We have seen Rome rise, step by step, to the headship of Latium,
the headship of the West, the headship of the Mediterranean world.
At most stages of her course her progress has been slow; at one
stage only does she rise to a new position as in a moment. That is
when, having been checked on her Eastern course by the Hannibalian
war, the city that had overthrown the Eastern masters of the West
sprang at once to the headship of the Eastern as well as of the
Western world. The power which had trodden under foot the sons
of Thunder was entitled to take its next step with the swiftness
of the thunderbolt. But, once head of the Eastern Mediterranean,
with her Senate once established as judge in all causes from the
Hadriatic to the Euphrates, Rome was in no hurry to exchange her
rule of influence for a rule of acknowledged dominion. Indeed, if
her later hankering after provinces had begun sooner, it may be that
she would have better checked the advance of the lords of Parthia
and Pontos. As it was, it was by slow degrees indeed that cities and
kingdoms which long kept a nominal freedom were formally brought
within the grasp of her universal sovereignty. And as the forms of
her _imperium_ grew up only by slow degrees, so the forms of her
_libertas_ died out only by slow degrees. Slowly and stealthily did
Rome march to the acknowledged sovereignty of her own world; slowly
and stealthily did the citizen whom Rome placed at the head of her
commonwealth march to the acknowledged sovereignty of Rome herself
and her subject lands. It was almost at the same moment that the
power of the _Imperator_ and his army finally supplanted the power
of the Prince, the Senate and the People, and that all the free
inhabitants of the Roman world were admitted to the rank of Romans.
That is, they became equal subjects of the _Imperator_, while each
man among them who could wield his sword with skill and good luck
gained the chance of becoming _Imperator_ himself. The artificial
Roman nation, the _Romani_ of the West, the Ῥωμαῖοι of the East, was
now called into being. By the next step the master of that nation
avowed his mastery. The diadem of Jovius and Herculius, the proud
style of the Lords of All, the bendings of the knee, the whole
ceremonial which surrounded the new Augusti, were a contrast indeed
to the simple pre-eminence of the first of citizens, the highest of
magistrates, to whom that sacred name was first decreed. Chief of
a Roman nation, Roman alike on the Euphrates and on the Ocean, the
Emperor was in no sort bound to the local Rome by the Tiber. Shall we
say that Rome had been swallowed up in Romania, or more truly that
all Romania had become Rome? Emperors were now as much at home at
Nikomêdeia and at Antioch, at Milan and Ravenna, at York and Trier
and Arles and the true Vienna by the Rhone as they had once been in
the modest _regia_ of the elder Rome or in its prouder Septizonium.
No wonder that in after years Emperors were found no less at home at
Ingelheim and Aachen and Gelnhausen, at Nikaia and Thessalonica and
Skoupi, and in the false Vienna by the Danube. But the chosen servant
of Jove on his throne at Nikomêdeia did but open the way for changes
vaster still. A man born in Illyricum, raised to power in Britain,
schooled in Gaul in the arts of empire, won Rome by his right hand,
but only to transplant the very life of Rome to a more abiding seat
of power. Diocletian, first of the avowed lords of the Roman world,
had not slept for many years in his mausoleum at Spalato before a New
Rome had arisen by the Bosporos, before the temples of a new worship
on the hill of the Vatican and in the palace of the Laterani had
begun to threaten the dominion of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on his own
Capitol.
The New Rome, the Rome of Constantine, the city of Constantine, the
city of Emperors, the βασιλεύουσα of the Greek, the _Tzarigrad_
of the Slave,--more proudly still, simply the City, ἡ πόλις, the
name that survives in the _Stamboul_ of her alien lords--was a city
Christian from its birth. The Rome of Romulus remained for a while
more pagan than any city of the Empire, save Athens alone. In its
new seat meanwhile the Empire was Holy from the beginning. The great
question of the divided Empire did not present itself till ages
later. In days to come men disputed which was the true Augustus;
was it he who received his unction among the columns of Saint Peter
in the Old Rome or he who received it beneath the dome of the Divine
Wisdom in the New? As yet the oil of the Old Covenant had not been
poured on any Imperial head; and though two or three Augusti might
reign side by side, the Empire was not held to be thereby divided.
Yet a certain pre-eminence came by a kind of natural selection to
the Emperors who reigned in the Eastern seat of Empire. In the days
of transition, the true middle ages, the days when Roman and Teuton
stood side by side, ready to be fused, but not yet fused, into the
compound being of the modern world, every cause, every accident,
tended in every way to make the Eastern Rome the truest and most
abiding representative, not indeed of Rome’s moral influence, but of
Rome’s abiding power.
* * * * *
When did the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire begin? The clear
instinct of Gibbon carried on his tale to the fall of its Eastern
branch; the formal fall of its Western branch he lived not to see. In
our point of view the ages of the so-called decline of the Empire are
the ages of its greatest influence; the political decline of Rome,
the moment when her strength directly as a power began to fail, might
perhaps be placed a little earlier than the date chosen by that great
master of us all whose immortal tale none of us can hope to displace.
Under Trajan the Empire reached its greatest territorial extent.
But we may stop and ask whether conquests like his were not in some
sense a sign of coming weakness. The second century of our æra opens
with Trajan’s momentary glories; before that century is ended, the
day of real conquest is past. Marcus keeps his watch by the Danube
with other objects than those with which Drusus had kept his watch
by the Rhine. The work of a Roman prince is now, not to press the
Roman Terminus forward, but to keep him from falling back. The days
of victories and triumphs, the days of conquest in the territorial
sense, are still far from being past; but from Marcus to Stilicho, we
might say from Marcus to Belisarius and Heraclius, to Nikêphoros and
John Tzimiskês, to the Palaiologos who won back Constantinople and
the Palaiologos who won back Peloponnêsos, conquest commonly meant
simply the recovery of a dominion which had once been held and which
had fallen away. We may apply the rule which we applied in our first
lecture. When the Greek had to drive back the Persian from Greek
soil, when the Roman had to drive back the German from Roman soil, it
was a sign that the greatest days of each people, as far as greatness
of territorial dominion is concerned, had passed away.
But, as in the Greek case, so in the Roman, the very decline of
territorial dominion marked the beginning of a newly extended moral
influence. By the days of Marcus the two great elements of the
world that was making already stood face to face. The tables were
now turned; the German was the invader; the Roman stood on his
defence. Again and again was the German driven back from the soil of
Gaul and even from the soil of Italy. Presently days came when he
could no longer be driven back, days when it was oftentimes wiser
to welcome him on Roman soil, as the subject, the ally, the soldier
of the Empire, taught to guard the borders of the Empire against
brethren who came on the same errand as himself. Warlike Emperors
won triumphs at the head of Teutonic armies; unwarlike Emperors sent
forth commanders of Teutonic blood to win triumphs for them. At the
bidding of such commanders Emperors were made and unmade; men of
Teutonic birth became consuls, patricians, guardians of Imperial
sons-in-law; one prize alone was forbidden; the diadem itself was
not as yet to rest on a Teutonic brow. And if the sovereignty of
Rome remained in Roman hands, so it was in one quarter alone, the
quarter in which she had seemed to make the greatest advance, that
the territorial extent of the dominion of Rome was formally cut
short. The Asiatic conquests of Trajan had passed away almost with
Trajan’s self; his European conquest, his vast Dacian province, last
to be won and first to pass away, was given up by a soldier of Rome
hardly less illustrious than himself. Aurelian made the Danube once
more the Roman frontier; beyond it the Goth might dwell till his day
came to march at will through the three great peninsulas and at last
to find himself a throne in the most western. But for a hundred and
fifty years after the surrender of Dacia, fully up to the end of
the fourth century, we can hardly say that the borders of the Empire
ever formally went back. The Empire contained crowds of Teutonic
settlers; we can hardly say that it as yet contained any Teutonic
settlements. Whoever dwelled within the Roman frontier was either, in
name at least, a subject or soldier of Cæsar, or else he was an enemy
marching to and fro in a foreign land. The Franks already dwelled in
their distant corner of Gaul; but they dwelled there as soldiers of
the Empire, charged with the duty, which, if they sometimes betrayed,
they sometimes loyally discharged, of keeping the frontier of Rome
against new comers. The Goth himself, marching hither and thither
through Greek, Italian, and Gaulish lands, holding Rome herself to
ransom, keeping at last his jubilee of plunder within her walls, was
not always the formal foe of her princes; at one moment he accepted
honours and commands from the lawful Augustus; at another he made
himself the friend and soldier of the Empire by setting up an Emperor
of his own. Alaric himself, in all his marches, all his sieges,
never found abiding rest for the sole of his foot; he never became
the acknowledged territorial master of a single inch of Roman soil.
But before he had gone to rest in his grave beneath the waters,
before the Gothic trumpet was heard at the Salarian gate, before
he entered by the same path by which Brennus had entered well nigh
eight hundred years before, the path from which Hannibal had turned
away, the path on which Pontius of Telesia had dealt the last blow
for free and disunited Italy, before that day of fear and wonder in
the annals alike of the waning and of the rising power, another act
in the great drama had begun. Other Teutonic settlers had begun to
establish themselves as abiding dwellers on Roman soil, and the Goth
was presently to follow in their steps.
* * * * *
We are now landed in the fifth century of our æra, the century which
beheld the earliest germs of the nations of modern Europe. It is
the age which, more than any other, answers to the third and second
centuries before our æra. They answer to one another, because the
later period, to a great degree, reverses the work of the earlier.
The former period made the Roman Empire; the latter went far to
unmake it. Never, till the days of its gradual dying out, did it come
so near, in the Western lands at least, to being broken in pieces.
We might say in truth that in the West the Empire was broken in
pieces in the fifth century, but that it was largely put together
again in the sixth by a reaction from the East. For the first aspect
of that age is that which has been already pointed out, the fact
that, while the political power of Rome is thus shivered in the
West, in the East it maintains itself, to some extent even enlarges
itself. The Eastern division of the Empire, the lot of the successors
of Arcadius, is that which really kept up the unbroken political
traditions of Rome. It has its wars and its revolutions, its settings
up and puttings down of Emperors; it even sees the marching to and
fro of Teutonic armies. But all seems mild compared with the turmoil
of the West. The war with the Persian, ended at last by an honourable
peace which abides for a hundred years, is another matter from the
endless struggle with the German on every frontier. The occasional
revolts at Constantinople do not begin till the second half of the
century, and they pass for nothing alongside of the series of tyrants
and momentary Emperors which disturbed the West during nearly the
whole time. The Eastern throne was so far the firmer that the West
was over and over again willing to accept an Emperor of his Eastern
colleague’s choosing. Above all, the Eastern provinces were not
parted out among Teutonic rulers. The Eastern movements of Alaric
hardly reach into the fifth century, and the marchings to and fro of
the two Theodorics at a later time were a trifle compared with the
great invasions which parted out the West into Teutonic kingdoms.
It is these which are the real work of the fifth century. At its
beginning, the Empire, with the boundaries of Valentinian hardly
touched, is divided between the sons of Theodosius as Imperial
colleagues. At its end, a single Emperor reigns at Constantinople;
but the whole West, with Rome itself, has fallen away from his
practical dominion, and the greater part has passed from even his
nominal supremacy. The power of Rome lives on only in those Eastern
lands into which she made her way when her power in the West was
assured by the weakening of the power of Carthage. She has lost the
fruits of the fights of Metaurus and of Zama, of the leaguer of New
Carthage and the leaguer of Syracuse; she keeps the fruits of the day
of Kynoskephalai and the day of Pydna, the day of Thermopylai and the
day of Magnêsia. The genius of Rome, banished from his elder seat by
the Tiber, is watching from his newer seat by the Bosporos till the
old home can be won back again.
The two ages which we have thus casually brought together, the age
in which the East was won for Rome and the age in which the West
fell away from Rome, supply, as has been already hinted, some most
instructive points of comparison and contrast. The two ages may be
compared and contrasted from two points of view, one as regards the
breaking up of the Roman power, the other as regards the formation of
the Teutonic powers which so largely took its place. We may compare
the way in which the Roman power was formed and the way in which
it fell in pieces. We may also compare the way in which the Roman
power was formed and the way in which the powers were formed which
took its place. We will begin with the former comparison, with the
analogy, as a political study, between the way in which the power of
Rome came together and the way in which it split asunder. As that
power emphatically was not made but grew, so, no less emphatically,
it was not abolished but died out. That is of course in those lands
where, as in Gaul and in the greater part of Spain, it can be said to
have ever died out. In any land that came under the power of Rome,
that power was established step by step; so in any land that fell
away from the power of Rome, that power vanished away step by step.
The intermediate state between complete independence and complete
subjection, the various stages of alliance and dependence, play a
great part alike in the work of welding together and in the work of
splitting asunder. Rome has again her allied and vassal kings, in
some cases even her allied and vassal commonwealths. They passed from
subjection to complete independence by the same path by which they
had passed from independence to complete subjection. But in such
cases it makes a wide difference in which direction men’s faces are
turned. The formal relation may be the same; the real position is
different. In the elder case alliance is a decent name for subjection
which the time has not yet come to press to the extreme point. In
the later case alliance is a decent name for independence which the
time has not yet come formally to acknowledge. Hierôn, Massinissa,
Eumenês, Prousias, were kings in alliance with Rome; so were Alaric,
Ataulf, Odowakar, perhaps Chlodowig himself. Two things mark the
difference between the ally who is marching towards subjection and
the ally who is marching towards perfect independence. The ally of
old dwells outside the acknowledged Roman dominions; his land is
destined to be one day a part of them, but it is not so as yet. If
he receives titles and honours from Rome, they are the titles of
kingship in his own realm. A consulship of Hierôn, an army of Roman
citizens or Italian allies marching under the command of Massinissa,
would have seemed strange indeed. The ally of the later day dwells
within the Roman dominion; he receives certain Roman lands by the
tenure of defending Roman lands generally against fresh invaders.
Already king of his own people, he adds to the titles of barbarian
kingship the titles of Roman civil or military office; he is consul,
patrician, _magister militum_. Above all, the ally of old, weaker
ally of a stronger power, never draws his sword against his mightier
ally, unless indeed, in some wild moment of hope or of despair, he
seeks to win back the independence which he finds that he has lost,
and thereby only hastens his subjection. The ally of the later day,
in very truth stronger ally of a weaker power, freely draws his sword
against the lord whom he professes to serve, whenever so to do seems
the readiest way to win from him new grants and honours. The contrast
is marked indeed; yet the analogy is clear also. Rome did not win her
provinces by suddenly annexing lands which were wholly independent;
she did not lose her provinces by having them suddenly torn away from
her substance to form at once some wholly separate power. In both
cases the same formally intermediate stage was gone through, the
stage of alliance, dependence, vassalage, whatever name we choose to
give to it. It was step by step that the world became Roman; it was
step by step that it ceased to be so.
And it is a striking thought that, as far as we can see, the two
processes, of absorption in the Roman body and of separation from
the Roman body, were actually going on at the same time. I have
hinted at this already. It is certain, and it is one of the facts in
all history which makes us most pause and think, that the work of
incorporation of Greek states into the Roman body which began beyond
Hadria in the later days of the third century before Christ and which
had begun long before in Italy and Sicily, was by no means over in
the fifth century after Christ. The history of Cherson alone shows
it. That distant and long-lived outpost of Greece and ally of Rome
cannot be looked on as fully passing from alliance into subjection
till the ninth century had run a good part of its course. The work
which began when Korkyra, Apollônia, and Epidamnos became Roman
allies was not ended till the Roman power was divided for ever, and
till a Frank Cæsar reigned in the West. The geographical position of
Cherson secured her a practical freedom; to bring her into bondage
would have needed an exertion of the full power of the Empire.
But the relation which Cherson could really keep was for ages the
formal relation of a crowd of cities whose liberties could be at
any moment trampled under foot by the nearest proconsul. When were
all these free cities, whose rights Trajan respected, each a little
San Marino with the Roman Empire surrounding it, formally annexed
to that Empire? Or were they ever formally annexed at all? Can any
man tell the last day of that Athenian commonwealth which numbered
Hadrian among its archons and Constantine among its generals? What
if the Senate and People of Athens still went on in their old home
after Honorius had striven to gather together at Arles something like
a Senate and People of Southern Gaul? Most likely there is no date
to be fixed in this and in a crowd of other cases. The old forms,
the old feelings, died out so gradually that it would be impossible
to say when the dependent commonwealth finally changed into the
municipal town. When Theodoric was putting out edicts for Goths and
Romans in Italy, Greek Senates and assemblies in Asia may still
have been passing decrees in ancient form. One thing is plain; when
Justinian shut up the University of Athens, the General, successor of
Periklês, who acted as its Chancellor, must have found the more part
of his duties slip away from him.
But if the fifth century was for the Roman power a time of dying
out or of splitting asunder, for the Teutonic settlers in the Roman
lands it was beyond all other ages the time of birth and growth.
And here comes in our other side of comparison and contrast. The
process of Roman conquest in the East, if it has very many points of
unlikeness to the process of Teutonic conquest in the West, has also
some points of likeness. In each case a less cultured people made a
political conquest of a people more advanced than themselves. And in
neither case did the conquest carry with it any great destruction or
displacement of the older inhabitants, or any sweeping away of their
laws, customs, or language. A new people came in and set up some
new laws and customs alongside of the old. Only in the Roman case we
can hardly say that a new people did come in. Many Romans dwelled,
for public or private ends, in Greece and Asia; some doubtless
even settled there; but there was not, even in Roman colonies like
Corinth, any real Roman settlement like the Teutonic settlements
in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. Still in both cases the conquered led
captive the conquerors. The Greek East received a certain Roman
infusion, but it remained Greek. The Roman West received a far
greater Teutonic infusion; but, on two sides at least, those of
religion and language, it remained Roman.
In other words, the Roman conquest of the Greek East, being
unaccompanied by any real settlement in the conquered lands, did not
lead to the growth of a new nation. The Greek nation, in the sense
in which we long ago defined it, the artificial Greek nation which
grew out of Greek colonization and Macedonian conquest, passed,
through the stages of dependence and subjection, to the citizenship
of Rome, such as the citizenship of Rome had then become. From that
day the Greek was entitled to the Roman name, and a time at last came
when Greek and Roman came to mean the same, when the Greek was the
only surviving political representative of the Roman name. But the
name Ῥωμαῖος on the lips of a Greek never expressed the same real
change which was expressed by the name _Romanus_ on the lips of a
Gaul. Its meaning was purely political. The Greek, heir of the most
perfect form of human speech, never cast aside that speech for what
he deemed the barbarous dialect of his conqueror; he did but admit a
crowd of Latin technical terms into his official language, witnesses
each of them that Greek had again supplanted Latin as the official
language of the Roman Empire of the East. The Gaul meanwhile could
not indeed exchange his Celtic forefathers for old patricians or
plebeians of the Roman hills; but in everything short of actual blood
he became as thoroughly Roman as if he had come of the stock of Fabii
or Licinii. He spoke the tongue, he adopted the ways, of Rome; long
after the thought of Roman nationality in any political sense had
passed away, when he had long learned to acquiesce in the dominion of
his Frankish conqueror, when Rome and what clave to her had become to
him a foreign power, the Frankish conqueror was still as much in his
eyes the barbarian and himself the Roman as when Chlodowig went forth
to battle with Syagrius.
We have said that it was the fifth century which beheld the first
germs of the nations of modern Europe. We ruled that, if modern
history must have a definite beginning, the most convenient beginning
for it is the great Teutonic invasion of Gaul in the year 407. Yet
the nations of modern Europe do not spring from the nations which
then crossed the Rhine, or from any intermixture between them and the
Romans into whose land they made their way. The nations which then
crossed the Rhine were the Vandals, Suevians, and Alans. Who were
the Alans, who play a great part in Spain for a moment and a small
part in Gaul for a somewhat longer time? Most likely they were not
Teutonic at all in their origin, but had been more or less Teutonized
by long contact with Teutonic nations. There may be a few drops of
Alan blood in the mixed nationalities of Gaul and Spain; but the Alan
assuredly forms no abiding or visible element in those lands; the
nation passes away from history before the fifth century is over.
Neither did their undoubtedly Teutonic comrades, Vandal and Suevian,
found any abiding settlements in Gaul, or contribute any visible
element to the nationality of France, Aquitaine, or Burgundy. In fact
none of these nations made any real settlements in Gaul; Gaul was to
them simply the high road to Spain. There they did settle, though the
Vandals soon forsook their settlement, and the Alans were soon rooted
out of theirs. The Suevian kept his ground for a far longer time; we
may, if we please, look on him as the Teutonic forefather of Leon,
while we look on the Goth as the Teutonic forefather of Castile.
Here we have touched one of the great national names of history; the
Goth, like the Frank, plays quite another part in Western Europe from
the Alan, the Suevian, and the Vandal. And yet he has not played the
same part as the Frank. Several lands in Europe have at one time or
another borne the name of _Gothia_--I trust none needs the warning
that they are to be looked for in Gaul and Spain, or far away in Crim
Tartary, not in the islands or on the mainland of the Baltic. But no
land has kept that name down to modern times. But two lands, rather
two fragments of one greater land, still keep the name of _Francia_,
and the Frankish name, with the natural changes on modern lips, has
become the name of one of the foremost of modern nations.
Now both Franks and Goths had passed into the Empire long before the
invasion of 407. One branch of the Franks, as we have already hinted,
was actually settled on Roman lands, and, as Roman subjects, they
did their best to withstand the great invasion. What then makes that
invasion so marked an epoch? It may be argued that the nations which
took a part in it are not those which play any great and abiding part
in European history--the Vandals, great for a season, are isolated,
and are great only for a season; the great and abiding part is played
by the nations which were in the Empire before they came. The answer
is that the invasion of 407 not only brought in new elements, but put
the existing elements into new relations to one another. Franks and
Goths put on a new character and begin a new life. The Burgundians
pass into Gaul, not as a road to Spain, but as a land in which to
find many homes. They press down to the south-eastern corner of the
land, while the Frank no longer keeps himself in his north-eastern
corner, while in the south-west the Goth is settled as for a while
the liegeman of Cæsar, and in the north-west a continental Britain
springs into being. Here in truth are some of the chiefest elements
of the modern world, and though none of them are among the nations
that crossed the Rhine in 407, yet the new position taken by all of
them is the direct consequence of that crossing.
In this way, in Gaul and Spain at least, the joint Vandal, Alan, and
Suevian invasion is the beginning of the formation of the modern
nations, though the invading nations themselves form no element in
the later life of Gaul and only a secondary element in the later life
of Spain. The later life of these lands, and that of Italy also, has
sprung of the settlement of Teutonic nations in a Roman land, and of
the mutual influences which Roman and Teuton have had on one another.
Roman and Teuton lived side by side, and out of their living side by
side has gradually sprung up a third thing different from either, a
thing which we cannot call either Roman or Teutonic, or more truly a
thing which we may call Roman and Teutonic and some other things as
well, according to the side of it which we look at. This third thing
is the Romance element in modern Europe, the Romance nations and
their Romance tongues. Their birth, perhaps rather the appearance of
their first germs, comes in the fifth century; we do not see them in
their fulness till ages afterwards; but it is then that the causes
out of which they sprang began to work. Unluckily it is hard to find
a land in which the elements of the fifth century have been allowed
to run their natural course undisturbed to this day. Italy had no
chance. Had not the system of Theodoric been violently broken up,
first by the Imperial reconquest, then by the Lombard invasion, Italy
might have supplied the best of all studies of the way in which a
Romance people with a Romance speech might grow up on the very soil
of Rome herself. Spain supplied a more hopeful field; the position
of the country hindered later Teutonic settlements; but the Saracen
conqueror came before West-Goth and Roman had been thoroughly fused
into one people. Hence came the distinctive character of Spanish
history, the history of a people whose national life was formed by
the need laid upon them of daily working out the Eternal Question
in its sternest shape. Northern Gaul, unlike Spain and Italy, lay
open to continued reinforcements of the Teutonic element within it.
_Francia_ was an unbroken land lying far away on both sides of the
Rhine, and the division into _Austria_ and _Neustria_ forestalls the
later division into _Francia Teutonica_ and _Francia Latina_. The
rise to power of the Austrasian Mayors was almost as much a Teutonic
conquest of a Latin land as had been the first conquest by Chlodowig,
and the settlement of the Normans in the tenth century brought in
another Teutonic element in one part of the land. France then, in
the narrower sense of that name, differs from Spain and Italy in
the presence of these later Teutonic elements; but in Aquitaine and
Provence they had little force; it is there, rather than anywhere
else, that the normal result of the movements of the fifth century
may be best studied. In the modern world of all, where those
South-Gaulish lands have helped to make up the great nation of modern
France, it is undoubtedly in that French nation that we can best
study the threefold elements of a Romance people. The præ-Roman, the
Roman, the Teutonic, elements are all there; the whole, as a whole,
is none of the three, but the result of their fusion; but the whole,
looked at from special sides only, may well be called by any name of
the three. The blood must be mainly Celtic--in the south Iberian and
Ligurian--but with some Roman and some Teutonic infusion. The speech
is Latin, but with a larger Teutonic infusion than would be thought
at first sight. The political history is that of a Teutonic kingdom,
but a kingdom modified by planting its Teutonic kingship among the
Latin-speaking folk of an originally Celtic land. The elements are
fused into a whole; yet they still stand side by side; we cannot say
that the Frank assimilated the Roman or that the Roman assimilated
the Frank. The Frank learned the speech of the Roman; but in
learning it he modified it, and he gave it his own name. The modern
Frenchman is neither Roman nor Frank; he is rather the outcome of the
settlement of the two in a land in which elements earlier than either
have not been without their influence on both.
The mention of the earlier elements in Gaul, elements earlier than
either Roman or Teuton, suggests yet another analogy between the
age in which the Roman power was formed and the age in which it was
broken in pieces. The Roman was so far from displacing the Greek
tongue or Greek life, wherever he found them really established,
that he became in some sort, not only their disciple, but their
missionary. Wherever the Roman went, he carried some measure of
Greek influences with him. The Roman conquest of Asia continued
that work of hellenizing Asia which the Macedonian conquest had
begun. It did much to root up elements older than Greek; it made the
solid Asiatic peninsula, the special Romania of later times, into
a land where in later times the Turk has come in on his errand of
destruction, but where all that he has spared is still Greek. As
the Roman did this work in the East, so the Teuton did a kindred
work in the West; as the Roman everywhere carried Greece with him,
so the Teuton everywhere carried Rome with him; his coming gave
the finishing stroke to the rooting out of all elements older than
the Roman conquest. Here and there old tongues and old beliefs had
lingered till his coming; but for them he had not even those feeble
traces of reverence which may have still lived on in the mind of a
Roman of Gaul. He gladly learned the tongue of the Roman; he never
learned the tongue of the Celt or the Iberian; he gladly bowed to the
God whom Rome had learned to worship; nothing drew him either to the
elder gods of Rome or to the gods elder still who were worshipped
before the Roman came. In two corners only, special circumstances,
taking the shape of a distinct reaction, allowed the elder races
and tongues to put on a new life. The Gascon north of the Pyrenees
and the Briton south of the Channel rose again, when elsewhere all
kindred vestiges were dying out, to form each one a folk which has
lived on to our own day as a survival of days, not only before
Chlodowig and Ataulf, but before Gaius Julius and Gaius Sextius.
So grew up the new nations in the Western lands of Rome, the fruit
in some sort, we may say, of the union of Gothia and Romania.
But there were other nations which did not spring of that union,
nations which kept their untouched Teutonic being, nations which
still dwelled beyond the Empire, which within some small parts of
the Empire settled in another sort from the Goth and the Burgundian
nations. So it was in the island which we won, not from the Roman but
from the Briton; so it was in the lands by Rhine and Danube, where
our kinsfolk conquered almost in the same sort as we did. Yet even
on lands and nations like these the influence of Rome was deep and
abiding. Step by step they embraced the faith of Rome; and, without
casting away their own tongues, they adopted the tongue of Rome
as the tongue of learning and religion. So it was in Germany and
Scandinavia; so it was in all the lands whose religion and culture
came from Germany;--with the Slaves of the North-West who came within
the world of the Western Cæsar and the Western Pontiff, even with
the intruding Magyar whose coming split asunder the great Slavonic
mass, and left the Pole and the Wend to look to the elder Rome,
while the Serb and the Russian looked to the younger. But the great
conquest--only which side was the conqueror?--was nearer home. It
was another partnership between Gothia and Romania, though of quite
another kind from that which was meant to come of the bride-ale of
Narbonne, when Rome and Germany fused together their political being,
and the Western Empire of Rome became the Holy Roman Empire of the
German Nation.
* * * * *
In our general survey of the fifth century in the West, we have
passed but lightly over the most striking event of its earlier
years, the taking of the Roman city by the Goth. Before the century
was out, Rome had become used to capture and plunder. Gaiseric and
Ricimer had harried her more fiercely than ever Alaric had done. As
an event, as an incident, none in the whole history of the world
was ever fitted to make a deeper impression on men’s minds than the
first Teutonic capture of Rome. For the purposes of the preacher
and the moralist it was all that the preachers and moralists of the
time painted it. But on the actual course of events it had little
effect. And why? Because the world had so largely become Rome that
the momentary woes of the city which had once alone been Rome were
of comparatively little moment. The invasion of Italy by Alaric
led indirectly to those invasions of Gaul and Spain which laid the
foundations of the modern world; but his actual sack of Rome had no
effect on the busy series of revolutions which followed on those
invasions. So it was with that other event of the later half of the
century in which so many have so strangely seen the end of the Roman
Empire, the boundary line between ancient and modern history. It was
doubtless an impressive fact, we see in the annals of the time that
it was an impressive fact, when Emperors ceased to reign either at
Rome or at Ravenna. But as the news that the Roman Empire had come
to an end would have sounded very strange at Constantinople, so it
would have sounded no less strange at Soissons or at Salona. It
did not greatly touch the Roman realm of Syagrius in northern Gaul
that Italy had acknowledged Zeno as sole Emperor, and that he was
represented in the Italian diocese by the patrician Odowakar. That
those decent formalities veiled a revolution by which the reigning
Emperor had been set aside by a chief of barbarian mercenaries was
nothing new or wonderful. The only difference between the revolution
of 476 and a crowd of earlier revolutions was that Odowakar found
that it suited his purpose to acknowledge the nominal superiority of
an absent sovereign rather than to reign in the name of a present
puppet of his own creation. Presently it was found convenient at
Constantinople to brand the patrician as a tyrant, and to grant a new
commission to another Teutonic leader to displace him and to rule in
his stead. The personal greatness of Theodoric overshadowed Emperor
and Empire; from his palace at Ravenna, by one title or another, by
direct dominion, as guardian, as elder kinsman, as representative of
the Roman power, as head by natural selection of the whole Teutonic
world, he ruled over all the western lands save one; and even to
the conquering Frank he could say, Thus far shalt thou come and no
further. In true majesty such a position was more than Imperial;
moreover there was nothing in the rule of Theodoric which touched
the Roman life of Italy. What might have happened if the East-Gothic
power in Italy had been as lasting as the Frankish power in Gaul, or
even as the West-Gothic power in Spain, it is vain to guess. As far
as we can see, it was the very greatness of Theodoric which kept his
power from being lasting. Like so many other of the very greatest of
men, he set on foot a system which he himself could work, but which
none but himself could work. He sought to set up a kingdom of Goths
and Romans, under which the two nations should live side by side,
distinct but friendly, each keeping its own law and doing its own
work. And for one life-time the thing was done. Theodoric could keep
the whole fabric of Roman life untouched, with the Goth standing
by as an armed protector. He could, as he said, leave to the Roman
consul the honours of government and take for the Gothic king only
the toils. Smaller men neither could nor would do this, and even a
succession of Theodorics could hardly have kept on for generations
the peculiar relations between Goths and Romans which he established.
His rule was the best, as that of the Franks was about the worst,
to be found in Roman and Teutonic Europe in his day. Still fusion
between Roman and Teuton was the very essence of Frankish rule; under
the system of Theodoric no direct step towards fusion could be taken.
It was the necessary result of his position that he gave Italy one
generation of peace and prosperity such as has no fellow for ages on
either side of it, but that, when he was gone, a fabric which had no
foundation but his personal qualities broke down with a crash. Then
came the two events of the sixth century at which we have already
glanced. Italy was wasted by a long and bloody war, which in the end
swept the East-Gothic people from the earth, and for a moment left
the Roman Augustus undisputed master of every corner of the Italian
peninsula. Then, before the land had rested from the long struggle,
came another Teutonic invasion, the invasion of a people far less
touched by Roman teaching than the Goths had been. The Lombards,
establishing their rule and their name in the two ends of Italy,
never won the whole of Italy. They never reigned in Rome; it was
only in the last days of their power that they reigned in Ravenna.
Throughout the land, if there was a bit of Lombardy here, there was
a bit of untouched Romania there, and if the Roman Terminus often
fell back, he also sometimes went forward. Even after the Lombard
had yielded to the Frank, after the Frank had taken on himself the
titles and mission of the Roman, a large part of Southern Italy, the
once Greek land, with the old Greek life which had never wholly died
out kept up and strengthened, acknowledged the lordship, not of the
German-speaking Augustus of the Old Rome, but of the Greek-speaking
Augustus of the New.
Of the Empire itself, its unions, its divisions, the general
position which it kept in the world, I shall speak in another
lecture. My present subject is the influence of Rome on the new
nations which in the course of the fifth century found themselves
homes within her borders. And that practically means her influence
on the Teutonic nations of the Western European mainland. It is true
that the greatest Teutonic migration of all, the long marches of
the Goths, Eastern and Western, began in the East. While Vandals,
Burgundians, Franks, came in by way of Rhine, the Goths came in by
way of Danube. Their course in the Danubian lands forms one of the
most striking pieces of the history of the fourth century and one
of the most confused pieces of the history of the fifth. But that
history of the Goths which really affected the world, the history
both of the West-Goths of Alaric and of the East-Goths of Theodoric,
was wrought in the West. The Western Goths, as their name implies,
came before the Eastern and found homes further to the West. And
after the withdrawal of Theodoric and the East-Goths from the Eastern
provinces, those provinces which still remained under the immediate
rule of the Emperors at the New Rome, all part of the first Teutonic
invaders in the history of the Eastern peninsula may be said to come
to an end. In that peninsula they had been hardly more than invaders;
they had formed no important abiding settlement. For them the Eastern
lands were mainly a road to Italy and Spain and Gaul. The part which
the Teutons played in the West was to be played in the East, so far
as it was to be played at all, by quite another branch of the Aryan
stock.
I have often had to point out the analogy between the position of
the Teutonic settlers in the West and that of the Slavonic settlers
in the East. The East, mainly the South-East, of Europe is the true
field for Slavonic growth. Of the Slaves of the North-West we have
already spoken a word or two, as coming within the range of the
dominion and the creed of the Western Rome. The North-Western Slaves
have been largely exterminated or assimilated by Teutonic conquerors;
even those who escaped this lot have passed, by their union with
the Latin Church, into the general group of the nations of Western
Europe. The historic calling of the Slavonic nations lies in the
East, within the range of the Eastern Empire and the Eastern Church.
There we may make our comparison between their position towards that
side of the Roman world and the position of the Teutons towards its
Western side. The analogy between the two is real and strong; but
it is an analogy which presents almost as many points of contrast
as of likeness. In the phrase that I have so often had to use, the
Slaves were to the Eastern lands of Rome, as the Teutons were to the
Western, at once conquerors and disciples. But they were neither
conquerors nor disciples in exactly the same sense. The difference
largely turned on the different positions of the Old and the New
Rome. In the West, the more deeply Roman influences took root, the
less did the city of Rome show itself as a seat of actual rule,
till the days came when it became the seat of an œcumenical rule of
another kind. From the third century to the nineteenth, Rome never
was the abiding dwelling-place of Emperors; wherever they dwelled,
they were, as far as the local Rome was concerned, non-resident.
The influence of Rome, the use of the Roman language, had nothing
to do with any political boundary; it was only here and there, in
the Exarchate and in the Imperial possessions in Spain, that there
was any distinct geographical frontier between Roman and Teutonic
rule. The possession of the Roman city did not necessarily carry with
it any special dominion in other Roman lands, and a great dominion
in other Roman lands might be won without its possession. With the
Eastern Rome it was far otherwise; there the city was the life and
soul and centre of all. The too discerning eye of its founder had
planted his New Rome at the junction of two worlds, to prolong the
being of successive powers which, save for its possession, might
sooner have passed away. Constantinople was never without an Emperor
dwelling within its walls, and holding a greater or less extent of
territory in fact as well as in name. His boundaries might fluctuate;
the position of this or that land might fluctuate. In the process
of constant warfare along a long and ill-defined boundary, this or
that land or city might sometimes be under the undisputed authority
of the Emperor; it might sometimes be absolutely cut off from the
Empire and form part of a barbarian kingdom; it might sometimes be
in the intermediate state of a dependency over which the Emperor
held an outward superiority which he could enforce or not according
to circumstances. All this has its like in the West; but there is
nothing in the West like the firm abiding of the Imperial power at
Constantinople. Whatever was the extent or the nature of the dominion
of the Eastern Emperor, the Eastern Rome was its local centre, the
spot to which every corner of that dominion looked as its head. No
Slavonic host harried the Eastern Rome as so many Teutonic hosts
harried the Western. No king of a Slavonic people received an
Imperial crown in Saint Sophia, as so many kings of a Teutonic people
received an Imperial crown in Saint Peter’s. The utmost that such a
king could do was to set up a Tzarigrad of his own, to wear a crown
which he loved to call Imperial at Ochrida or at Skoupi. The Slave
became in many things a disciple of the Eastern Rome, but in some
things he was perhaps an imitator rather than a disciple. He always
remained an outsider, in a way in which the Teuton did not remain in
the West. In religious worship, above all, he never adopted either
of the tongues of the Empire; he could become a disciple without
becoming a subject. No new speech, no new nationality, arose in
the East out of a mixture of Slavonic and Roman or Greek elements,
answering to the formation of the Romance tongues and nations of the
West. One cause, as we shall hereafter see, was that the Eastern
Rome spoke with two tongues, while the Western Rome spoke with one
only. There is a Romance nation in the East, but the Slave was not
one of its component elements; the Slavonic invasion in short did
not a little to hinder its growth. On many of these points I may
have to speak again. The main business of the present lecture lies
in the West, in the Western lands of the European mainland. Yet we
must not forget that the birth of our own nation, the settlement of
our forefathers in our second home, came within the bounds of the
same century which saw Burgundian, Gothic, and Frankish kingdoms
arise in Gaul. But we, in our island home, our _alter orbis_, stood
largely aloof from the revolutions of the mainland. Our own tale must
be told separately, and it cannot be told in all its fulness till
the revolutions of the mainland are fully understood. To-day we have
had to deal with the settlements of our kinsfolk in the continental
provinces of the West. At the East we have simply glanced. We shall
have to speak of it more fully when we come to speak of the causes
which split East and West apart for ever.