king of the Lombards and the exarchate of Ravenna. Rome relapsed into a
state of misery. The Campania was reduced to the state of a dreary
wilderness. The stagnation of a deluge caused by the torrential swelling
of the Tiber produced a pestilential disease, and a stranger visiting
Rome might contemplate with horror the solitude of the city. Gregory the
Great, whose pontificate lasted from 590 to 604, reconciled the Arians
of Italy and Spain to the Catholic Church, conquered Britain in the name
of the Cross, and established his right to interfere in the management
of the episcopal provinces of Greece, Spain, and Gaul. The merits of
Gregory were treated by the Byzantine court with reproach and insult,
but in the attachment of a grateful people he found the purest reward of
a citizen and the best right of a sovereign.
The short and virtuous reign of Tiberius (578-582), which succeeded that
of Justin, made way for that of Maurice. For twenty years Maurice ruled
with honesty and honour. But the parsimony of the emperor, and his
attempt to cure the inveterate evil of a military despotism, led to his
undoing, and in 602 he was murdered with his children. A like fate
befell the Emperor Phocas, who succumbed in 610 to the fortunes of
Heraclius, the son of Crispus, exarch of Africa. For thirty-two years
Heraclius ruled the Roman world. In three campaigns he chastised the
rising power of Persia, drove the armies of Chosroes from Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt, rescued Constantinople from the joint siege of the
Avars and Persians (626), and finally reduced the Persian monarch to the
defence of his hereditary kingdom. The deposition and murder of Chosroes
by his son Siroes (628) concluded the successes of the emperor.
A treaty of peace was arranged, and Heraclius returned in triumph to
Constantinople, where, after the exploits of six glorious campaigns, he
peacefully enjoyed the sabbath of his toils. The year after his return
he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to restore the true Cross to the
Holy Sepulchre. In the last eight years of his reign Heraclius lost to
the Arabs the same provinces which he had rescued from the Persians.
Heraclius died in 612. His descendants continued to fill the throne in
the persons of Constantine III. (641), Heracleonas (641), Constans II.
(641), Constantine IV. (668), Justinian II. (685), until 711, when an
interval of six years, divided into three reigns, made way for the rise
of the Isaurian dynasty.
_V.--The New Era of Charlemagne_
Leo III. ascended the throne on March 25, 718, and the purple descended
to his family, by the rights of heredity, for three generations. The
Isaurian dynasty is most notable for the part it played in
ecclesiastical history.
The introduction of images into the Christian Church had confused the
simplicity of religious worship. The education of Leo, his reason,
perhaps his intercourse with Jews and Arabs, had inspired him with a
hatred of images. By two edicts he proscribed the existence, as well as
the use, of religious pictures. This heresy of Leo and of his successors
and descendants, Constantine V. (741), Leo IV. (775), and Constantine
VI. (780), whose blinding by his mother Irene is one of the most tragic
stories of Roman history, justified the popes in rebelling against the
authority of the emperor, and in restoring and establishing the
supremacy of Rome.
Gregory II. saved the city from the attacks of the Lombards, who had
seized Ravenna and extinguished the series of Greek exarchs in 751. He
secured the assistance of Pepin, and the real governor of the French
monarchy--Charles Martel, who, by his signal victory over the Saracens,
had saved Europe from the Mohammedan yoke. Twice--in 754 and 756--Pepin
marched to the relief of the city. His son Charlemagne, in 774, seemed
to secure the permanent safety of the ancient capital by the conquest of
Lombardy, and for twenty-six years he ruled the Romans as his subjects.
The people swore allegiance to his person and his family, and the
elections of the popes were examined and authorised by him. The senate
exercised its rights by proclaiming him patrician and of the power of
the emperor; nothing was lacking except the title.
A document, known as the Forged Decretals, which assigned the free and
perpetual sovereignty of Rome, Italy, and the provinces of the West to
the popes by Constantine, was presented by Pope Hadrian I. to
Charlemagne. This document served to absolve the popes from their debt
of gratitude to the French monarch, and excused the revolt of Rome from
the authority of the eastern empire.
Though Constantinople returned, under Irene, to the employment of
images, and the seventh general council of Nicæa, September 24, 787,
pronounced the worship of the Greeks as agreeable to scripture and
reason, the division between the East and the West could not be avoided.
The pope was driven to revive the western empire in order to secure the
gift of the exarchy, to eradicate the claims of the Greeks, and to
restore the majesty of Rome from the debasement of a provincial town.
The emperors of the West would receive their crown from the successor of
St. Peter, and the Roman Church would require a zealous and respectable
advocate.
Inspired by these motives, Pope Leo, who had nearly fallen a victim to a
conspiracy (788), and had been saved and reinstated by Charlemagne, took
the opportunity presented by the French king's visit to Rome to crown
him emperor. On the festival of Christmas (800), in the church of St.
Peter, Leo, after the celebration of the Holy Mysteries, suddenly placed
a precious crown on his head. The dome resounded with the acclamations
of the people, his head and body were consecrated with the royal
unction, and he was saluted, or adored, by the pontiff after the example
of the Cæsars.
Europe dates a new era from his restoration of the western empire.
* * * * *
THEODOR MOMMSEN
History of Rome
Theodor Mommsen was born at Garding in Schleswig on November
30, 1817. He studied at Kiel University for three years,
examined Roman inscriptions in France and Italy from 1844 to
1847, and attained his first professorship at Leipzig in 1848,
and the Berlin Chair of Ancient History in 1858. His greatest
work was the "History of Rome," published in 1854, and its
successor, the "Roman Provinces." On this work he brought to
bear a research and a scholarship of almost unparalleled range
and completeness. He was a man capable of vehement and
occasionally unreasonable partisanship, and a strict and
cold-blooded impartiality would have tempered the enthusiasm
of some of his portraits and the severity of others. These
defects, however, are less obvious when his history is
condensed in small compass. There are cases in which his
judgments are open to adverse criticism. But at the present
day it may safely be affirmed that there is no extant history
of Rome down to the establishment of the empire which can be
regarded as rivalling that here presented. Upwards of 900
separate publications remain as a monument of Mommsen's
industry. He died on November 1, 1903.
Iapygians, Etruscans, and Italians, the last certainly Indo-Europeans,
are the original stocks of Italy proper. Of the Italians there are two
divisions, the Latin and the Umbro-Sabellian. Central Italy was occupied
by the Latins, who were established in cantons formed of village groups;
which cantons at an early age formed themselves into the loose Latin
League, with Alba at its head.
The Roman canton, on both banks of the Tiber, concentrated itself on the
city earlier than others. The citizens consisted of the families which
constituted the larger groups of clans or gentes, formed into those
tribes. The remainder of the population were their dependents or slaves.
At the head of the family was the father, and the whole community had
its king, standing to it in the same relation as the father to the
family. His power, within the law, was absolute; but he could not
override it or change it on his own authority. This required the formal
assent of the assembled citizens. The heads of the clans formed a
separate body--the Senate--which controlled the appointment of the king,
and could veto legislation.
By admission of aliens and absorption of other communities, swelling the
number of dependents, was gradually created a great body of plebeians,
non-citizens, who began to demand political rights; and whom it was
necessary to organise for military purposes which was done by the
"Servian Constitution." Gradually Rome won a supremacy in the Latin
League, a position of superiority over the aggregate of the other
cantons.
In this community arose three political movements: (1) On the part of
the full citizen, patricii, to limit the power not of the state, but of
the kings; (2) of the non-citizens, to acquire political rights; (3) of
antagonism between the great landholders and the land-interests opposed
to them. The first resulted in the expulsion of the monarchs, and the
substitution of a dual kingship held for one year only. But in many
respects their joint power was curtailed as compared with that of the
monarch, while for emergencies they could appoint a temporary dictator.
The change increased the power of the General Assembly, to which it
became necessary to admit the non-citizen freeholders who were liable to
military duties. The life tenure of the members of the Senate greatly
increased the powers of that body, and intensified the antagonism of the
patriarch and the plebeians.
At the same time, a landed nobility was developing; and when fresh land
was acquired by the state, the Patricians claimed to control it. But the
great agricultural population could not submit to this process of land
absorption, and the consequent strife took the form of a demand for
political recognition, which issued in the appointment of Tribunes of
the Plebs, with power of administrative veto.
The struggle over privileges lasted for two hundred years. First the
Canuleian law made marriage valid between patricians and plebeians, and
instituted for a time military tribunes. The Licinian law, eighty years
later, admitted plebeians to the consulship, and also required the
employment of free labour in agriculture. The decisively democratic
measure was the Horticunian law, after another seventy years, giving the
exclusively plebeian assembly full legislative power. The practical
effect of the changes was to create a new aristocracy, semi-plebeian in
origin, and to reduce the personal power of the chief officers of state,
while somewhat increasing that of the remodelled Senate; rendering it a
body selfish indeed in internal matters, but essentially patriotic as
well as powerful.
_I.--The Description of Italy_
During the period of this long constitutional struggle, Rome and her
kinsfolk had first been engaged in a stubborn and ultimately successful
contest with the non-Aryan Etruscan race; and then Italy had been
attacked by the migrating Aryan hordes of the Celts, known as Gauls, who
sacked Rome, but retired to North Italy; events giving birth to many
well-known stories, probably in the main mythical. But the practical
effect was to impose a greater solidarity of the Latin and kindred
races, and a more decisive acceptance of Roman hegemony.
That hegemony, however, had to be established by persistent compulsion,
and there were three stages in its completion. First, the subjection of
the Latins and Campanians; then the struggle of Rome with the
Umbrian-Samnites; finally, the decisive repulse of the Epirote invader
Pyrrhus--in effect a Hellenic movement. The Roman supremacy established
through the exhaustion of the valiant Samnites required to be confirmed
by stern repression of attempts to recover liberty. But the Hellenic
element in Italy, antagonistic to the growing Roman power, in effect
invited the intervention of the Epirote chief. But his scheme was not
that of an imperial statesman, but of a chivalrous and romantic warrior.
His own political blunders and the iron determination of the Romans,
destroyed his chances of conquest. His retirement left Rome undisputed
lord of Italy; which in part shared full citizenship, in part possessed
only the more restricted Latin rights, and in part only rights conceded
under varying treaties.
A sense of common Italian nationality was developing. But if Rome was
queen of Italy, Carthage was queen of the seas. Maritime expansion was
precluded, though Rome's position fitted her for it. Carthage was the
one Phoenician state which developed political as well as commercial
power. The commercial cities of North Africa were in subordination to
her, in the Western Mediterranean she had no rivals, her domestic
government was oligarchical.
Roman intervention in the affairs of Sicily, where Carthage was the
dominant power, produced the rupture between the two great states which
was bound to come sooner or later. Sicily itself was the scene of the
initial struggle, which taught Rome that her victories on land were
liable to be nullified by the Carthaginian sea power. She resolved to
build a navy, on the plan of adopting boarding tactics which would
assimilate a naval engagement to a battle on land. These tactics were
successful enough to equalise the fighting value of the respective
fleets. The Romans were enabled to land an invading army under Regulus
in Africa.
Though superior on land, the general's blundering led to a disaster, and
for some time misfortune by sea and failure by land dogged the Romans.
But Carthage failed to use her opportunity; she did not attempt to
strike a crushing blow when she could have done so. But the private
energy of Roman patriots at last placed on the seas a fleet which once
more turned the scale, whereas it was on land that the brilliant
Carthaginian Hamilcar had displayed his genius and daring. The first
Punic War gave Rome predominance in Sicily, and a position of maritime
equality. Sardinia was added to the Roman dominion, and her provincial
administration came into being.
She was carrying her expansion farther over Celtic regions, when
Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, hurled himself against her, and came near
to destroying her. Hamilcar had conceived the idea of imperial
expansion, and given it shape by creating a dominion in Spain; he had
looked forward to the life-and-death struggle with Rome that was
destined to his son; for which Spain was to be the base. Hannibal, left
in control in Spain, deliberately challenged Rome to war.
The challenge was accepted, war was declared, and Hannibal accomplished
the amazing feat of leading an army of 60,000 men from Spain and
effecting the passage of the Alps, while the Romans were landing an army
in Spain. In a brilliant campaign, he defeated the stubborn Roman
legions at Vercellæ and the Trebia.
But success depended not on the winning of victories by an isolated
force, but on the disruption of Italy. His superiority in the field was
again demonstrated at Trasimenus, but no Italian allies came in. He
outwitted Fabius, and then utterly shattered at Cannæ a Roman force of
double his own numbers. For a moment it seemed that Italian cohesion was
weakening; but the Roman Senate and people were stirred only to a more
dogged resolution.
Cannæ failed to break up the Roman confederation. Generalship unaided
could accomplish no more. In Spain, where young Scipio was soon winning
renown, the Roman arms were in the ascendant, and in Sicily. No
effective aid was coming from Macedon, though war was declared between
her and Rome. Hannibal's activities began to be paralysed; by slow
degrees he was forced into the south. Hannibal succeeded in crossing
the Alps with fresh forces, but by a brilliant operation was annihilated
on the Metaurus. The time had come when Scipio could disregard Hannibal
and strike at Carthage herself. Even Hannibal's return could not save
her. The victory of Zama decided the issue. Carthage became virtually a
tributary and subject state. Spain was a Roman province, and North
Africa a sort of protectorate.
The threatening extension of Macedonian power now demanded the
protecting intervention of Rome; an honest act of liberation for the
Greeks, but entailing presently the war with Antiochus of Syria.
Antiochus had left Phillip and Macedon in the lurch; now he sought to
impose his own yoke in place of theirs. The practical outcome was his
decisive overthrow at the battle of Magnesia, and the cession to Rome of
Asia Minor. Pergamus, under the house of Actalus, was established as a
protected kingdom, as Numidia under Masinissa had been. The Greek
states, however, were becoming conscious that their freedom was hardly
more than a name; Perseus of Macedon once more challenged Rome, not
without Greek support. Macedon was finally crushed by Aemilius Paullus
at Pydna. From that moment, Rome dropped the policy of maintaining free
states beyond the seas, which had manifestly failed. Virtually, the
known world was divided into subjects and dependencies of Rome, so vast
was the change in the forty years between the battles of the Metaurus
and Pydna.
Rapid extension of dominion by conquest had demoralising results; the
ruling race was exposed to strong temptations in the provinces, and the
city remained the seat of government, while the best of the burgesses
were distributed elsewhere. Hence, the popular assembly became virtually
the city mob, while the ruling families tended more and more to form a
close and greedy and plutocratic oligarchy. The demoralisation was very
inadequately checked by the austerity of the censorship as exercised by
Cato.
In the provinces, the Spanish natives revolted, and were only repressed
after severe fighting. In Greece, Asia and Africa, the Roman rule gave
neither freedom nor strong government. In Africa, the disturbances led
to the wiping out of Carthage; in Greece to the complete subjection of
the dependent states; in the Far East, a new Parthian power arose under
Mithridates. The Mediterranean was allowed to be infested by pirates.
Revolution was at hand. Politics had become reduced to a process of
intrigue for office emoluments, involving a pandering to the city mob
for its suffrages.
_II.--The Revolution_
Socially, the most patent evil was the total disappearance of the free
agricultural class, the absorption of all the land into huge estates
under slave labour. The remedy proposed by Tiberius Gracchus was the
partial state resumption of land and its re-allotment. He adopted
unconstitutional methods for carrying his proposals, and was murdered in
a riot led by the oligarchs. Appeals to the Roman populace were not,
unfortunately, appeals to the Roman nation.
His brother, Gaius, deliberately designed a revolution. He proposed to
work through the antagonism of the aristocrats and the wealthy
non-senatorial equestrian order; and by concentrating power in the hands
of the tribunate, hitherto checked by the restrictions on re-election.
In effect, he meant to destroy the oligarchy by making the Tribune a
perpetual dictator, and thus to carry through social reforms; to
establish also legal equality first for the Italians, then for the
provinces also. But these reforms were not particularly attractive to
the city mob, and the other side could play the demagogue. The condition
of Cæsarism is the control of physical force; Gaius Gracchus fell
because he had not that essential control. The oligarchy remained
supreme. The plans of Gracchus for planting colonies and distributing
allotments were nullified.
The evils of slave labour multiplied, and issued in servile
insurrections. In Numidia, the able Masimissa had been succeeded by
Micipsa. On Micipsa's death, the rule was usurped by his illegitimate
nephew Jugurtha, whose story has been told by Sallust. The war was at
least terminated less by the low-born general in command, Marius, than
his brilliant lieutenant Sulla. But Marius re-organised the army on the
basis which was to make a military despotism practicable, as it made a
professional instead of a citizen army.
But now a new foe appears; the first Teutonic (not Celtic) hordes of the
Cimbri and Teutones; to meet with an overwhelming check at the hands of
Marius at Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. The successful soldier allied
himself with the popular leader Saturninus; the programme of Gaius
Gracchus was resuscitated. But Marius, a political incapable, separated
from the demagogues, and by helping to crush them, effaced himself.
Livius Drusus attempted to carry out the Gracchan social reform, with
the senate instead of the tribunate as the controlling power; the
senatorial party themselves wrecked his schemes, and the antagonistic
power of the equestrian order was advanced.
But the immediate outcome was the revolt of the Italians, the _socii_
(whence the name social war). They were not citizens, not on an equal
footing with the citizens before the law. The revolt was suppressed, but
the legions were completely out of hand. The attempt of Sulpicius to
head the reform movement was answered by Sulla, who for the first time
led a Roman army against Rome, crushed Sulpicius, prescribed some of his
adherents, and placed the power of the senate on a stronger footing by
legal enactment. Then he went to the East, to conduct the war against
Mithridates.
While Sulla was conducting his operations, military and diplomatic, with
skill and success in the East, his arrangements at Rome had left
discontent and disappointment seething. There was another revolution,
led by Cinna, Marius and Sertorius; it mastered Rome. Marius spilt seas
of blood, but soon died. For three years Cinna was supreme, but he had
no constructive policy.
But now Sulla had finished his work in the East. He was returning at the
head of a body of veterans devoted to him; and his diplomacy won over
half Italy to his side. The struggle with the revolutionary government
was not greatly prolonged, and it was decisive.
In plain terms, the Roman constitution had gone utterly to wreck; Sulla
was in something of the same position as Oliver Cromwell. He had to
reconstruct under conditions which made a constitutional restoration
impracticable; but his control of the efficient military force gave him
the necessary power. That any system introduced must be arbitrary and
find its main sanction in physical force--that it should partake of
terrorism--was inevitable.
Sulla obtained the formal conferment on himself of absolute power. He
began by applying this rule of terror not vindictively, but with
impersonal mercilessness, against the lives and property of the
opposition. In the constitution which he promulgated the senatorial body
was alone recognised as a privileged class; the senate itself was
increased, it recovered full control of the judiciary and of
legislation; no power was left of cancelling membership. The tribunician
power was curtailed.
The civil and military functions of consuls and prætors were separated.
They were to hold civil power in Italy proper during their year of
office; they were then to have a second year in military control of a
province. The planting of military colonies provided numerous garrisons
whose interests were associated with the new constitution. When Sulla
had done his work, he resigned his extraordinary powers with entire
indifference. In a little more than a year he died.
The Sullan constitution saved the Roman empire from imminent collapse;
but it was impossible that it should be more than a makeshift, like
Cromwell's protectorate. There were huge classes with perpetual
grievances; the removal of the military forces to the provinces left the
city of Rome without adequate governors of the provinces themselves. And
there was no man of the hour of supreme ability to carry on work
demanding a master.
_III.--Pompey and Cæsar_
The young Graccus Pompeius was the most distinguished of the Sullan
party; Crassus was the wealthiest and most powerful of the Equestrian
group; Lepidus was the popular leader. A popular insurrection which he
headed was suppressed, and he disappeared, but Sertorius, once an
associate of Marius, had obtained a remarkable personal ascendancy in
Spain, and, in league with the Mediterranean pirates, threatened to be a
formidable foe of the new constitution. For some years he maintained a
gradually waning resistance against the arms of Pompeius, but finally
was assassinated.