[Sidenote: [81-79 B.C.]]
The reign of violence and revolution dated from the victory of the
Colline Gate, the first of November, 82. While the young Marius and
his colleague still occupied the consular office, the master of Rome,
omnipotent as he really was, could not legitimately be invested with any
civil authority. The weapon which he wielded with such terrible effect
was the unsheathed sword of his proconsular imperium. The tribunal,
before which he cited the wretched victims of his policy or vengeance,
was the military suggestum of the prætorian tent. The death of Marius a
few days later rendered vacant one of the consuls’ chairs. Carbo, who
occupied the other, did not long survive, being taken in Sicily and
executed by Pompey without respect to his rank or office. Before the
close of the year the republic was left without a chief magistrate. The
senate appointed L. Flaccus, one of Sulla’s officers, interrex to hold
the assembly for the election of consuls for the term which was about to
commence. But Flaccus, prompted by his imperator, proceeded to recommend
the creation of a dictator.
The senate obeyed, the people acquiesced, and after an interval of 120
years, which had elapsed since Q. Fabius Maximus, the citizens beheld
once more the four-and-twenty lictors, who invested with invidious
splendour that union of civil and military pre-eminence of which their
feelings and institutions were equally jealous. The dictatorship, they
might remember, had been the rare resource of the patricians in ancient
times, when they roused themselves to defend their hateful privileges
against the just claims of the plebeians; but since the rights of either
class had been happily blended together, the office itself had ceased
to have any significance. To revive it now, when no enemy was at the
gates, was only to threaten the commons of Rome with a new aristocratical
revolution, to menace rights and liberties acquired in a struggle of
two hundred years, and on which the greatness and glory of Rome were
confessedly founded. But all these misgivings were hushed in silence.[b]
In the vivid words of Plutarch in North’s old translation, Sulla in the
beginning, was very modest and civil in all his prosperity, and gave
great good hope that if he came to the authority of a prince, he would
favour nobility well, and yet love, notwithstanding, the benefit of the
people. And being moreover a man in his youth given all to pleasure,
delighting to laugh, ready to pity, and weep for tender heart; in that
he became after so cruel and bloody, the great alteration gave manifest
cause to condemn the increase of honour and authority, as the only means
whereby men’s manners continue not such as they were at the first, but
still do change and vary, making some fools, others vain and fantastical,
and others extremely cruel and unnatural. But whether that alteration of
nature came by changing his state and condition, or that it was otherwise
a violent breaking out of hidden malice, which then came to show itself,
when the way of liberty was laid open; this matter is to be decided in
some other treatise. So it came to pass, that Sulla fell to shedding of
blood and filled all Rome with infinite and unspeakable murders; for
divers were killed for private quarrels, that had nothing to do with
Sulla at any time, who suffered his friends and those about him to work
their wicked wills.
But the most wicked and unjust act of all was that, he deprived the sons,
and son’s sons of them whom he had killed, of all credit and good name,
and besides that had taken all their goods as confiscate. And this was
not only done in Rome, but also in all the cities of Italy throughout;
and there was no temple of any god whatsoever, no altar in anybody’s
house, no liberty of hospital, nor father’s house, that was not imbrued
with blood and horrible murder. For the husbands were slain in their
wives’ arms, and the children on their mothers’ laps: and yet they which
were slain for private hatred and malice, were nothing in respect of
those that were murdered only for their goods. And they that killed them
might well say, his goodly great house made that man die, his goodly fair
garden the other; and his hot baths another.
But besides so many murders committed, yet were there other things also
that grieved the people marvellously. For he proclaimed himself dictator,
which office had not been of six score years before in use, and made
the senate discharge him of all that was past, giving him free liberty
afterwards to kill whom he would, and to confiscate their goods; to
destroy cities, and to build up new as he listed; to take away kingdoms,
and to give them where he thought good. And furthermore, he openly sold
the goods confiscate, by the crier, sitting so proudly and stately in his
chair of state, that it grieved the people more to see those goods packed
up by them, to whom he gave and disposed them, than to see them taken
from those that had forfeited them. For sometimes he would give a whole
country, or the whole revenues of certain cities, unto women for their
beauty, or unto pleasant jesters, minstrels, or wicked slaves made free;
and unto some, he would give other men’s wives by force, and make them to
be married against their wills.[c]
The people crouched beneath the brandished sword of the conqueror, and
the acclamations of the nobles, who relied upon his stern resolution to
crush the insolence of the tribunes and repel the advance of democracy.
Even the narrow limit of six months which the law had been wont to assign
to the duration of this extraordinary despotism was now disregarded.
Sulla was required to reform and reconstitute the commonwealth; he was
allowed to determine for himself the period so arduous an enterprise
would demand, nor less the principles and the means he should think fit
to adopt. The Romans solemnly divested themselves of all their political
rights, so long as the great reformer should deem it expedient to
exercise autocratic control over them. To Sulla they committed without
limit or question the power of life and death over citizens and subjects,
of amercing his enemies and rewarding his friends, of building cities or
destroying them, of giving away kingdoms or incorporating them in the
empire. In order perhaps to mark more conspicuously the pre-eminence of
this sovereign power above the legitimate dictatorship of ancient times,
Sulla required that the consulship should coexist with it in a state of
degrading subordination. He allowed the centuriate assembly to elect M.
Tullius Decula and Cneius Dolabella for the year 81. In the following
year he assumed the consular fasces himself in conjunction with Metellus
Pius, while still retaining the ensigns of the dictatorship. He was
elected a second time for the year 79; but his ambition was by this time
satisfied and he declined the proffered title.
Proscription and massacre had cleared the ground for the social edifice
which Sulla proposed to construct. With a blind and arrogant predilection
for the traditionary forms of the ancient Roman municipality, he resolved
to restore, as far as circumstances could be moulded thereto, by the
harshest exercise of his prerogative, the civil ascendency of the old
Roman families. To re-enact indeed the letter of the old oligarchical
constitution, as it had existed before the days of plebeian encroachment,
was impossible; but he hoped at least to reanimate its spirit. The temper
however of the dictator was too impetuous and vehement for an undertaking
requiring the most delicate management. His reforms were bold and
decisive, they were conceived on a single great idea, and executed with
consistency and vigour; but they were not adopted with any consideration
for the genuine tendencies of society, and accordingly they struck no
root in the mind of the people. Sulla, we have seen, had cut off two
hundred senators with the sword of the proscriptions; Marius had probably
slaughtered an equal number. The remnant had been decimated on the field
of battle. To replenish this frightful void the dictator selected three
hundred from the equestrian order; but however respectable in birth
and rank these new senators may have been, they could hardly restore
the lustre of the great council of the state, which had formerly owed
its chief authority to the personal distinction of its members. We may
conjecture that the numbers of the body thus reconstructed amounted to
about six hundred. The vacancies which thenceforth occurred were probably
more than supplied by the regular succession to the benches of the senate
of the men who had filled certain high offices. Twenty quæstors were
elected annually, and passed into it in due rotation.
The principle of hereditary succession to the senate was never recognised
under the Roman Republic, but the practical restriction of the great
offices from which it was replenished to one or two hundred families,
allowed none of the chief Roman houses to remain unrepresented in the
great council of the nation. To these houses Sulla wished to confine the
entire legislation of the commonwealth. He repealed the _lex Hortensia_,
by which the resolutions of the tribes were invested with the force of
law, and gave to the senate alone the initiation of all legal enactments.
To the senate he transferred once more the exclusive possession of the
_judicia_, while he extended the authority of the _quæstiones perpetuæ_,
or standing commissions for the trial of political offences, to a large
class of criminal cases, which had hitherto fallen under the cognisance
of the popular assemblies. Nothing however so much advanced the influence
of the senate as the limitations Sulla placed upon the functions of
the tribunate. He deprived the champions of the people of the right of
proposing measures in the assembly of the tribes,[97] forbade them to
exercise their arbitrary veto upon the legislation of the curia, and
restricted their protectorate of the plebs to the relief of individuals
in a few trifling cases of civil or criminal process. Whatever shadow of
authority the office of tribune might still retain, a stigma was cast
upon it by the decree which declared its holder incapable of succeeding
to any of the chief magistracies of the state. Ambitious men disdained
an office condemned to silence and obscurity. By the disparagement of
its leaders the assembly of the tribes lost all its real power [though
it could make laws with the senate’s consent and elect certain inferior
magistrates]. As for the assembly by centuries, Sulla seems to have
felt the impossibility of restoring the complicated machinery by which
the citizens were enrolled in classes, according to their means, and
the numbers of the lower ranks balanced by an artificial adjustment. If
he could not restore in this popular assembly the preponderance which
the Servian constitution had secured to property, the superiority he
conferred upon the senate in the matter of legislation might suffice to
keep the comitia in due subordination. The assembly of the centuries
retained the election to the higher magistracies; the dictator relied
on the influence of wealth, rank, and dignity, in breaking down the
independence of the electors, already sapped by the prevalent dissolution
of manners and degeneracy of public feeling. Nevertheless, he took
from the people the appointment to the college of pontiffs, and placed
the great political engine of the state religion in the hands of a
self-elective corporation of the noblest members of the aristocracy.
The senate thus planted one foot on the neck of the knights, the other
on that of the commons. Having, as we have seen, almost re-created it by
one enormous draft from an inferior order, Sulla wished to insure the
permanence of its constitution, and he would have looked, we may suppose,
with jealousy on the independent action of the censorship, which ought to
have called all its members to account every fifth year, and summarily
ejected the unworthy. Accordingly he allowed no censors to execute
their functions during his retention of power, nor was their venerable
office revived for several years afterwards. The slaughter of the civil
wars had caused a frightful reduction in the old Roman population. It
was necessary to take measures for recruiting it, and on this account,
perhaps, more than from any regard for the promises he had made at
an earlier period, the dictator abstained from closing the franchise
against the Italians.[98] He showed his contempt for the needy and venal
populace by the enfranchisement at one blow of ten thousand slaves, the
miserable remnant of the families of proscribed and murdered citizens.
Left without masters they would have endangered the tranquillity of
the commonwealth, but enrolled among the citizens they might become
themselves masters in their turn, and help to keep the oppressed and
discontented in subjection, both at home and abroad. They might at least
devote themselves to the policy of the dictator.
The establishment of military colonies was one of the most important
measures of the dictator. Besides satisfying claims he dared not
disregard, he might hope to make these establishments the bulwark of his
reforms. If so, we shall presently see how much he miscalculated their
effect. But the change they produced in the social and political aspect
of Italy was neither light nor transient. One hundred and twenty thousand
legionaries, as has been said, received lands in the most fertile parts
of the peninsula, and with them, of course, the franchise of the city, if
they did not already possess it. This was carrying out an Agrarian law
more sweeping and far more arbitrary than the Gracchi had even ventured
to conceive. But these same legionaries, thus pampered and enriched,
became the most restless and dangerous members of the body politic.
Scattered broadcast over the face of the land, they became the prolific
seed of disturbance and revolution.
SULLA’S LEGISLATION
Sulla’s legislation, besides its grand political bearings, descended to
many minute particulars of social and civil economy. His enemies had
revelled in the enjoyment of many successive consulships; he forbade any
magistrate to fill the same office twice within a period of ten years.
Casting a jealous eye on the proconsular imperium, the foundation of his
own extraordinary power, he enacted a law of treason (_maiestas_), which
defined the crimes of leaving the province, leading forth the legions,
and attacking a foreign potentate without express command of the senate
and people. Like other statesmen of antiquity, he was fully possessed
with the notion that the moral character of a nation can be reformed and
maintained by sumptuary laws. Accordingly, he sought to restrict the
luxuries of the wealthy, in which the imitation of foreign tastes caused,
perhaps, more scandal than the actual excess. He fixed the precise sums
which might be expended on the pleasures of the table, and assigned three
hundred sesterces, about sixty shillings, for suppers on the Calends,
Ides, and Nones, and certain of the most solemn festivals of the year.
He went even further in the same delusive path, in fixing the prices
of articles by arbitrary enactment. Such laws could not outlast even
the brief rule of the imposer himself, and Sulla seems, indeed, to have
set the example of disregarding them in person. Nevertheless the same
ineffective legislation continued to be frequently repeated at later
periods.
Among other precautions for guarding the morality of the people, Sulla
had denounced the vengeance of the law against the crimes of murder and
adultery. But he lived himself in a course of notorious profligacy, and
besides the guilt of the proscriptions, he showed that no law could deter
him from shedding blood to gratify a momentary passion, or, at least,
to confirm his enactments by terror. Lucretius Ofella, the officer who
had so long blockaded Præneste, ventured to disregard the dictator’s
provision for confining the suit for the consulship to persons who had
been already prætors. Sulla admonished him to desist; nevertheless he
persisted in his claim. A centurion poniarded him in the middle of the
Forum. When the people dragged the assassin to the dictator’s tribunal,
he commanded them to let the man go, avowing that he had acted by his
own orders; and he proceeded, with the rude humour which he affected, to
relate a story, how a labourer, being annoyed by vermin, twice stopped
from his work to pluck them off; the third time he cast them without
mercy into the fire. “Twice,” said Sulla, “I have conquered and spared
you; take care lest, a third time, I consume you utterly.”
ABDICATION OF SULLA
[Sidenote: [79-78 B.C.]]
Such acts and such language were, however, rather ebullitions of a
spoiled and vicious temper than any deliberate expression of contempt
for law, or the assertion of an unlimited despotism. The reigning
principle of Sulla’s actions was still an affectation of legality. He
pretended, at least, to consider the oligarchical constitution of the
early republic the only legitimate model for its renovation. The success
of his schemes of ambition, the overthrow of all his opponents, the
complete restoration, as he imagined, of the principles to which he had
devoted himself, all combined to work upon a mind prone to superstition
and addicted to fatalism, and changed him from a jealous partizan into
an arrogant fanatic. Sulla claimed to be the favourite of fortune, the
only divinity in whom he really believed. His reforms were complete, his
work accomplished, his part performed; he feared to tempt his patroness
by trespassing another moment on her kindness. By resigning his power he
sought to escape the Nemesis which haunted his dreams.
[Illustration: A LICTOR]
In the year 79 Sulla abdicated the dictatorship. He could say that it had
been conferred upon him for the reconstitution of the commonwealth, and
having done what he was appointed to do, it was no longer his to enjoy.
But if the Romans were amazed at this act of sublime self-sacrifice,
it was with a feeling akin to awe that they beheld the tyrant descend
from his blood-stained tribunal and retire with unmoved composure to the
privacy of a suburban villa. Aged and infirm,[99] and sated perhaps with
pleasure as well as ambition, it is not too much to believe that such a
man as Sulla was indifferent to life, and little troubled by the risk to
which he might thus expose himself from the daggers of his enemies. But
in truth, while his veteran colonists were sworn to maintain his policy,
his person was not unprotected, by bands of armed attendants. When the
magistrate of a neighbouring town, in the expectation of the old man’s
death, delayed paying the local contribution to the restoration of the
Capitol, for the completion of which Sulla was anxious, as the only thing
wanting to complete his career of prosperity, he could send men to seize
the defaulter and even inflict death upon him. Sulla was evidently secure
against the vengeance of his victim’s relatives. It may also be remarked
that such vengeance would have been foreign to the habits of the Romans.
However little they scruple to use the dagger to cut off a political
enemy in the midst of his career, there is no instance perhaps in their
history of exacting personal retribution from one who had ceased to
possess the power of injuring.
There was, moreover, in Sulla a haughty contempt for mankind, and
consequently for its highest aims and pleasures. Even while devoting his
utmost energies to the pursuit of political eminence and the achievement
of a national revolution, he could smile with grim moroseness at the
vanity of his own exploits, and the hollowness of his triumphs. He paused
in the midst of his career to break the toy with which he had so long
amused himself. He had commenced life as a frivolous sensualist; he
wished for nothing better than to finish it as a decrepit débauché. At
the moment of laying down his office he made an offering of the tenth
of his substance to Hercules, and feasted the people magnificently; so
much, indeed, did the preparations made exceed what was required, that
vast heaps of the superfluous supplies were thrown with ostentatious
prodigality into the river.
In the midst of these entertainments, lasting several days, Metella, the
consort to whom he was most permanently attached, fell sick and died.
As the favourite and perhaps the priest of Venus, his house might not
be polluted by the presence of death, and he was required to send her a
divorce, and cause her to be removed while still breathing. The custom
he observed strictly, through superstition; but the law which limited
the cost of funerals, though enacted by himself, he violated in the
magnificence of her obsequies. Retiring to his villa at Cumæ he finally
relinquished the reins of government. Surrounded by buffoons and dancers,
he indulged to the last in every sensual excess which his advancing years
and growing infirmities permitted. Nevertheless he did not wholly abandon
literature. He amused himself with reading Aristotle and Theophrastus,
and dictating memoirs of his own life, upon which he was employed, it is
said, only two days before his decease. In those pages he recorded how
astrologers had assured him that it was his fate to die after a happy
life, at the very height of his prosperity. Stained with the blood of so
many thousand victims, and tormented with a loathsome disease--for his
bowels corrupted and bred vermin, and neither medicines nor ablutions
could mitigate the noisome stench of his putrefaction--in this faith he
persisted to the last, and quitted the world without a symptom either
of remorse or repining. He believed that a deceased son appeared to him
in a dream, and entreated him to rest from his troubles, and go with
him to rejoin his lost Metella and dwell with her in eternal peace and
tranquillity. Fearful perhaps of the fate of Marius, he directed that
his body should be burned; whereas it had ever been the custom of his
house to inter the remains of their dead. A monument was erected to him
in the Campus Martius, which was standing in the time of Plutarch, after
the lapse of two centuries and the events of several revolutions. It
bore an inscription, ascribed to Sulla himself, which said that none of
his friends ever did him a kindness and none of his foes a wrong without
being largely requited. Sulla survived his abdication about twelve
months, and died in the year 78, at the age of sixty.
ROME’S DEBT TO SULLA
[Sidenote: [81-79 B.C.]]
Slowly and with many a painful struggle the Roman commonwealth had
outgrown the narrow limits of a rustic municipality. The few hundred
families which formed the original nucleus of her citizenship, and
which in her earliest and simplest days had sufficed to execute all the
functions of her government, had been compelled to incorporate allies
and rivals in their own body, to enlarge their views, and to expand
their institutions. The main object of Sulla’s policy was to revive at
least the spirit of the old restrictions. The old families themselves
had perished almost to a man; he replaced them by a newer growth; but he
strove to pare away the accretions of ages, and restore the government
of the vast empire of Rome to a small section of her children. The
attempt was blind and bigoted; it was not less futile than unjust. It
contravened the essential principle of national growth; while the career
of conquest, to which the Romans devoted themselves, required the fullest
expansion and the most perfect freedom of development.
Nevertheless the legislation of Sulla was undoubtedly supported by a
vast mass of existing prejudice. He threw himself into the ideas of his
time, as far as they were interpreted by history, by tradition, and by
religious usage. The attempt to enlarge the limits of the constitution
was in fact opposed to every acknowledged principle of polity. It was
regarded equally by its opponents and its promoters as anomalous and
revolutionary. It had as yet no foundation in argument, or in any sense
of right, as right was then understood. Society at Rome was in a highly
artificial state; and Sulla with many of his ablest contemporaries,
mistook for the laws of nature the institutions of an obsolete and
forgotten expediency. But nature was carrying on a great work, and proved
too strong for art. Ten years sufficed to overthrow the whole structure
of this reactionary legislation, and to launch the republic once more
upon the career of growth and development. The champions of a more
liberal policy sprang up in constant succession, and contributed, perhaps
unconsciously, to the great work of union and comprehension, which was
now rapidly in progress. The spirit of isolation which had split Greece
and Italy into hundreds of separate communities was about to give way to
a general yearning for social and moral unity. The nations were to be
trained by the steady development of the Roman administration.
But though Sulla’s main policy was thus speedily overthrown, he had not
lived in vain. As dictator he wasted his strength in attempting what, if
successful, would have destroyed his country; but as proconsul he had
saved her. The tyranny of the Roman domination had set the provinces in
a blaze. Mithridates had fanned the flame. Greece and Asia had revolted.
The genius of the king of Pontus might have consolidated an empire, such
as Xerxes might have envied, on either shore of the Ægean Sea. But at
this crisis of her fate, hardly less imminent than when Hannibal was
wresting from her allies and subjects within the Alps, Rome had confided
her fortunes to the prowess of Sulla. The great victory of Chæronea
checked the dissolution of her empire. The invader was hurled back across
the Ægean; the cities of Greece returned reluctantly to their obedience,
never more to be tempted to renounce it. Sulla followed Mithridates into
Asia; one by one he recovered the provinces of the republic. He bound his
foe by treaties to abstain from fomenting their discontents. He left his
officers to enforce submission to his decrees, and quartered the armies
of Rome upon the wretched populations of the East. The pressing danger of
the moment was averted, though it took twenty years more to subdue the
power of Mithridates, and reduce Asia to passive submission. Rome was
relieved from the last of her foreign invaders; and this was the great
work of Sulla, which deserved to immortalise his name in her annals.[100]
Nevertheless this rolling back of the tide of aggression, and the return
of the legions of the republic to the limits of her former conquests, had
no effect in healing the internal sickness of which the irritation of the
provinces was only symptomatic. The triumph of her arms and the sense of
security it engendered only served to redouble her oppressions and to
aggravate the misery of her subjects. The course of events will lead us
on some future occasion to trace the remains of resentment and hatred
towards Rome, which lingered long in some regions of Italy itself: but
for the most part the Italians were now satisfied; they were content
to regard the city of Romulus as their own metropolis; and while they
enjoyed the fruits of her wide-wasting domination, gradually learned
to take a pride in her name. But beyond the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian
seas the same ardent vows were formed for enfranchisement which had
precipitated upon Rome the Marsians and the Samnites; in more than one
quarter the old struggle of the Social Wars was about to be renewed on
wider and more distant theatres: but the elements of strife were now
more complicated than before; the parties engaged were more thoroughly
alien from each other; the hostility of Rome’s new enemies was the more
inveterate as they had less sympathy with her institutions, and were
ambitious of overthrowing rather than of sharing them. The second period
of the civil wars of Rome opens with the revolt of the Iberians in the
west, and the maritime devastations of the pirates in the east.
THE ROMAN PROVINCES
Italia, the region to which the privileges of the city had been conceded
by the Plautian law, was bounded, as we have seen, by a line drawn across
the neck of the peninsula from the Rubicon on the Adriatic, to the Isère
on the Tyrrhenian Sea. To the north and south lay two provinces which
held the first rank in political importance: on the one hand Gallia, or
Gaul within the Alps; on the other the island of Sicily. The Gaulish
province was divided into two districts by the Padus, or the Po, from
whence they derived their denominations respectively, according as they
lay within or beyond that river.
But the whole of this rich and extensive territory was placed under the
command of a single proconsul, and the citizens soon learned to regard
with jealousy a military force which menaced their own liberties at the
same time that it maintained the obedience of their subjects. Sicily, on
the other hand, though tranquil and generally contented, and requiring
but a slender force to control it, was important to the republic from
the abundance of its harvests, to which the city could most confidently
look for its necessary supplies of grain. Next among the provinces in
proximity to Rome were the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, of which
the former also furnished Italy with grain; but both were rudely and
imperfectly cultivated, and the unhealthiness of the larger island
especially continued to keep it below many far remoter regions in wealth,
population, and intelligence. The first province the Romans had acquired
beyond their own seas was Spain, where their arms had made slow but
steady progress from the period of their earliest contests with the
Carthaginians, although the legions had never yet penetrated into its
wildest and most distant fastnesses. The connection between Rome and
her Iberian dependencies was long maintained principally by sea, while
the wide territory intervening between the Alps and Pyrenees was still
occupied by numerous free and jealous communities. But in the course of
the last half-century the republic had acquired the command of the coast
of the Gulf of Lyons; her roads were prolonged from Ariminum to Barcino
and Valentia, while the communications of her armies were maintained
by numerous fortified positions in the Further Gaul, and a secure and
wealthy province extending from the Var to the Garonne.
The Adriatic and the Ionian straits separated Italy from her eastern
acquisitions. The great provinces of Illyricum and Macedonia comprised
the whole expanse of territory from the Adriatic to the Ægean Sea, and
were divided from one another by the long mountain ridges of Boion and
Scardus. Ancient Greece, from Thermopylæ to Cape Malea, constituted a
single command under the title of Achaia. With Asia, Rome communicated
principally by sea, the route of the Hellespont being insecure, and the
barbarous tribes of Thrace but imperfectly subjected. The province of
Asia, recovered by Sulla, was held by an imperator with a numerous army,
destined to control the dependent potentates of Bithynia, Cilicia, and
Cappadocia. The eastern proconsul watched the movements of Mithridates,
and unravelled his intrigues with every court from the Halys to the
Tigris. He intruded himself into the affairs of Cyprus, Palestine, and
Egypt, hunted down the mountaineers of Crete, and menaced with the
vengeance of the republic the buccaneers who swarmed in every harbour of
the eastern Mediterranean. On the southern coasts of the great inland sea
the domain which once belonged to Carthage, limited on either side by the
lesser Syrtis and the river Bagradas, formed the proconsular province of
Africa; while the five cities of the Pentapolis acknowledged their entire
dependence on the will of the republic. The extent of her empire under
Sulla was hardly one-half of that which it attained under Augustus and
Trajan.
The various relations in which the different classes of the provincial
population stood to the ruling city, have been compared with the
constitution of a Roman household. The colonies of Roman citizens
planted in the provinces, enjoying the full exercise of their national
rights, and presenting a miniature of the metropolis herself, held the
position of the son towards the paterfamilias. The conquered races,
which had thrown themselves on the victor’s mercy, were subjected to
his dominion as unreservedly as the slave to that of his master. Those
among them to whom the state had restored their lands and institutions,
occupied a place analogous to that of freedmen. Some cities or nations
had voluntarily sought a connection with Rome on terms of alliance, but
with acknowledged inferiority. Others again stood on a more independent
footing, offering a mutual interchange of good offices and citizenship;
and lastly, there were some which entered into confederacy with the
republic with perfect equality of rights on either side. All these had
their prototypes respectively in the clients, the guests and the friends
of the Roman noble. Within the limits of each Roman province there were
generally some states which stood in these several relations to the
republic; and the strictness of the military and civil administration was
maintained or relaxed towards them according to their respective claims.
But after all the mass of the provincial population belonged to the class
of _dediticii_, that is, of those who had originally submitted without
conditions, the slaves, as they may be termed, of the great Roman family.
These were subjected to the severest fiscal and other burdens, enhanced
by the rapacity of their rulers, who, from the consul or prætor to the
lowest of their officers, preyed upon them without remorse and without
satiety.
The appointment to the provincial commands was left ordinarily in the
hands of the senate; nevertheless, the people had always regarded it as
their own indefeasible prerogative, and sometimes, at the instigation
of their demagogues, had not hesitated to resume it. It was the general
rule that the consuls and prætors, after serving their year of office in
the city, should proceed to administer for one, or sometimes for three
years, the affairs of a province. The state placed large standing armies
at their disposal, and threw enormous patronage into their hands; while
their ambition, avarice, or mutual rivalry, far more than any sense of
the public interests, impelled them to exert themselves, during their
brief career, in reducing frontier tribes, in quelling insurrections
which their own injustice excited, and, whenever they could find an
excuse for it, in annihilating the ancient liberties and privileges still
retained by the more favoured classes of the provincials. Surrounded
by an army of officials, all creatures of their own, all engaged in
the same work of carving fortunes for themselves and abetting their
colleagues, the proconsuls had little sense of responsibility to the
central government, and glutted their cupidity without restraint. Of
all the provinces the Cisalpine and Macedonia, and latterly Asia, were
the richest and most amply furnished with military armaments, and
on both these accounts they were generally coveted by the consuls,
and distributed between them by lot. The tithes, tolls, and other
imposts, from which the public revenue was drawn, were farmed by Roman
contractors, belonging generally to the order of knights, who had few
opportunities of rising to the highest political offices at home. The
connivance of their superiors in the province, backed by the corrupt
state of public feeling in Rome, shielded, to a great extent, the sordid
arts by which they were accustomed to defraud both the government and its
subjects.
The means of enrichment which the provinces afforded to the nobility
became the ultimate object of the deepest political intrigues. A man of
ruined fortune looked to the office of proconsul as the sole means of
retrieving his affairs. To obtain it, he allied himself with the chief or
the party by whose influence he might hope to rise successively through
the various steps which led to the consulship. He first sued for the
post of quæstor; after a due interval he might hope to be elected ædile,
next prætor, and ultimately consul. His grand object was then obtained;
for upon the expiration of his term of office he departed as governor
to a consular province, from the emoluments of which he calculated on
repaying the expenses of his numerous contests, on liquidating the debt
of gratitude to his adherents, and accumulating a vast fortune for his
own gratification or the advancement of his party.
The cupidity which animated individuals was in fact the mainspring of the
political factions of the time. The spoil of the provinces was the bait
with which the popular leaders had lured the Italians to their standards.
All the legal rights of citizenship had been conceded, but the old
oligarchic families, dignified by historic associations, and revelling in
the wealth accumulated by centuries of conquest, still hoped to maintain
their grasp of the larger share of honours and emoluments, which they
contrived to make generally accessible only to the richest. They still
looked with scorn themselves, and infused the same sentiment into their
inferiors, on the “new men,” the men of talents and education, but of
moderate origin and fortune, who were striving on all sides to thrust
themselves into public notice. The judicia was the great instrument by
which they protected their monopoly; for by keeping this in their own
hands, they could quash every attempt at revealing, by legal process, the
enormities of the provincial administration. But as far as each party
succeeded in retaining or extorting a share in the plunder, the same
system was carried on by both. It would be unfair to point to either as
exceeding the other in rapacity and tyranny. The distress and alienation
of the provinces became the pressing evil and danger of the times.
Adventurers sprang up in every quarter, and found a floating mass of
discontent around them, from which they were certain of deriving direct
assistance, or meeting at least with sullen approbation.
The original vice of the provincial administration of the republic
consisted in the principle, openly avowed, that the native races were
to be regarded as conquered subjects. The whole personnel of the civil
and military government of the provinces was literally quartered upon
the inhabitants; houses and establishments were provided for it at the
cost of the provincials; the proconsul’s outfit, or _vasarium_, was
perhaps generally defrayed by a grant from the public treasury, but
the sums required for his maintenance, and that of his retinue, known
by the name of _salarium_, was more commonly charged upon the local
revenues. The proconsul himself indeed was supposed, in strictness, to
serve the commonwealth gratuitously for the honour of the office; but
practically he was left to remunerate himself by any indirect means of
extortion he chose to adopt. As the supreme judicial as well as military
authority there was no appeal against either the edicts he issued, or
the interpretation he put upon them. The legions in occupation of the
province were maintained at free quarters, and their daily pay supplied
by the contributions of the inhabitants. The landowners were burdened
with a tithe or other proportion of their produce, as a tribute to the
conquering city. This payment was in most cases made by a composition, in
which the proconsul was instructed to drive the hardest bargain he could
for his employers. The local revenues were raised for the most part by
direct taxes and customs’ dues; and these were generally farmed by Roman
contractors, who made large fortunes from the transaction. Public opinion
at home was such as rather to stimulate than to check their extortions.
For it was a settled maxim of Roman policy that every talent extracted
from the coffers of the provincial for the enrichment of the ruling caste
was the transfer of so much of the sinews of war to the state from its
enemies. But the rulers of the world were not content with the extortion
of money from their subjects. An era of taste in art had recently dawned
upon the rude conquerors of the East, and every proconsul, quæstor, and
legatus was smitten with the desire to bring home trophies of Greek and
Asiatic civilisation.
[Illustration: PUNISHMENT OF A TRAITOR]
Those among them ambitious of ingratiating themselves with their
fellow-citizens sought out the most celebrated statues and pictures, and
even the marble columns of edifices, for the decoration of public places
in the city. They did not scruple to violate the shrines of the gods, and
ransomed rebellious cities for the plunder of their favourite divinities.
This thirst for spoil led to acts of abominable cruelty: where persuasion
failed, punishments and tortures were unsparingly resorted to; the
proconsul and his officials were all bound together in a common cause,
and the impunity of the subordinates was repaid by zeal for the interests
of the chief. Of those who could refrain from open violence, and
withhold their hands from the plunder of temples and palaces, few could
deny themselves the sordid gains of money-lending usury. The demands of
the government were enforced without compunction, and the provincial
communities were repeatedly driven to pledge their sources of revenue to
Roman capitalists. The law permitted the usurer to recover his dues by
the severest process. In a celebrated instance the agent of one of the
most honourable men at Rome could shut up the senators of a provincial
town in their curia, till five of them actually died of starvation, to
recover the debts due to his principal.
When indeed this intolerable tyranny reached its height, the provinces
might sometimes enjoy the sweets of revenge, though with little prospect
of redress, or of any alleviation of their lot. In a government by
parties, the misdeeds of one set of men could not fail to rouse the
pretended indignation of another; and while the factions of Rome
contended for the prerogatives of conquest, they tried to brand each
other with the iniquity of their abuse. The domination of the senators,
as established by Sulla, soon provoked the jealous animadversions of
their excluded rivals. Their administration of the provinces, protected
as it was by the tribunals in which they reigned themselves supreme,
presented a vulnerable point of attack, and against the crimes of the
senatorial proconsuls the deadliest shafts of the popular orators were
directed. The remains of Roman eloquence have preserved to us more than
one full-length portrait of a proconsular tyrant. It is impossible indeed
to rely upon the fidelity of the colouring, or the correctness even of
the lines; nevertheless the general impression they leave upon us is
amply borne out by numerous independent testimonies. There is a limit in
the possible and the probable even to the rhetorical exaggerations of the
Roman demagogues. A slight sketch from one of these pictures may suffice
to give us an idea of the frightful originals.
THE CAREER OF VERRES
About the period of Sulla’s abdication, a young noble named Caius Verres
accompanied the prætor Dolabella to his government of Cilicia (80).
At Sicyon in Achaia, he chose to demand a sum of money of the chief
magistrate of the city, and being refused, shut him up in a close chamber
with a fire of green wood, to extort the gratuity he required. From the
same place he carried off several of the finest statues and paintings.
At Athens he shared with his chief the plunder of the temple of Minerva,
at Delos that of Apollo; at Chios, Erythræ, Halicarnassus, and elsewhere
on the line of his route, he perpetrated similar acts of rapine. Samos
possessed a temple venerated throughout Asia; Verres rifled both the
temple and the city itself. The Samians complained to the governor of
Asia; they were recommended to carry their complaints to Rome. Perga
boasted a statue of Diana, coated with gold; Verres scraped off the
gilding. Miletus offered him the escort of one of her finest ships;
he detained it for his own use and sold it. At Lampsacus he sought to
dishonour the daughter of the first citizen of the place; her father and
brother ventured to defend her: one of his attendants was slain. Verres
seized the pretext to accuse them both of an attempt on his life, and
the Roman governor of the province obliged him by cutting off the heads
of both. Such were the atrocities of the young ruffian, while yet a mere
dependent of the proconsul, with no charge or office of his own. Being
appointed quæstor he extended his exactions over every district of the
province, and speedily amassed, by the avowal of his own principal, from
two to three million sesterces [about £24,000, or $120,000] beyond the
requisitions of the public service.
[Sidenote: [75-72 B.C.]]
Verres could now pay for his election to the prætorship in the city.
For one year he dispensed his favourable judgments to wealthy suitors
at home, and on its termination sailed for the province of Sicily. Here
his conduct on the tribunal was marked by the most glaring venality.
He sold everything, both his patronage and his decisions, making sport
of the laws of the country and of his own edicts, of the religion, the
fortunes, and the lives of the provincials. During the three years of
his government, not a single senator of the sixty-five cities of the
island was elected without a gratuity to the proprætor. He imposed
arbitrary requisitions of many hundred thousand bushels of grain upon
the communities already overburdened with their authorised tithes. He
distributed cities among his favourites with the air of a Persian despot;
Lipara he gave to a boon companion, Segesta to an actress, Herbita to
a courtesan. These exactions rapidly depopulated the country. At the
period of his arrival, the territory of Leontium possessed eighty-three
farms; in the third year of the Verrine administration only thirty-two
remained in occupation. At Motya the number of tenanted estates had
fallen from 188 to 101, at Herbita from 257 to 120, at Argyrona from 250
to 80. Throughout the province more than one-half of the cultivated lands
were abandoned by their miserable owners, as if the scourge of war or
pestilence had passed over the island.
But Verres was an amateur and an antiquary, and had a taste for art
as well as a thirst for lucre. At every city where he stopped on his
progresses he extorted gems, vases, and trinkets from his hosts, or from
any inhabitant whom he understood to possess them. No one ventured to
complain; there was no redress even for a potentate in alliance with
the republic, such as Antiochus, king of Syria, who was thus robbed
of a splendid candelabrum enriched with jewels, which he was about to
dedicate in the Capitol of Rome. All these objects of art were sent off
to Italy to decorate the villa of the proprætor; nor were the antiques
and curiosities he amassed less valuable than the ornaments of gold and
silver. Finally Verres laid his hands on certain statues of Ceres and
Diana, the special objects of worship among the natives, who were only
allowed the consolation of coming to offer them their sacrifices in his
gardens.
Nor did the extortions of Verres fall upon the Sicilians alone. He
cheated the treasury at Rome of the sums advanced to him in payment
of corn for the consumption of the city. He withheld the necessary
equipments from the fleet which he was directed to send against the
pirates, and applied them to his own use. The fleet was worsted by
the enemy, and the proprætor caused its officers to be executed for
cowardice. His lictors sold to the victims’ relatives the miserable
favour of despatching them at one blow. He crowned his enormities by
punishing one of the ruling caste with death. Gavius, a Roman trader, he
confined in the quarries of Syracuse; the man escaped, was retaken, and
fastened to a cross on the beach within sight of Italy, that he might
address to his native shores his plaintive but ineffectual exclamation,
“I am a Roman citizen!”
Such is a specimen of the charges which could be plausibly advanced
against a Roman officer, and which the criminal, though backed by the
united influence of his party, and defended by the most experienced
and successful advocate of his times, shrank from rebutting. In most
cases however the governor accused of tyranny or malversation could
screen himself by bribing his judges, who besides their natural anxiety
to absolve one of their own order of crimes which might in turn be
imputed to themselves, had been bred in the same school of corruption and
venality as himself. The prosecution of these charges became indeed a
ready means of acquiring notoriety, and the people, stimulated by their
demagogues, encouraged, it was said, the young orators in their attacks,
as whelps are trained to hunt down beasts of prey. But the assailants
were in almost every case repulsed, and even if successful the provinces
themselves reaped no benefit from their efforts. The proconsuls only
exerted themselves the more strenuously to grasp the means of securing
their acquittal. They could boast that the fruits of three years’
occupation of office would suffice--the first to make their own fortunes,
the second to reward their advocates and partisans, the third and most
abundant to buy the suffrages of their judges. The provinces, it might
be anticipated, would soon come forward of their own accord and pray for
the repeal of the laws against malversation, since they only served to
redouble the extortions of their oppressors.
[Sidenote: [72-69 B.C.]]
These frightful iniquities which rendered the dominion of Rome as
formidable to the nations in peace as her hostility had been in war,
had grown with the progress of luxury and corruption. Her provincial
governors had ever wielded their public authority with arrogance and
harshness; but in purer and simpler ages they had at least refrained
from the sordid exactions and selfish rapacity for which they had now
become infamous. The tribunals also had degenerated both in corruption
and shamelessness. The knights could venture to assert that during the
forty years they had participated in the dispensation of the laws, the
justice of Rome had been unstained even by the breath of suspicion. To
the notorious venality of the tribunals under the administration of
the senate they pointed as a proof of their own superior purity. It
was indeed true that the increasing vices of the provincial government
were symptomatic of the growing relaxation of morality at home. On the
one hand the extension of foreign conquest and the opening in every
quarter of new sources of wealth, had inflamed the passions of cupidity
and ambition. On the other, half a century of domestic contentions had
loosened the bonds of society, overbearing the ancient principles of
justice, of respect for law and order, of reverence for things divine.
But in fact this greater development of vice was accompanied at the
same time by more general publicity, and a more jealous exposure of the
faults of political parties. The knights, deterred from the use of force
for the recovery of their lost privileges, affected a zeal for justice,
to undermine their more fortunate rivals. The constitution of Sulla was
assailed and eventually overthrown, not on the field of battle, but on
the floor of the law courts.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[97] [That is, without the consent of the senate.]
[98] [Now that they were dispersed among all the tribes, and thus
seemingly deprived of influence in the elections, the Italians could,
in reality, if they chose, exercise far greater influence than when
confined to a few tribes of their own, which always voted last. In all
the assemblies they now stood on an equal footing with the rest of the
citizens.]
[99] [Appian,[d] however, one of our best authorities for Sulla, says
that “he was still of virile age and sound constitution.”]
[100] [This achievement of Sulla is perhaps exaggerated. Either Marius or
Sertorius would have been able to put down Mithridates, and restore order
in the East. Sulla’s chief service was the reform of the courts and the
improvement of the administration.]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: DEATH OF SERTORIUS]