so small and insignificant a people could have the madness even to
dream of being able to stand against the Romans. During the fifty
years which had elapsed since they had been under their protection,
they had been quite inactive: they had only carried on petty and
trifling wars, and as they had ceased to have a standing army, they
had nothing but militia, which was still to be properly trained. They
had spent their time, while they were well off, in sensual indulgence,
and had neglected everything which they ought to have done for their
armament; so that they were not prepared for the chance of a danger
which might try their utmost strength, as may be seen from the newly
discovered fragments of Polybius. A wanton luxury and moral degeneracy,
the contemplation of which awakens most dismal thoughts, was now rife
among them. They came, as we have said, to the resolution of waging
war; and they were joined by the Bœotians and Chalcidians, the latter
of whom may have feared for their newly recovered freedom. These
transactions are, however, very obscure. The Ætolians did not take
part with them, perhaps from revenge and a malignant joy at seeing
the downfall of their rivals. Critolaus led a small army to Thessaly,
in all likelihood with the hope that the false Philip would still be
able to hold out, and that the Romans would thus be placed between
two fires: for it was thought that the Macedonians would go on with
the war, and that the Thessalians perhaps would rise in a body. But
in Macedon all was over. Heraclea, which before had sided with the
Achæans, was in fact separated from them by the Romans: an Achæan
detachment, which had already penetrated through Thermopylæ, and was
besieging Heraclea, quickly fled at the approach of Metellus and the
Romans to the main army, and joined Critolaus, who had not yet reached
Thermopylæ. Experience indeed had shown that this pass could be turned;
yet the very place ought surely to have called upon the Greeks to die a
glorious death: but they did the very worst thing that they could have
done; for they made off in all haste for the Isthmus, and when near
Scarphea,[60] Metellus came up with their rear-guard, being seized
by a sudden panic, they were scattered like chaff before the wind.
Critolaus disappeared: the most likely supposition is that he sank with
his horse in the marshes on the sea-shore, though it is possible that
they who told this, may also have meant by this mysterious account to
designate him as the evil genius of Greece. The Romans now entered
Bœotia, and fell in at Chæronea with the Arcadian contingent of one
thousand men, which, at the tidings of the battle, was trying to
retreat. The misery of Greece is described by Polybius, and we then
see how unjust it was to this great man to have looked upon him as
having no feeling for the fate of his native country. Metellus advanced
towards the Isthmus. The whole population of Thebes had left it, and
had fled for refuge to Cithæron and Helicon; Metellus took the town,
and treated it with much forbearance: he wished to end the war, and
to deal mildly with the Greeks. But that he could not do; for which
the Greeks themselves, as well as their stars, are to be blamed. In
almost all the towns it was the same as in Thebes; no one thought of
making a stand. At the same time, a Roman fleet went to Peloponnesus,
and, landing on the coast of Elis, barbarously ravaged the country,
the Achæans not being able anywhere to protect their shores: the
contingent belonging to those parts did not now go to the Isthmus; it
tried to defend its own towns, but in vain. Diæus, who, on the death of
Critolaus, had seized upon the office of _strategus_, and had posted
himself near Megara, at the approach of Metellus, retreated to the
Isthmus. Now indeed the Achæans might have made peace; for Metellus
was a great soul, and had the safety of Greece at heart. He offered
to negotiate; but Diæus, whose faction had the upperhand at Corinth,
thought that he was able to maintain the Isthmus: reckless as he was,
he scouted every proffer like a madman. How lucky it would have been
if, like Papius Brutulus, he had thought of opening, by his own death,
to his country, the prospect of tranquillity! It would then have been
an easy thing for the Achæans to have gotten a peace, in which the
existence of the single states would have been maintained.
Before Metellus reached the Isthmus, Mummius hastened to take the
command of the army. Mummius was not of so mild a disposition as
Metellus; he sought laurels for himself, and booty for the Romans. He
tried to come up before Metellus could have concluded a peace: for the
latter, although a plebeian like Mummius, was of a family which had
long been in possession of the curule dignities, and being a _nobilis_,
he could easily have carried the peace in the senate; Mummius was a
_novus homo_, and not one of the aristocracy. Diæus had enlisted all
the slaves who were able to bear arms, and yet he had only got together
an army of fourteen thousand men, though there had been more than half
a century of peace: this, more than anything, shows in what a wretched
moral and political condition the country was; for wealthy the Achæans
undoubtedly were. These had their heads turned by an advantage which
they won in a cavalry fight, and they provoked the Romans to a battle,
which was soon so utterly lost as to leave no hope of safety. They
ought to have defended the impregnable Acrocorinthus; but the whole
population of Corinth fled into the Arcadian mountains, and the town
and the citadel were abandoned, not a soul having remained behind.
On the third day after the battle, Mummius, who would not believe it
possible that they had given up every thought of defence, ordered
the gates to be broken open, and convinced himself that the city was
deserted. The pillage of Corinth; Mummius’ barbarian honesty; and the
burning of the most wealthy commercial town then in Europe, are well
known facts. The booty was immense: all the Corinthians were sold for
slaves, and the most noble works of art were carried away. In the same
manner, Thebes and Chalcis were destroyed: with regard to other towns,
we have no distinct information. Thebes, in Pausanias’ times, was only
a small village within the Cadmea. The inhabitants of the whole of
the Peloponnesus would have been sold into slavery, had not Polybius,
through his friend Scipio, managed to get some merciful decrees from
the senate.
Greece was changed into a Roman province, a few places only, like
Sparta and Athens, remaining _liberæ civitates_: the real province was
Achaia, the prætor of which had the other Greek districts under his
rule as dependencies. Phocis and Bœotia were to pay tribute, a thing
which they had never done even in the days of the Macedonian sway.
Moreover, they got a uniform constitution, which Polybius had a hand in
bringing about, and which is said to have contributed greatly towards
the reviving of the country. But the national strength was paralysed by
the law, that no one should possess landed property in a state to which
he did not politically belong; all the συστήματα of the peoples were
done away with; all _concilia_, and most likely, all _connubia_ and
_commercia_ were forbidden: the territory of Corinth was added to the
_ager publicus_. Polybius now returned to the land of his fathers, to
obtain for his unhappy countrymen as fair conditions as he could. But
his lot was that of a physician who performs on his wife or his child
the most painful and dangerous cure: it is his love which animates him
in his task; and yet it is that very love which, in such an operation,
rends his heart with thrice the agony that it does that of others. This
courage is more than heroism: to bear up under such a trial, where
once he had lived happily; not to despair amid the general dismay, and
even then only to get the tyrants to keep within bounds; and after all
to attain at last to a certain end, truly bespeaks a great soul. The
author of a petulant essay on Polybius which was published a few years
ago, has only exposed himself by his incapability of understanding the
sterling greatness of the man. It was through Polybius that the statue
of Philopœmen was restored; and all the concessions which were at all
favourable to Greece, were owing to nothing but his endeavours alone.
WARS IN SPAIN. VIRIATHUS. DESTRUCTION OF NUMANTIA.
In Spain, fortune was so far from smiling on the Romans, that it seemed
as if fate wished to remind them of a Nemesis, as the slave did the
warrior in his triumph. The Spanish wars may be divided into periods.
The first goes down to the end of the second Punic war; the second,
to the treaty of Gracchus by which the Romans ruled over Catalonia,
Valencia, Andalusia, as well as western Aragon and eastern Castile, and
also acquired a kind of supremacy over the Celtiberians. The violation
of this peace by the fortification of Segida, called forth a fresh
struggle which we may name as the first Celtiberian war: M. Claudius
Marcellus had then the command; it lasted three or four years.
Out of the war against the Lusitanians, in which Galba by his
faithlessness had branded the Roman name with dishonour, that of
Viriathus sprang. This man, who was a Lusitanian, had been a common
shepherd and also a robber, as is very often the case with herdsmen in
southern Europe, even as it is to this very day in Italy; and having
been among those Lusitanians towards whom Galba had behaved with
such infamous treachery, he had vowed implacable revenge against the
Romans. He placed himself at the head of a small band; for in Spain it
is characteristic of the nation to have a continual guerilla warfare,
for which the Spaniards have a turn, owing to the nature of their
country, and also from their disposition, law and order not having
the least power over them, while personal qualities are everything.
Viriathus enjoyed unbounded confidence as the hero of the nation.
He seldom engaged with the Romans in a pitched battle; but to lie in
ambush, to cut off supplies, to go round the enemy, to scatter quickly
after a defeat, were the ways in which he would wage war. By his great
skill he wore out the Roman generals, more than one of whom lost his
life against him. The history of his achievements, imperfectly as we
know it, is exceedingly interesting. For eight years[61] (605-612),
he maintained himself against the Romans; they would march against
him with a superior force, and yet he always got out of their reach,
and then would suddenly show himself in their rear, or hem them in on
impassable roads, and rob them of their baggage, and cut them to pieces
in detail. By these means, he gained the whole of the country for
himself; only the inhabitants of the coast of Andalusia, who had ever
been the least warlike, remained subject to the Romans, being quickly
latinized. Among these, therefore, Viriathus made his appearance as a
foe; but the ground which was particularly friendly to him, lay from
Portugal, all through Estremadura, as far as Aragon: here he moved
remarkably quickly with his light horse and foot. Seldom did he meet
with loss against the Romans. The Celtiberians also he managed to win
over to his side: they did not indeed carry on their warfare according
to his plan, but still, as is always the case with Spaniards, they
sought the same end in a way of their own. The Romans saw themselves
reduced to the necessity of concluding with him a formal peace, in
which they acknowledge him as _socius_ and _amicus populi Romani
æquissimo jure_, and by which he and his people became completely
sovereign,--a peace the like of which the Romans had hardly ever made
before. On his side it was honestly meant; whereas the Romans, on the
contrary, did not deem themselves bound to keep a treaty which was
so utterly at variance with their maxims. The Roman proconsul Cæpio
wished for a triumph and booty, like all the Roman generals of that
time; and so he rekindled the war, having with an utter want of faith
been authorized by the senate to do harm to Viriathus, wherever it
was in his power. Thus the war broke out anew, though negotiations
were seemingly going on. Traitors were found who offered to murder
Viriathus: they accomplished the deed in his tent, and, before any
body was aware of his death, escaped to the Romans, from whom they
received the price of blood. All that the Lusitanians could now do,
was to bury him with an enthusiasm which has become famous in history
(612): the friends of this great man fought with each other over his
grave, until they fell. Treachery like this is often met with among the
Iberians:--the Celtiberians, however, are to be excepted. The character
of the Spaniards has in many points remained entirely the same; and
though we must lay not a few such cases to the charge of that fearful
party spirit of theirs, which still displays itself as strong as ever,
of them most particularly the saying holds good, that friendship dies,
but that hatred is immortal. Another characteristic has continued to
distinguish them even to this day: they are hardly fit for any thing
in the lines, and they have shown themselves great in battles only
at times, and under great generals,--under Hamilcar and Hannibal, in
ancient history; in the middle ages and afterwards, under Gonsalvo de
Cordova who formed the Spanish infantry, down to the duke of Alva,
under whom it still was excellent: from thence it began to decline.[62]
The Lusitanians now went on with the war under several other generals;
but none of the successors of Viriathus was as great as he was,--there
was not the same confidence in their personal qualities. D. Junius
Brutus Callaicus concluded a peace with them, and they accepted the
offer of settling as a sort of Roman colony in Valencia, where they
founded the town of that name: the climate there is most softening,
so that they soon lost their warlike character. It is remarkable with
what ease the same Brutus made conquests in the north-west of Spain,
and the north-east of Portugal; and also in modern times, these peoples
have shown little perseverance, except against the Moorish rule. He is
the first Roman who advanced beyond the Minho into the country of the
Callæcians; but his campaign did not leave any lasting consequences,
although it made a deep impression in those parts.
These conquests, which shed such lustre upon Rome, took place at
the very time when the wars with the Celtiberians were carrying on
so unsuccessfully. This people was divided in several small tribes,
of which the Belli, Titthi, and Arevaci were the chief. Of their
constitution we have no satisfactory idea. Southern Spain seems to have
been ruled by kings; the Celtiberians were republican, and perhaps had
highly popular institutions: besides which, as in Greece, the most
important towns had a free and independent existence of their own,
Termantia or Termestia, and Numantia being in the first rank among
those of the Arevaci. The Celtiberian wars began in 609, and ended in
619 or 620: when we bear in mind what the races were which held out in
them, their great length is well nigh inconceivable. At first, most of
the Celtiberians were under arms; little by little, one place after the
other fell off. Numantia lay in a very strong position, amid ravines
and torrents, near the spot where Soria now stands: whether it is true
that it had no walls, or whether this be only said in imitation of
the accounts of Sparta, can no longer be made out. They were able to
send but eight thousand men into the field, a number which was greatly
lessened in the course of the war: at the time of the blockade, there
were not more than four thousand left. Twice the Romans make a peace
with them, and twice did they break it again: at last, Scipio was once
more charged with the commission of torturing to death a noble people.
The year 611 was that of the consulship of Q. Pompeius, who, to
distinguish him from another of the same name, is called _Auli filius_:
he was appointed to the command in Spain. He is the ancestor of Cn.
Pompeius Magnus, who stood at the head of the aristocracy of his day,
and he himself figured as one of the leaders of that class, although
the son of a very humble musician. As he leagued himself with the
_nobiles_, he was welcome to them, and was received into their ranks;
so that even before he was consul, he had already a powerful party.
How he raised himself, is uncertain: according to some, he did it by
dishonourable means; yet he was a man of talent. His very opposite was
Tib. Sempronius Gracchus, who was of a plebeian house, but of most
ancient nobility: the latter was at the head of the popular party. Q.
Pompeius led his army against the Numantines, and was unsuccessful:
they took his camp, and brought him to very great straits. Being in
this plight, he offered peace: the Numantines, but only for form’s
sake, were to give hostages, whom he was to return to them; they were
also to pay a certain sum, and to promise to serve in the field. This
they also did. But this most reasonable peace did not please at Rome,
nor was Pompeius fool enough to believe that it would; his successor,
by order of the senate, disregarded it altogether. The Numantines sent
ambassadors to Rome, and appealed to the treaties, in which they were
borne out by the Roman staff-officers: but the senate annulled the
peace, Pompeius himself doing his utmost to bring this about, that he
might not be called to account for the way in which he had conducted
the war. Hostilities were renewed on a greater scale; and a few years
afterwards the command fell to C. Hostilius Mancinus, a man who had
the ill luck to gain a great celebrity and a sort of moral notoriety
which indeed is of a very doubtful nature. The frightened Spaniards
had abandoned Numantia to its fate, and Mancinus had reached as far as
the _suburbana_, the gardens and cemeteries of the town: there he was
driven back in an engagement; the Numantines pursued, and the Romans,
retreating in blind haste, got into a place from which there was no
way out, so that they had to make up their minds either to sue for
peace or perish. At first, the Numantines would have nothing to say
to the conditions offered by Mancinus, favourable as they were; it
was only Tib. Gracchus, then serving as a quæstor, who could save the
army. The Numantines had not forgotten the equitable peace which his
father had made, but the remembrance of his upright conduct towards
all the Celtiberians was so dear to them, that they accepted the son
as a mediator, being convinced that he meant honestly. So great was
the respect in which he was held by them, that he betook himself in
the midst of them to Numantia, to get back his account-books, which,
as well as the camp, had fallen into their hands; and these were also
returned to him uninjured. The army, which, without reckoning the
allies, numbered twenty thousand men, was allowed to march off without
disgrace, and independence and friendship were stipulated for Numantia.
Mancinus afterwards played at Rome the same part which Sp. Postumius
had done after the Caudine peace: he recommended the senate to yield
up himself and the officers, to atone for the unauthorized peace. The
people agreed to this, so far as he was concerned; but it threw out the
clause as to the officers, out of regard for Tib. Gracchus. Mancinus
was delivered up: the noble-minded Numantines would not have him, that
the curse of a broken oath might fall upon those who were guilty.
The war lasted yet a few years longer without any result; so that the
Romans were driven, in spite of the laws, (as Appian says,) to elect
Scipio Africanus consul. Ten years had already passed away since his
first consulship, and the _leges annales_ could not have prescribed
an age which he had not reached already; perhaps there was a law that
no one should be consul twice. Scipio went forth with many recruits,
allies, and volunteers from all parts, with Numidians and men from the
far East, against that small people, to root it out from the earth.
All the proffers of the Numantines were rejected. Scipio found a
great degeneracy in the Roman troops; and it cost him a vast deal of
trouble to restore discipline, as the loose morals and the luxury which
were rife among individuals, were likewise spreading in the army: he
purified it, and then marched with sixty thousand men against Numantia.
This city was surrounded on three sides by the Douro, and it lay
therefore on an isthmus, which was strongly fortified. Around the town,
the circumference not being more than three Roman miles, (one German,)
Scipio now drew a line of pallisades with a rampart, and behind it a
second one,--just as Platææ was shut in by the Spartans,--and here he
distributed his army. On these lines, he placed engines for hurling
missiles, with which the Romans tried to keep off their desperate foes,
as they wanted to destroy them by hunger. For a while, some of them
escaped on the Douro, by which the besieged also got supplies; but
he cut them off even from this, by sinking above the town huge beams
armed with saws into the river, so that the rafts with flour could no
longer float down that way. How long this dreadful blockade lasted,
is more than we can tell. Once, however, some Numantines climbed
over the walls, and came to a distant town where some hundred youths
enthusiastically took up arms; and thus a general rising against the
Romans was on the eve of bursting forth. When Scipio found this out, he
forthwith marched thither, and had the hands of those who were guilty
cut off. Such an atrocity stamps the man. The Numantines, when they had
fed, first on the dead bodies of the enemy, and then on those of their
own countrymen, and gone through all those horrors which Missolunghi
had to suffer, wished at length to capitulate. Scipio demanded that
their arms should be given up, and that they should surrender at
discretion: they asked for three days, which they spent in freeing
their wives and children by death from slavery; so that a few of them
only came out, who were like skeletons. Of these, Scipio picked out
fifty for his triumph, who seem to have been beheaded afterwards: the
rest were sold; but they are said to have broken out with such rage,
some of them killing themselves, and others murdering their masters,
that after a short time not a Numantine was left alive. The place where
the town had stood, from henceforth became a waste.
THE SERVILE WAR IN SICILY. ACQUISITION OF THE KINGDOM OF PERGAMUS.
ARISTONICUS. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS.
The punishment for so foul a deed was not slow in overtaking the
Romans. Even before the fall of Numantia, a servile war broke out in
Sicily; though indeed this does not so much belong to Roman, as to
Grecian history. It was brought on by the depopulation of the island
owing to the many wars in which famine and pestilence were raging, as
in Germany during the Thirty Years’ war. Twenty-four years had not yet
passed since the first Punic war, when the second completed the misery
of Sicily: it was in a state of desolation, like that of Ireland after
the peace of Limerick, in the times of William III. Much of the land
was made _ager publicus_, and thus fell into the hands of speculators;
in this way there arose large estates in Sicily, which were chiefly
used for grazing. Thus (according to the _Codex Theodosianus_) nearly
the whole of Lucania, Bruttium, and Calabria, in the days of Honorius
and Arcadius, was pasture land, of which the owners, who were partly
Romans, partly Siciliotes, kept large studs of horses and herds of
cattle. Herdsmen in Italy are a degenerate race of men: they are,
almost all of them, as far as I know, (in the States of the Church
and in the kingdom of Naples,--in Tuscany there are few of them,) the
associates of robbers: the herdsman is as bad and as robber-like, as
the peasant, on the other hand, is respectable. On these large estates,
there was an immense number of slaves,--often as many as thousands
together on one alone. The traffic in slaves, owing to the wars and
the continual piracy of those times, had reached a fearful height; so
that at the slave-market in Delos, ten thousand are said to have been
sold in one day, and they were to be had for a mere trifle. They were
treated with the greatest cruelty, and had to work in the fields in
chains; of course, there were among them many respectable men from all
parts, Carthaginians, Achæans, Macedonians, Celtiberians, and others,
who deserved quite a different fate, and could not but thirst for the
blood of their tyrants. Thus the Servile war broke out in Sicily,
and it is not to be wondered at that there was then another of these
risings in Greece: the cause was everywhere the same. In Greece,
tillage had formerly been mostly the business of the freedmen, and it
was only of late that it had fallen into the hands of the slaves. The
war had now reached its fourth year; several Roman armies had been
utterly routed, and it required a consular one under P. Rupilius to
reduce the island (620): for the slaves were masters of the strongest
places, Enna and Tauromenium, and they had for their leader Eunus
(Εὔνους), a Syrian, who, like Jean François at St. Domingo in the year
1791, put on the diadem in due form. The struggle was carried on with
the same relentless cruelty which slaves have met with everywhere, as
in the West Indies and in North America. Sicily was laid utterly waste
by it, and thirty years afterwards, the same circumstances led to the
same results. The details are awfully interesting; yet, as we have
said before, they are not in their place here.