In my last lecture I strove to draw a picture of the Mediterranean
lands at the moment when the Greek world, as the Greek world had been
shaped by Macedonian conquest, a world of kingdoms, federations,
and single cities, a busy and intricate system full of the deepest
political lessons at every step, was suddenly startled by the
invasion of a power from the West. That power had already slowly
risen to the first place in its own Western world; it now sprang
as in a moment to the first place in the East; but, having thus
sprung to the first place, it was content to fall back on its former
slow and piecemeal course. Generations had to pass away before the
paramount influence in the Greek world which Rome won at a single
grasp was fully changed into immediate dominion over every land and
city to which its influence had spread. Very early in the second
century B.C. Rome was already the paramount power in the Greek
world. She had not a single province east of Hadria; but cities,
confederations, kingdoms, all knew that she was practically their
mistress. Late in the first century A.D. Rome had many provinces
east of Hadria; her immediate dominion had become the rule, and even
nominal independence was the exception; but there were still free
Greek cities which Vespasian deemed it prudent to bring under his
immediate dominion, and there were not a few other free Greek cities
which Vespasian left to give Trajan an opportunity of respecting the
faith of treaties. The first step in short was sudden and swift;
every later step was slow; but the first step carried every later
step with it as its necessary consequence. In the interval between
the First and Second Punic Wars, Rome appeared east of the Hadriatic
as the deliverer of Greek cities from the pirates of Illyricum. That
was in truth the first step in that eastward march by which, five
hundred and fifty years later, Rome herself, in her own person,
followed in the wake of her dominion, and transferred her seat from
the seven hills by the Tiber to the seven hills by the Bosporos. Or
shall we say that the first step was taken at a far earlier time?
The position of Rome as an Italian state, ruling over Greek allies
and subjects, but in return deeply affected by Greek influences of
every kind, had begun while Rome still dwelled in her own peninsula.
Before she crossed the Hadriatic, she had begun to put on the
character of that compound power, politically Roman, intellectually
Greek, whose calling it was to leaven the world. The extension which
was marked, in the later half of the third century, by the Roman
alliance with Apollônia, Epidamnos, and Korkyra, was an extension
only geographical. The ally or mistress, whichever name we choose,
of Naples, Tarentum, and Syracuse, the undoubted mistress of the
greater half of Sicily, had already begun to put on the character of
a Greek power before she drew sword for or against any city of the
elder Greece. Rome had entered the ranks of the _Hellênismos_ before
Corinth admitted her citizens to strive in the games of the Isthmos,
before Athens honoured them with initiation into the holiest rites of
Dêmêtêr and her Child.
* * * * *
In a lecture of my former course I pointed out some of the physical
conditions which made it possible for Rome to rise to the headship
of the world. The course of all history, I then ventured to say, had
been determined by the geological fact that certain hills by the
Tiber were lower and nearer together than the other hills of Latium.
If I were lecturing on Roman history as such, instead of taking a
glance of a moment, a glance of a mere thousand years or so, at Rome
in her œcumenical position, I might carry out this thought into great
detail. For my present purpose it is enough to say that the central
spot of the central peninsula was naturally called to headship. We
might point out that the process which made Lugubalium and Nisibis
bulwarks of Rome began when the Palatine and the Capitoline hills
were girded by a single wall. But it is enough for us to mark the
great steps in the advance of the Roman power, the steps which made
her the head of Latium, the head of Italy, the head of the West, the
head, and in the end the mistress, of the Mediterranean world. In
all these stages we must ever bear in mind that the rule of Rome was
in the fullest sense the rule of a city, a rule of essentially the
same kind as the rule of other ruling cities before and after. It was
distinguished from the rule of Athens, Sparta, Carthage, Bern, and
Venice only by the vastness of the scale to which the rule of the
Roman city extended, and by the process, unparalleled in the history
of any other city, by which the franchise of the ruling commonwealth
was gradually extended to all its allies and subjects. Latium, Italy,
the Mediterranean world, were merged bit by bit, not only in the
Roman dominion but in the Roman city, till every Italian ally, every
Greek confederate, even every barbarian provincial, had become a
citizen of Rome. It is true that the last stage of the process did
not take place till to be a citizen of Rome simply meant to be a
subject of Rome’s master. It has been doubted, with no small show of
reason, whether the edict of Antoninus Caracalla was not an immediate
loss rather than an immediate gain to those whom it admitted to the
full honours of the Roman name. But the eye of universal history
looks at the change in another light. The edict of Antoninus,
whatever its immediate motives, whatever its immediate results, did
in the end create an artificial Roman nation throughout the Roman
dominion, at any rate from the Ocean to Mount Tauros. Every freeman
throughout the Empire had now a right in the name and traditions of
Rome. We see the results of this change in the men of the fifth
and sixth centuries, in those Romans of Gaul and Spain who knew no
national name, no national being, save that of the city to which
their forefathers had bowed. We see its yet more lasting results in
the Romans and the Romania of the East, in the Greek-speaking folk
from whom the Roman name has not yet wholly passed away, in the
Latin-speaking folk to whom in our own day the Roman name has again
become the living badge of their regenerate being.
On Rome then, as head of Europe in a sense in which no other among
the powers of Europe ever reached that headship, the two duties of a
great European power were laid in a fulness in which they were never
laid on any other. Rome was called on, before all others, to be the
teacher of nations of her own European stock, to be the champion of
Europe against the inroads of barbarians from without. In the former
character her teaching had sometimes to be sharp; she had often to
wield the rod of as stern a discipline as that with which Gideon
taught the men of Succoth. It was the mission of Rome to make the
Gaul the partaker of her tongue and culture. It was her mission to
make the Teuton the heir of one half of her political power. She
was to frame out of his stores and her own a third state of things
distinct from either of the elements that went to frame it. Of the
union of Teuton and Roman sprang the world of modern Europe. But
for that union the nations had to bide their time; as in the games
of Hellas, they that rose before the happy moment were scourged
back again. They who came as invaders only had to be dealt with as
invaders and not as disciples. The Gaul who came before his time had
his scourging at Sentinum; the Teuton who came before his time had
his scourging at Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. But how well the work was
done with Gauls and Teutons who better knew their time and place, we
see when the Gaul Sidonius paints in his Roman speech the portrait
of one Theodoric, Gothic lord of a Roman realm; we see it when a
greater Theodoric, Gothic lord of a mightier Roman realm, legislates
from his throne at Ravenna for the welfare of Rome’s earliest Gaulish
province. Here was one side of the mission of the head of Europe, the
teacher of the kindred nations. Her other side as European champion,
as foremost representative of the Eternal cause, stands forth in her
long warfare with the Carthaginian, the Persian, the Arab, and the
Turk. And both sides stand forth together when Rome, lady of the
nations, marches forth with her Teutonic _comitatus_ round her to
meet the hosts of Attila. The work was well in doing when Anianus
looked from the walls of Orleans on the banners of deliverance, Roman
and Gothic, flocking side by side, in the strife when Roman, Goth,
and Frank, Catholic, Aryan, and heathen, joined to deal the final
blow for the common European soil on the day of slaughter in the
Catalaunian fields.
How the Latin city of Rome marched to the headship of Latium, how
the head of Latium marched to the headship of Italy, are matters of
Roman rather than of universal history. The œcumenical calling of
Rome comes upon her as soon as she has become the head of Italy,
perhaps more strictly in the very moment of her becoming such. She
is not fully head of Italy till she has beaten back the invader
from Epeiros from the shores of her peninsula. But her war with
Pyrrhos had brought her into the thick of the Greek world and all its
complications. Unless we accept the tales of her earlier dealings
with Massalia, Rome has not yet sought either Greek allies or Greek
enemies beyond the bounds of Italy. But Greece, in the person of her
foremost champion, had come to seek out Rome within those bounds. The
fight of Beneventum ruled that Italy should be Italian; it ruled that
no Greek power should arise in Western Europe to balance the realms
of Ptolemy and Seleukos in the East. It ruled in short that the head
of Italy should be Rome. The wars which Rome had waged against the
Samnite and the Gaul had made her beyond all comparison the first
power in Italy. The war with Pyrrhos, the war that threatened to make
Italy, like Asia or Egypt, part of a Greek dominion, made her the
undoubted head.
The head of Italy now stood forth as one of the great powers of
the world. It marks one of the differences between the political
state of those days and that of our own that Rome had no sooner
undoubtedly risen to this position than she found herself engaged
in a struggle, a struggle well nigh for life and death, with the
other great power of the Western Mediterranean. In the modern world,
whatever jealousies, controversies, wars, may arise between any of
the great powers of Europe, none seeks the utter destruction of any
other, none seeks the abiding weakening of any other, its degradation
from the rank of a great power. But the establishment of Rome as the
undoubted head of Italy, as one of the two greatest powers of the
West, at once condemned her to abiding rivalry with the other power,
a rivalry which might be salved over by this or that interval of
peace, but which meant that, sooner or later, either Rome or Carthage
must perish. We must remember that, while between any other two of
the great wars of Rome there was some slight interval of peace, the
war with Pyrrhos and the Italian allies of Pyrrhos was followed
without any break whatever by the first war with Carthage. That
war was the War for Sicily. On any theory of natural boundaries, a
power that was the head of Italy might reasonably, so far as there
is reason in such matters, expect to spread its dominion over the
lands within the Alps, and over the three great islands which look
like natural appendages to the peninsula of Italy. And a power which
spread itself over the lands within the Alps, a power which from its
own shores could look out on the mountains of Illyricum, could hardly
expect to keep itself wholly unentangled by the affairs of the lands
on the other side of Hadria. Rome then had hardly become the head
of Italy before two fields of action were opened for her without a
breathing-space. She had to strive with the other great power of the
West, and signs were not wanting that before long her destiny would
call her to mingle in the strifes of Eastern Europe also.
The Western call was the earlier and the nearer. Close on the war
with Pyrrhos followed the War for Sicily, the war of more than twenty
years waged mainly on the waters by the fleets of Rome and Carthage.
As a war for Sicily, as one of the greatest of the many wars for
Sicily, it takes its place in the long range of cycles which make up
the history of that illustrious island. Rome now for the first time
buckled on her harness to play her part in dealing with the Eternal
Question. Was the greatest of Mediterranean islands to be a part of
Europe or of Africa, to be a possession of Aryan or of Semitic man,
to be the home of the gods of Alba and Olympos or of the Moloch and
Baalim of the men of Canaan? The Greek had waged the warfare for
ages; the fates had gone against him; the realm of Hierôn was but a
small survival of the days when Sicily had come so near to being a
purely Hellenic island. The calling for which Syracuse was too weak
passed on to the stronger hand of Rome. Panormos, won for Europe for
eleven hundred years, was no mean first-fruits of the strife. After
well nigh a generation of warfare, Rome stood forth victorious,
mistress of Sicily, presently mistress of Sardinia and Corsica,
seized of her first provincial dominion, rich in the faithful
alliance of the first and worthiest of her long line of dependent
kings. The rival power came out of the strife, not crushed, hardly
weakened, but driven to transfer her energies to a new sphere, to
seek in a new land the means of dealing a blow at Rome in the heart
of her own Italy.
The choice of that new sphere of Carthaginian energy, the exploits
of the house of Hamilkar, the line of the sons of Thunder, of itself
opens a new and important, though as yet a secondary, page in the
history of Europe. The time has come for the most western of her
three peninsulas to play its part in the general affairs of the
world. But the peninsula which was not wholly Mediterranean, which
had two of its three sides washed by the outer Ocean, was never to
play such a part as the elder peninsulas which felt only the waters
of the inland sea. A day was to come in ages still far distant when
Spain should be a ruling power in Italy and in Greece. But Spain
never was to be what Italy or what Greece had been, nor what Italy
was to be again. For several centuries her fate was to be a great
and flourishing dependency of Rome, which, when it had once fully
accepted the dependent relation, was to be less disturbed either
by civil wars or by foreign invasion than any other province of
the West. And now her fate was a strange one, but a fate which the
wonderful cycles of history brought back again after more than nine
hundred years. Spain was to be as Sicily. One phase of the Eternal
Question was twice to be whether the most western land of Europe
should be a part of the Western or the Eastern world. Rome had to win
the land from the grasp of the Phœnician; its own sons had in after
ages to win it back from the grasp of the Saracen. For the moment
the third of the great peninsulas was to be in turn the stronghold
of either side, to be the arsenal where Carthage first gathered up
her strength for the attempted overthrow of Rome, and where Rome then
gathered up her strength for the more than attempted overthrow of
Carthage.
* * * * *
The Punic Wars form a kind of episode in the history of Europe, just
as the presence of a Punic people in the Western Mediterranean is
of itself an anomaly and in some sort an episode. The existence of
the Carthaginian power hindered what we might have looked on as the
natural course of history for the three great European peninsulas.
When Rome had become the undisputed head of Italy, the next growth of
her power might have been looked for in the direction of the Gaul and
of the Greek. The headship of Italy had been won by driving back a
Greek invasion, an invasion from a Greek land within sight of Italy,
and that headship might be looked on as imperfect till it was further
spread over Sicily at one end and Cisalpine Gaul at the other. Sicily
was at once fought for, and in the end won; but it had to be won from
the intruding Carthaginian. When the first Punic War was over, the
eyes of Rome were again drawn beyond the Po and beyond the Hadriatic.
The conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was begun; the Illyrian wars led to
the first establishment of Rome as an influence, as a power, in the
Eastern peninsula. Protector, mistress in all but name, of Korkyra,
Epidamnos, and Apollônia, Rome has become an element in the affairs
of Greece herself as well as in those of Greek colonies in Italy,
Sicily, Spain, and Gaul. She has won the jealousy of Macedonia, the
good will of the free states of Greece. That is, she has taken the
first steps towards bringing Greek friends and Greek enemies alike,
first under her influence and then under her dominion.
If the first Punic War was in some sort an episode in European
history, a check in the expected march of Rome, still more truly can
this be said of the second. The Hannibalian War stands out in the
history of the world as before all things a strife between a man
and a commonwealth, a strife between the first of men and the first
of commonwealths. Yet if Hannibal overshadows Carthage, if Carthage
seems but an instrument in his hands, we must remember that Hannibal
has no being apart from Carthage, that the work that he does is not
the work of Hannibal but the work of Carthage. Nor must we let the
glory of Hannibal altogether quench the glory of the other members
of his house. Rome had to strive against a line of heroes, against
the whole lion-brood of the house of Barak. One son of Thunder came
after another; what the Grace of Baal began, the Help of Baal came
to strengthen. But in our swift œcumenical survey we must be careful
of tarrying to do homage even to the greatest of individual men.
We have to deal with the results of their actions. The object of
the Hannibalian war was the humiliation, the destruction, of Rome.
Its effect was to raise Rome higher than ever, to make her in one
generation the head of the whole West, before long to be the head of
the East also. It brought, as we have seen, the western peninsula
into the current of European affairs; it brought it into that
current as a stronghold of Roman dominion; it made Rome a power out
of Europe; she came out of the struggle more than ever the head of
Italy, mistress of all Sicily, advancing to be mistress of Spain,
holding a commanding influence in Africa. If she lost Cisalpine Gaul
for a season, it was only for a season; the work could be done again,
and Rome won an influence in Gaul beyond the Alps which was presently
to stand her in good stead. From Eastern Europe her eyes are turned
away for a moment, to be turned thither again in another moment with
far more steadfastness. That which, but for the check given to the
course of things by the great Hannibalian episode, we might have
looked for as the next scene of the drama, now actually comes on the
stage as an episode within the episode. Under cover as it were of
the war with Hannibal, Rome for the first time wages war east of the
Hadriatic as the ally of one of the chief Greek powers and as the
enemy of another. But if that first war between Rome and Macedonia
looks like an episode, if it seems trifling beside the great strife
with Hannibal, that was merely because the Macedonian king failed to
do what in reason he ought to have done, if he went to war at all.
The phalanx and the siege-train of Philip failed to take their place
alongside of the horsemen and the elephants of Hannibal. Still the
first Macedonian war marks a most important stage in the advance of
Rome towards the East. Rome now for the first time measured herself
against the resources of a great kingdom, as in the war with Carthage
she for the first time measured herself against the resources of
a great commonwealth. Rome, Carthage, and Macedonia were now the
three great powers of Europe, and Rome had to strive against both
the other two at once. It was well indeed for Rome that Macedonia
never put forth her full strength while the strength of Carthage was
still unbroken. As it was, Hannibal alone, without allies save the
barbarians whom he gathered to his standard, after the fearful losses
of his Pyrenæan and his Alpine march, was able to win every pitched
battle that he fought, and to bring Rome so near to destruction that
no power but Rome could have come alive out of the trial.
Never in truth was the Eternal Question so near to its solution,
so near to a solution which might have stifled the life of Europe
for ever, as when Hannibal debated in his mind whether he should
march straight from the field of Cannæ to the gates of Rome. It
was a moment like that when it rested on the vote of the polemarch
Kallimachos whether the thousands of Athens should meet the tens of
thousands of Persia on the day of Marathôn. It is not for us to say
whether such a march would have turned the destiny of the world for
ever; it is enough that all that formed the life of Europe, all that
was to form the life of Christendom, seemed at that moment to hang
on the balance. The difficulty is fully to take in that Hannibal and
his kinsfolk, the great house and the greatest of its sons, were in
truth fighting in the same cause as the mere barbarian destroyers
against whom the strife had to be waged at other stages of the long
tale. Yet so it is; when we see Rome, with her citizens, colonists,
and allies, holding up against the mercenaries of Carthage, when we
contrast the votary of Jupiter with the votary of Moloch, we shall
soon see on which side it was the abiding interests of mankind truly
lay. It was after all in the worthiest of causes that the first of
cities was pitted against the first of men. The overthrow of Carthage
enabled Rome to go on to the overthrow of Greece; but if Greece was
to have a conqueror, it was well that she should have a conqueror
who could become a disciple in a way such as the Phœnician never
could be. It is hard to name Hannibal along with Attila or even with
Abd-al-rahman, yet the day of Zama, or rather the long endurance
which made the day of Zama possible, must be set down by the still
abiding world of Europe as a great salvation, a crowning mercy,
alongside of the work of Aetius and Theodoric and the work of the
elder Charles.
How it was that Rome and Europe lived through such a trial, what
were the special causes which gave Rome strength to bear up through
the most fearful of dangers, it is for special historians of Rome to
tell. For us it is enough that Rome came forth out of the struggle
mistress of the West, with Carthage spared to live on for rather
more than fifty years as a Roman dependency. She was then to perish;
her land was to become a Roman province; she was herself, after a
hundred years of desolation, to rise again as a Roman city, the head
of one of the greatest of Roman lands, the seat of a special and
abiding form of Roman life, a life of more than seven hundred years,
till the power of Rome in Africa gave way to Semitic invaders more
terrible than the old Phœnician. The fight of Zama put an end to the
long and wonderful episode of Phœnician power in the Western seas; it
left Rome leisure to go on with her work, as conqueror and teacher in
Western Europe, as conqueror and disciple beyond Hadria. Whether if
Philip had put forth the full power of his kingdom and its allies,
he and Hannibal together could have overthrown Rome, it is a waste
of time to guess. It is enough for us to know and to rejoice that
so it was not; Philip failed to act with Hannibal, and Rome could
overthrow Hannibal and Philip, each in his turn. The first Macedonian
war brought Rome into the thick of Greek affairs. The Greek states
learned all of a sudden what Rome could be either as a friend or
as an enemy. But they were slow to learn how truly the relation of
either friend or enemy of Rome was only a step to the relation,
first of Roman dependent, and then of Roman subject. They were not
likely to learn the lesson; neither princes nor commonwealths are
ever quick in learning such lessons. The Greeks of that day no more
dreamed what Roman interference meant than the Greeks of a hundred
and fifty years before had dreamed what Macedonian interference
meant. No prince or people ever does in such cases fully understand
what is coming. But, seeing Rome had been on the whole the immediate
loser in the first Macedonian war, the Greeks of that day were still
less likely to see how vastly Rome was a gainer by engaging in any
Macedonian war at all. Men who had grown up as leaders in the several
Greek states, who were used to look on Greece and the neighbouring
powers as forming a world of their own, a world in which Roman
interference was as little looked for as interference from another
planet, were not likely to foresee the days that were to come before
their own lives were ended. Philopoimên dreamed not yet of days when
no Greek statesman dared to strike a blow or speak a word without the
good will of the barbarian commonwealth which had become practically
the mistress of them all. That they did not foresee those days was
no special short-sightedness of Greeks or of commonwealths; it was
the common short-sightedness of merely human statesmen, who had not,
like their critics, the means of profitting by the experience of ages
which were still unborn.
At the beginning of the second century B.C. the actual possessions of
Rome were small indeed compared with what they were at its ending.
When the century opened, Rome was the undoubted head of the West;
it was by no means clear that she was ever to become head of the
East as well. To rule that so she was to be was the work of that
all-important and neglected age. At its beginning, Rome was head
of Italy; she was winning back the dominion in Cisalpine Gaul which
the Hannibalian war had cost her; but she had no provinces of her
own separate winning; she had only the lands in Sicily, Sardinia,
and Spain which she had taken over from Carthage, lands which in
Spain at least needed frequent hard fighting to enlarge or even to
keep. In Transalpine Gaul she had as yet no possessions; Massalia was
still an independent and specially cherished ally. In Africa Carthage
was an unwilling dependency; Massinissa of Numidia was a faithful
and zealous vassal king, to be favoured and strengthened as long
as Carthage was allowed to live. In Eastern Europe Rome had indeed
begun her dominion beyond Hadria, a dominion as yet over allies and
not over acknowledged subjects. But it was a dominion which did not
stretch beyond certain points of coast immediately opposite to the
Italian peninsula. Rome had appeared as a destroyer in more than one
island and city in the heart of Greece; but she had done her work of
havoc in fellowship with Greek allies, and, if she had shown herself
at all in Greek warfare, it was only because Philip had chosen to
be the ally of Hannibal, but not to be his ally in such a sort as
to strike at Rome on her own ground. In the further East Pergamon
was already the ally of Rome; Attalos and Eumenês were to be as
Massinissa so long as either Macedonia or the Seleukid power needed
watching on behalf of Rome. The Seleukid power was as yet neither
friend nor enemy; Egypt was bound to Rome by a friendship of some
standing, but friendship had not as yet brought dependence with it.
Let us look only twenty years later. Rome has not increased her
immediate territory on the eastern mainland by a single district
or city. But Kephallênia and Zakynthos have joined the company of
Korkyra and Epidamnos; Aitôlia has entered the formal relation of
Roman dependence; Macedonia has sunk to it as the penalty of warfare
with Rome; she has risen again to at least formal independence as
the reward of good service to the ruling commonwealth. Beyond her
small possessions in Western Greece, Rome has in the Eastern world
no dominion but that of influence; but through that dominion she is
supreme. The vast dominion of Antiochos, the Great King, successor
alike of Cyrus and of Alexander, has been cut short; driven back
beyond Tauros, he has almost withdrawn from the Hellenic world; the
lord of Asia, seeking for a moment to be lord of Europe, has sunk
to be lord only of Syria and of such lands east of Syria as he can
keep back from the grasp of the encroaching Parthian. In his stead,
royal Pergamon, democratic Rhodes, a crowd of smaller powers, ready
to receive the bounty of Rome, have parted out the solid peninsula
of Asia among them. The Roman Senate, which so lately sat to devise
means by which Rome might be saved from the grasp of Hannibal, now
sits as a Court of International Justice for the whole civilized
world, ready to hear the causes of every king or commonwealth that
has any plaint against any other king or commonwealth, ready even to
bend its ear to the voice of every party, of every man, that has any
plaint against any other party or any other man within the smallest
commonwealth. The Roman Fathers judge the causes of powers which
are in theory the equal allies of Rome; they judge by virtue of no
law, of no treaty; they judge because the common instinct of mankind
sees the one universal judge in the one power which has strength to
enforce its judgements. When Rome speaks, all obey; kings fall down
at the threshold of the Senate-house, as entering an assembly of
gods; they keep themselves humbly within the line that the Roman rod
traces round them, even on soil that they have made their own. Rome
in truth rules from the Hadriatic to the Euphrates no less than from
the Ocean to the Hadriatic; but save in the old Roman land which is
her own, save in the few provinces which she has taken over as part
of the spoil of Carthage, her power is still everywhere a power of
influence and nowhere of direct dominion.
The work of the hundred and fifty years which were to pass before
Rome came to obey the rule of a single man was largely to change
this power of influence into a power of direct dominion, in a word
to change allied and dependent states into subject provinces. Let us
look again in the later years of that same second century. Italy has
extended herself, if not in formal language, if not in legal right,
yet in the common speech of men, over all the lands within the Alps.
Gaul is now the land beyond the Alps where Rome, now protector of
Massalia, has won a mighty province, a province binding together
Italy and Spain, and keeping her old ally as it were in ward.
Spain has largely become a Roman land; it has altogether become a
Roman possession, save only those mountain districts which so many
conquerors, each in turn, have found it so hard to conquer. Africa
is a province; Carthage is a wilderness; Numidia and Mauretania are
helpless dependencies. East of the Hadriatic, not a few lands and
cities, Athens, Sparta, Rhodes, Byzantium, the wise confederates of
Lykia, still keep their formal independence. But direct dominion has
widely advanced; if not as yet actually the rule, yet it is the fate
which has overwhelmed the greatest powers; the kingdom of Macedonia
is now the province of Macedonia; the kingdom of Pergamon, so lately
enlarged out of Seleukid spoils, is now the province of Asia; Achaia,
with Corinth lying waste, is, whether formally a province or not,
at least so utterly dependent as to make the question as to its
political state a question merely formal. Syria, Egypt, all the
kingdoms of Asia, must count as vassals of Rome. If absolute freedom
lives on anywhere in the Mediterranean world, it is where freedom
is the shame of Rome rather than her glory; the independence which
Rhodes and Athens keep but in name is kept in all its fulness by the
pirates of Crete and the pirates of Kilikia.
* * * * *
So the headship of Rome was won over Italy and the Mediterranean
world. A dominion had grown up of which mankind had never seen
the like. No king of kings had ever come so near to universal rule
as this city of cities. And now, in the last years of the second
century and the early years of the first, came the question whether
Rome could keep what she had won, the question, we might almost
say, whether Rome could keep her own independent being. New powers
arose to dispute her claim to be head of the West, to be head of the
East, to be head of her own Italy. Gaius Marius came down from his
car of triumph over Jugurtha, to march, in a new consulship, in new
consulships crowded one upon another, to save Gaul, to save Italy,
to save Rome herself, from the attacks of Teutonic invaders who had
come before their time. Small are the remains that Aquæ Sextiæ can
show to remind us of that great deliverance; yet we look up to the
Mount of Victory, and feel that it was in the fates that the bones
of our kinsfolk should fence in Massaliot vineyards; the day was not
yet come for Gothia and Romania to be freely yoked together in the
happy bride-ale of Narbonne. The day of Aquæ Sextiæ, the day of the
Raudian fields, confirmed Roman headship in the West for five hundred
years. It needed a longer struggle with Eastern powers strengthened
by the arts of Greece--when Greece and Asia, allies and subjects,
were goaded to revolt by the misdeeds of the ruling city--to secure
Roman headship in the East, not for five hundred years only, but
for thrice that time. And nearer still, on her own soil, at her own
gates, within her own future walls, Rome had again to fight for life
and death against Italian enemies. Another Pontius had come from the
Samnite hills to root up the wood that sheltered the wolves of Italy.
It needed the happy star of Lucius Sulla, it needed the last eager
prayer of the Felix, the Epaphroditos, to the angered gods of Greece,
to keep in being, not merely the lordship over Gaul and Asia, but the
very life of Rome as one Italian city on her own hills.
Yet vain indeed was the struggle of Cimbri and Teutones, of Marsian
and Samnite, of the Pontic king and his allies in Asia and in Europe.
Rome came forth from her threefold trial the undoubted mistress of
all. On no corner of Mediterranean soil was there any power left that
could really dispute her will. The first century before and after our
æra sufficed to gather in the spoil. Enemies and allies, independent
and dependent, were to be changed into subjects; kingdoms were to
sink to provinces; and, if some cities once more than sceptred still
kept the forms of freedom, yet chains did in truth clank over them
when the Senate and People of an independent commonwealth dared
only to pass such decrees as might suit the pleasure of the nearest
proconsul. Of Rome’s two great rival leaders, one was to spread her
dominion to the Euphrates, the other to the Channel and the Northern
Sea. The Syria of Gnæus Pompeius became Rome’s richest province; but
the land of old Damascus and younger Antioch could never become a
Roman land. The Gaul of Gaius Cæsar became a Roman land indeed, the
abiding home of Roman life and Roman culture, the land that had the
praises of its cities sung by Ausonius of Bordeaux and its whole
life painted for us in full by the pencil of Sidonius of Auvergne.
And above all things the possession of Syria and Gaul gave Rome a
new position and laid on her new duties. One aspect of the second
century before our æra is that the barbarian powers of the East are
again threatening. The work of Alexander and Seleukos seems half
undone. Rome had weakened the arms of their successors without taking
their calling on her own shoulders. As it was with the pirates, so
it was with the Parthians; so it was even with the barbarians to the
north of Macedonia. During the time when the Greek commonwealths
and kingdoms had ceased to be really independent, but when they had
not yet formally sunk to the state of Roman provinces, neither of
these frontiers of the civilized world was effectually guarded. The
second century before Christ was therefore a great age of barbarian
advance. Again, as Mommsen puts it, the world had two lords. A power
grew up on the eastern border, before which the Macedonian kings of
Syria gave way, and against which Rome herself could do little more
than hold her own. That Sulla was the first Roman who had direct
dealings with the Parthians marks the course of things. Parthia was
waxing mighty while Rome was weakening the kingdoms which might
have checked the growth of Parthia. The new barbarian power lived
for three hundred years after Sulla’s day to be the equal rival of
Rome, in whose strife with Rome both sides could boast of victories
and momentary conquests, while neither could boast of any lasting
weakening of its rival. And a day came when the Parthians, who had
come within the range of Greek influences, whose kings boasted
themselves as φιλέλληνες, had to give way to more vigorous champions
of the Asiatic side in the Eternal Question. In a long rivalry of
four hundred years, the regenerate Persian, strong in his national
life and national religion, remained Rome’s truest and worthiest
rival. Again each power felt the might of the other on its borders;
what Galerius won Jovian had to give back. At last, when the great
blow was coming on both alike, each sent forth as it were its own
Hannibal to strike at the vitals of the enemy. Chosroes encamped
within sight of Constantinople; Heraclius gave law to the Persian in
the heart of his own realm. One might be curious to know how this
great side of the world’s history looks in the eyes of those who
draw the mystic line at the patriciate of Odowakar. Julian to be
sure comes before the line; but the writings which record the deeds
of Julian are a sealed book--unclassical, I believe, not of the
golden or even of the silver age. As for Belisarius and Heraclius,
they doubtless pass, either in East or West, for Greeks of the Lower
Empire, as cowardly and effete as all their fellows.
But the growth of the Parthian power, continued, as far as universal
history is concerned, in the power of the regenerate Persian, is
after all only one aspect of a chain of events which was then
already ancient and which still abides. It did but put the Eternal
Question under new conditions and give either side new and stronger
champions. Meanwhile in vast regions of the West, in one memorable
corner of the East, conditions arose which were absolutely new.
Pompeius, conqueror of Syria, caused the lands of Rome to march upon
the Parthian; Cæsar, conqueror of Gaul, caused the lands of Rome to
march upon the German. One gave her a neighbour who could be only
an abiding rival; the other gave her a neighbour who would not be a
subject, but who was, in the fulness of his time, to enter on his
twofold calling as conqueror and disciple. And now our own history
begins, the history of the Teutonic race in its three great homes,
in the European mainland, in the great island of the Ocean, in the
vaster mainland beyond the Ocean. I need tell no one here that in
Cæsar’s day, in days ages after Cæsar, the history of ourselves,
as distinguished from the history of our future home, is to be
sought for, not by the Thames and the Severn, but by the Rhine
and the Weser. We have not very long to wait before one line of
Tacitus will reveal the existence of the Angle, before one line of
Ptolemy will reveal the existence of the Saxon. But as yet we stand
undistinguished among the mass of our brethren. Whatever is theirs is
ours also. We have our part in the great deliverance by the wood of
Teutoburg; Arminius, “liberator Germaniæ,” is but the first of a roll
which goes on to Hampden and to Washington. By Rhine and Danube Rome
at last found her Terminus; to extend it to Elbe or Eider was not for
Drusus or Germanicus, but for the first Teuton who wore her crown.
The conquests of Cæsar then, by making the Roman and the German
neighbours, neighbours whose presence could not fail to work the
deepest impress on each other, opened one side of later history. The
world that then was, the world of Roman dominion tempered by Greek
influences, had now nations beside it which were neither subjects
nor as yet rivals, nations whose mingling with that elder world, in
many forms and at many stages, was to call into being the world in
which we live. But the Roman and Teutonic elements out of which the
world of modern Europe and European colonies was to be formed, were
not the Roman and the Teuton in the first state in which history
shows them. Their fusion did not come till both had been brought
under a common influence. And that was an influence whose birthplace
carries us back again from the conquests of Cæsar to the conquests
of Pompeius, from the conquests of Pompeius to an earlier stage of
the Seleukid power. When that power was weakened on the great day of
Magnêsia, its weakness was not merely to open the way for the advance
of Parthia from the East. Native powers, held down under Persian and
Macedonian supremacy, sprang into new life. The greatest of existing
Semitic powers had been humbled; it was soon to be wiped out; but the
abiding life of the Semitic race showed itself in new shapes, in one
shape that was doomed to be more abiding than the power of Sidon and
Carthage. That shape of Semitic influence was to intertwine itself
so closely with the power of Rome that the two could never more be
rent asunder. Arab lords of Damascus gave a foretaste of the days
when mightier Arab lords of Damascus should reign from the Indus to
the Ocean. Hebrew lords of Jerusalem called up the memory of the
days when mightier Hebrew lords of Jerusalem had reigned from the
river to the Great Sea westward. Hannibal might die in banishment;
his city might become heaps like older Nineveh; but men speaking the
tongue of Hannibal, though they worshipped not the gods of Hannibal,
were, from the day when the holy zeal of Mattathias struck down
the renegade, to form one of the great moving powers in all future
history. If the Greek was to enlighten the world, if the Roman was
to rule the world, if the Teuton was to be the common disciple and
missionary of both, it was from the Hebrew that all were to learn
the things that belong to another world. In the highest teaching of
all, Roman and Goth had to become the disciples of the Jew, but of
the Jew speaking only by the mouth of a Greek interpreter. Before
the Aryan world of Europe could truly do its work, it had to take
to itself a Semitic creed. It had to take to itself that Semitic
creed so fully, so exclusively, as to make it by adoption the creed
of Europe, to make it before all things the creed of Rome. For the
last twelve hundred years the Eternal Question has taken the shape of
an abiding strife between two creeds alike of Semitic birth. But of
those two creeds one has become Aryan by adoption; the younger races
accepted the gift which the elder cast aside; as the birthright of
Edom passed to Israel, so the birthright of Israel passed to be the
common heritage of the Greek, the Roman, and the Teuton. Rome is not
Rome in all her fulness, she has not risen to the true height of her
mission in the world, she is not fully mistress and teacher of the
nations, till she has cast aside her old gods and has bowed to the
spiritual mastery of a despised sect from a despised corner of her
dominion. The miracle of miracles, greater than dried-up seas and
cloven rocks, greater than the dead rising again to life, was when
the Augustus on his throne, Pontiff of the gods of Rome, himself a
god to the subjects of Rome, bent himself to become the worshipper
of a crucified provincial of his Empire. The conversion of our own
folk, the conversion of any other barbarian folk of Europe, was no
marvel. Where Rome led, all must follow, Celt, Teuton, Slave, each in
his turn. That Christianity should become the religion of the Roman
Empire is the miracle of history; but that it did so become is the
leading fact of all history from that day onwards. Explain the fact
as we will, Christianity is the religion of the Roman Empire, and
it is hardly more. It has been accepted by every land which either
became part of the Empire or came under its influence; that is, it
has become the creed of Europe and European colonies. Beyond those
limits it has made conquests, but they have seldom been abiding; such
cases as Abyssinia are exceptional, and after all they come of Roman
influence more widely spread than usual. Christianity has never been
the creed of any great power beyond the European world. The great
nations of Asia and Africa have either kept their ancient heathendom
or have become more distinctly antagonistic to the faith of Rome by
embracing the faith of Arabia. On the other hand, no nation within
the Roman pale can be said to have fallen away from Christendom. The
folk of Christian lands have been enslaved or swept away; renegades
have been many; whole tribes, as in Albania, have become apostates,
but whole nations never. It would have sounded strange in the ears
of Nero or of Trajan to be told that a day would come when the rule
of Rome could be spoken of as the joint “rule of Christ and Cæsar;”
to be told that their successors should be admitted to their office
by rites borrowed from the sacred books of the Hebrew, at the hands
of the chief of the sect whose votaries they sent to the lions or to
the coat of fire. It was in a very deep and living sense that the
words were fulfilled which said that the kingdoms of the world had
become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. But their highest
fulfilment of all was when the Empire of the Cæsar came to rejoice
in its Christian style of Holy; when the Emperor, Advocate of the
Universal Church, deemed it a further honour to wear the garb and
to share in the office of Christian priesthood; when Dante gave his
genius to show that the growth of the Roman power was the special
work of God, and that the head of the Roman power was, in all things
earthly, God’s immediate Vicar upon earth. A theory, it may be said,
which no age saw in practice. Truly so, and chiefly because the
power of Rome split asunder, because the inheritance of her Cæsar
was disputed between a prince by the Bosporos and a prince by the
Rhine. Those days are still far from us; we shall reach them in the
course of our story; it is enough here to say that the very cleaving
to Roman titles and traditions on the part of powers from which all
that was truly Roman had passed away was in truth the most speaking
witness to the deep and lasting impress on men’s minds which had been
won for the teaching that it was for Rome, and for Rome alone, to
rule and judge the nations.
* * * * *
The change from the commonwealth to the Empire of Rome was in truth
a gradual process by which a single citizen of Rome, charged with a
special commission, allowed to unite offices and powers which were
designed to act as checks on one another, changed, step by step,
first into a practical, and then into an acknowledged, master of Rome
and of all that obeyed Rome. That change, so strikingly analogous to
the gradual process by which Rome herself changed from influence to
dominion, is, in our œcumenical survey, of far less direct moment
than it is in the constitutional history of Rome herself. We have
to deal with the œcumenical headship of Rome, whatever form the
government of Rome herself may take. But the indirect œcumenical
results of the change from commonwealth to Empire were vast indeed.
To the Roman city the change was political death; to the provinces
it was the beginning of a new life. Under the Empire, not only were
many practical grievances lessened in the subject lands, but the
process of fusion between the subject lands and the ruling city went
on with far greater speed than it could go on as long as the Roman
city was engaged in the vain task of striving to unite _libertas_ at
home with _imperium_ in other lands. The _Imperator_ came because
the _imperium_ was there to call for him, because for the subject
lands one master was less grievous than many. It was not without
good reason that the provincials raised their altars to more than
one prince for whom the citizens, also not without good reason,
sharpened their daggers. Under the Empire, families, cities, whole
lands among the provinces, were admitted, one by one, to the full
rights of Romans. At last the decree went forth of which we have
already spoken, the decree which gave to all of them the rights, or
at least the name, of Romans. From that day, most fully in the West,
more fully perhaps than we fancy even in the East, an artificial
nation grew up, a nation with its blood mingled with the blood of
every stock in Europe, but a nation Roman in name, Roman in feeling,
Roman in culture, and, with the exception of the merest survivals,
Roman in speech. Before the days of Teutonic migration began, Rome
had done her work in the West. Gaul and Spain were lands no less
Roman than Italy. If the Roman of Gaul was not always eager to fight
for Cæsar, so neither was the Roman of Italy; but the Roman of Gaul
was as little inclined as the Roman of Italy either to join the
barbarians or to set up for himself. I speak of the lands as wholes;
the special fortunes of Britain and of a corner of Armorica we may
have other occasions to think over. If the world of Europe was to
run its destined course, it was needful that the lands into which the
Teutonic conquerors of the mainland were to make their way should
be thoroughly Roman lands, lands where the invaders would find that
fully developed Roman culture which was needful for the future of
mankind. The work could not have been done if the lands into which
the Goth and the Burgundian entered had been still Iberian and Celtic
instead of Roman. The process of making them Roman was carried on
more swiftly, steadily, and thoroughly under the Empire than it could
ever have been under the commonwealth. In this way, without sharing
the fashionable admiration for successful crime, without joining in
the base and shallow sneers which even great scholars have stooped to
hurl at patriots whose worth soars above their moral level, we can
still see that the overthrow of the freedom of the Roman city was a
needful step in the progress of the Roman world. It was one stage
towards that wedding of Gothia and Romania the offspring of which is
the world in which we live.