That, of course, made it necessary for Tiberius to perpetuate his office. He gathered a band of followers sworn to protect his life, proposed a string of attractive measures to secure popular support, and stood for a second term of office. The senate put up more tribunes to veto his election. Thus the state was at a deadlock; there were no more resources for such a situation within constitutional limits, so the senators simply girt up their togas and, led by a Scipio, marched down into the forum to settle the question of reform in a truly Roman manner. Tiberius Gracchus was murdered, and his followers left for judicial assassination.

Ten years later Gaius Gracchus, with a similar programme and the added motive of piety to his brother’s memory, took up the campaign afresh. The senate, indeed, having slain the author of reform, had been forced to allow the reforms themselves at any rate to start. Some lands had been redistributed, and when another Scipio got a decree passed to stop the work of the land commission, he too was assassinated. It is clear that by this time the agrarian agitation had been largely appeased; what follows is political merely. The reformers had got the constitution altered to permit the re-election of tribunes, and in 123 Gaius was elected to that office; he was rather more practical, and therefore far more dangerous, than his brother, but the passion for vengeance against the stubborn and brutal nobility had no doubt blinded his judgment. Coupled with the land-agitation there was now a loud demand for political rights by the Italians, who were debarred even from the elementary rights of market and marriage with each other.

The platform upon which Gaius Gracchus stood was a radical one. Henceforth every poor citizen was to be supplied with cheap corn at less than half price, about 4d. a bushel. The land commission was to be restored. The Assembly was to be reorganised upon a new basis, which would destroy the preponderant voting power of the nobility. New colonies were to be founded, including one at Carthage—a most salutary measure. Easier terms of military service were to be granted, including free equipment and the right of appeal. By these measures, some of them wise and just, some of them mere vote-catching devices, Gaius won the support of the people. Then he turned to the second estate—the capitalist Equites. To buy their favour he took up their demand that the taxes of “Asia,” as the Romans called their new province bequeathed to them by King Attalus III., should be put up for auction not locally but in Rome. It seemed to the Romans that since the Asiatics were bound to be plundered in any case, as indeed the inhabitants of Asia Minor always had and always have been plundered, the proceeds might as well flow straight into the pockets of Roman capitalists. To this he added the proposition that the jury-lists should henceforth be drawn from the Equestrian order and the senators excluded. It was probably more iniquitous that money-lenders and governors should be tried by a jury of money-lenders exclusively than that they should come before a jury of governors past and future. Neither would seem to us or to the provincials an ideal arrangement.

Much of this policy, we have to admit, was pure demagogy, but for that the conservative nobles, who cared nothing for the welfare of the state, and were impervious to anything but force, are directly responsible. Gracchus got his measures through the comitia, and secured his re-election for the next year. Feeling that his policy had secured him a large and faithful party of supporters, he now prepared to introduce a measure which he knew to be necessary for the salvation of his country, but which he must equally well have known to be unpopular at Rome, namely, the grant of citizen rights to the Italians. By this we see that Gaius Gracchus, if he sometimes stooped to the arts of the demagogue, was also capable of real statesmanship. The progressive grant of burgess rights as soon as subject peoples were sufficiently Romanised to be fit for them was the old Roman policy, which had made the city great in the past, and kept her safe in the shock of invasion. But the Romans had now become jealous and exclusive. The proposal was detested in Rome. Each side organised its gangs of roughs; there were daily riots in the streets, and at last the senatorial party once more charged down into the forum and slaughtered the second reformer as they had slaughtered the first. In the prosecutions that followed no fewer than 3000 of his partisans were executed.

In all this it is evident that the Roman political system had completely broken down. The constitution had always been incredibly ill-defined. There is no doubt that sovereignty legally belonged to the people, and that senatorial government was a usurpation, as the Gracchi called it. By calling the citizen body of Rome a mob or a rabble you do not alter the rights of the case. It was largely the fault of the Government that they had been allowed to become so selfish, so disorderly, and so corrupt. The extraordinary machinery of the tribunate—ten magistrates, each with an absolute veto upon all government—had made it impossible to find any constitutional method of reform. The policy of Gaius Gracchus was the only possible one if Rome was to be saved, and as a matter of plain fact it was the policy which after a century of unceasing bloodshed Rome eventually adopted. It was to be a disguised monarchy, like that of Pericles at Athens, working on the basis of the tribunician powers. The old ascendancy of the Senate could not stand a challenge; not only did it rest upon no legal title, but it had lost whatever claim to respect it ever possessed on the score of patriotism or statesmanship. For the agrarian problem it had no policy but to hold fast to its ill-gotten lands; to the demands of the Italian allies it had nothing but a miserly “no.” It watched with indifference the ruin of Italy, the degeneracy of Rome, and the oppression of the provincial world. The policy of the Gracchi may have included dreams and nightmares, but it did look forward and hold out hopes. The Gracchi had now definitely started a party system. They had laid the foundation of a democratic movement, and it is Rome’s misfortune that this foundation was built of such rotten materials. The democracy had been bought by bribes, but it had failed to exhibit a spark of disinterested statesmanship. If ever a state needed a master that state was Rome. Henceforth until a master came the condition of Rome and Italy and the provinces was simply deplorable. Nothing could be done in politics without a hired gang of bravos.

Marius

The next conspicuous attempt at reform comes from a genuine son of the people, one of the very few peasants who emerge into the light of history at Rome. In the wretchedly mismanaged Jugurthan war Gaius Marius had shouldered his way to the front by sheer courage and capacity for war through a crowd of cowardly and incompetent aristocrats, who almost openly trafficked with the foreign enemy of Rome. The course of this business requires a brief sketch if we are to understand the condition of Roman government at this period.

The king of the client state of Numidia dying divided his realm between two legitimate sons and one illegitimate, the latter being Jugurtha. This amiable bastard straightway murdered one of his brothers and attacked the other, who fled to the Roman province and appealed to the senate for protection. Jugurtha, already knowing the ropes of senatorial policy, sent envoys with well-filled purses, and easily convinced the senate of his innocence and good intentions. The senate decided to send out a commission to divide the kingdom equitably between Jugurtha and his half-brother. The result of its labours was that Adherbal got the desert and the capital, while Jugurtha got all the fertile part of the country, and the commission returned home rich and happy. Jugurtha had now only to obtain the capital, but as Adherbal refused to fight and kept appealing to Rome, there was nothing for it but to besiege Cirta. Numerous envoys came to Jugurtha from the senate in the course of the siege, but he easily assured them of his pacific intentions. As soon as he had taken the city he put his rival to death with torture, and massacred the entire male population, including a great number of Italian and Roman citizens.

The senate did not feel that this course of action was entirely meritorious, but it required the stimulus of a democratic agitation and another troublesome tribune to induce them to declare war. The senate sent out two of its best men in Bestia and Scaurus; the latter especially was generally reputed to be a veritable Aristides, for he had ventured to protest against the former iniquities. When the Roman army arrived, Jugurtha knew better ways than fighting. He submitted at discretion, surrendered the Roman deserters, whom of course he did not want to keep, and a few elephants, which he soon afterwards repurchased privately. In return he was permitted to retain his kingdom. Once more there were outcries at Rome, voiced by the same democratic tribune Memmius, who insisted that Jugurtha should be summoned to Rome to answer for his sins. Meekly but with bulging moneybags Jugurtha arrived. As soon as Memmius began to cross-examine him another tribune interposed his veto. During his visit Jugurtha was able to purchase a strong party in the senate; he also had time to procure the assassination of an obnoxious fellow-countryman in the city itself. This outrage, combined with the ambition of the new consul, Spurius Albinus, led to another declaration of war, Jugurtha himself being allowed to go home and prepare for it. As he departed he uttered the famous words, “Ah, Rome! Venal city! She would sell herself if she could find a purchaser.”

When Albinus led out the second army, he found it utterly incapable of fighting. It was a band of cowardly brigands, who spent their time in plundering their own province; and when the consul’s brother conceived the spirited project of seizing the king’s treasury for himself, instead of waiting for the more tedious and uncertain profits of bribery, he led the Roman army into an ambush. It surrendered readily. It was forced to go under the yoke, and agree to evacuate all Numidia.

This was a little too much. Another tribune—in all this period we observe the tribunes acting as the heads of popular opposition quite in the Gracchan manner—proposed a special inquiry to investigate the matter, and bring the offenders to justice. Three of the worst—Spurius Albinus, Bestia, and L. Opimius, the destroyer of G. Gracchus—were banished, but the incorruptible Scaurus escaped condemnation by sitting on the bench. The treaty of peace was cancelled, and its author—following the usual Roman custom when armies in awkward places surrendered—was given up to the enemy.

In the third campaign the senate really tried to do its best. Q. Metellus, the new general, belonged to the party of liberal nobles who were in favour of moderate reform. He began well by choosing his officers for military skill—somewhat of an innovation. Among others he chose a brave young farmer, G. Marius. Arrived in Africa, Metellus had first to reduce the Roman army to order, and then, having failed to get his enemy assassinated, marched out to fight him. Jugurtha was beaten in battle (for the Roman army could still fight under decent leadership), and henceforth was driven to guerilla warfare, in which he displayed such remarkable skill that the war soon came to a standstill.

At this point G. Marius, who had achieved popularity and renown through his valour, conceived the ambitious plan of standing for the consulship. It is hard to guess how such an audacious idea can have entered his head, for such an application from a man of no family was entirely without precedent. Somebody at Rome must have whispered the idea. When he asked his consul for permission to go to Rome for the purpose, Metellus was vastly diverted, and suggested that Marius had better wait until his general’s little boy was grown up, in order that he might have a Metellus for a colleague. Probably Marius had little sense of humour, for he did go to Rome, just in time, and was elected consul. Moreover, a special decree entrusted him with command of the army in Africa.

Among his officers was the young legate, L. Cornelius Sulla, and though Marius undoubtedly displayed vigour and competence, it was very largely the luck and diplomacy of Sulla which procured the seizure and surrender of the Numidian king. Marius, however, reaped the glory. Jugurtha graced his triumph (104 B.C.), and soon afterwards perished in a Roman dungeon.

Simultaneously with the Jugurthan war the Romans were called upon to face a far more serious affair, one of those great folk-wanderings from the north which occur periodically in the course of Mediterranean history. The Cimbri and Teutons, who may have numbered ancestors of our own among them, came down from the shores of the Baltic, travelling with their households in a train of waggons which took six days in defiling past the onlooker. These barbarians were terrible to the Romans, with their strange aspect, their long iron swords and savage war-cries, their fair hair and giant stature. But of course they were savages compared to the Romans, and they should never have inflicted more than one defeat on intelligent generals of disciplined armies. As it was, they had to face mutinous legions and incompetent consuls. First they defeated Carbo and overran Gaul; then coming south into the province they beat Silanus and Scaurus; and then, united with the Helvetians, they inflicted a frightful disaster on Longinus, when a Roman legate had to surrender, and another Roman army was sent under the yoke. In 105 a worse thing happened: the great defeat of Arausio (Orange) seemed more fatal even than Cannæ in the extent of its losses. There was a panic in Italy, which seemed helplessly exposed to the fury of the northmen, but fortunately the aimless barbarians wandered off into the west and spent their strength on the warlike Spanish tribes.

As before, popular indignation at Rome, diverted from the real cause of the mischief, the rotten system of cliques which governed them, wasted its fury on individuals. Senators were mobbed and stoned. A proconsul was actually deposed from office. There was only one man deemed capable of dealing with the peril—Marius, the man of the people, the triumphant conqueror of Jugurtha. So, despite laws forbidding re-election, Marius became consul for a second time and a third—five times consul. This was symptomatic of a changed Rome. It was, however, necessary. Amateur generals had had a long trial. From 104 to 100 Marius was continuously chief magistrate of the state, as well as generalissimo of its armies. He did his work. First he had to get his army in hand, and accustom them to the sight of the terrible barbarians. Then he dealt two smashing blows at the Teutons and Cimbri near Aquæ Sextiæ and on the Raudine Plain. It was the misfortune of the Roman system of imperium that no general could attain to eminence in war without at the same time acquiring political importance. Hence Marius in 100 B.C. found himself absolutely first in the Roman state without education or even common sense in politics. He presents a pathetic figure in the turbulent world of Roman statecraft, a war-scarred veteran, the indubitable saviour of Rome, called upon to play the part of a statesman, and yet a mere puppet in the hands of unscrupulous intriguers. First he fell into the hands of two shameless demagogues—Saturninus and Glaucia—who used him to revive the Gracchan revolution. Marius became consul for the sixth time, and a new reform programme was drawn up, including an agrarian law to divide the land conquered from the Cimbri, and incidentally all the land they had conquered, into small holdings for the Marian veterans, Latins and Italians alike. Marius was to have personal charge of the distribution, and this task would make him master of Rome for many years to come. Secondly, there was to be a still further cheapening of corn; and, thirdly, new colonies were to be founded and the Italian allies to have a share in them. Of course there was violent opposition. The senate tried all its old stratagems, tribunician veto, portents, and lastly bludgeons. To meet the latter, Marius whistled his veteran soldiers to his side, and the “Appuleian Laws” were carried, with the addition of a very obnoxious clause that each senator was to take an oath of allegiance to the new legislation within five days on pain of forfeiting his seat. Q. Metellus alone had the courage to prefer exile.

Then, it seems, the senate found it necessary to beguile the great general over to the side of aristocracy. Marius was a child in their hands. He actually boggled at taking the oath to his own laws, and added the remarkable proviso, “So far as they are valid.” Saturninus and Glaucia in their turn tried violence, and Marius led the forces of the senate against them. There was a battle in the forum, the demagogues were slain, and four magistrates of the Roman people put to death without trial. Once more reaction had triumphed. For the time being Marius was politically defunct.

But one side of his work was lasting and fraught with momentous consequences for the Roman state. It was Marius, the first professional general, who formed the first professional army. We noticed that Greece, even before the end of the fifth century, had already begun to use paid and trained soldiers, partly owing to the unwillingness of her comfortable or busy citizens to engage in annual campaigns, but still more because it was found that the more highly trained and better disciplined mercenaries were far more efficient at their business. So for many centuries Rome had now been the only power in the Mediterranean world to rely upon a citizen militia. That citizen militia had indeed conquered the world; but certainly in dealing with the trained troops of Pyrrhus and Hannibal, the Roman forces had always begun with disaster and slowly been schooled to their trade by defeat. So it was now in the Jugurthan and Cimbric wars: the generals had to train their armies in the face of the enemy, and while that is no doubt the best training ground it is terribly dangerous and expensive. It implies, too, an almost inexhaustible stock of recruits to fall back upon. With the decline of Italian agriculture and the growth of city life the stock of recruits was no longer inexhaustible. Moreover the art of war was becoming more intricate. Rome found it necessary to appoint a genuine soldier for her general against Jugurtha in view of the disastrous failures of aristocratic amateurs. In the same way Marius found it necessary to overhaul the Roman fighting machine, and by the end of his five years of successive consulship he had organised a professional army on much the same system as our own. Rome like England required a highly trained expeditionary force and behind it a large reserve. The principal change instituted by Marius seemed at first a small one and required no legislative sanction. Hitherto the army had consisted only of the propertied classes, the infantry of those who could afford a suit of arms, and the cavalry of the richest citizens who could maintain one of the state horses. The minimum property for a Roman soldier is said to have been £115. The poorest had originally formed a light-armed support, the three middle classes were the line, and the richest the cavalry. But the three classes of the line had by now come to be drawn up not according to property but according to length of service. This was the traditional battle formation of the Roman infantry maniples:

with the cavalry upon the wings. But social changes were changing the army. As wealth increased and the gulf between rich and poor grew wider the comfortable burgesses were no longer obedient or willing soldiers. Bad discipline—a monstrous violation of the old Roman spirit—had begun to appear in the ranks as early as the Macedonian wars. In the Jugurthan wars it was deplorably rife. The equestrian class as the richest was also the most mutinous: as early as the third century the knights had refused to work in the trenches alongside of the legionaries. By 140 B.C. they had ceased to act as a military force and become merely a grade of honour, or rather of income, in the state, though the younger knights continued to form a corps of noble guards to the general. As for the army as a whole, the theory down to the time of Marius was still that of the annual spring campaign; each consul levied his own army for a specific purpose. This levy had become more and more difficult. The simple innovation which Marius introduced was that in the process of holding his levy he began by asking for volunteers and enrolling those first. There was generally a distinct promise of rewards on discharge. Thus instead of the moneyed classes Marius filled his ranks with the poorest and hardiest inhabitants of Rome and Italy. Of course the obligation to serve still remained part of the condition of certain subject peoples. The auxiliary ranks were now supplied by foreign experts—cavalry from the Numidian deserts or the Ligurian hills, slingers from the Balearic Islands, and presently archers from Crete. Having thus professionalised his army Marius proceeded to abolish all distinctions in the ranks. All the men of the line now had a uniform equipment supplied by the state, and instead of a bewildering variety of insignia all the legionaries now fought under that emblem destined to be carried in victory to the four corners of Europe—the silver eagle. The eagle was the standard of the legion and it was regarded as sacred. In camp it rested in a special shrine and terrible was the disgrace attaching to its loss in battle. Hitherto legions had been gathered for each campaign and disbanded at its close. Now a legion had a permanent existence, a fixed number, a tradition and an esprit de corps of its own. It was now a larger unit of 6000 men; for while the maniple or company of 120 men still remained, the maniples were grouped into cohorts or battalions, which now became the regular tactical unit, and ten cohorts formed the legion.

Beside the body-armour consisting of helmet, cuirass, and cylindrical shield,[14] the uniform equipment of the legionary included the pilum, a short heavy javelin for throwing (it is interesting to notice that whereas Marius had the point loosely attached to the shaft so as to break off in the shield or body of the enemy, Julius Cæsar actually invented what may fairly be called a “Dum-Dum pilum” with a soft nose for stopping the rush of barbarians), and the short broad-bladed sword[15] which had been copied from the Spanish swordsmen in the Second Punic War. The latter was a very handy little weapon only about thirty inches long including the hilt, with two edges as well as a point, though the thrust was always advocated in preference to the cut. Marius now introduced a new drill which included lessons in fencing given in the first instance by masters from the gladiatorial schools. Though bloodshed be abhorrent to the learned, many a scholar would like to have witnessed the combat between the Roman gladius and the Cimbrian claymore. It must be repeated that the Roman maniple, unlike the close Greek phalanx, stood in open order with a six-foot square of space for each man so that there was room for individual prowess in swordsmanship. Lastly, Marius still further professionalised his army by introducing a system of bounties on discharge which made the army a really attractive career for poor citizens. He promised them each a farm at the end of the war and his example was followed by other generals. In fact a veteran soldier came to expect a handsome pension on retirement.

PlateXIII: SCABBARD OF LEGIONARY SWORD

It is surely unnecessary to emphasise the meaning of all this. An army was now a trained corps against which no levy of recruits could stand for an instant. Hitherto it had been the chief guarantee against usurpation by a general that new armies could be summoned from the soil at any time. Now there was a weapon in the hands of a successful general against which the feeble safeguards of the republican constitution were powerless. As with the first trained army in English history, the general of such a force became master of the destinies of the state so long as the allegiance of the soldiers was personal rather than patriotic. The Roman soldier’s allegiance had always been personal and now it became more so. Moreover the Roman constitution had never sought to distinguish military from civil power. Hence that day in 100 B.C., when the Appuleian code was carried under threat of the legions of Marius, was of evil omen for the constitution. Less than twenty years were to elapse before a Roman army entered Rome in triumph to support the political enactments of Sulla. It is in reality henceforward one long state of civil war, open or concealed, between rival generals, until at last a permanent military monarchy was established. It only required a bold free spirit like that of Julius Cæsar to discern the real facts of the case. Marius, as we have already seen, had not sufficient intellect to play a political part with success; Sulla attained what was really a monarchical position but retired when he had won it. Pompeius never had the courage to face the situation. Cæsar had, but he was sacrificed to the republican tradition. Finally the diplomatic Augustus realised the long inevitable fact.

Henceforth, then, it is merely a question of who shall be Emperor of Rome. The causes of the end of Rome’s incoherent constitutional system, called by us a Republic, are already clear. There are the constitutional causes—above all the inelasticity of the Roman system, which made legitimate reform impossible, provided no machinery to express the will of the people, and rendered it inevitable that rioting should accompany every change. It was a constitution essentially municipal and the tribunate was the centre of mischief. Then there are the economic causes, now working more banefully than ever, and causing the decay of the agricultural population, the rise of a dangerous uneducated city proletariat, and the corruption of the governing aristocracy. There was the political fact that the government of a vast ill-organised empire destroyed the Republican spirit and further increased corruption, while it denationalised the Roman temper. Lastly, there is the military cause, namely, the professionalisation of the army, putting excessive power into the hands of the general and replacing patriotism by esprit de corps.

It strikes the onlooker that no one of these evils, nor even the accumulation of them, need have been fatal to the republican system if there had been a genuine spirit of patriotic enthusiasm determined to overcome them. For instance, if the great men of Rome had been loyal and patriotic there is no reason why the excessive power of the generals should have led to high treason. And again, though the provincial system was misbegotten it might have been corrected and reformed. But it was the spirit that failed. Was not that just because Roman power had outstripped Roman civilisation? For the upper-class Roman, faith was dead or dying, and there were no high interests of the mind to replace it. Fighting was their sole inherited interest and their tastes were correspondingly brutal and bloody. The last agony of the Republic in the period we are now considering is painful enough, but the wise will surely regard it as the period in which a new and much more hopeful order of things was gradually evolved.

Sulla

On the extinction of Marius there arose Sulla. Sulla was the aristocrat of talent, almost of genius, who tried to save the state by reaction. He tried, vainly and foolishly enough, to bolster up the rickety structure of senatorial ascendancy, but had not the patience or the wisdom to attempt even that with any thoroughness. L. Cornelius Sulla was of the class of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belong, but an inferior specimen of the class. Though of noble birth he had risen from poverty and obscurity by his own talents. He was clever—and he did the most foolish acts in history. He was handsome—and his face in later life is described as “a mulberry speckled with meal.” He was brave and successful in war; half lion and half fox, they said, and the fox was the more dangerous of the two. He secured the affections of his soldiers by giving them free licence to plunder or to murder unpopular officers. He was a rake and a gambler, reckless of bloodshed as he was careless of praise or blame, and he had that fatal belief in a star which has led better men than him to follow will-o’-the-wisps. He might have stood where Cæsar stands. He would have made a very typical bad emperor, and whatever it was that made him decline to be one, it was not patriotism. He was as cultured as Nero, and showed it by sacking Athens, plundering Delphi, and looting a famous library. Like Nero, but unlike the majority of his fellow-countrymen, he had a sense of humour.

After the shelving of Marius and the destruction of his democratic associates the governing clique pursued its old course of headlong folly. For one thing the aristocrats soon fell out with the capitalists, which is always an unwise thing for aristocrats to do. The equestrian jury-courts established by Gracchus acted with brutal simplicity on behalf of their tax-gathering and tax-farming brothers against whatever honest governors proceeded from the senate. Men were condemned for honest administration in those days. For another thing the bitter cry of the Italian “allies,” who bore all the hard knocks of the Roman service, and in return got nothing but servitude, was persistently and contemptuously ignored. In 95 a consular law flatly prohibited them from ever claiming the franchise. But presently there came forward a new reformer in M. Livius Drusus. This remarkable man might be described as a third Gracchus, only that he saw the futility of the so-called democracy of Rome, and adopted other means to attain his ends. On the one hand he was a champion of the senate against the knights, and on the other hand he was resolved to give the Italians their rights. He seems to have promoted a widespread secret organisation among the Italians. He then proposed four measures: the inevitable vote-catching corn law and agrarian law, the jury-courts to be restored to the senate, the senate for that purpose to be enlarged by the inclusion of three hundred knights, and, lastly, citizenship for the allies. The first three were carried, not without violence, but the fourth was his stumbling-block. The Italians were by now so clamorous that civil war was inevitable if it were refused, and no man denied the justice of their claim. But neither justice nor expediency had any power to move the dead weight of senatorial conservatism. Drusus was murdered and his laws repealed. That was the signal for the long and terrible Social War which completed the ruin of Italy and caused grave alarm for the very existence of Rome herself. In the course of this struggle and in fear for her existence Rome yielded in fact, if not openly, to the demand of the Italians. Some states received the franchise as a reward for fidelity and others as a bait for submission. By a law of 89 all Italians who applied to the prætor within sixty days received the citizenship, and this belated concession had its effect. The face of Italy had been covered with mourning to secure it. Even so the governing clique succeeded in nullifying the political value of the concession by confining the Italians along with the Roman freedmen to a few of the tribes so that their votes were almost useless.

The pressure of this war and of the great Mithradatic war which began simultaneously in Asia led to a serious economic crisis at Rome. Debt and usury were the symptoms, and when a prætor tried to meet it by reviving the old laws against usury he was murdered in his priestly robes at sacrifice. Now we begin to hear the ominous cry of “Novæ tabulæ”—the clean slate for debtors. A popular orator named Sulpicius Rufus, whose programme included the exclusion of all bankrupts from the senate, protected his valuable person with a bodyguard of 3000 hired roughs, and organised a mock senate of 300 high-spirited young bloods. Then, since Sulla with his army threatened opposition, he passed a decree giving the command of the great army destined to fight Mithradates to the old Marius. During the Social War both these generals had held command with some success, but on the whole the reputation of Marius had declined while that of Sulla had increased. Without hesitation Sulla now marched his army into Rome, and won a battle in the streets of the city. Sulpicius was of course executed, his head was nailed to the rostra, and Marius escaped under circumstances of romantic adventure. Sulla was thus in the year 88 completely master of Rome.

At this moment his real ambition was for more fighting. Mithradates, King of Pontus,[16] was then in full career of rebellion against the Roman dominion in Asia, where 80,000 Roman traders and money-lenders were murdered in a sudden mutiny. Sulla saw in Mithradates a worthy foeman, and much preferred glory on the fields of Asia to Roman politics; and besides, his army was clamouring for plunder. So he hastily flung out a series of constitutional reforms designed to restore the senate to more than its ancient predominance, and then set out for the East, heedless or ignorant of the fact that he had not really changed anything. On the contrary he had left at Rome in sole charge the new consul, Cinna, the worst and most dangerous of all the demagogues. Sulla—most innocent of reprobates—seems to have fancied that an oath to obey his constitution would restrain such a man at such a time.

Consequently as soon as his back was turned a fresh revolution broke out. Cinna also brought an army to Rome and invited Marius to return. Then the old general, furious with all his disappointments, began a fearful debauch of bloodshed. Every distinguished senator left in Rome, including statesmen like L. Cæsar, soldiers like Catulus, orators like Antonius and Crassus, were butchered by his slaves and their heads displayed in the forum. In 86 Marius gained the goal of his ambition, that seventh consulship which had been promised him long ago by a prophet. In the same year he died. Now for four years Cinna ruled as monarch at Rome. Year after year he assumed the consulship and nominated the other magistrates at his own choice without the formality of election. He repealed the laws of Sulla, equalised all the citizens in the tribes, and reduced all debts by 75 per cent. It is the last measure which is truly typical of Roman democracy. Meanwhile, of course, the reckoning was in preparation across the seas. Sulla was winning glorious victories in Greece and Asia, and at length in 84, drove Mithradates to surrender temporarily. Cinna, who does not seem to have understood that a Roman army belonged not to the republic but to its general, audaciously set out to supersede Sulla, and was murdered by the troops.

Plate XIV. GN. POMPEIUS MAGNUS

Sulla, having offered terms which the government very foolishly declined, came home in 83 after five years’ absence bearing not peace but a sword. He had five veteran legions of his own, the exiled aristocrats joined him, and among them a young man called Pompeius with three more legions. The lead of the democratic party had now fallen into the hands of a young Marius, and he having no troops to oppose the returning veterans decided to join the Samnite rebels who remained unconquered from the Social War. Before leaving the city they ordered a final and still more bloody massacre of the surviving aristocrats; practically all the men of distinction left in the city suffered death. Sulla had to fight 40,000 Samnites at the Colline Gate of Rome, and after a desperate struggle was victorious. The young Marius committed suicide. Thus Sulla was once more master of Rome. His 8000 Samnite prisoners were slaughtered in the Circus. Of the Roman democrats, 80 senators, 3600 equites, and over 2000 private citizens were proscribed, and their heads nailed up in the forum. In Spain, Sertorius, an honest and valorous democrat, maintained a gallant struggle by the aid of a miraculous deer, and a native Spanish army trained on the Roman model, until at last he fell by treachery.

For two years Sulla was monarch at Rome. For the purpose he invented a sort of revival of the obsolete dictatorship, without limit of time and without a colleague. If we care for the term, Sulla was at that time as much “Emperor” as Augustus. He enacted a whole constitution of his own—which it is scarcely necessary to recount since scarcely anything of it survived—all destined to put the senate on its throne again, and then simply abdicated and retired into private life. I think he was bored with Rome and politics. It is generally admitted that he had a sense of humour. It was a very foolish thing to do. But Sulla’s star was with him and he died in his bed. His dying moments were comforted by the apparition of his deceased wife (he had had five) and son, who invited him to join them in the land of peace and bliss beyond the grave.

Sulla was hardly dead before another consul had marched against Rome with his army and suffered defeat in the city. But these were mere episodes. The streets of the sacred city were in a perpetual state of war: every serious politician had to organise his gang of roughs, and when the very senate-house was burnt down in one such encounter it only seemed an excessive display of political zeal. Of constitutional government there was little pretence. The seas were swarming with pirates, no longer isolated rovers who preyed upon commerce, but an organised pirate-state with head-quarters in Cilicia, and a great fleet consisting of all the broken men and desperate outlaws of the unhappy Mediterranean world. They sailed the high seas in fleets under admirals who voyaged in state like princes. For their homes they had impregnable citadels among the creeks of the Cilician and Dalmatian coasts where they stored their families and their plunder. They were not afraid to march inland to sack a city or loot a rich temple. Commerce at sea was ruined, even the food-supply of the capital was occasionally cut off. On land and even in Italy things were not much better. All through Republican history (but seldom afterwards) we hear of risings among the slaves of Italy. Now, under the plantation system, the inaccessible Apennine highlands were swarming with desperate runaways who constantly committed minor acts of brigandage. In 73 they found a leader in Spartacus, the gladiator who was said to be of royal descent in Thrace. Starting as a mere handful the band swelled in the course of a few months to 40,000. Roman armies one after another and ten in all marched against them in vain. Two consuls were defeated, many eagles were captured, Italy was at their mercy. Respectable towns like Thurii and Nola were seized, their prisoners were crucified like slaves or forced with grim irony to fight one another to the death like gladiators. Thus the most frightful form of civil war was devastating Italy. It was necessary to raise an army of eight legions to crush the slaves, and the command was entrusted to Marcus Crassus, who even then had to decimate a legion before he could get his cowardly troops to stand and fight. After several stubborn battles, and aided by the want of discipline which was even more conspicuous among the slaves than among the Romans, Crassus accomplished his task. Six thousand crucified slaves who lined the road from Capua to Rome testified to the restoration of order.

Abroad matters were little better. The war against Mithradates, which had provided so many Roman triumphs and had so often been proclaimed at an end, actually lasted for twenty-five years, and its duration was due rather to the ineptitude of the government than to the prowess of the unmilitary Asiatics. In Spain it took ten years to defeat Sertorius with his native troops, and even then the result was only accomplished by assassination. If a Hannibal had entered Italy in these latter days the state could not have survived. But there was only one military power of any consequence left in the world in those days, the Parthians. Here there were half-hellenised despots ruling over tribes of warriors only lately descended from the Caucasian and Armenian highlands, and still nursing a fierce mountain spirit though they occupied the rich plains of Mesopotamia. Crassus, the victor over the slaves, was sent to fight them with a great army, but the millionaire displayed wretched ignorance of strategy and especially of the perils of Eastern warfare. He blundered on into the wilderness and tried to meet the terrible horse-bowmen and mail-clad lancers of the East with his legions in a hollow square. The result was the great disaster of Carrhæ in 53, a defeat which amid all the shameful ignominies of this period rankled continually owing to the loss of the eagles and the tragic fate of the leader. Marcus Crassus himself was an almost wholly repulsive character, who had amassed a fortune, colossal even in those days of millionaires, by the most discreditable method. The foundations of his millions had been laid by speculating in the property of the victims of Sulla’s proscriptions. He had been a slave-trainer on a large scale and at one time he had organised a private fire-brigade which he used for acquiring house-property cheaply by blackmail. By lending money to the young spendthrifts of the aristocracy he obtained great influence at Rome, and indeed figures in the wretched politics of his day as a statesman on equality with really great men like Cæsar and Pompeius. But he had no policy and was only of importance through his wealth and influence.

Pompeius and Cæsar

So we come to the final phase of the Republic—the great struggle between the giants Cæsar and Pompeius, with figures like Cicero, Cato, and Clodius in the background. I do not propose to linger over this period, because on the one hand it is so thoroughly well known as the period of fullest evidence in all Roman history, and therefore would require a volume for adequate treatment, and on the other hand because it has been such a battle-ground for partisan historians of all times that it is difficult in such a summary as this to do justice without detailed argument.

Gneius Pompeius the Great[17] had first come into prominence as a supporter of Sulla. He was of high official family and was a born soldier. That is really the secret of his career. Like Marius he was a general and no statesman, but he was a very great general, and one of the few honest men, one might almost say one of the few gentlemen, of his period. The tragedy of his life was to be born in such a period. He had disdained the minor offices of state, and relying on his military renown but in defiance of the law, he stood for the consulship in 70 B.C. As the official aristocracy objected he went over to the democrats, and allied himself with Crassus. These two, elected under threat of Pompeius’s army, straightway repealed most of the Sullan constitution, and restored the balance of power to the knights and the assembly. At the end of the year Pompeius retired into private life. This was characteristic of him; he was capable of grandiose schemes but he lived in fear of public opinion, and he was really moved when orators spoke of illegality. Meanwhile there was a loud demand for some comprehensive scheme of attack upon the pirates. No ordinary

Plate XV. BUST OF CICERO

consular command would do. Even the Roman senate was by this time convinced that it was useless to send legions and cavalry against pirate ships. Accordingly a Gabinian Law of 67 gave to Pompeius a command of unprecedented magnitude. Millions of money were voted to him, he was to be supreme over all the seas and all the coasts for fifty miles inland for three years, with a staff of twenty-five legates, and all governors were to obey his orders. The price of corn fell at once: Pompeius discovered abundance of it in the granaries of the Sicilian corn trust. Then he began a systematic drive of the seas, and in about three months had cleared them. Thousands of pirates were caught and crucified. All this made Pompeius the most powerful and the most dangerous man in Rome.

Next the tribune Manilius, in whose favour that rising novus homo the friend of our youth, Marcus Tullius Cicero, pronounced an oration, gave to Pompeius another huge commission against Mithradates, the irrepressible rebel of Asia. Pompeius succeeded where all his predecessors, from Sulla to Lucullus, had failed, and the wicked old king was driven to suicide. Then Pompeius proceeded to organise the East like an Alexander, but always in perfect loyalty to Rome.

While Pompeius was absent the so-called democracy, which mostly consisted of hired ruffians in the pay of discontented nobles, ruled the streets of the city. Among the young nobles who took this side was one more dissolute and more foppish than the rest, a notorious adulterer and spendthrift, Gaius Julius Cæsar. Though of the highest birth—the goddess Venus by her marriage with the father of Æneas was among his ancestors—he was also by lineage associated with the democracy. His aunt was the wife of Marius, and his wife was a daughter of Cinna. He began his public career quaintly enough as pontifex maximus. When Julia the widow of Marius died, young Cæsar had the audacity to display images and utter an oration in praise of Marius. This, as was intended, set all the gossips talking, and his amazing extravagance kept him well in the public eye. On one occasion he exhibited three hundred gladiators in silver armour, although he was known to be penniless. Probably Crassus was his financier all along.

At this time there was another of the frequently recurring financial crises at Rome. Everybody was deeply in debt, and loud rose the cry for the clean slate, as part of the democratic programme—the only intelligible part. This was the cause of the famous conspiracy of Catiline, who, if Cicero may be trusted, proposed to seize and burn Rome by the aid of the discontented Sullan colonists in Etruria. Both Cæsar and Crassus are said to have favoured the plot, but it is exceedingly difficult to see what a large owner of Roman house property had to gain by it. Cicero was the consul for the year 63, and though it is the fashion just now to sneer at Cicero, he seems to have displayed courage and promptitude in dealing with the conspirators. Unfortunately his arrest and execution of Catiline was technically illegal. Cicero himself, as a parvenu, was naturally an aristocrat, and his policy, though futile, was intelligible. Briefly, it was to unite the senate with the capitalist class in what he called the “union of the orders” against the democratic elements of disorder. Pompeius came home from the East to find the conspiracy crushed. He and his legions were not wanted. With incredible folly and ingratitude the senate, led by Cicero, refused even to grant the lands he had promised to his veterans.