originally near kindred to the Greeks. The same movement, it
is supposed, in the successive outswarmings of Aryan peoples,
deposited in one peninsula the Italian tribes, and in the next
peninsula, eastward, the tribes of the Hellenes. Among the
Italian tribes were Latins, Umbrians, Sabines, Samnites, etc.,
occupying the middle and much of the southern parts of the
peninsula, while a mysterious alien people, the Etruscans,
whose origin is not known, possessed the country north of them
between the Arno and the Tiber. In the extreme south were
remnants of a primitive race, the Iapygian, and Greek colonies
were scattered there around the coasts. From the Latins sprang
the Romans, at the beginning of their separate existence; but
there seems to have been a very early union of these Romans of
the primitive tradition with a Sabine community, whereby was
formed the Roman city-state of historical times. That union
came about through the settlement of the two communities,
Latin and Sabine, on two neighboring hills, near the mouth of
the river Tiber, on its southern bank. In the view of some
historians, it is the geographical position of those hills,
hardly less than the masterful temper and capacity of the race
seated on them, which determined the marvellous career of the
city founded on that site. Says Professor Freeman: "The whole
history of the world has been determined by the geological
fact that at a point a little below the junction of the Tiber
and the Anio the isolated hills stand nearer to one another
than most of the other hills of Latium. On a site marked out
above all other sites for dominion, the centre of Italy, the
centre of Europe, as Europe then was, a site at the junction
of three of the great nations of Italy, and which had the
great river as its highway to lands beyond the bounds of
Italy, stood two low hills, the hill which bore the name of
Latin Saturn, and the hill at the meaning of whose name of
Palatine scholars will perhaps guess for ever. These two
hills, occupied by men of two of the nations of Italy, stood
so near to one another that a strait choice indeed was laid on
those who dwelled on them. They must either join together on
terms closer than those which commonly united Italian leagues,
or they must live a life of border warfare more ceaseless,
more bitter, than the ordinary warfare of Italian enemies.
Legend, with all likelihood, tells us that warfare was tried;
history, with all certainty, tells us that the final choice
was union. The two hills were fenced with a single wall; the
men who dwelled on them changed from wholly separate
communities into tribes of a single city."
The followers of Romulus occupied the Palatine Mount, and the
Sabines were settled on the Quirinal. At subsequent times, the
Cœlian, the Capitoline, the Aventine, the Esquiline and the
Viminal hills were embraced in the circumvallation, and the
city on the seven hills thus acquired that name.
If modern students and thinkers, throwing light on the
puzzling legends and traditions of early Rome from many
sources, in language and archæology, have construed their
meaning lightly, then great importance attaches to those first
unions or incorporations of distinct settlements in the
forming of the original city-state. For it was the beginning
of a process which went on until the whole of Latium, and then
the whole of Italy, and, finally, the whole Mediterranean
world, were joined to the seven hills of Rome. "The whole
history of Rome is a history of incorporation"; and it is
reasonable to believe that the primal spring of Roman
greatness is found in that early adoption and persistent
practice of the policy of political absorption, which gave
conquest a character it had never borne before. At the same
time, this view of the creation of the Roman state contributes
to an understanding of its early constitutional history. It
supposes that the union of the first three tribes which
coalesced--those of the Palatine, the Quirinal and Capitoline
(both occupied by the Sabines) and the Cœlian hills--ended the
process of incorporation on equal terms. These formed the
original Roman people--the "fathers," the "patres," whose
descendants appear in later times as a distinct class or
order, the "patricians"--holding and struggling to maintain
exclusive political rights, and exclusive ownership of the
public domain, the "ager publicus," which became a subject of
bitter contention for four centuries. Around these heirs of
the "fathers" of Rome arose another class of Romans, brought
into the community by later incorporations, and not on equal
terms. If the first class were "fathers," these were children,
in a political sense, adopted into the Roman family, but without
a voice in general affairs, or a share in the public lands, or
eligibility to the higher offices of the state. These were the
"plebeians" or "plebs" of Rome, whose long struggle with the
patricians for political and agrarian rights is the more
interesting side of Roman history throughout nearly the whole
of the prosperous age of the republic.
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At Rome, as at Athens, there was a period of early kingship,
the legends of which are as familiar to us all as the stories
of the Bible, but the real facts of which are almost totally
unknown. It is surmised that the later kings--the well known
Tarquins of the classical tale--were Etruscan princes (it is
certain that they were Etruscans), who had broken for a time
the independence of the Romans and extended their sovereignty
over them. It is suspected, too, that this period of Etruscan
domination was one in which Roman civilization made a great
advance, under the tuition of a more cultivated people. But if
Rome in its infancy did know a time of subjugation, the
endurance was not long. It ended, according to Roman
chronology, in the 245th year of the city, or 509 B.C., by the
expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, the last of the kings.
The Roman Republic.
The Republic was then founded; but it was an aristocratic and
not a democratic republic. The consuls, who replaced the
kings, were required to be patricians, and they were chosen by
the landholders of the state. The senate was patrician; all
the important powers of government were in patrician hands,
and the plebs suffered grievous oppression in consequence.
They were not of a tamely submissive race. They demanded
powers for their own protection, and by slow degrees they won
them--strong as the patricians were in their wealth and their
trained political skill.
Precisely as in Athens, the first great effort among the
common people was to obtain relief from crushing burdens of
debt, which had been laid upon them in precisely the same
way--by loss of harvests while in military service, and by the
hardness of the laws which creditors alone had framed. An army
of plebs, just home from war, marched out of the city and
refused to return until magistrates of their own choosing had
been conceded to them. The patricians could not afford to lose
the bone and sinew of their state, and they yielded the point
in demand (B. C. 494). This first "secession of the plebs"
brought about the first great democratic change in the Roman
constitution, by calling into existence a powerful
magistracy--the Tribunes of the Plebs--who henceforth stood
between the consuls and the common people, for the protection
of the latter.
From this first success the plebeian order went forward, step
by step, to the attainment of equal political rights in the
commonwealth, and equal participation in the lands which Roman
conquest was continually adding to the public domain. In 450
B. C., after ten years of struggle, they secured the
appointment of a commission which framed the famous Twelve
Tables of the Law, and so established a written and certain
code. Five years later, the caste exclusiveness of the
patricians was broken down by a law which permitted marriages
between the orders. In 367 B. C. the patrician monopoly of the
consular office was extinguished, by the notable Licinian
Laws, which also limited the extent of land that any citizen
might occupy, and forbade the exclusive employment of slave
labor on any estate. One by one, after that, other
magistracies were opened to the plebs; and in 287 B. C. by the
Lex Hortensia, the plebeian concilium, or assembly, was made
independent of the senate and its acts declared to be valid
and binding. The democratic commonwealth was now completely
formed.
Roman Conquest of Italy.
While these changes in the constitution of their Republic were
in progress, the Romans had been making great advances toward
supremacy in the peninsula. First they had been in league with
their Latin neighbors, for war with the Æquians, the
Volscians, and the Etruscans. The Volscian war extended over
forty years, and ended about 450 B. C. in the practical
disappearance of the Volscians from history. Of war with the
Æquians, nothing is heard after 458 B. C., when, as the tale
is told, Cincinnatus left his plow to lead the Romans against
them. The war with the Etruscans of the near city of Veii had
been more stubborn. Suspended by a truce between 474 and 438
B. C., it was then renewed, and ended in 396 B. C., when the
Etruscan city was taken and destroyed. At the same time the
power of the Etruscans was being shattered at sea by the
Greeks of Tarentum and Syracuse, while at home they were
attacked from the north by the barbarous Gauls or Celts.
These last named people, having crossed the Alps from Gaul and
Switzerland and occupied northern Italy, were now pressing
upon the more civilized nations to the south of the Po. The
Etruscans were first to suffer, and their despair became so
great that they appealed to Rome for help. The Romans gave
little aid to them in their extremity; but enough to provoke
the wrath of Brennus, the savage leader of the Gauls. He
quitted Etruria and marched to Rome, defeating an army which
opposed him on the Allia, pillaging and burning the city (B.
C. 390) and slaying the senators, who had refused to take
refuge, with other inhabitants, in the capitol. The defenders
of the capitol held it for seven months; Rome was rebuilt,
when the Gauls withdrew, and soon took up her war again with
the Etruscan cities. By the middle of the same century she was
mistress of southern Etruria, though her territories had been
ravaged twice again by renewed incursions of the Gauls. In a
few years more, when her allies of Latium complained of their
meager share of the fruits of these common wars, and demanded
Roman citizenship and equal rights, she fought them fiercely
and humbled them to submissiveness (B. C. 339-338), reducing
their cities to the status of provincial towns.
And now, having awed or subdued her rivals, her friends, and
her enemies, near at hand, the young Republic swung into the
career of rapid conquest which subdued to her will, within
three-fourths of a century, the whole of Italy below the mouth
of the Arno.
In 343 B. C. the Roman arms had been turned against the
Samnites at the south, and they had been driven from the
Campania. In 327 B. C. the same dangerous rivals were again
assailed, with less impunity. At the Caudine Forks, in 321 B.
C., the Samnites inflicted both disaster and shame upon their
indomitable foes; but the end of the war (B. C. 304) found
Rome advanced and Samnium fallen back. A third contest ended
the question of supremacy; but the Samnites (B. C. 290)
submitted to become allies and not subjects of the Roman
state.
In this last struggle the Samnites had summoned Gauls and
Etruscans to join them against the common enemy, and Rome had
overcome their united forces in a great fight at Sentinum.
This was in 295 B. C. Ten years later she annihilated the
Senonian Gauls, annexed their territory and planted a colony
at Sena on the coast. In two years more she had paralyzed the
Boian Gauls by a terrible chastisement, and had nothing more
to fear from the northward side of her realm. Then she turned
back to finish her work in the south.
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War with Pyrrhus.
The Greek cities of the southern coast were harassed by
various marauding neighbors, and most of them solicited the
protection of Rome, which involved, of course, some surrender
of their independence. But one great city, Tarentum, the most
powerful of their number, refused these terms, and hazarded a
war with the terrible republic, expecting support from the
ambitious Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, on the Greek coast opposite
their own. Pyrrhus came readily at their call, with dreams of
an Italian kingdom more agreeable than his own. Assisted in
the undertaking by his royal kinsmen of Macedonia and Syria,
he brought an army of 25,000 men, with 20 elephants--which
Roman eyes had never seen before. In two bloody fights (B. C.
280-279), Pyrrhus was victorious; but the cost of victory was
so great that he dared not follow it up. He went over to
Sicily, instead, and waged war for three years (B. C. 278-276)
with the Carthaginians, who had subjugated most of the island.
The Epirot king brought timely aid to the Sicilian Greeks, and
drove their Punic enemies into the western border of the
island; but he claimed sovereignty over all that his arms
delivered, and was not successful in enforcing the claim. He
returned to Italy and found the Romans better prepared than
before to face his phalanx and his elephants. They routed him
at Beneventum, in the spring of 275 B. C. and he went back to
Epirus, with his dreams dispelled. Tarentum fell, and Southern
Italy was added to the dominion of Rome.
Punic Wars.
During her war with Pyrrhus, the Republic had formed an
alliance with Carthage, the powerful maritime Phœnician city
on the African coast. But friendship between these two cities
was impossible. The ambition of both was too boundless and too
fierce. They were necessarily competitors for supremacy in the
Mediterranean world, from the moment that a narrow strait
between Italy and Sicily was all that held them apart. Rome
challenged her rival to the duel in 264 B. C., when she sent
help to the Mamertines, a band of brigands who had seized the
Sicilian city of Messina, and who were being attacked by both
Carthaginians and Syracusan Greeks. The "First Punic War,"
then begun, lasted twenty-four years, and resulted in the
withdrawal of the Carthaginians from Sicily, and in their
payment of an enormous war indemnity to Rome. The latter
assumed a protectorate over the island, and the kingdom of
Hiero of Syracuse preserved its nominal independence for the
time; but Sicily, as a matter of fact, might already be looked
upon as the first of those provinces, beyond Italy, which Rome
bound to herself, one by one, until she had compassed the
Mediterranean with her dominion and gathered to it all the
islands of that sea.
The "Second Punic war," called sometimes the "Hannibalic war,"
was fought with a great Carthaginian, rather than with
Carthage herself. Hamilcar Barca had been the last and ablest
of the Punic generals in the contest for Sicily. Afterwards he
undertook the conquest of Spain, where his arms had such
success that he established a very considerable power, more
than half independent of the parent state. He nursed an
unquenchable hatred of Rome, and transmitted it to his son
Hannibal, who solemnly dedicated his life to warfare with the
Latin city. Hamilcar died, and in due time Hannibal found
himself prepared to make good his oath. He provoked a
declaration of war (B. C. 218) by attacking Saguntum, on the
eastern Spanish coast--a town which the Romans "protected."
The latter expected to encounter him in Spain; but before the
fleet bearing their legions to that country had reached
Massilia, he had already passed the Pyrenees and the Rhone,
with nearly 100,000 men, and was crossing the Alps, to assail
his astounded foes on their own soil. The terrific barrier was
surmounted with such suffering and loss that only 20,000 foot
and 6,000 horse, of the great army which left Spain, could be
mustered for the clearing of the last Alpine pass. With this
small following, by sheer energy, rapidity and precision of
movement--by force, in other words, of a military genius never
surpassed in the world--he defeated the armies of Rome again
and again, and so crushingly in the awful battle of Cannæ (B.
C. 216) that the proud republic was staggered, but never
despaired. For fifteen years the great Carthaginian held his
ground in southern Italy; but his expectation of being joined
by discontented subjects of Rome in the peninsula was very
slightly realized, and his own country gave him little
encouragement or help. His brother Hasdrubal, marching to his
relief in 207 B. C., was defeated on the river Metaurus and
slain. The arms of Rome had prospered meantime in Sicily and
in Spain, even while beaten at home, and her Punic rival had
been driven from both. In 204 B. C. the final field of battle
was shifted to Carthaginian territory by Scipio, of famous
memory, thereafter styled Africanus, because he "carried the
war into Africa." Hannibal abandoned Italy to confront him,
and at Zama, in the autumn of 202 B. C., the long contention
ended, and the career of Carthage as a Power in the ancient
world was forever closed. Existing by Roman sufferance for
another half century, she then gave her implacable conquerors
another pretext for war, and they ruthlessly destroyed her
(B.C. 146).
Roman Conquest of Greece.
In that same year of the destruction of Carthage, the conquest
of Greece was finished. The first war of the Romans on that
side of the Adriatic had taken place during the Second Punic
war, and had been caused by an alliance formed between
Hannibal and King Philip of Macedonia (B. C. 214). They
pursued it then no further than to frustrate Philip's designs
against themselves; but they formed alliances with the Greek
states oppressed or menaced by the Macedonian, and these drew
them into a second war, just as the century closed. On
Cynoscephalæ, Philip was overthrown (B. C. 197), his kingdom
reduced to vassalage, and the freedom of all Greece was
solemnly proclaimed by the Roman Consul Flaminius.
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And now, for the first time, Rome came into conflict with an
Asiatic power. The throne of the Syrian monarchy, founded by
one of the generals of Alexander the Great, was occupied by a
king more ambitious than capable, who had acquired a large and
loosely jointed dominion in the East, and who bore the
sounding name of Antiochus the Great. This vainglorious King,
having a huge army and many elephants at his disposal, was
eager to try a passage at arms with the redoubtable men of
Rome. He was encouraged in his desire by the Ætolians in
Greece, who bore ill-will to Rome. Under this encouragement,
and having Hannibal--then a fugitive at his court--to give him
counsel, which he lacked intelligence to use, Antiochus
crossed the Ægean and invaded Greece (B. C. 192). The Romans
met him at the pass of Thermopylæ; drove him back to the
shores from which he came; pursued him thither; crushed and
humbled him on the field of Magnesia, and took the kingdoms
and cities of Asia Minor under their protection, as the allies
(soon to be subjects) of Rome.
Twenty years passed with little change in the outward
situation of affairs among the Greeks. But discontent with the
harshness and haughtiness of Roman "protection" changed from
sullenness to heat, and Perseus, son of Philip of Macedonia,
fanned it steadily, with the hope of bringing it to a flame.
Rome watched him with keen vigilance, and before his plans
were ripe her legions were upon him. He battled with them
obstinately for three years (B. C. 171-168); but his fate was
sealed at Pydna. He went as a prisoner to Rome; his kingdom
was broken into four small republics; the Achæan League was
stricken by the captivity of a thousand of its chief men; the
whole of Greece was humbled to submissiveness, though not yet
formally reduced to the state of a Roman province. That
followed some years later, when risings in Macedonia and
Achaia were punished by the extinction of the last semblance
of political independence in both (B. C. 148-146).
The Zenith of the Republic.
Rome now gripped the Mediterranean (the ocean of the then
civilized world) as with four fingers of a powerful hand: one
laid on Italy and all its islands, one on Macedonia and
Greece, one on Carthage, one on Spain, and the little finger
of her "protection" reaching over to the Lesser Asia. Little
more than half a century, since the day that Hannibal
threatened her own city gates, had sufficed to win this vast
dominion. But the losses of the Republic had been greater,
after all, than the gains; for the best energies of its
political constitution had been expended in the acquisition,
and the nobler qualities in its character had been touched
with the incurable taints of a licentious prosperity.
Beginning of Decline.
A century and a half had passed since the practical ending of
the struggle of plebeians with patricians for political and
agrarian rights. In theory and in form, the constitution
remained as democratic as it was made by the Licinian Laws of
367 B. C., and by the finishing touch of the Hortensian Law of
287 B. C. But in practical working it had reverted to the
aristocratic mode. A new aristocracy had risen out of the
plebeian ranks to reinforce the old patrician order. It was
composed of the families of men who had been raised to
distinction and ennobled by the holding of eminent offices,
and its spirit was no less jealous and exclusive than that of
the older high caste.
The Senate and the Mob.
Thus strengthened, the aristocracy had recovered its
ascendancy in Rome, and the Senate, which it controlled, had
become the supreme power in government. The amazing success of
the Republic during the last century just reviewed--its
successes in war, in diplomacy, and in all the sagacious
measures of policy by which its great dominion had been
won--are reasonably ascribed to this fact. For the Senate had
wielded the power of the state, in most emergencies, with
passionless deliberation and with unity and fixity of aim.
But it maintained its ascendancy by an increasing employment
of means which debased and corrupted all orders alike. The
people held powers which might paralyze the Senate at any
moment, if they chose to exercise them, through their
assemblies and their tribunes. They had seldom brought those
powers into play thus far, to interfere with the senatorial
government of the Republic, simply because they had been
bribed to abstain. The art of the politician in Rome, as
distinguished from the statesman, had already become
demagoguery. This could not well have been otherwise under the
peculiar constitution of the Roman citizenship. Of the
thirty-five tribes who made up the Roman people, legally
qualified to vote, only four were within the city. The
remaining thirty-one were "plebs urbana." There was no
delegated representation of this country populace--citizens
beyond the walls. To exercise their right of suffrage they
must be personally present at the meetings of the "comitia
tributa"--the tribal assemblies; and those of any tribe who
chanced to be in attendance at such a meeting might give a
vote which carried with it the weight of their whole tribe.
For questions were decided by the majority of tribal, not
individual, votes; and a very few members of a tribe might act
for and be the tribe, for all purposes of voting, on occasions
of the greatest possible importance. It is quite evident that
a democratic system of this nature gave wide opportunity for
corrupt "politics." There must have been, always, an
attraction for the baser sort among the rural plebs, drawing
them into the city, to enjoy the excitement of political
contests, and to partake of the flatteries and largesses which
began early to go with these. And circumstances had tended
strongly to increase this sinister sifting into Rome of the
most vagrant and least responsible of her citizens, to make
them practically the deputies and representatives of that
mighty sovereign which had risen in the world--the "Populus
Romanus." For there was no longer either thrift or dignity
possible in the pursuits of husbandry. The long Hannibalic War
had ruined the farming class in Italy by its ravages; but the
extensive conquests that followed it had been still more
ruinous to that class by several effects combined. Corn
supplies from the conquered provinces were poured into Rome at
cheapened prices; enormous fortunes, gathered in the same
provinces by officials, by farmers of taxes, by money-lenders,
and by traders, were largely invested in great estates,
absorbing the small farms of olden time; and, finally,
free-labor in agriculture was supplanted, more and more, by
the labor of slaves, which war and increasing wealth combined
to multiply in numbers. Thus the "plebs urbana" of Rome were a
depressed and, therefore, a degenerating class, and the same
circumstances that made them so impelled them towards the
city, to swell the mob which held its mighty sovereignty in
their hands.
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So far, a lavish amusement of this mob with free games, and
liberal bribes, had kept it generally submissive to the
senatorial government. But the more it was debased by such
methods, and its vagrancy encouraged, the more extravagant
gratuities of like kind it claimed. Hence a time could never
be far away when the aristocracy and the senate would lose
their control of the popular vote on which they had built
their governing power.
Agrarian Agitations.