dominion of exaggerated notions of the beneficence of the Empire which
Caesar founded, of its value as a political model, of its connection with
the life of modern civilization, and of the respect, not to say
devotion, due to the memory of its founder. Let us try to cast off for
an hour the influence of these modern sentiments, and put the whole
group of ancient figures back into its place in ancient history.
The Empire was a necessity at the time when it came--granted. But a
necessity of what sort? Was it a necessity created by an upward effort,
by an elevation of humanity, or by degradation and decline? In the
former case you may pass the same sentence upon those who opposed its
coming which is passed upon those who crucified Christ, or who, like
Philip II., opposed the Reformation in the spirit of bigoted reaction.
But in the latter case they must be charged, not with moral blindness or
depravity, but only with the lack of that clearness of sight which leads
men and parties at the right moment, or even in anticipation of the
right moment, to despair; and such perspicacity, to say the least, is a
highly scientific quality, requiring perhaps, to make it respectable and
safe, a more exact knowledge of historical sequences than we even now
possess. Even now we determine these historical necessities by our
knowledge of the result. It was a necessity, given all the conditions--
the treachery of Ephialtes included--that the Persians should force the
pass of Thermopylae. But the Three Hundred could not know all the
conditions. Even if they had, would they have done right in giving way?
They fell, but their spirits fought again at Salamis.
To me it appears that the Empire was a necessity of the second kind;
that it was an inevitable concession to incurable evil, not a new
development of good. The Roman morality, the morality which had produced
and sustained the Republic, was now in a state of final and irremediable
decay. That morality was narrow and imperfect, or rather it was
rudimentary, a feeble and transient prototype of the sounder and more
enduring morality which was soon to be born into the world. It was the
morality of devotion to a single community, and in fact consisted mainly
of the performance of duty to that community in war. But it was real and
energetic after its measure and its own time. It produced a type of
character, which, if reproduced now, would be out of date and even
odious, but which stands in history dignified and imposing even to the
last. Nor was it without elements of permanent value. It contributed
largely to the patriotism of the seventeenth century, a patriotism which
has now perhaps become obsolete in its turn, and is superseded in our
aspirations by an ideal with less of right and self-assertion, with more
of duty and of social affection, yet did good service against the
Stuarts. The Roman morality, together with dignity of character,
produced as usual simplicity of life. It produced a reverence for the
majesty of law, the voice of the community. It produced relations
between the sexes, and domestic relations generally, far indeed below
the ideal, yet decidedly above those which commonly existed in the pagan
world. It produced a high degree of self-control and of abstinence from
vices which prevailed elsewhere. It produced fruits of intellect, some
original, especially in the political sphere, others merely borrowed
from Greece, yet evincing on the part of the borrower a power of
appreciating the superior excellence of another, and that a conquered
nation, the value of which, as breaking through the iron boundary of
national self-love, has perhaps not received sufficient notice. What was
of most consequence to the world at large and to history, it produced,
though probably not so much in the way of obedience to recognised
principle as of noble instinct, a signal mitigation of Conquest, which
was then the universal habit, but from being extermination and
destruction, at best slavery or forcible transplantation, became under
the Romans a supremacy, imposed indeed by force, and at the cost of much
suffering, yet, in a certain sense civilizing, and not exercised wholly
without regard for the good of the subject races. Thus that political
unity of the nations round the Mediterranean was brought about, which
was the necessary precursor and protector of a union of a better kind. A
measure of the same praise is due to Alexander, who was a conqueror of
the higher order for a similar reason--namely, that though a Macedonian
prince, he was imbued with the ideas and the morality of the Greek
republics. But Alexander was a single man, and he could not accomplish
what was accomplished in a succession of generations by the corporate
energies and virtues of the Roman Senate.
The conditions under which this morality had maintained itself were now
gone. It depended on the circumstances of a small community, long
engaged in a struggle for existence with powerful and aggressive
neighbours, the Latin, the Etruscan, the Samnite, and the Gaul; entering
in turn, when its own safety had been secured, on a career of conquest,
still in a certain sense defensive, since every neighbour was in those
days an enemy; and continuing to task to the utmost the citizen's
devotion to the State, the virtues of command and obedience necessary to
victory, and the frugality necessary to supply the means of great
national efforts; while luxury was kept at bay, though the means of
indulging it had begun to flow in, by the check of national danger and
the counter-attraction of military glory. But all this was at an end
when Carthage and Macedon were overthrown. National danger and the
necessity for national effort being removed, self-devotion failed,
egotism broke loose, and began to revel in the pillage and oppression of
a conquered world. The Roman character was corrupted, as the Spartan
character was corrupted when Sparta, from being a camp in the midst of
hostile Helots, became a dominant power and sent out governors to
subject states; though the corruption in the case of Sparta was far more
rapid, because Spartan excellence was more exclusively military, more
formal and more obsolete. The mass of the Romans ceased to perform
military duty, and there being no great public duty except military duty
to be performed, there remained no school of public virtue. Such public
virtue as there was lingered, though in a degraded form round the eagles
of the standing armies, to which the duties of the citizen-soldier were
now consigned; and the soldiery thus acquired not only the power but the
right of electing the emperors, the best of whom, in fact, after
Augustus, were generally soldiers. The ruling nation became a city
rabble, the vices of which were but little tempered by the fitful
intervention of the enfranchised communities of Italy. Of this rabble,
political adventurers bought the consulships, which led to the
government of provinces, and wrung out of the unhappy provincials the
purchase money and a fortune for themselves besides. These fortunes
begot colossal luxury and a general reign of vice. Violence mingling
with corruption in the elections was breeding a complete anarchy in
Rome. Roman religion, to which, if we believe Polybius, we must ascribe
a real influence in the maintenance of morality, was at the same time
undermined by the sceptical philosophy of Greece, and by contact with
conflicting religions, the spectacle of which had its effect in
producing the scepticism of Montaigne.
The empire itself was on the point of dissolution. In empires founded by
single conquerors, such as those of the East, when corruption has made
the reigning family its prey, the satraps make themselves independent.
The empire of Alexander was divided among his generals. The empire of
the conquering republic of Rome, the republic itself having succumbed to
vices analagous to the corruption of a reigning family, was about to be
broken up by the great military chiefs. Pompey had already, in fact,
carved out for himself a separate kingdom in Spain, which with its
legions he had got permanently into his own hands. Thus the unity of the
civilized portion of humanity, so indispensable to the future of the
race, would have been lost. Nor was there any remedy but one.
Representation of the provinces was out of the question. Supposing it
possible that a single assembly could have been formed out of all these
different races and tongues, the representation of the conquered would
have been the abdication of the conqueror, and abdication was a step for
which the lazzaroni of the so-called democratic party were as little
prepared as the haughtiest aristocrat in Rome. A world of egotism,
without faith or morality, could be held together only by force, which
presented itself in the person of the ablest, most daring, and most
unscrupulous adventurer of the time. If faith should again fail, and the
world again be reduced to a mass of egotism, the same sort of government
will again, be needed. In fact, we are at this moment rather in danger
of something of the kind, and these revivals of Caesarism are not wholly
out of season. But in any other case to propose to society such a model
would be treason to humanity.
The abandonment of military duty by the Roman people had, among other
things, made slavery more immoral than ever, because there was no longer
any semblance of a division of labour: the master could no longer be
said to defend the slave in war while the slave supported him by labour
at home. Becoming more immoral, slavery became more cruel. The six
thousand crosses erected on the road from Capua to Rome after the
Servile War were the terrible proof.
As to the existence of an oligarchy in the bosom of the dominant
republic, this would in itself have been no great evil to the subject
world, to which it mattered little whether its tyrants were a hundred or
a hundred thousand; just as to the unenfranchised in modern communities
it matters little whether the enfranchised class be large or small. In
fact, the broader the basis of a tyranny, the more fearless and
unscrupulous, generally speaking, the tyranny is.
We need not overstate the case. If we do we shall tarnish the laurels of
Caesar, who would have shown no genius in killing the republic had the
republic been already dead. There was still respect for the law and the
constitution. Pompey's hesitation when supreme power was within his
grasp, Caesar's own pause at the Rubicon, are proofs of it. The civil
wars of Marius and Sulla had fearfully impaired, in the eyes of Romans,
but they had not utterly destroyed, the majesty of Rome. There were
still great characters--characters which you may dislike, but of which
you can never rationally speak with contempt--and there must have been
some general element of worth in which these characters were formed. If
the recent administration of the Senate had not been glorious, still,
from a Roman point of view, it had not been disastrous: the revolt of
the slaves and the insurrection in Spain had been quelled; Mithridates
had been conquered; the pirates, though for a time their domination
accused the feebleness of the government, had at length been put down.
The only great military calamity of recent date was the defeat of
Crassus, whose unprovoked and insane invasion of Parthia was the error,
not of the Senate, but of the Triumvirate. Legions were forthcoming for
the conquest of Gaul, and a large reserve of treasure was found in the
sacred treasure-house when it was broken open by Caesar. Bad governors of
provinces, Verres, Fonteius, Gabinius, were impeached and punished.
Lucullus, autocrat and voluptuary as he was, governed his province well.
So did Cicero, if we may take his own word for it. We may, at all
events, take his own word for this, that he was anxious to be thought to
have ruled with purity and justice, which proves that purity and justice
were not quite out of fashion. The old Roman spirit still struggled
against luxury, and we find Cicero suffering from indigestion, caused by
a supper of vegetables at the house of a wealthy friend, whose excellent
cook had developed all the resources of gastronomic art in struggling
with the restrictions imposed by a sumptuary law. There was intellectual
life, and all the civilized tastes and half-moral qualities which the
existence of intellectual life implies. In spite of the sanguinary
anarchy which often broke out in the Roman streets, Cicero, the most
cultivated and the least combative of men, when in exile or in his
province, sighs for the capital as a Frenchman sighs for Paris. In
short, if we consider the case fairly, we shall admit, I believe, that,
besides the force of memory and of old allegiance, there was enough of
worth and of apparent hope left, not only to excuse republican
illusions, but probably to make it a duty to try the issue with fate. I
say probably, and, after all, how can we presume to speak with certainty
of a situation so distant from us in time, and so imperfectly recorded?
The great need of the world was public virtue--the spirit of self-
sacrifice for the common good. This the empire could not possibly call
into being. The public virtue of the ancient world resided in the
nationalities which the conquering republic had broken up, and of which
the empire only sealed the doom. The empire could never call forth even
the lowest form of public virtue, loyalty to the hereditary right of a
royal family, because the empire never presented itself as a right, but
merely as a personal power. The idea of legitimacy, I apprehend never
connected itself with these dynasts who were, in fact, a series of
usurpers, veiling their usurpation under republican forms. When the
spirit which leads man to sacrifice himself to the good of the community
appeared again it appeared in associations and notably in one great
association formed not by the empire but independently of it in
antagonism to its immorality, and in spite of its persecutions.
Accidentally the empire assisted the extension of the great Christian
association by completing the overthrow of the national religions, but
the main part of this work had been done by the republic and it was the
merit neither of the republic nor of the empire.
It is said with confidence that the empire vastly improved the
government of the provinces, and that on this account it was a great
blessing to the world. I do not believe that any nation had then
attained, I do not believe that any nation has now attained, and I doubt
whether any nation ever will attain, such a point of morality as to be
able to govern other nations for the benefit of the governed. I will say
nothing about our Christian policy in India, but let those who rate
French morality so highly, consider what French tutelage is to the
people of Algeria. But supposing the task undertaken, the question which
is the best organ of imperial government--an assembly or an autocrat--is
a curious one. I am disposed to think that, taking the average of
assemblies and the average of autocrats, there is more hope in the
assembly, because in the assembly opinion must have some force. The
autocrat is in a certain sense, raised above the dominant nation and its
interests, but, after all, he is one of that nation, he lives in it, and
subsists by its support. Even in the time of Augustus, if we may trust
Dion Cassius Licinius the Governor of Gaul, was guilty of corruptions
and peculations curiously resembling those of Verres, from whom he seems
to have borrowed the device of tampering with the calendar for the
purpose of fiscal fraud, and when the provinces complained, the Emperor
hushed up the matter, partly to avoid scandal, partly because Licinius
was cunning enough to pretend that his peculations had been intended to
cut the sinews of revolt, and that his spoils were reserved for the
imperial exchequer. The rebellions of Vindex and Civilis seem to prove
that even Caesar's favourite province was not happy. Spain was
misgoverned by the deputies both of Julius and Augustus. In Britain, the
history of the revolt of the Iceni shews that neither the extortions of
Roman usurers, nor the brutalities of Roman officers, had ended with the
republic. The blood tax of the conscription appears also to have been
cruelly exacted. The tribute of largesses and shows which the empire,
though supposed to be lifted high above all partialities, paid to the
Roman populace, was drawn almost entirely from the provinces. Emperors
who coined money with the tongue of the informer and the sword of the
executioner, were not likely to abstain from selling governorships; and,
in fact, Seneca intimates that under bad emperors governorships were
sold. Of course, the tyranny was felt most at Rome, where it was
present; but when Caligula or Caracalla made a tour in the provinces, it
was like the march of the pestilence. The absence of a regular
bureaucracy, practically controlling, as the Russian bureaucracy does,
the personal will of the Emperor, must have made government better under
Trajan, but much worse under Nero. The aggregation of land in the hands
of a few great land-holders evidently continued, and under this system
the garden of Italy became a desert. The decisive fact, however, is that
the provinces decayed, and that when the barbarians arrived, all power
of resistance was gone. That the empire was consciously levelling and
cosmopolitan, surely cannot be maintained. Actium was a Roman victory
over the gods of the nations. Augustus, who must have known something
about the system, avowedly aimed at restoring the number, the purity,
the privileged exclusiveness of the dominant race. His legislation was
an attempt to regenerate old Rome; and the political odes of the court
poet are full of that purpose. That the empire degraded all that had
once been noble in Rome is true; but the degradation of what had once
been noble in Rome was not the regeneration of humanity. The vast slave
population was no more elevated by the ascendency of the freedmen of the
imperial household than the female sex was elevated by the ascendancy of
Messalina.
That intellect declined under the emperors, and that the great writers
of its earlier period, Tacitus included, were really legacies of the
Republic, cannot be denied; and surely it is a pregnant fact. The empire
is credited with Roman law. But the Roman law was ripe for codification
in the time of the first Caesar. The leading principles of the civil law
seem by that time to have been in existence. Unquestionably the great
step had been taken of separating law as a science from consecrated
custom, and of calling into existence regular law courts and what was
tantamount to a legal profession. The mere evolution of the system from
its principles required no transcendant effort; and the idea of
codification must have been something less than divine, or it could not
have been compassed by the intellect of Justinian. The criminal law of
the empire, with its arbitrary courts, its secret procedure, its elastic
law of treason, and its practice of torture, was the scourge of Europe
till it was encountered and overthrown by the jury system, a
characteristic offspring of the Teutonic mind.
Tolerant the empire was, at least if you did not object to having the
statue of Caligula set up in your Holy of Holies, and this toleration
fostered the growth of a new religion. But it is needless to say that,
in this respect, the politicians of the empire only inherited the
negative virtue of those of the republic.
As to private morality, we may surely trust the common authorities--
Juvenal, Suetonius, Petronius Arbiter--supported as they are by the
evidence of the museums. There was one family, at least, whose colossal
vices and crimes afforded a picture in the deepest sense tragic,
considering their tremendous effect on the lot and destinies of
humanity.
It is a glorious dream, this of an autocrat, the elect of humanity,
raised above all factions and petty interests, armed with absolute power
to govern well, agreeing exactly with all our ideas, giving effect to
all our schemes of beneficence, and dealing summarily with our
opponents; but it does not come through the "horngate" of history, at
least not of the history of the Roman empire.
The one great service which the empire performed to humanity was this:
it held together, as nothing else could have held together, the nations
of the civilized world, and thus rendered possible a higher unity of
mankind.
I ventured to note, as one of the sources of illusion, a somewhat
exaggerated estimate of the amount and value of the Roman element
transfused by the empire into modern civilization. The theory of
continuity, suggested by the discoveries of physical science, is
prevailing also in history. A historical theory is to me scientific, not
because it is suggested by physical science, but because it fits the
historical facts. It may be true that there are no cataclysms in
history, but still there are great epochs. In fact, there are great
epochs, even in the natural history of the world; there were periods at
which organization and life began to exist. There may have been a time
at which a still further effort was made, and spiritual life also was
brought into being. Things which do not come suddenly or abruptly, may
nevertheless be new. A great sensation has been created by an article in
the _Quarterly_, on "The Talmud," which purports to shew that the
teachings of Christianity were, in fact, only those of Pharisaism. The
organ of orthodoxy, in publishing that article, was rather like our
great mother Eve in Milton, who "knew not eating death." But after all,
Pharisaism crucified Christianity, and probably it was not for
plagiarism. Supposing we adopt the infiltration theory of the Barbarian
conquests, and discard that of a sudden deluge of invasion, it remains
certain, unless all contemporary writers were much mistaken, that some
very momentous change did, after all, occur. Catholicism and Feudalism
were the life of the Middle Ages. Catholicism, though it had grown up
under the Empire, and at last subjugated it, was not of it. As to
Feudalism, it is possible, no doubt, to find lands held on condition of
military service under the Roman empire as well as under the Ottoman
empire, and in other military states. But is it possible to find
anything like the social hierarchy of Feudalism, its code of mutual
rights and duties, or the political and social characters which it
formed?