greediness in the employment of their power for selfish and
dishonest ends. They had practically recovered their monopoly
of the use of the public lands. The Licinian law, which
forbade any one person to occupy more than five hundred jugera
(about three hundred acres) of the public lands, had been made
a dead letter. The great tracts acquired in the Samnite wars,
and since, had remained undistributed, while the use and
profit of them were enjoyed, under one form of authority or
another, by rich capitalists and powerful nobles.
This evil, among many that waxed greater each year, caused the
deepest discontent, and provoked movements of reform which
soon passed by rapid stages into a revolution, and ended in
the fall of the Republic. The leader of the movement at its
beginning was Tiberius Gracchus, grandson of Scipio Africanus
on the side of his mother, Cornelia. Elected tribune in 133 B.
C., he set himself to the dangerous task of rousing the people
against senatorial usurpations, especially in the matter of
the public domain. He only drew upon himself the hatred of the
senate and its selfish supporters; he failed to rally a
popular party that was strong enough for his protection, and
his enemies slew him in the very midst of a meeting of the
tribes. His brother Caius took up the perilous cause and won
the office of tribune (B. C. 123) in avowed hostility to the
senatorial government. He was driven to bid high for popular
help, even when the measures which he strove to carry were
most plainly for the welfare of the common people, and he may
seem to modern eyes to have played the demagogue with some
extravagance. But statesmanship and patriotism without
demagoguery for their instrument or their weapon were hardly
practicable, perhaps, in the Rome of those days, and it is not
easy to find them clean-handed in any political leader of the
last century of the Republic. The fall of Caius Gracchus was
hastened by his attempt to extend the Roman franchise beyond
the "populus Romanus," to all the freemen of Italy. The mob in
Rome was not pleased with such political generosity, and
cooled in its admiration for the large-minded tribune. He lost
his office and the personal protection it threw over him, and
then he, like his brother, was slain (B. C. 121) in a melee.
Jugurthine War.
For ten years the senate, the nobility, and the capitalists
(now beginning to take the name of the equestrian order), had
mostly their own way again, and effaced the work of the
Gracchi as completely as they could. Then came disgraceful
troubles in Numidia which enraged the people and moved them to
a new assertion of themselves. The Numidian king who helped
Scipio to pull Carthage down had been a ward of Rome since
that time. When he died, he left his kingdom to be governed
jointly by two young sons and an older nephew. The latter,
Jugurtha, put his cousins out of the way, took the kingdom to
himself, and baffled attempts at Rome to call him to account,
by heavy bribes. The corruption in the case became so flagrant
that even the corrupted Roman populace revolted against it, and
took the Numidian business into its own hands. War was
declared against Jugurtha by popular vote, and, despite
opposing action in the Senate, one Marius, an experienced
soldier of humble birth, was elected consul and sent out to
take command. Marius distinguished himself in the war much
less than did one of his officers, Cornelius Sulla; but he
bore the lion's share of glory when Jugurtha was taken captive
and conveyed to Rome (B. C. 104). Marius was now the great
hero of the hour, and events were preparing to lift him to the
giddiest heights of popularity.
Teutones and Cimbri.
Hitherto, the barbarians of wild Europe whom the Romans had
met were either the Aryan Celts, or the non-Aryan tribes found
in northern Italy, Spain and Gaul. Now, for the first time,
the armies of Rome were challenged by tribes of another grand
division of the Aryan stock, coming out of the farther North.
These were the Cimbri and the Teutones, wandering hordes of
the great Teutonic or Germanic race which has occupied Western
Europe north of the Rhine since the beginning of historic
time. So far as we can know, these two were the first of the
Germanic nations to migrate to the South. They came into
collision with Rome in 113 B. C., when they were in Noricum,
threatening the frontiers of her Italian dominion. Four years
later they were in southern Gaul, where the Romans were now
settling colonies and subduing the native Celts. Twice they
had beaten the armies opposed to them; two years later they
added a third to their victories; and in 105 B. C. they threw
Rome into consternation by destroying two great armies on the
Rhone. Italy seemed helpless against the invasion for which
these terrible barbarians were now preparing, when Marius went
against them. In the summer of 102 B. C. he annihilated the
Teutones, near Aquæ Sextiæ (modern Aix), and in the following
year he destroyed the invading Cimbri, on a bloody field in
northern Italy, near modern Vercellæ.
Marius.
From these great victories, Marius went back to Rome, doubly
and terribly clothed with power, by the devotion of a reckless
army and the hero-worship of an unthinking mob. The state was
at his mercy. A strong man in his place might have crushed the
class-factions and accomplished the settlement which Cæsar
made after half a century more of turbulence and shame. But
Marius was ignorant, he was weak, and he became a mere
blood-stained figure in the ruinous anarchy of his time.
{1001}
Optimates and Populares.
The social and political state of the capital had grown
rapidly worse. A middle-class in Roman society had practically
disappeared. The two contending parties or factions, which had
taken new names--"optimates" and "populares"--were now
divided almost solely by the line which separates rich from
poor. "If we said that 'optimates' signified the men who
bribed and abused office under the banner of the Senate and
its connections, and that 'populares' meant men who bribed and
abused office with the interests of the people outside the
Senatorial pale upon their lips, we might do injustice to many
good men on both sides, but should hardly be slandering the
parties" (Beesly). There was a desperate conflict between the
two in the year 100, B. C. and the Senate once more recovered
its power for a brief term of years.
The Social War.
The enfranchisement of the so-called "allies"--the Latin and
other subjects of Rome who were not citizens--was the burning
question of the time. The attempt of Caius Gracchus to extend
rights of citizenship to them had been renewed again and
again, without success, and each failure had increased the
bitter discontent of the Italian people. In 90 B. C. they drew
together in a formidable confederation and rose in revolt. In
the face of this great danger Rome sobered herself to action
with old time wisdom and vigor. She yielded her full
citizenship to all Italian freemen who had not taken arms, and
then offered it to those who would lay their arms down. At the
same time, she fought the insurrection with every army she
could put into the field, and in two years it was at an end.
Marius and his old lieutenant, Sulla, had been the principal
commanders in this "Social War," as it was named, and Sulla
had distinguished himself most. The latter had now an army at
his back and was a power in the state, and between the two
military champions there arose a rivalry which produced the
first of the Roman Civil Wars.
Marius and Sulla.
A troublesome war in the East had been forced upon the Romans
by aggressions of Mithridates, King of Pontus. Both Marius and
Sulla aspired to the command. Sulla obtained election to the
consulship in 88 B. C. and was named for the coveted place.
But Marius succeeded in getting the appointment annulled by a
popular assembly and himself chosen instead for the Eastern
command. Sulla, personally imperilled by popular tumults, fled
to his legions, put himself at their head, and marched back to
Rome--the first among her generals to turn her arms against
herself. There was no effective resistance; Marius fled; both
Senate and people were submissive to the dictates of the
consul who had become master of the city. He "made the tribes
decree their own political extinction, resuscitating the
comitia centuriata; he reorganized the Senate by adding three
hundred to its members and vindicating the right to sanction
legislation; conducted the consular elections, exacting from
L. Cornelius Cinna, the newly elected consul, a solemn oath
that he would observe the new regulations, and securing the
election of Cn. Octavius in his own interest, and then, like
'a countryman who had just shaken the lice off his coat,' to
use his own figure, he turned to do his great work in the
East."
(Horton).
Sulla went to Greece, which was in revolt and in alliance with
Mithridates, and conducted there a brilliant, ruthless
campaign for three years (B. C. 87-84), until he had restored
Roman authority in the peninsula, and forced the King of
Pontus to surrender all his conquests in Asia Minor. Until
this task was finished, he gave no heed to what his enemies
did at Rome; though the struggle there between "Sullans" and
"Marians" had gone fiercely and bloodily on, and his own
partisans had been beaten in the fight. The consul Octavius,
who was in Bulla's interest, had first driven the consul Cinna
out of the city, after slaying 10,000 of his faction. Cinna's
cause was taken up by the new Italian citizens; he was joined
by the exiled Marius, and these two returned together, with an
army which the Senate and the party of Sulla were unable to
resist. Marius came back with a burning heart and with savage
intentions of revenge. A horrible massacre of his opponents
ensued, which went on unchecked for five days, and was
continued more deliberately for several months, until Marius
died, at the beginning of the year 86 B. C. Then Cinna ruled
absolutely at Rome for three years, supported in the main by
the newly-made citizens; while the provinces generally
remained under the control of the party of the optimates. In
83 B. C. Sulla, having finished with carefulness his work in
the East, came back into Italy, with 40,000 veterans to attend
his steps. He had been outlawed and deprived of his command,
by the faction governing at the capital; but its decrees had
no effect and troubled him little. Cinna had been killed by
his own troops, even before Bulla's landing at Brundisium.
Several important leaders and soldiers on the Marian side,
such as Pompeius, then a young general, and Crassus, the
millionaire, went over to Sulla's camp. One of the consuls of
the year saw his troops follow their example, in a body; the
other consul was beaten and driven into Capua. Sulla wintered
in Campania, and the next spring he pressed forward to Rome,
fighting a decisive battle with Marius the younger on the way,
and took possession of the city; but not in time to prevent a
massacre of senators by the resentful mob.
Sulla's Dictatorship.
Before that year closed, the whole of Italy had been subdued,
the final battle being fought with the Marians and Italians at
the Colline Gate, and Sulla again possessed power supreme. He
placed it beyond dispute by a deliberate extermination of his
opponents, more merciless than the Marian massacre had been.
They were proscribed by name, in placarded lists, and rewards
paid to those who killed them; while their property was
confiscated, and became the source of vast fortunes to Sulla's
supporters, and of lands for distribution to his veterans.
When this terror had paralyzed all resistance to his rule, the
Dictator (for he had taken that title) undertook a complete
reconstruction of the constitution, aiming at a permanent
restoration of senatorial ascendancy and a curbing of the
powers which the people, in their assemblies, and the
magistrates who especially represented them, had gained during
the preceding century. He remodelled, moreover, the judicial
system, and some of his reforms were undoubtedly good, though
they did not prove enduring. When he had fashioned the state
to his liking, this extraordinary usurper quietly abdicated
his dictatorial office (B. C. 80) and retired to private life,
undisturbed until his death (B. C. 78).
{1002}
After Sulla.
The system he had established did not save Rome from renewed
distractions and disorder after Sulla died. There was no
longer a practical question between Senate and people--between
the few and the many in government. The question now, since
the legionaries held their swords prepared to be flung into
the scale, was what one should again gather the powers of
government into his hands, as Sulla had done.
The Great Game and the Players.
The history of the next thirty years--the last generation of
republican Rome--is a sad and sinister but thrilling chronicle
of the strifes and intrigues, the machinations and
corruptions, of a stupendous and wicked game in politics that
was played, against one another and against the Republic, by a
few daring, unscrupulous players, with the empire of the
civilized world for the stake between them. There were more
than a few who aspired; there were only three players who
entered really as principals into the game. These were
Pompeius, called "the Great," since he extinguished the Marian
faction in Sicily and in Spain; Crassus, whose wealth gave him
power, and who acquired some military pretensions besides, by
taking the field against a formidable insurrection of slaves
(B. C. 73-71); and Julius Cæsar, a young patrician, but nephew
of Marius by marriage, who assiduously strengthened that
connection with the party of the people, and who began, very
soon after Sulla's death, to draw attention to himself as a
rising power in the politics of the day. There were two other
men, Cicero and the younger Cato, who bore a nobler and
greater because less selfish part in the contest of that
fateful time. Both were blind to the impossibility of
restoring the old order of things, with a dominant Senate, a
free but well guided populace, and a simply ordered social
state; but their blindness was heroic and high-souled.
Pompeius in the East.
Of the three strong rivals for the vacant dictatorial chair
which waited to be filled, Pompeius held by far the greater
advantages. His fame as a soldier was already won; he had been
a favorite of Fortune from the beginning of his career;
everything had succeeded with him; everything was expected for
him and expected from him. Even while the issues of the great
struggle were pending, a wonderful opportunity for increasing
his renown was opened to him. The disorders of the civil war
had licensed a swarm of pirates, who fairly possessed the
eastern Mediterranean and had nearly extirpated the maritime
trade. Pompeius was sent against them (B. C. 67), with a
commission that gave him almost unlimited powers, and within
ninety days he had driven them from the sea. Then, before he
had returned from this exploit, he was invested with supreme
command in the entire East, where another troublesome war with
Mithridates was going on. He harvested there all the laurels
which belonged by better right to his predecessor, Lucullus,
finding the power of Mithridates already broken down. From
Pontus he passed into Armenia, and thence into Syria, easily
subjugating both, and extinguishing the monarchy of the
Seleucids. The Jews resisted him and he humbled them by the
siege and conquest of their sacred city. Egypt was now the
only Mediterranean state left outside the all-absorbing
dominion of Rome; and even Egypt, by bequest of its late king,
belonged to the Republic, though not yet claimed.
The First Triumvirate.
Pompeius came back to Rome in the spring of 61 B. C. so
glorified by his successes that he might have seemed to be
irresistible, whatever he should undertake. But, either
through an honest patriotism or an overweening confidence, he
had disbanded his army when he reached Italy, and he had
committed himself to no party. He stood alone and aloof, with
a great prestige, great ambitions, and no ability to use the
one or realize the other. Before another year passed, he was
glad to accept offers of a helping hand in politics from
Cæsar, who had climbed the ladder of office rapidly within
four or five years, spending vast sums of borrowed money to
amuse the people with games, and distinguishing himself as a
democratic champion. Cæsar, the far seeing calculator,
discerned the enormous advantages that he might gain for
himself by massing together the prestige of Pompeius, the
wealth of Crassus and his own invincible genius, which was
sure to be the master element in the combination. He brought
the coalition about through a bargain which created what is
known in history as the First Triumvirate, or supremacy of
three.
Cæsar in Gaul.
Under the terms of the bargain, Cæsar was chosen consul for 59
B. C., and at the end of his term was given the governorship
of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, with command of three
legions there, for five years. His grand aim was a military
command--the leadership of an army--the prestige of a
successful soldier. No sooner had he secured the command than
fortune gave him opportunities for its use in the most
striking way and with the most impressive results. The Celtic
tribes of Gaul, north of the two small provinces which the
Romans had already acquired on the Mediterranean coast, gave
him pretexts or provocations (it mattered little to Cæsar
which) for war with them, and in a series of remarkable
campaigns, which all soldiers since have admired, he pushed
the frontiers of the dominion of Rome to the ocean and the
Rhine, and threatened the nations of Germany on the farther
banks of that stream. "The conquest of Gaul by Cæsar," says
Mr. Freeman, "is one of the most important events in the
history of the world. It is in some sort the beginning of
modern history, as it brought the old world of southern
Europe, of which Rome was the head, into contact with the
lands and nations which were to play the greatest part in
later times--with Gaul, Germany, and Britain." From Gaul
Cæsar crossed the channel to Britain in 55 B. C. and again in
the following year, exacting tribute from the Celtic natives,
but attempting no lodgment in the island.
{1003}
Meantime, while pursuing a career of conquest which excited
the Roman world, Cæsar never lost touch with the capital and
its seething politics. Each winter he repaired to Lucca, the
point in his province which was nearest to Rome, and conferred
there with his friends, who flocked to the rendezvous. He
secured an extension of his term, to enable him to complete
his plans, and year by year he grew more independent of the
support of his colleagues in the triumvirate, while they
weakened one another by their jealousies, and the Roman state
was more hopelessly distracted by factious strife.
End of the Triumvirate.
The year after Cæsar's second invasion of Britain, Crassus,
who had obtained the government of Syria, perished in a
disastrous war with the Parthians, and the triumvirate was at
an end. Disorder in Rome increased and Pompeius lacked energy
or boldness to deal with it, though he seemed to be the one
man present who might do so. He was made sole consul in 52 B.
C.; he might have seized the dictatorship, with approval of
many, but he waited for it to be offered to him, and the offer
never came. He drew at last into close alliance with the party
of the Optimates, and left the Populares to be won entirely to
Cæsar's side.
Civil War.
Matters came to a crisis in 50 B. C., when the Senate passed
an order removing Cæsar from his command and discharging his
soldiers who had served their term. He came to Ravenna with a
single legion and concerted measures with his friends. The
issue involved is supposed to have been one of life or death
to him, as well as of triumph or failure in his ambitions; for
his enemies were malignant. His friends demanded that he be
made consul, for his protection, before laying down his arms.
The Senate answered by proclaiming him a public enemy if he
failed to disband his troops with no delay. It was a
declaration of war, and Cæsar accepted it. He marched his
single legion across the Rubicon, which was the boundary of
his province, and advanced towards Rome.
Pompeius, with the forces he had gathered, retreated
southward, and consuls, senators and nobles generally streamed
after him. Cæsar followed them--turning aside from the
city--and his force gathered numbers as he advanced. The
Pompeians continued their flight and abandoned Italy,
withdrawing to Epirus, planning to gather there the forces of
the East and return with them. Cæsar now took possession of
Rome and secured the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, from
which it drew its supply of food. This done, he proceeded
without delay to Spain, where seven legions strongly devoted
to Pompeius were stationed. He overcame them in a single
campaign, enlisted most of the veterans in his own service,
and acquired a store of treasure. Before the year ended he was
again in Rome, where the citizens had proclaimed him dictator. He
held the dictatorship for eleven days, only, to legalize an
election which made him consul, with a pliant associate. He
reorganized the government, complete in all its branches,
including a senate, partly composed of former members of the
body who had remained or returned. Then (B. C. 48.--January) he
took up the pursuit of Pompeius and the Optimates. Crossing to
Epirus, after some months of changeful fortune, he fought and
won the decisive battle of Pharsalia. Pompeius, flying to
Egypt, was murdered there. Cæsar, following, with a small
force, was placed in great peril by a rising at Alexandria,
but held his ground until assistance came. He then garrisoned
Egypt with Roman troops and made the princess Cleopatra, who
had captivated him by her charms, joint occupant of the throne
with her younger brother. During his absence, affairs at Rome
were again disturbed, and he was once more appointed dictator,
as well as tribune for life. His presence restored order at
once, and he was soon in readiness to attack the party of his
enemies who had taken refuge in Africa. The battle of Thapsus,
followed by the suicide of Cato and the surrender of Utica,
practically finished the contest, though one more campaign was
fought in Spain the following year.
Cæsar Supreme.
Cæsar was now master of the dominions of Rome, and as entirely
a monarch as anyone of his imperial successors, who took his
name, with the power which he caused it to symbolize, and
called themselves "Cæsars," and "Imperators," as though the
two titles were equivalent. "Imperator" was the title under
which he chose to exercise his sovereignty. Other Roman
generals had been Imperators before, but he was the first to
be named Imperator for life, and the word (changed in our
tongue to Emperor) took a meaning from that day more regal
than Rex or King. That Cæsar, the Imperator, first of all
Emperors, ever coveted the crown and title of an
older-fashioned royalty, is not an easy thing to believe.
Having settled his authority firmly, he gave his attention to
the organization of the Empire (still Republic in name) and to
the reforming of the evils which afflicted it. That he did
this work with consummate judgment and success is the opinion
of all who study his time. He gratified no resentments,
executed no revenges, proscribed no enemies. All who submitted
to his rule were safe; and it seems to be clear that the
people in general were glad to be rescued by his rule from the
old oligarchical and anarchical state. But some of Cæsar's own
partisans were dissatisfied with the autocracy which they
helped to create, or with the slenderness of their own parts
in it. They conspired with surviving leaders of the Optimates,
and Cæsar was assassinated by them, in the Senate chamber, on
the 15th of March, B. C. 44.