Of the struggle between the Romans and the Etruscans we cannot tell in

any detail here. The Etruscans were the better armed, the more

civilized, and the more numerous, and it would probably have gone hard

with the Romans if they had had to fight them alone. But two disasters

happened to the Etruscans which so weakened them that the Romans were

able at last to master them altogether. The first of these was a war

with the Greeks of Syracuse in Sicily which destroyed the Etruscan fleet

(474 B.C.), and the second was a great raid of the Gauls from the north

into Italy. These latter people swarmed into North Italy and occupied

the valley of the Po towards the end of the fifth century B.C., as a

couple of centuries later their kindred were to swarm down into Greece

and Asia Minor and settle in Galatia. The Etruscans were thus caught

between hammer and anvil, and after a long and intermittent war the

Romans were able to capture Veii, an Etruscan fortress, a few miles from

Rome, which had hitherto been a great threat and annoyance to them.

It is to this period of struggle against the Etruscan monarchs, the

Tarquins, that Macaulay’s _Lays of Ancient Rome_, familiar to every

schoolboy, refer.

[Illustration: Greek statuette of a Gaul.

(From Myrina)]

But the invasion of the Gauls was one of those convulsions of the

nations that leave nothing as it has been before. They carried their

raiding right down the Italian peninsula, devastating all Etruria. They

took and sacked Rome (390 B.C.). According to Roman legends--on which

doubt is thrown--the citadel on the Capitol held out, and this also the

Gauls would have taken by surprise at night, if certain geese had not

been awakened by their stealthy movements and set up such a cackling as

to arouse the garrison. After that the Gauls, who were ill-equipped for

siege operations, and perhaps suffering from disease in their camp, were

bought off, and departed to the northward again, and, though they made

subsequent raids, they never again reached Rome.

The leader of the Gauls who sacked Rome was named Brennus. It is related

of him that as the gold of the ransom was being weighed, there was some

dispute about the justice of the counterpoise, whereupon he flung his

sword into the scale, saying, “_Væ victis!_” (“Woe to the

vanquished!”)--a phrase that has haunted the discussions of all

subsequent ransoms and indemnities down to the present time.

For half a century after this experience Rome was engaged in a series of

wars to establish herself at the head of the Latin tribes. For the

burning of the chief city seems to have stimulated rather than crippled

her energies. However much she had suffered, most of her neighbours

seem to have suffered more. By 290 B.C. Rome was the mistress city of

all Central Italy from the Arno to south of Naples. She had conquered

the Etruscans altogether, and her boundaries marched with those of the

Gauls to the north and with the regions of Italy under Greek dominion

(Magna Græcia) to the south. Along the Gaulish boundary she had planted

garrisons and colonial cities, and no doubt it was because of that line

of defence that the raiding enterprises of the Gauls were deflected

eastward into the Balkans.

[Illustration: The ROMAN POWER after the SAMNITE WARS]

After what we have already told of the history of Greece and the

constitutions of her cities, it will not surprise the reader to learn

that the Greeks of Sicily and Italy were divided up into a number of

separate city governments, of which Syracuse and Tarentum (the modern

Taranto) were the chief, and that they had no common rule of direction

or policy. But now, alarmed at the spread of the Roman power, they

looked across the Adriatic for help, and found it in the ambitions of

Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus. Between the Romans and Pyrrhus these Greeks

of Magna Græcia were very much in the same position that Greece proper

had been in, between the Macedonians and the Persians half a century

before.

[Illustration: Samnite warriors.... (from painted vases)]

[Illustration: Map of ITALY after 275 B.C.]

The reader will remember that Epirus, the part of Greece that is closest

to the heel of Italy, was the native land of Olympias, the mother of

Alexander. In the kaleidoscopic changes of the map that followed the

death of Alexander, Epirus was sometimes swamped by Macedonia, sometimes

independent. This Pyrrhus was a kinsman of Alexander the Great, and a

monarch of ability and enterprise, and he seems to have planned a career

of conquest in Italy and Sicily. He commanded an admirable army,

against which the comparatively inexpert Roman levies could at first do

little. His army included all the established military devices of the

time, an infantry phalanx, Thessalian cavalry and twenty fighting

elephants from the east. He routed the Romans at Heraclea (280 B.C.),

and, pressing after them, defeated them again at Ausculum (279 B.C.) in

their own territory. Then, instead of pursuing the Romans further, he

made a truce with them, turned his attention to the subjugation of

Sicily, and so brought the sea power of Carthage into alliance against

him. For Carthage could not afford to have a strong power established so

close to her as Sicily. Rome in those days seemed to the Carthaginians a

far less serious threat than the possibility of another Alexander the

Great ruling Sicily. A Carthaginian fleet appeared off the mouth of the

Tiber, therefore, to encourage or induce the Romans to renew the

struggle, and Rome and Carthage were definitely allied against the

invader.

This interposition of Carthage was fatal to Pyrrhus. Without any

decisive battle his power wilted, and, after a disastrous repulse in an

attack upon the Roman camp of Beneventum, he had to retire to Epirus

(275 B.C.).

It is recorded that when Pyrrhus left Sicily, he said he left it to be

the battleground of Rome and Carthage. He was killed three years later

in a battle in the streets of Argos. The war against Pyrrhus was won by

the Carthaginian fleet, and Rome reaped a full half of the harvest of

victory. Sicily fell completely to Carthage, and Rome came down to the

toe and heel of Italy, and looked across the Straits of Messina at her

new rival. In eleven years’ time (264 B.C.) the prophecy of Pyrrhus was

fulfilled, and the first war with Carthage, the first of the three

Punic[227] Wars, had begun.

§ 2[228]

But we write “Rome” and the “Romans,” and we have still to explain what

manner of people these were who were playing a rôle of conquest that had

hitherto been played only by able and aggressive monarchs.

Their state was, in the fifth century B.C., a republic of the Aryan type

very similar to a Greek aristocratic republic. The earliest accounts of

the social life of Rome give us a picture of a very primitive Aryan

community. “In the second half of the fifth century before Christ, Rome

was still an aristocratic community of free peasants, occupying an area

of nearly 400 square miles, with a population certainly not exceeding

150,000, almost entirely dispersed over the country-side and divided

into seventeen districts or rural tribes. Most of the families had a

small holding and a cottage of their own, where father and sons lived

and worked together, growing corn for the most part, with here and there

a strip of vine or olive. Their few head of cattle were kept at pasture

on the neighbouring common land; their clothes and simple implements of

husbandry they made for themselves at home. Only at rare intervals and

on special occasions would they make their way into the fortified town,

which was the centre at once of their religion and their government.

Here were the temples of the gods, the houses of the wealthy, and the

shops of the artizans and traders, where corn, oil, or wine could be

bartered in small quantities for salt or rough tools and weapons of

iron.”[229]

[Illustration: ROMAN COIN STRUCK TO COMMEMORATE THE VICTORY OVER PYRRHUS

AND HIS ELEPHANTS.]

This community followed the usual tradition of a division into

aristocratic and common citizens, who were called in Rome patricians and

plebeians. These were the citizens; the slave or out-lander had no more

part in the state than he had in Greece. But the constitution differed

from any Greek constitution in the fact that a great part of the ruling

power was gathered into the hands of a body called the Senate, which was

neither purely a body of hereditary members nor directly an elected and

representative one. It was a nominated one, and in the earlier period it

was nominated solely from among the patricians. It existed before the

expulsion of the kings, and in the time of the kings it was the king who

nominated the senators. But after the expulsion of the kings (510 B.C.),

the supreme government was vested in the hands of two elected rulers,

the _consuls_; and it was the consuls who took over the business of

appointing senators. In the early days of the Republic only patricians

were eligible as consuls or senators, and the share of the plebeians in

the government consisted merely in a right to vote for the _consuls_ and

other public officials. Even for that purpose their votes did not have

the same value as those of their patrician fellow citizens. But their

votes had at any rate sufficient weight to induce many of the patrician

candidates to profess a more or less sincere concern for plebeian

grievances. In the early phases of the Roman state, moreover, the

plebeians were not only excluded from public office, but from

intermarriage with the patrician class. The administration was evidently

primarily a patrician affair.

The early phase of Roman affairs was therefore an aristocracy of a very

pronounced type, and the internal history of Rome for the two centuries

and a half between the expulsion of the last Etruscan king, Tarquin the

Proud, and the beginning of the first Punic War (264 B.C.), was very

largely a struggle for mastery between those two orders, the patricians

and the plebeians. It was, in fact, closely parallel with the struggle

of aristocracy and democracy in the city states of Greece, and, as in

the case of Greece, there were whole classes in the community, slaves,

freed slaves, unpropertied free men, outlanders, and the like, who were

entirely outside and beneath the struggle. We have already noted the

essential difference of Greek democracy and what is called democracy in

the world to-day. Another misused word is the Roman term _proletariat_,

which in modern jargon means all the unpropertied people in a modern

state. In Rome the _proletarii_ were a voting division of fully

qualified citizens whose property was less than 10,000 copper asses (=

£275). They were an enrolled class; their value to the state consisted

in their raising families of citizens (proles = offspring), and from

their ranks were drawn the colonists who went to form new Latin cities

or to garrison important points. But the proletarii were quite distinct

in origin from slaves or freedmen or the miscellaneous driftage of a

town slum, and it is a great pity that modern political discussion

should be confused by an inaccurate use of a term which has no exact

modern equivalent and which expresses nothing real in modern social

classification.

The mass of the details of this struggle between patricians and

plebeians we can afford to ignore in this outline. It was a struggle

which showed the Romans to be a people of a curiously shrewd character,

never forcing things to a destructive crisis, but being within the

limits of their discretion grasping hard dealers. The patricians made a

mean use of their political advantages to grow rich through the national

conquests at the expense not only of the defeated enemy, but of the

poorer plebeian, whose farm had been neglected and who had fallen into

debt during his military service. The plebeians were ousted from any

share in the conquered lands, which the patricians divided up among

themselves. The introduction of money[230] probably increased the

facilities of the usurer and the difficulties of the borrowing debtor.

Three sorts of pressure won the plebeians a greater share in the

government of the country and the good things that were coming to Rome

as she grew powerful. The first of these (1) was the general strike of

plebeians; the plebeians seem to have invented the strike, which now

makes its first appearance in history. Twice they actually marched right

out of Rome, threatening to make a new city higher up the Tiber, and

twice this threat proved conclusive. The second method of pressure (2)

was the threat of a tyranny. Just as in Attica (the little state of

which Athens was the capital), Peisistratus raised himself to power on

the support of the poorer districts, so there was to be found in most

periods of plebeian discontent some ambitious man ready to figure as a

leader and wrest power from the senate. For a long time the Roman

patricians were clever enough to beat every such potential tyrant by

giving in to a certain extent to the plebeians. And finally (3) there

were patricians big-minded and far-seeing enough to insist upon the need

of reconciliation with the plebeians.

[Illustration: Mercury

The plebeian god of commerce.

J.F.M.

[From a Roman bronze.]]

Thus in 509 B.C., Valerius Poplicola (3), the consul, enacted that

whenever the life or rights of any citizen were at stake, there should

be an appeal from the magistrates to the general assembly. This Lex

Valeria was “the Habeas Corpus of Rome,” and it freed the Roman

plebeians from the worst dangers of class vindictiveness in the law

courts.

In 494 B.C. occurred the first strike (1). “After the Latin war the

pressure of debt had become excessive, and the plebeians saw with

indignation their friends, who had often served the state bravely in the

legions, thrown into chains and reduced to slavery at the demand of

patrician creditors. War was raging against the Volscians; but the

legionaries, on their victorious return, refused any longer to obey the

consuls, and marched, though without any disorder, to the Sacred Mount

beyond the Anio (up the Tiber). There they prepared to found a new city,

since the rights of citizens were denied to them in the old one. The

patricians were compelled to give way, and the plebeians, returning to

Rome from the “First Secession,” received the privilege of having

officers of their own, tribunes and ædiles.”[231]

In 486 B.C. arose Spurius Cassius (2), a consul who carried an Agrarian

Law securing public land for the plebeians. But the next year he was

accused of aiming at royal power, and condemned to death. His law never

came into operation.

There followed a long struggle on the part of the plebeians to have the

laws of Rome written down, so that they would no longer have to trust to

patrician memories. In 451-450 B.C. the law of the Twelve Tables was

published, the basis of all Roman law.

But in order that the Twelve Tables should be formulated, a committee of

ten (the _decemvirate_) was appointed in the place of the ordinary

magistrates. A second decemvirate, appointed in succession to the first,

attempted a sort of aristocratic counter-revolution under Appius

Claudius. The plebeians withdrew again a second time to the Sacred

Mount, and Appius Claudius committed suicide in prison.

In 440 came a famine, and a second attempt to found a popular tyranny

upon the popular wrongs, by Spurius Mælius, a wealthy plebeian, which

ended in his assassination.

After the sack of Rome by the Gauls (390 B.C.), Marcus Manlius, who had

been in command of the Capitol when the geese had saved it, came forward

as a popular leader. The plebeians were suffering severely from the

after-war usury and profiteering of the patricians, and were incurring

heavy debts in rebuilding and restocking their farms. Manlius spent his

fortune in releasing debtors. He was accused by the patricians of

tyrannous intentions, condemned, and suffered the fate of condemned

traitors in Rome, being flung from the Tarpeian Rock, the precipitous

edge of that same Capitoline Hill he had defended.

In 376 B.C., Licinius, who was one of the ten tribunes for the people,

began a long struggle with the patricians by making certain proposals

called the Licinian Rogations, that there should be a limit to the

amount of public land taken by any single citizen, so leaving some for

everybody, that outstanding debts should be forgiven without interest

upon the repayment of the principal, and that henceforth one at least of

the two consuls should be a plebeian. This precipitated a ten-year

struggle. The plebeian power to stop business by the veto of their

representatives, the tribunes, was fully exercised. In cases of national

extremity it was the custom to set all other magistrates aside and

appoint one leader, the Dictator. Rome had done such a thing during

times of military necessity before, but now the patricians set up a

Dictator in a time of profound peace, with the idea of crushing Licinius

altogether. They appointed Camillus, who had besieged and taken Veii

from the Etruscans. But Camillus was a wiser man than his supporters; he

brought about a compromise between the two orders in which most of the

demands of the plebeians were conceded (366 B.C.), dedicated a temple to

Concord, and resigned his power.

Thereafter the struggle between the orders abated. It abated because,

among other influences, the social differences between patricians and

plebeians were diminishing. Trade was coming to Rome with increasing

political power, and many plebeians were growing rich and many

patricians becoming relatively poor. Inter-marriage had been rendered

possible by a change in the law, and social intermixture was going on.

While the rich plebeians were becoming, if not aristocratic, at least

oligarchic in habits and sympathy, new classes were springing up in Rome

with fresh interests and no political standing. Particularly abundant

were the freedmen, slaves set free, for the most part artisans, but some

of them traders, who were growing wealthy. And the Senate, no longer a

purely patrician body--since various official positions were now open to

plebeians, and such plebeian officials became senators--was becoming now

an assembly of all the wealthy, able, energetic, and influential men in

the state. The Roman power was expanding, and as it expanded these old

class oppositions of the early Latin community were becoming unmeaning.

They were being replaced by new associations and new antagonisms. Rich

men of all origins were being drawn together into a common interest

against the communistic ideas of the poor.

In 390 B.C. Rome was a miserable little city on the borders of Etruria,

being sacked by the Gauls; in 275 B.C. she was ruling and unifying all

Italy, from the Arno to the Straits of Messina. The compromise of

Camillus (367 B.C.) had put an end to internal dissensions, and left her

energies free for expansion. And the same queer combination of sagacity

and aggressive selfishness that had distinguished the war of her orders

at home and enabled her population to worry out a balance of power

without any catastrophe, marks her policy abroad. She understood the

value of allies; she could assimilate; abroad as at home she could in

those days at least “give and take” with a certain fairness and sanity.

There lay the peculiar power of Rome. By that it was she succeeded where

Athens, for example, had conspicuously failed.

The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of

“patriotism” which is the ruin of all nations. “Athens for the

Athenians” was the guiding principle of her rule, and “tax the

foreigner” her substitute for political wisdom.[232] Even Pericles used

the funds of the allies to beautify the capital city. So Athens was

disliked and envied by her own empire; her disasters were not felt and

shared as disasters by her subject-cities. The shrewder, nobler Roman

senators of the great years of Rome, before the first Punic War

overstrained her moral strength and began her degeneration, were not

only willing in the last resort to share their privileges with the mass

of their own people, but eager to incorporate their sturdiest

antagonists upon terms of equality with themselves. They extended their

citizenship cautiously but steadily. Some cities became Roman, with even

a voting share in the government. Others had self-government and the

right to trade or marry in Rome, without full Roman citizenship.

Garrisons of full citizens were set up at strategic points, and colonies

with variable privileges established amidst the purely conquered

peoples. The need to keep communications open in this great and growing

mass of citizenship was evident from the first. Printing and paper were

not yet available for intercourse, but a system of high roads followed

the Latin speech and the Roman rule. The first of these, the Appian Way,

ran from Rome ultimately into the heel of Italy. It was begun by the

censor Appius Claudius (who must not be confused with the decemvir

Appius Claudius of a century earlier) in 312 B.C.

According to a census made in 265 B.C., there were already in the Roman

dominions, that is to say in Italy south of the Arno, 300,000 citizens.

They all had a common interest in the welfare of the state; they were

all touched a little with the diffused kingship of the republic. This

was, we have to note, an absolutely new thing in the history of mankind.

All considerable states and kingdoms and empires hitherto had been

communities by mere obedience to some head, some monarch, upon whose

moods and character the public welfare was helplessly dependent. No

republic had hitherto succeeded in being anything more than a city

state. The so-called Athenian “empire” was simply a city state directing

its allies and its subjugated cities. In a few decades the Roman

republic was destined to extend its citizenship into the valley of the

Po, to assimilate the kindred Gauls, replacing their language by Latin,

and to set up a Latin city, Aquileia, at the very head of the Adriatic

Sea. In 89 B.C. all free inhabitants of Italy became Roman citizens; in

212 A.D. the citizenship was extended to all free men in the

empire.[233]

This extraordinary political growth was manifestly the precursor of all

modern states of the western type. It is as interesting to the political

student, therefore, as a carboniferous amphibian or an _archæopteryx_ to

the student of zoological development. It is the primitive type of the

now dominant order. Its experiences throw light upon all subsequent

political history.

One natural result of this growth of a democracy of hundreds of

thousands of citizens scattered over the greater part of Italy was the

growth in power of the Senate. There had been in the development of the

Roman constitution a variety of forms of the popular assembly, the

plebeian assembly, the assembly by tribes, the assembly by centuries,

and the like, into which variety we cannot enter here with any fullness;

but the idea was established that with the popular assembly lay the

power of initiating laws. It is to be noted that there was a sort of

parallel government in this system. The assembly by tribes or by

centuries was an assembly of the _whole citizen body_, patrician and

plebeian together; the assembly of the plebeians was of course an

assembly only of the plebeian class. Each assembly had its own

officials; the former, the consuls, etc.; the latter, the tribunes.

While Rome was a little state, twenty miles square, it was possible to

assemble something like a representative gathering of the people, but it

will be manifest that with the means of communication existing in Italy

at that time, it was now impossible for the great bulk of the citizens

even to keep themselves informed of what was going on at Rome, much less

to take any effective part in political life there. Aristotle in his

_Politics_ had already pointed out the virtual disenfranchisement of

voters who lived out of the city and were preoccupied with agricultural

pursuits, and this sort of disenfranchisement by mechanical difficulties

applied to the vast majority of Roman citizens. With the growth of Rome

an unanticipated weakness crept into political life through these

causes, and the popular assembly became more and more a gathering of

political hacks and the city riffraff, and less and less a

representation of the ordinary worthy citizens. The popular assembly

came nearest to power and dignity in the fourth century B.C. From that

period it steadily declined in influence, and the new Senate, which was

no longer a patrician body, with a homogeneous and on the whole a noble

tradition, but a body of rich men, ex-magistrates, powerful officials,

bold adventurers, and the like, pervaded by a strong disposition to

return to the idea of hereditary qualification, became for three

centuries the ruling power in the Roman world.

There are two devices since known to the world which might have enabled

the popular government of Rome to go on developing beyond its climax in

the days of Appius Claudius the Censor, at the close of the fourth

century B.C., but neither of them occurred to the Roman mind. The first

of these devices was a proper use of print. In our account of early

Alexandria we have already remarked upon the strange fact that printed

books did not come into the world in the fourth or third century B.C.

This account of Roman affairs forces us to repeat that remark. To the

modern mind it is clear that a widespread popular government demands, as

a necessary condition for health, a steady supply of correct information

upon public affairs to all the citizens and a maintenance of interest.

The popular governments in the modern states that have sprung up on

either side of the Atlantic during the last two centuries have been

possible only through the more or less honest and thorough ventilation

of public affairs through the press. But in Italy the only way in which

the government at Rome could communicate with any body of its citizens

elsewhere was by the antiquated device of sending a herald, and with the

individual citizen it could hold no communication by any means at all.

The second device, for which the English are chiefly responsible in the

history of mankind, which the Romans never used, was the almost equally

obvious one of representative government. For the old Popular Assembly

(in its threefold form) it would have been possible to have substituted

a gathering of delegates. Later on in history, the English did, as the

state grew, realize this necessity. Certain men, the Knights of the

Shire, were called up to Westminster to speak and vote for local

feeling, and were more or less formally elected for that end. The Roman

situation seems to a modern mind to have called aloud for such a

modification. It was never made.[234]

The method of assembling the _comitia tributa_[235] (one of the three

main forms of the Popular Assembly) was by the proclamation of a herald,

who was necessarily inaudible to most of Italy, seventeen days before

the date of the gathering. The augurs, the priests of divination whom

Rome had inherited from the Etruscans, examined the entrails of

sacrificial beasts on the night before the actual assembly, and if they

thought fit to say that these gory portents were unfavourable, the

_comitia tributa_ dispersed. But if the augurs reported that the livers

were propitious, there was a great blowing of horns from the Capitol and

from the walls of the city, and the assembly went on. It was held in the

open air, either in the little Forum beneath the Capitol or in a still

smaller recess opening out of the Forum, or in the military exercising

ground, the Campus Martius, now the most crowded part of modern Rome,

but then an open space. Business began at dawn with prayer. There were

no seats, and this probably helped to reconcile the citizen to the rule

that everything ended at sunset.

After the opening prayer came a discussion of the measures to be

considered by the assembly, and the proposals before the meeting were

read out. Is it not astonishing that there were no printed copies

distributed? If any copies were handed about, they must have been in

manuscript, and each copy must have been liable to errors and deliberate

falsification. No questions seem to have been allowed, but private

individuals might address the gathering with the permission of the

presiding magistrate.

The multitude then proceeded to go into enclosures like cattle-pens

according to their tribes, and each tribe voted upon the measure under

consideration. The decision was then taken not by the majority of the

citizens, but by the majority of tribes, and it was announced by the

heralds.

The Popular Assembly by centuries, _comitia centuriata_, was very

similar in its character, except that instead of thirty-five tribes

there were, in the third century B.C., 373 centuries, and there was a

sacrifice as well as prayer to begin with. The centuries, originally

military (like the “hundreds” of primitive English local government),

had long since lost any connection with the number one hundred. Some

contained only a few people; some very many. There were eighteen

centuries of knights (equites), who were originally men in a position to

maintain a horse and serve in the cavalry, though later the Roman

knighthood, like knighthood in England, became a vulgar distinction of

no military, mental, or moral significance. (These equites became a very

important class as Rome traded and grew rich; for a time they were the

real moving class in the community. There was as little chivalry left

among them at last as there is in the “honours list” knights of England

of to-day. The senators from about 200 B.C. were excluded from trade.

The equites became, therefore, the great business men, _negotiatores_,

and as _publicani_ they farmed the taxes.) There were, in addition,

eighty (!) centuries of wealthy men (worth over 100,000 asses),

twenty-two of men worth over 75,000 asses, and so on. There were two

centuries each of mechanics and musicians, and the _proletarii_ made up

one century. The decision in the _comitia centuriata_ was by the

majority of centuries.

Is it any wonder that with the growth of the Roman state and the

complication of its business, power shifted back from such a Popular

Assembly to the Senate, which was a comparatively compact body varying

between three hundred as a minimum, and, at the utmost, nine hundred

members (to which it was raised by Cæsar), men who had to do with

affairs and big business, who knew each other more or less, and had a

tradition of government and policy? The power of nominating and calling

up the senators vested in the Republic first with the consuls, and when,

some time after, “censors” were created, and many of the powers of the

consuls had been transferred to them, they were also given this power.

Appius Claudius, one of the first of the censors to exercise it,

enrolled freedmen in the tribes and called sons of freedmen to the

Senate. But this was a shocking arrangement to the conservative

instincts of the time; the consuls would not recognize his Senate, and

the next censors (304 B.C.) set aside his invitations. His attempt,

however, serves to show how far the Senate had progressed from its

original condition as a purely patrician body. Like the contemporary

British House of Lords, it had become a gathering of big business men,

energetic politicians, successful adventurers, great landowners, and the

like; its patrician dignity was a picturesque sham; but, unlike the

British House of Lords, it was unchecked legally by anything but the

inefficient Popular Assembly we have already described, and by the

tribunes elected by the plebeian assembly. Its legal control over the

consuls and proconsuls was not great; it had little executive power; but

in its prestige and experience lay its strength and influence. The

interests of its members were naturally antagonistic to the interests of

the general body of citizens, but for some generations that great mass

of ordinary men was impotent to express its dissent from the proceedings

of this oligarchy. Direct popular government of a state larger than a

city state had already failed therefore in Italy, because as yet there

was no public education, no press, and no representative system; it had

failed through these mere mechanical difficulties, before the first

Punic War. But its appearance is of enormous interest, as the first

appearance of a set of problems with which the whole political

intelligence of the world wrestles at the present time.

The Senate met usually in a Senate House in the Forum, but on special

occasions it would be called to meet in this or that temple; and when it

had to deal with foreign ambassadors or its own generals (who were not

allowed to enter the city while in command of the troops), it assembled

in the Campus Martius outside the walls.

§ 3

It has been necessary to deal rather fully with the political structure

of the Roman republic because of its immense importance to this day.

The constitution of Carthage[236] need not detain us long.

Italy under Rome was a republican country; Carthage was that much older

thing, a republican city. She had an “empire,” as Athens had an

“empire,” of tributary states which did not love her, and she had a

great and naturally disloyal industrial slave population.

In the city there were two elected “kings,” as Aristotle calls them, the

_suffetes_, who were really equivalent to the Roman censors; their

Semitic name was the same as that used for the Jewish _judges_. There

was an impotent public assembly and a senate of leading personages; but

two committees of this senate, nominally elected, but elected by easily

controlled methods, the Hundred and Four and the Thirty, really

constituted a close oligarchy of the richest and most influential men.

They told as little as they could to their allies and fellow citizens,

and consulted them as little as possible. They pursued schemes in which

the welfare of Carthage was no doubt subordinated to the advantage of

their own group. They were hostile to new men or novel measures, and

confident that a sea ascendancy that had lasted two centuries must be in

the very nature of things.

§ 4

It would be interesting, and not altogether idle, to speculate what

might have happened to mankind if Rome and Carthage could have settled

their differences and made a permanent alliance in the Western world. If

Alexander the Great had lived, he might have come westward and driven

these two powers into such a fusion of interests. But that would not

have suited the private schemes and splendours of the Carthaginian

oligarchy, and the new Senate of greater Rome was now growing fond of

the taste of plunder and casting covetous eyes across the Straits of

Messina upon the Carthaginian possessions in Sicily. They were covetous,

but they were afraid of the Carthaginian sea-power. Roman popular

“patriotism,” however, was also jealous and fearful of these

Carthaginians, and less inclined to count the cost of a conflict. The

alliance Pyrrhus had forced upon Rome and Carthage held good for eleven

years, but Rome was ripe for what is called in modern political jargon

an “offensive defensive” war. The occasion arose in 264 B.C.

At that time Sicily was not completely in Carthaginian hands. The

eastward end was still under the power of the Greek king of Syracuse,

Hiero, a successor of that Dionysius to whom Plato had gone as resident

court philosopher. A band of mercenaries who had been in the service of

Syracuse seized upon Messina (289 B.C.), and raided the trade of

Syracuse so that at last Hiero was forced to take measures to suppress

them (270 B.C.). Thereupon Carthage, which was also vitally concerned in

the suppression of piracy, came to his aid, and put in a Carthaginian

garrison at Messina. This was an altogether justifiable proceeding. Now

that Tyre had been destroyed, the only capable guardian of sea law in

the Mediterranean was Carthage, and the suppression of piracy was her

task by habit and tradition.

[Illustration: Carthaginian coins.]

The pirates of Messina appealed to Rome, and the accumulating jealousy

and fear of Carthage decided the Roman people to help them. An

expedition was dispatched to Messina under the consul Appius Claudius

(the third Appius Claudius we have had to mention in this history).

So began the first of the most wasteful and disastrous series of wars

that has ever darkened the history of mankind. But this is how one

historian, soaked with the fantastic political ideas of our times, is

pleased to write of this evil expedition. “The Romans knew they were

entering on war with Carthage; but the political instincts of the people

were right, for a Carthaginian garrison on the Sicilian Straits would

have been a dangerous menace to the peace of Italy.” So they protected

the peace of Italy from this “menace” by a war that lasted nearly a

quarter of a century. They wrecked their own slowly acquired political

_moral_ in the process.

The Romans captured Messina, and Hiero deserted from the Carthaginians

to the Romans. Then for some time the struggle centred upon the town

Agrigentum. This the Romans besieged, and a period of trench warfare

ensued. Both sides suffered greatly from plague and irregular supplies;

the Romans lost 30,000 men; but in the end (261 B.C.) the Carthaginians

evacuated the place and retired to their fortified towns on the western

coast of the island of which Lilybæum was the chief. These they could

supply easily from the African mainland, and, as long as their sea

ascendancy held, they could exhaust any Roman effort against them.

And now a new and very extraordinary phase of the war began. The Romans

came out upon the sea, and to the astonishment of the Carthaginians and

themselves defeated the Carthaginian fleet. Since the days of Salamis

there had been a considerable development of naval architecture. Then

the ruling type of battleship was a trireme, a galley with three banks

(rows) of oars; now the leading Carthaginian battleship was a

quinquereme, a much bigger galley with five banks of oars, which could

ram or shear the oars of any feebler vessel. The Romans had come into

the war with no such shipping. Now they set to work to build

quinqueremes, being helped, it is said, in their designing by one of

these Carthaginian vessels coming ashore. In two months they built a

hundred quinqueremes and thirty triremes. But they had no skilled

navigators, no experienced oarsmen, and these deficiencies they remedied

partly with the assistance of their Greek allies and partly by the

invention of new tactics. Instead of relying upon ramming or breaking

the oars of the adversary, which demanded more seamanship than they

possessed, they decided to board the enemy, and they constructed a sort

of long drawbridge on their ships, held up to a mast by a pulley and

with grappling-hooks and spikes at the end. They also loaded their

galleys with soldiers. Then as the Carthaginian rammed or swept

alongside, this _corvus_, as it was called, could be let down and the

boarders could swarm aboard him.

Simple as this device was, it proved a complete success. It changed the

course of the war and the fate of the world. The small amount of

invention needed to counteract the _corvus_ was not apparently within

the compass of the Carthaginian rulers. At the battle of Mylæ (260 B.C.)

the Romans gained their first naval victory and captured or destroyed

fifty vessels. At the great battle of Ecnomus (256 B.C.), “probably the

greatest naval engagement of antiquity,”[237] in which seven or eight

hundred big ships were engaged, the Carthaginians showed that they had

learnt nothing from their former disaster. According to rule they

out-manœuvred and defeated the Romans, but the _corvus_ again

defeated them. The Romans sank thirty vessels and captured sixty-four.

Thereafter the war continued with violent fluctuations of fortune, but

with a continuous demonstration of the greater energy, solidarity, and

initiative of the Romans. After Ecnomus the Romans invaded Africa by

sea, and sent an insufficiently supported army, which after many

successes and the capture of Tunis (within ten miles of Carthage) was

completely defeated. They lost their sea ascendancy through a storm, and

regained it by building a second fleet of two hundred and twenty ships

within three months. They captured Palermo, and defeated a great

Carthaginian army there (251 B.C.), capturing one hundred and four

elephants, and making such a triumphal procession into Rome as that city

had never seen before. They made an unsuccessful siege of Lilybæum, the

chief surviving Carthaginian stronghold in Sicily. They lost their

second fleet in a great naval battle at Drepanum (249 B.C.), losing one

hundred and eighty out of two hundred and ten vessels; and a third fleet

of one hundred and twenty battleships and eight hundred transports was

lost in the same year partly in battle and partly in a storm.

For seven years a sort of war went on between the nearly exhausted

combatants, a war of raids and feeble sieges, during which the

Carthaginians had the best of it at sea. Then by a last supreme effort

Rome launched a fourth fleet of two hundred keels, and defeated the

last strength of the Carthaginians at the battle of the Ægatian Isles

(241 B.C.), after which Carthage (240 B.C.) sued for peace.

By the terms of this peace, all Sicily, except for the dominions of

Hiero of Syracuse, became an “estate” of the Roman people. There was no

such process of assimilation as had been practised in Italy; Sicily

became a conquered province, paying tribute and yielding profit like the

provinces of the older empires. And, in addition, Carthage paid a war

indemnity of 3200 talents (£788,000).

§ 5

[Illustration: Roman As (bronze, 4th Cent. B.C. Half size.)]

For twenty-two years there was peace between Rome and Carthage. It was

peace without prosperity. Both combatants were suffering from the want

and disorganization that follow naturally and necessarily upon all great

wars. The territories of Carthage seethed with violent disorder; the

returning soldiers could not get their pay, and mutinied and looted; the

land went uncultivated. We read of horrible cruelties in the suppression

of these troubles by Hamilcar, the Carthaginian general; of men being

crucified by the thousand. Sardinia and Corsica revolted. The “peace of

Italy” was scarcely happier. The Gauls rose and marched south; they were

defeated, and 40,000 of them killed at Telamon. It is manifest that

Italy was incomplete until it reached the Alps. Roman colonies were

planted in the valley of the Po, and the great northward artery, the Via

Flaminia, was begun. But it shows the moral and intellectual degradation

of this post-war period that when the Gauls were threatening Rome, human

sacrifices were proposed and carried out. The old Carthaginian sea law

was broken up--it may have been selfish and monopolistic, but it was at

least orderly--the Adriatic swarmed with Illyrian pirates, and as the

result of a quarrel arising out of this state of affairs, Illyria, after

two wars, had to be annexed as a second “province.” By sending

expeditions to annex Sardinia and Corsica, which were Carthaginian

provinces in revolt, the Romans prepared the way for the Second Punic

War.

The First Punic War had tested and demonstrated the relative strength of

Rome and Carthage. With a little more wisdom on either side, with a

little more magnanimity on the part of Rome, there need never have been

a renewal of the struggle. But Rome was an ungracious conqueror. She

seized Corsica and Sardinia on no just grounds, she increased the

indemnity by 1200 talents, she set a limit, the Ebro, to Carthaginian

developments in Spain. There was a strong party in Carthage, led by

Hanno, for the propitiation of Rome; but it was natural that many

Carthaginians should come to regard their national adversary with a

despairing hatred.

So began that age-long hostility between the lands north and south of

the Mediterranean which lasts down to our own day, the conflict of the

Semiticized Berber and the Aryanized south European, in spite of the

fact that these two divisions of Mediterranean man have so much

physically in common. Henceforth they took different sides in religion,

in language, in costume, and culture.

Hatred is one of the passions that can master a life, and there is a

type of temperament very prone to it, ready to see life in terms of

vindictive melodrama, ready to find stimulus and satisfaction in

frightful demonstrations of “justice” and revenge. The fears and

jealousies of the squatting-place and the cave still bear their dark

blossoms in our lives; we are not four hundred generations yet from the

old Stone Age. Great wars, as all Europe knows, give this “hating”

temperament the utmost scope, and the greed and pride and cruelty that

the First Punic War had released were now producing a rich crop of

anti-foreign monomania. The outstanding figure upon the side of Carthage

was a great general and administrator, Hamilcar Barca, who now set

himself to circumvent and shatter Rome. He was the father-in-law of

Hasdrubal and the father of a boy Hannibal, destined to be the most

dreaded enemy that ever scared the Roman Senate. The most obvious

course before Carthage was the reconstruction of its fleet and naval

administration, and the recovery of sea power, but this, it would seem,

Hamilcar could not effect. As an alternative he resolved to organize

Spain as the base of a land attack upon Italy. He went to Spain as

governor in 236 B.C., and Hannibal related afterwards that his father

then--he was a boy of eleven--made him vow deathless hostility to the

Roman power.

This quasi-insane concentration of the gifts and lives of the Barca

family upon revenge is but one instance of the narrowing and

embitterment of life that the stresses and universal sense of insecurity

of this great struggle produced in the minds of men. A quarter of a

century of war had left the whole western world miserable and harsh.

While the eleven-year-old Hannibal was taking his vow of undying hatred,

there was running about a farmhouse of Tusculum a small but probably

very disagreeable child of two named Marcus Porcius Cato. This boy lived

to be eighty-five years old, and his ruling passion seems to have been

hatred for any human happiness but his own. He was a good soldier, and

had a successful political career. He held a command in Spain, and

distinguished himself by his cruelties. He posed as a champion of

religion and public morality, and under this convenient cloak carried on

a lifelong war against everything that was young, gracious, or pleasant.

Whoever roused his jealousy incurred his moral disapproval. He was

energetic in the support and administration of all laws against dress,

against the personal adornment of women, against entertainments and free

discussion. He was so fortunate as to be made censor, which gave him

great power over the private lives of public people. He was thus able to

ruin public opponents through private scandals. He expelled Manlius from

the Senate for giving his wife a kiss in the daytime in the sight of

their daughter. He persecuted Greek literature, about which, until late

in life, he was totally ignorant. Then he read and admired Demosthenes.

He wrote in Latin upon agriculture and the ancient and lost virtues of

Rome. From these writings much light is thrown upon his qualities. One

of his maxims was that when a slave was not sleeping he should be

working. Another was that old oxen and slaves should be sold off. He

left the war horse that had carried him through his Spanish campaigns

behind him when he returned to Italy in order to save freight. He hated

other people’s gardens, and cut off the supply of water for garden use

in Rome. After entertaining company, when dinner was over he would go

out to correct any negligence in the service with a leather thong. He

admired his own virtues very greatly, and insisted upon them in his

writings. There was a battle at Thermopylæ against Antiochus the Great,

of which he wrote, “those who saw him charging the enemy, routing and

pursuing them, declared that Cato owed less to the people of Rome, than

the people of Rome owed to Cato.”[238] In his old age Cato became

lascivious and misconducted himself with a woman slave. Finally, when

his son protested against this disorder of their joint household, he

married a young wife, the daughter of his secretary, who was not in a

position to refuse his offer. (What became of the woman slave is not

told. Probably he sold her.) This compendium of all the old Roman

virtues died at an advanced age, respected and feared. Almost his last

public act was to urge on the Third Punic War and the final destruction

of Carthage. He had gone to Carthage as a commissioner to settle certain

differences between Carthage and Numidia, and he had been shocked and

horrified to find some evidences of prosperity and even of happiness in

that country.

From the time of that visit onward Cato concluded every speech he made

in the Senate by croaking out “_Delenda est Carthago_” (“Carthage must

be destroyed”).

Such was the type of man that rose to prominence in Rome during the

Punic struggle, such was the protagonist of Hannibal and the

Carthaginian _revanche_, and by him and by Hannibal we may judge the

tone and quality of the age.

The two great western powers, and Rome perhaps more than Carthage, were

strained mentally and morally by the stresses of the First War. The evil

side of life was uppermost. The history of the Second and Third Punic

Wars (219 to 201 and 149 to 146 B.C.), it is plain, is not the history

of perfectly sane peoples. It is nonsense for historians to write of the

“political instincts” of the Romans or Carthaginians. Quite other

instincts were loose. The red eyes of the ancestral ape had come back

into the world. It was a time when reasonable men were howled down or

murdered; the true spirit of the age is shown in the eager examination

for signs and portents of the still quivering livers of those human

victims who were sacrificed in Rome during the panic before the battle

of Telamon. The western world was indeed black with homicidal monomania.

Two great peoples, both very necessary to the world’s development, fell

foul of one another, and at last Rome succeeded in murdering Carthage.

§ 6

We can only tell very briefly here of the particulars of the Second and

Third Punic Wars. We have told how Hamilcar began to organize Spain, and

how the Romans forbade him to cross the Ebro. He died in 228 B.C., and

was followed by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who was assassinated in 221

B.C., and succeeded by Hannibal, who was now twenty-six. The actual war

was precipitated by the Romans making a breach of their own regulations,

and interfering with affairs south of the Ebro. Whereupon Hannibal

marched straight through the south of Gaul, and crossed the Alps (218

B.C.) into Italy.

The history of the next fifteen years is the story of the most brilliant

and futile raid in history. For fifteen years Hannibal held out in

Italy, victorious and unconquered. The Roman generals were no match for

the Carthaginian, and whenever they met him they were beaten. But one

Roman general, P. Cornelius Scipio, had the strategic sense to take a

course that robbed all Hannibal’s victories of fruit. At the outbreak of

the war he had been sent by sea to Marseilles to intercept Hannibal; he

arrived three days late, and, instead of pursuing him, he sent on his

army into Spain to cut up Hannibal’s supplies and reinforcements.

Throughout all the subsequent war there remained this Roman army of

Spain between Hannibal and his base. He was left “in the air,” incapable

of conducting sieges or establishing conquests.

Whenever he met the Romans in open fight he beat them. He gained two

great victories in North Italy, and won over the Gauls to his side. He

pressed south into Etruria, and ambushed, surrounded, and completely

destroyed a Roman army at Lake Trasimene. In 216 B.C. he was assailed by

a vastly superior Roman force under Varro at Cannæ, and destroyed it

utterly. Fifty thousand men are said to have been killed and ten

thousand prisoners taken. He was, however, unable to push on and capture

Rome because he had no siege equipment.

But Cannæ produced other fruits. A large part of Southern Italy came

over to Hannibal, including Capua, the city next in size to Rome, and

the Macedonians allied themselves with him. Moreover, Hiero of Syracuse,

the faithful ally of Rome, was now dead, and his successor Hieronymus

turned over to the Carthaginians. The Romans carried on the war,

however, with great toughness and resolution; they refused to treat with

Hannibal after Cannæ, they pressed a slow but finally successful

blockade and a siege of Capua, and a Roman army set itself to reduce

Syracuse. The siege of Syracuse is chiefly memorable for the brilliant

inventions of the philosopher Archimedes, which long held the Romans at

bay. We have already named this Archimedes as one of the pupils and

correspondents of the school of the Alexandrian Museum. He was killed in

the final storm of the town. Tarentum (209 B.C.), Hannibal’s chief port

and means of supply from Carthage, at last followed Syracuse (212 B.C.)

and Capua (211 B.C.), and his communications became irregular.

Spain also was wrested bit by bit from the Carthaginian grip. When at

last reinforcements for Hannibal under his brother Hasdrubal (not to be

confused with his brother-in-law of the same name who was assassinated)

struggled through into Italy, they were destroyed at the battle of the

Metaurus (207 B.C.), and the first news that came to Hannibal of the

disaster was the hacked-off head of his brother thrown into his camp.

Thereafter Hannibal was blockaded into Calabria, the heel of Italy. He

had no forces for further operations of any magnitude, and he returned

at last to Carthage in time to command the Carthaginians in the last

battle of the war.

This last battle, the battle of Zama (202 B.C.), was fought close to

Carthage.

It was the first defeat Hannibal experienced, and so it is well to give

a little attention to the personality of his conqueror, Scipio Africanus

the Elder, who stands out in history as a very fine gentleman indeed, a

great soldier and a generous man. We have already mentioned a certain P.

Cornelius Scipio who struck at Hannibal’s base in Spain; this was his

son; until after Zama this son bore the same name of P. Cornelius

Scipio, and then the surname of Africanus was given him. (The younger

Scipio Africanus, Scipio Africanus Minor, who was later to end the Third

Punic War, was the adopted son of this first Scipio Africanus the

Elder.) Scipio Africanus was everything that aroused the distrust,

hatred, and opposition of old-fashioned Romans of the school of Cato. He

was young, he was happy and able, he spent money freely, he was well

versed in Greek literature, and inclined rather to Phrygian novelties in

religion than to the sterner divinities of Rome. And he did not believe

in the extreme discretion that then ruled Roman strategy.

After the early defeats of the Second Punic War, Roman military

operations were dominated by the personality of a general, Fabius, who

raised the necessity of avoiding battle with Hannibal into a kind of

sacred principle. For ten years “Fabian tactics” prevailed in Italy. The

Romans blockaded, cut up convoys, attacked stragglers, and ran away

whenever Hannibal appeared. No doubt it was wise for a time after their

first defeats to do this sort of thing, but the business of the stronger

power, and Rome was the stronger power throughout the Second Punic War,

is not to tolerate an interminable war, but to repair losses, discover

able generals, train better armies, and destroy the enemy power.

Decision is one of the duties of strength.

To such men as young Scipio, the sly, ineffective artfulness of

Fabianism, which was causing both Italy and Carthage to bleed slowly to

death, was detestable. He clamoured for an attack upon Carthage itself.

“But Fabius, on this occasion, filled the city with alarms, as if the

commonwealth was going to be brought into the most extreme danger by a

rash and indiscreet young man; in short, he scrupled not to do or say

anything he thought likely to dissuade his countrymen from embracing the

proposal. With the Senate he carried his point. But the people believed

that his opposition to Scipio proceeded either from envy of his success,

or from a secret fear that if this young hero should perform some signal

exploit, put an end to the war, or even remove it out of Italy, his own

slow proceedings through the course of so many years might be imputed to

indolence or timidity.... He applied to Crassus, the colleague of

Scipio, and endeavoured to persuade him not to yield that province to

Scipio, but, if he thought it proper to conduct the war in that manner,

to go himself against Carthage. Nay, he even hindered the raising of

money for that expedition, so that Scipio was obliged to find the

supplies as he could.... He endeavoured to prevent the young men who

offered to go as volunteers from giving in their names, and loudly

declared, both in the Senate and Forum, ‘That Scipio did not only

himself avoid Hannibal, but intended to carry away with him the

remaining strength of Italy, persuading the young men to abandon their

parents, their wives, and native city, while an unsubdued and potent

enemy was still at their doors.’ With these assertions he so terrified

the people, that they allowed Scipio to take with him only the legions

that were in Sicily, and three hundred of those men who had served him

with so much fidelity in Spain.... After Scipio was gone over into

Africa, an account was soon brought to Rome of his glorious and

wonderful achievements. This account was followed by rich spoils, which

confirmed it. A Numidian king was taken prisoner; two camps were burned

and destroyed; and in them a vast number of men, arms, and horses; and

the Carthaginians sent orders to Hannibal to quit his fruitless hopes in

Italy, and return home to defend his own country. Whilst every tongue

was applauding these exploits of Scipio, Fabius proposed that his

successor should be appointed, without any shadow of reason for it,

except what this well-known maxim implies: viz., ‘That it is dangerous

to trust affairs of such importance to the fortune of one man, because

it is not likely that he will be always successful.’ ... Nay, even when

Hannibal embarked his army and quitted Italy, Fabius ceased not to

disturb the general joy and to damp the spirits of Rome, for he took the

liberty to affirm, ‘That the commonwealth was now come to her last and

worst trial; that she had the most reason to dread the efforts of

Hannibal when he should arrive in Africa, and attack her sons under the

walls of Carthage; that Scipio would have to do with an army yet warm

with the blood of so many Roman generals, dictators, and consuls.’ The

city was alarmed with these declamations, and though the war was removed

into Africa, the danger seemed to approach nearer Rome than ever.”

Before the battle of Zama there were a brief truce and negotiations,

which broke down through the fault of the Carthaginians. As with the

battle of Arbela, so the exact day of the battle of Zama can be fixed by

an eclipse, which in this case occurred during the fighting. The Romans

had been joined by the Numidians, the hinterland people of Carthage,

under their king Massinissa, and this gave them--for the first time in

any battle against Hannibal--a great superiority of cavalry. Hannibal’s

cavalry wings were driven off, while at the same time the sounder

discipline of Scipio’s infantry enabled them to open lanes for the

charge of the Carthaginian war elephants without being thrown into

confusion. Hannibal attempted to extend his infantry line to envelop the

Roman infantry mass, but while at Cannæ all the advantage of training

and therefore of manœuvring power had been on his side, and he had

been able to surround and massacre a crowd of infantry, he now found

against him an infantry line better than his own. His own line broke as

it extended, the Roman legion charged home, and the day was lost. The

Roman cavalry came back from the pursuit of Hannibal’s horse to turn

what was already a defeat into a disastrous rout.

Carthage submitted without any further struggle. The terms were severe,

but they left it possible for her to hope for an honourable future. She

had to abandon Spain to Rome, to give up all her war fleet except ten

vessels, to pay 10,000 talents (£2,400,000), and, what was the most

difficult condition of all, to agree not to wage war without the

permission of Rome. Finally a condition was added that Hannibal, as the

great enemy of Rome, should be surrendered. But he saved his countrymen

from this humiliation by flying to Asia.

These were exorbitant conditions, with which Rome should have been

content. But there are nations so cowardly that they dare not merely

conquer their enemies; they must _mak siccar_ and destroy them. The

generation of Romans that saw greatness and virtue in a man like Cato

the Censor, necessarily made their country a mean ally and a cowardly

victor.

§ 7

The history of Rome for the fifty-six years that elapsed between the

battle of Zama and the last act of the tragedy, the Third Punic War,

tells of a hard ungracious expansion of power abroad and of a slow

destruction, by the usury and greed of the rich, of the free

agricultural population at home.

The spirit of the nation had become harsh and base; there was no further

extension of citizenship, no more generous attempts at the assimilation

of congenial foreign populations. Spain was administered badly, and

settled slowly and with great difficulty. Complicated interventions led

to the reduction of Illyria and Macedonia to the position of

tribute-paying provinces; Rome, it was evident, was going to “tax the

foreigner” now and release her home population from taxation. After 168

B.C. the old land tax was no longer levied in Italy, and the only

revenue derived from Italy was from the state domains and through a tax

on imports from overseas. The revenues from the province of “Asia”

defrayed the expenses of the Roman state.[239] At home men of the Cato

type were acquiring farms by loans and foreclosure, often the farms of

men impoverished by war service; they were driving the free citizens off

their land, and running their farms with the pitilessly driven slave

labour that was made cheap and abundant. Such men regarded alien

populations abroad merely as unimported slaves. Sicily was handed over

to the greedy enterprise of tax-farmers. Corn could be grown there by

rich men using slaves, and imported very profitably into Rome, and so

the home land could be turned over to cattle and sheep feeding.

Consequently a drift of the uprooted Italian population to the towns,

and particularly to Rome, began.

Of the first conflicts of the spreading power of Rome with the

Seleucids, and how she formed an alliance with Egypt, we can tell little

here, nor of the tortuous fluctuations of the Greek cities under the

shadow of her advance until they fell into actual subjugation. A map

must suffice to show the extension of her empire at this time.

[Illustration: The EXTENT of the ROMAN POWER & its ALLIANCES about 150

B.C.]

The general grim baseness of the age was not without its protesting

voices. We have already told how the wasting disease of the Second Punic

War, a disease of the state which was producing avaricious rich men

exactly as diseases of the body will sometimes produce great pustules,

was ended by the vigour of Scipio Africanus. When it had seemed doubtful

whether the Senate would let him go as the Roman general, he had

threatened an appeal to the people. Thereafter he was a marked man for

the senatorial gang, who were steadily changing Italy from a land of

free cultivators to a land of slave-worked cattle ranches; they

attempted to ruin him before ever he reached Africa; they gave him

forces insufficient, as they hoped, for victory; and after the war they

barred him strictly from office. Interest and his natural malice alike

prompted Cato to attack him.

Scipio Africanus the Elder seems to have been of a generous and

impatient temperament, and indisposed to exploit the popular discontent

with current tendencies and his own very great popularity to his own

advantage. He went as subordinate to his brother Lucius Scipio, when the

latter commanded the first Roman army to pass into Asia. At Magnesia in

Lydia a great composite army under Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch,

suffered the fate (190 B.C.) of the very similar Persian armies of a

hundred and forty years before. This victory drew down upon Lucius

Scipio the hostility of the Senate, and he was accused of

misappropriating moneys received from Antiochus. This filled Africanus

with honest rage. As Lucius stood up in the Senate with his accounts in

his hands ready for the badgering of his accusers, Africanus snatched

the documents from him, tore them up, and flung the fragments down. His

brother, he said, had paid into the treasury 200,000 sestertia (=

£2,000,000). Was he now to be pestered and tripped up upon this or that

item? When, later on, Lucius was prosecuted and condemned, Africanus

rescued him by force. Being impeached, he reminded the people that the

day was the anniversary of the battle of Zama, and defied the

authorities amidst the plaudits of the crowd.

The Roman people seem to have liked and supported Scipio Africanus, and,

after an interval of two thousand years, men must like him still. He was

able to throw torn paper in the face of the Senate, and when Lucius was

attacked again, one of the tribunes of the people interposed his veto

and quashed the proceedings. But Scipio Africanus lacked that harder

alloy which makes men great democratic leaders. He was no Cæsar. He had

none of the qualities that subdue a man to the base necessities of

political life. After these events he retired in disgust from Rome to

his estates, and there he died in the year 183 B.C.

In the same year died Hannibal. He poisoned himself in despair. The

steadfast fear of the Roman Senate had hunted him from court to court.

In spite of the indignant protests of Scipio, Rome in the peace

negotiations had demanded his surrender from Carthage, and she continued

to make this demand of every power that sheltered him. When peace was

made with Antiochus III, this was one of the conditions. He was run to

earth at last in Bithynia; the king of Bithynia detained him in order to

send him to Rome, but he had long carried the poison he needed in a

ring, and by this he died.

It adds to the honour of the name of Scipio that it was another Scipio,

Scipio Nasica, who parodied Cato’s Delenda est Carthago by ending all

his speeches in the Senate with “Carthage must stand.” He had the wisdom

to see that the existence and stimulus of Carthage contributed to the

general prosperity of Rome.[240]

Yet it was the second Scipio Africanus, the adopted grandson of Scipio

Africanus the Elder, who took and destroyed Carthage.[241] The sole

offence of the Carthaginians, which brought about the third and last

Punic War, was that they continued to trade and prosper. Their trade was

not a trade that competed with that of Rome; when Carthage was

destroyed, much of her trade died with her, and North Africa entered

upon a phase of economic retrogression; but her prosperity aroused that

passion of envy which was evidently more powerful even than avarice in

the “old Roman” type. The rich Equestrian order resented any wealth in

the world but its own. Rome provoked the war by encouraging the

Numidians to encroach upon Carthage until the Carthaginians were goaded

to fight in despair. Rome then pounced upon Carthage, and declared she

had broken the treaty! She had made war without permission.

The Carthaginians sent the hostages Rome demanded, they surrendered

their arms, they prepared to surrender territory. But submission only

increased the arrogance of Rome and the pitiless greed of the rich

Equestrian order which swayed her counsels. She now demanded that

Carthage should be abandoned, and the population remove to a spot at

least ten miles from the sea. This demand they made to a population that

subsisted almost entirely by overseas trade!

This preposterous order roused the Carthaginians to despair. They

recalled their exiles and prepared for resistance. The military

efficiency of the Romans had been steadily declining through a

half-century of narrow-minded and base-spirited government, and the

first attacks upon the town in 149 B.C. almost ended in disaster. Young

Scipio, during these operations, distinguished himself in a minor

capacity. The next year was also a year of failure for the incompetents

of the Senate. That august body then passed from a bullying mood to one

of extreme panic. The Roman populace was even more seriously scared.

Young Scipio, chiefly on account of his name, although he was under the

proper age, and in other respects not qualified for the office, was made

consul, and bundled off to Africa to save his precious country.

There followed the most obstinate and dreadful of sieges. Scipio built a

mole across the harbour, and cut off all supplies by land or sea. The

Carthaginians suffered horribly from famine; but they held out until the

town was stormed. The street fighting lasted for six days, and when at

last the citadel capitulated, there were fifty thousand Carthaginians

left alive out of an estimated population of half a million. These

survivors went into slavery, the whole city was burnt, the ruins were

ploughed to express final destruction, and a curse was invoked with

great solemnities upon anyone who might attempt to rebuild it.

In the same year (146 B.C.) the Roman Senate and Equestrians also

_murdered_ another great city that seemed to limit their trade

monopolies, Corinth. They had a justification, for Corinth had been in

arms against them, but it was an inadequate justification.

§ 8

We must note here, in a brief section, a change in the military system

of Rome, after the Second Punic War, that was of enormous importance in

her later development. Up to that period the Roman armies had been

levies of free citizens. Fighting power and voting power were closely

connected; the public assembly by centuries followed the paraphernalia

of a military mobilization, and marched, headed by the Equestrian

centuries, to the Campus Martius. The system was very like that of the

Boers before the last war in South Africa. The ordinary Roman citizen,

like the ordinary Boer, was a farmer; at the summons of his country he

went “on commando.” The Boers were, indeed, in many respects, the last

survivors of Aryanism. They fought extraordinarily well, but at the back

of their minds was an anxious desire to go back to their farms. For

prolonged operations, such as the siege of Veii, the Romans reinforced

and relieved their troops in relays; the Boers did much the same at the

siege of Ladysmith.

The necessity for subjugating Spain after the Second Punic War involved

a need for armies of a different type. Spain was too far off for

periodic reliefs, and the war demanded a more thorough training than was

possible with these on and off soldiers. Accordingly men were enlisted

for longer terms and _paid_. So the paid soldier first appeared in Roman

affairs. And to pay was added booty. Cato distributed silver treasure

among his command in Spain; and it is also on record that he attacked

Scipio Africanus for distributing booty among his troops in Sicily. The

introduction of military pay led on to a professional army, and this, a

century later, to the disarmament of the ordinary Roman citizen, who was

now drifting in an impoverished state into Rome and the larger towns.

The great wars had been won, the foundations of the empire had been well

and truly laid by the embattled farmers of Rome before 200 B.C. In the

process the embattled farmers of Rome had already largely disappeared.

The change that began after the Second Punic War was completed towards

the close of the century in the reorganization of the army by Marius, as

we will tell in its place. After his time we shall begin to write of

“the army,” and then of “the legions,” and we shall find we are dealing

with a new kind of army altogether, no longer held together in the

solidarity of a common citizenship. As that tie fails, the legions

discover another in _esprit de corps_, in their common difference from

and their common interest against the general community. They begin to

develop a warmer interest in their personal leaders, who secure them pay

and plunder. Before the Punic Wars it was the tendency of ambitious men

in Rome to court the plebeians; after that time they began to court the

legions.

§ 9

The history of the Roman Republic thus far, is in many respects much

more modern in flavour, especially to the American or Western European

reader, than anything that has preceded it. For the first time we have

something like a self-governing “nation,” something larger than a mere

city state, seeking to control its own destinies. For the first time we

have a wide countryside under one conception of law. We get in the

Senate and the popular assembly a conflict of groups and personalities,

an argumentative process of control, far more stable and enduring than

any autocracy can be, and far more flexible and adaptable than any

priesthood. For the first time also we encounter social conflicts

comparable to our own. Money has superseded barter, and financial

capital has become fluid and free; not perhaps so fluid and free as it

is to-day, but much more so than it had ever been before. The Punic Wars

were wars of peoples, such as were no other wars we have yet recorded.

Indubitably the broad lines of our present world, the main ideas, the

chief oppositions, were appearing in those days.

But, as we have already pointed out, certain of the elementary

facilities and some of the current political ideas of our time were

still wanting in the Rome of the Punic Wars. There were no

newspapers,[242] and there was practically no use of elected

representatives in the popular assemblies. And another deficiency, very

understandable to us nowadays, but quite beyond the scope of anyone

then, was the absence of any general elementary political education at

all. The plebeians of Rome had shown some glimmering of the idea that

without knowledge votes cannot make men free, when they had insisted

upon the publication of the law of the Twelve Tables; but they had never

been able, it was beyond the possibilities of the time, to imagine any

further extension of knowledge to the bulk of the people. It is only

nowadays that men are beginning to understand fully the political

significance of the maxim that “knowledge is power.” Two British Trade

Unions, for example, have recently set up a Labour College to meet the

special needs of able working-men in history, political and social

science, and the like. But education in republican Rome was the freak of

the individual parent, and the privilege of wealth and leisure. It was

mainly in the hands of Greeks, who were in many cases slaves. There was

a thin small stream of very fine learning and very fine thinking up to

the first century of the monarchy, let Lucretius and Cicero witness, but

it did not spread into the mass of the people. The ordinary Roman was

not only blankly ignorant of the history of mankind, but also of the

conditions of foreign peoples; he had no knowledge of economic laws nor

of social possibilities. Even his own interests he did not clearly

understand.

Of course, in the little city states of Greece and in that early Roman

state of four hundred square miles, men acquired by talk and observation

a sufficient knowledge for the ordinary duties of citizenship, but by

the beginning of the Punic Wars the business was already too big and

complicated for illiterate men. Yet nobody seems to have observed the

gap that was opening between the citizen and his state, and so there is

no record at all of any attempt to enlarge the citizen by instruction to

meet his enlarged duties. From the second century B.C. and onward

everyone is remarking upon the ignorance of the common citizen and his

lack of political wisdom, everything is suffering from the lack of

political solidarity due to this ignorance, but no one goes on to what

we should now consider the inevitable corollary, no one proposes to

destroy the ignorance complained of. There existed no means whatever for

the instruction of the masses of the people in a common political and

social ideal. It was only with the development of the great propagandist

religions in the Roman world, of which Christianity was the chief and

the survivor, that the possibility of such a systematic instruction of

great masses of people became apparent in the world. That very great

political genius, the Emperor Constantine the Great, six centuries

later, was the first to apprehend and to attempt to use this possibility

for the preservation and the mental and moral knitting-together of the

world community over which he ruled.

[Illustration: Gladiators (from a wall-painting at Pompeii)]

But it is not only in these deficiencies of news and of education and of

the expedient of representative government that this political system of

Rome differed from our own. True, it was far more like a modern

civilized state than any other state we have considered hitherto, but in

some matters it was strangely primordial and “sub-civilized.” Every now

and then the reader of Roman history, reading it in terms of debates

and measures, policies and campaigns, capital and labour, comes upon

something that gives him much the same shock he would feel if he went

down to an unknown caller in his house and extended his hand to meet the

misshapen hairy paw of _Homo Neanderthalensis_ and looked up to see a

chinless, bestial face. We have noted the occurrence of human sacrifice

in the third century B.C., and much that we learn of the religion of

republican Rome carries us far back beyond the days of decent gods, to

the age of shamanism and magic. We talk of a legislative gathering, and

the mind flies to Westminster; but how should we feel if we went to see

the beginning of a session of the House of Lords, and discovered the

Lord Chancellor, with bloody fingers, portentously fiddling about among

the entrails of a newly killed sheep? The mind would recoil from

Westminster to the customs of Benin. And the slavery of Rome was a

savage slavery, altogether viler than the slavery of Babylon. We have

had a glimpse of the virtuous Cato among his slaves in the second

century B.C. Moreover, in the third century B.C., when King Asoka was

ruling India in light and gentleness, the Romans were reviving an

Etruscan sport, the setting on of slaves to fight for their lives. One

is reminded of West Africa again in the origin of this amusement; it

grew out of the prehistoric custom of a massacre of captives at the

burial of a chief. There was a religious touch about this sport, the

slaves with hooks, who dragged the dead bodies out of the arena, wore

masks to represent the infernal ferry-man-god, Charon. In 264 B.C., the

very year in which Asoka began to reign and the First Punic War began,

the first recorded gladiatorial combat took place in the forum at Rome,

to celebrate the funeral of a member of the old Roman family of Brutus.

This was a modest display of three couples, but soon gladiators were

fighting by the hundred. The taste for these combats grew rapidly, and

the wars supplied an abundance of captives. The old Roman moralists, who

were so severe upon kissing and women’s ornaments and Greek philosophy,

had nothing but good to say for this new development. So long as pain

was inflicted, Roman morality, it would seem, was satisfied.

If republican Rome was the first of modern self-governing national

communities, she was certainly the “Neanderthal” form of them.

In the course of the next two or three centuries the gladiatorial shows

of Rome grew to immense proportions. To begin with, while wars were

frequent, the gladiators were prisoners of war. They came with their

characteristic national weapons, tattooed Britons, Moors, Scythians,

negroes, and the like, and there was perhaps some military value in

these exhibitions. Then criminals of the lower classes[243] condemned to

death were also used. The ancient world did not understand that a

criminal condemned to death still has rights, and at any rate the use of

a criminal as a gladiator was not so bad as his use as “material” for

the vivisectors of the Museum at Alexandria. But as the profits of this

sort of show business grew and the demand for victims increased,

ordinary slaves were sold to the trainers of gladiators, and any slave

who had aroused his owner’s spite might find himself in an establishment

for letting out gladiators. And dissipated young men who had squandered

their property, and lads of spirit, would go voluntarily into the trade

for a stated time, trusting to their prowess to survive. As the business

developed, a new use was found for gladiators as armed retainers; rich

men would buy a band, and employ it as a bodyguard or hire it out for

profit at the shows. The festivities of a show began with a ceremonial

procession (_pompa_) and a sham fight (_prælusio_). The real fighting

was heralded by trumpets. Gladiators who objected to fight for any

reason were driven on by whips and hot irons. A wounded man would

sometimes call for pity by holding up his forefinger. The spectators

would then either wave their handkerchiefs in token of mercy, or condemn

him to death by holding out their clenched fists with the thumbs

down.[244] The slain and nearly dead were dragged out to a particular

place, the _spoliarium_, where they were stripped of their arms and

possessions, and those who had not already expired were killed.

This organization of murder as a sport and show serves to measure the

great gap in moral standards between the Roman community and our own. No

doubt cruelties and outrages upon human dignity as monstrous as this

still go on in the world, but they do not go on in the name of the law

and without a single dissentient voice. For it is true that until the

time of Seneca (first century A.D.) there is no record of any plain

protest against this business. The conscience of mankind was weaker and

less intelligent then than now. Presently a new power was to come into

the human conscience through the spread of Christianity. The spirit of

Jesus in Christianity became the great antagonist in the later Roman

state of these cruel shows and of slavery, and, as Christianity spread,

these two evil things dwindled and disappeared.[245]

XXVIII

FROM TIBERIUS GRACCHUS TO THE GOD EMPEROR IN ROME

§ 1. _The Science of Thwarting the Common Man._ § 2. _Finance in

the Roman State._ § 3. _The Last Years of Republican Politics._ §

4. _The Era of the Adventurer Generals._ § 5. _The End of the

Republic._ § 6. _The Coming of the Princeps._ § 7. _Why the Roman

Republic Failed._

§ 1

We have already twice likened the self-governing community of Rome to a

“Neanderthal” variety of the modern “democratic” civilized state, and we

shall recur again to this comparison. In form the two things, the first

great primitive essay and its later relations, are extraordinarily

similar; in spirit they differ very profoundly. Roman political and

social life, and particularly Roman political and social life in the

century between the fall of Carthage and the rise of Cæsar and Cæsarism,

has a very marked general resemblance to the political and social life

in such countries as the United States of America or the British Empire

to-day. The resemblance is intensified by the common use, with a certain

inaccuracy in every case, of such terms as “senate,” “democracy,”

“proletariat,” and the like. But everything in the Roman state was

earlier, cruder, and clumsier; the injustices were more glaring, the

conflicts harsher. There was comparatively little knowledge and few

general ideas. Aristotle’s scientific works were only beginning to be

read in Rome in the first century B.C.; Ferrero,[246] it is true, makes

Cæsar familiar with the Politics of Aristotle, and ascribes to him the

dream of making a “Periclean Rome,” but in doing so, Ferrero seems to

be indulging in one of those lapses into picturesque romancing which are

at once the joy and the snare of all historical writers.

Attention has already been drawn to the profound difference between

Roman and modern conditions due to the absence of a press, of any

popular education or of the representative idea in the popular assembly.

Our world to-day is still far from solving the problem of representation

and from producing a public assembly which will really summarize,

crystallize, and express the thought and will of the community; our

elections are still largely an ingenious mockery of the common voter who

finds himself helpless in the face of party organizations which reduce

his free choice of a representative to the less unpalatable of two

political hacks, but, even so, his vote, in comparison with the vote of

an ordinary honest Roman citizen, is an effective instrument. Too many

of our histories dealing with this period of Roman history write of “the

popular party,” and of the votes of the people and so forth, as though

such things were as much working realities as they are to-day. But the

senators and politicians of Rome saw to it that such things never did

exist as clean and wholesome realities. These modern phrases are very

misleading unless they are carefully qualified.

We have already described the gatherings of the popular comitia; but

that clumsy assembly in sheep pens does not convey the full extent to

which the gerrymandering of popular representation could be carried in

Rome. Whenever there was a new enfranchisement of citizens in Italy,

there would be the most elaborate trickery and counter-trickery to enrol

the new voters into as few or as many of the thirty old “tribes” as

possible, or to put them into as few as possible new tribes. Since the

vote was taken by tribes, it is obvious that however great the number of

new additions made, if they were all got together into one tribe, their

opinion would only count for one tribal vote, and similarly if they were

crowded into just a few tribes, old or new. On the other hand, if they

were put into too many tribes, their effect in any particular tribe

might be inconsiderable. Here was the sort of work to fascinate every

smart knave in politics. The _comitia tributa_, could be _worked_ at

times so as to vote right counter to the general feeling of the people.

And as we have already noted, the great mass of voters in Italy were

also disenfranchised by distance. About the middle period of the

Carthaginian wars there were upwards of 300,000 Roman citizens; about

100 B.C. there were more than 900,000, but in effect the voting of the

popular assembly was confined to a few score thousand resident in and

near Rome, and mostly men of a base type. And the Roman voters were

“organized” to an extent that makes the Tammany machine of New York seem

artless and honest. They belonged to clubs, _collegia sodalicia_, having

usually some elegant religious pretensions; and the rising politician

working his way to office went first to the usurers and then with the

borrowed money to these clubs. If the outside voters were moved enough

by any question to swarm into the city, it was always possible to put

off the voting by declaring the omens unfavourable. If they came in

unarmed, they could be intimidated; if they brought in arms, then the

cry was raised that there was a plot to overthrow the republic, and a

massacre would be organized.

There can be no doubt that all Italy, all the empire, was festering with

discomfort, anxiety, and discontent in the century after the destruction

of Carthage; a few men were growing very rich, and the majority of

people found themselves entangled in an inexplicable net of uncertain

prices, jumpy markets, and debts; but yet there was no way at all of

stating and clearing up the general dissatisfaction. There is no record

of a single attempt to make the popular assembly a straightforward and

workable public organ. Beneath the superficial appearances of public

affairs struggled a mute giant of public opinion and public will, who

sometimes made some great political effort, a rush to vote or such like,

and sometimes broke into actual violence. So long as there was no actual

violence, the Senate and the financiers kept on in their own disastrous

way. Only when they were badly frightened would governing cliques or

parties desist from some nefarious policy and heed the common good. The

real method of popular expression in Italy in those days was not the

_comitia tributa_, but the strike and insurrection, the righteous and

necessary methods of all cheated or suppressed peoples. We have seen in

our own days in Great Britain a decline in the prestige of

parliamentary government and a drift towards unconstitutional methods on

the part of the masses through exactly the same cause, through the

incurable disposition of politicians to gerrymander the electoral

machine until the community is driven to explosion.

For insurrectionary purposes a discontented population needs a leader,

and the political history of the concluding century of Roman

republicanism is a history of insurrectionary leaders and

counter-revolutionary leaders. Most of the former are manifestly

unscrupulous adventurers who try to utilize the public necessity and

unhappiness for their own advancement. Many of the historians of this

period betray a disposition to take sides, and are either aristocratic

in tone or fiercely democratic; but, indeed, neither side in these

complex and intricate disputes has a record of high aims or clean hands.

The Senate and the rich equestrians were vulgar and greedy spirits,

hostile and contemptuous towards the poor mob; and the populace was

ignorant, unstable, and at least equally greedy. The Scipios in all this

record shine, by comparison, a group of gentlemen. To the motives of one

or the other figures of the time, to Tiberius Gracchus, for example, we

may perhaps extend the benefit of the doubt. But for the rest, they do

but demonstrate how clever and cunning men may be, how subtle in

contention, how brilliant in pretence, and how utterly wanting in wisdom

or grace of spirit. “A shambling, hairy, brutish, but probably very

cunning creature with a big brain behind;” so someone, I think it was

Sir Harry Johnston, has described _Homo Neanderthalensis_.

To this day we must still use similar terms to describe the soul of the

politician. The statesman has still to oust the politician from his

lairs and weapon heaps. History has still to become a record of human

dignity.

§ 2

Another respect in which the Roman system was a crude anticipation of

our own, and different from any preceding political system we have

considered, was that it was a cash and credit-using system. Money had

been in the world as yet for only a few centuries. But its use had been

growing; it was providing a fluid medium for trade and enterprise, and

changing economic conditions profoundly. In republican Rome, the

financier and the “money” interest began to play a part recognizably

similar to their rôles to-day.

We have already noted--in our account of Herodotus--that a first effect

of money was to give freedom of movement and leisure to a number of

people who could not otherwise have enjoyed these privileges. And that

is the peculiar value of money to mankind. Instead of a worker or helper

being paid in kind and in such a way that he is tied as much in his

enjoyment as in his labour, money leaves him free to do as he pleases

amidst a wide choice of purchasable aids, eases, and indulgences. He may

eat his money or drink it or give it to a temple or spend it in learning

something or save it against some foreseen occasion. That is the good of

money, the freedom of its universal convertibility. But the freedom

money gives the poor man is nothing to the freedom money has given the

rich man. With money rich men ceased to be tied to lands, houses,

stores, flocks, and herds. They could change the nature and locality of

their possessions with an unheard-of freedom. In the third and second

century B.C., this release, this untethering of wealth, began to tell

upon the general economic life of the Roman and Hellenized world. People

began to buy land and the like not for use, but to sell again at a

profit; people borrowed to buy, speculation developed. No doubt there

were bankers in the Babylon of 1000 B.C., but they lent in a far more

limited and solid way, bars of metal and stocks of goods. That earlier

world was a world of barter and payment in kind, and it went slowly--and

much more staidly and stably--for that reason. In that state the vast

realm of China has remained almost down to the present time.

The big cities before Rome were trading and manufacturing cities. Such

were Corinth and Carthage and Syracuse. But Rome never produced a very

considerable industrial population, and her warehouses never rivalled

those of Alexandria. The little port of Ostia was always big enough for

her needs. Rome was a political and financial capital, and in the latter

respect, at least, she was a new sort of city. She imported profits and

tribute, and very little went out from her in return. The wharves of

Ostia were chiefly busy unloading corn from Sicily and Africa and loot

from all the world.

After the fall of Carthage the Roman imagination went wild with the

hitherto unknown possibilities of finance. Money, like most other

inventions, had “happened” to mankind, and men had still to

develop--to-day they have still to perfect--the science and morality of

money. One sees the thing “catching on” in the recorded life and the

writings of Cato the Censor. In his early days he was bitterly virtuous

against usury; in his later he was devising ingenious schemes for safe

usury.

In this curiously interesting century of Roman history we find man after

man asking, “What has happened to Rome?” Various answers are made--a

decline in religion, a decline from the virtues of the Roman

forefathers, Greek “intellectual poison,” and the like. We who can look

at the problem with a large perspective, can see that what had happened

to Rome was “money”--the new freedoms and chances and opportunities that

money opened out. Money floated the Romans off the firm ground, everyone

was getting hold of money, the majority by the simple expedient of

running into debt; the eastward expansion of the empire was very largely

a hunt for treasure in strong rooms and temples to keep pace with the

hunger of the new need. The Equestrian order, in particular, became the

money power. Everyone was developing property. Farmers were giving up

corn and cattle, borrowing money, buying slaves, and starting the more

intensive cultivation of oil and wine. Money was young in human

experience and wild, nobody had it under control. It fluctuated greatly.

It was now abundant and now scarce. Men made sly and crude schemes to

corner it, to hoard it, to send up prices by releasing hoarded metals. A

small body of very shrewd men was growing immensely rich. Many

patricians were growing poor and irritated and unscrupulous. Among the

middle sort of peoples there was much hope, much adventure, and much

more disappointment. The growing mass of the expropriated was permeated

by that vague, baffled, and hopeless sense of being inexplicably bested,

which is the preparatory condition for all great revolutionary

movements.

§ 3

The first conspicuous leader to appeal to the gathering revolutionary

feeling in Italy was Tiberius Gracchus. He looks more like an honest man

than any other figure in this period of history, unless it be Scipio

Africanus the Elder. At first Tiberius Gracchus was a moderate reformer

of a rather reactionary type. He wished to restore the yeoman class to

property, very largely because he believed that class to be the backbone

of the army, and his military experience in Spain before and after the

destruction of Carthage had impressed upon him the declining efficiency

of the legions. He was what we should call nowadays a “Back-to-the-land”

man. He did not understand, and few people understand to-day, how much

easier it is to shift population from the land into the towns, than to

return it to the laborious and simple routines of agricultural life. He

wanted to revive the Licinian laws, which had been established when

Camillus built his temple of Concord nearly two centuries and a half

before (see Chap. xxvii, § 2), so far as they broke up great estates and

restrained slave labour.

These Licinian laws had repeatedly been revived and repeatedly lapsed to

a dead letter again. It was only when the big proprietors in the Senate

opposed this proposal that Tiberius Gracchus turned to the people and

began a furious agitation for popular government. He created a

commission to inquire into the title of all landowners. In the midst of

his activities occurred one of the most extraordinary incidents in

history. Attalus, the king of the rich country of Pergamum in Asia

Minor, died (133 B.C.), and left his kingdom to the Roman people.

It is difficult for us to understand the motives of this bequest.

Pergamum was a country allied to Rome, and so moderately secure from

aggression; and the natural consequence of such a will was to provoke a

violent scramble among the senatorial gangs and a dispute between them

and the people for the spoils of the new acquisition. Practically

Attalus handed over his country to be looted. The act is so amazing that

one is driven towards the hypothesis of forgery.[247] There were of

course many Italian business people established in the country and a

strong party of native rich men in close relations with Rome. To them,

no doubt, a coalescence with the Roman system would have been

acceptable. Josephus bears witness to such a desire for annexation among

the rich men of Syria, a desire running counter to the wishes of both

king and people. This Pergamum bequest, astonishing in itself, had the

still more astonishing result of producing imitations in other quarters.

In 96 B.C. Ptolemy Apion bequeathed Cyrenaica, in North Africa, to the

Roman people; in 81 B.C. Alexander II, King of Egypt, followed suit with

Egypt, a legacy too big for the courage if not for the appetite of the

Senators, and they declined it; in 74 B.C. Nicomedes, King of Bithynia,

demised Bithynia. Of these latter testamentary freaks we will say no

more here. But it will be manifest how great an opportunity was given

Tiberius Gracchus, by the bequest of Attalus, of accusing the rich of

greed and of proposing to decree the treasures of Attalus to the

commonalty. He proposed to use this new wealth to provide seed, stock,

and agricultural implements for the resettlement of the land.

His movement was speedily entangled in the complexities of the Roman

electoral system--without a simple and straightforward electoral method,

all popular movements in all ages necessarily become entangled and

maddened in constitutional intricacies, and almost as necessarily lead

to bloodshed. It was needed, if his work was to go on, that Tiberius

Gracchus should continue to be tribune, and it was illegal for him to be

tribune twice in succession. He overstepped the bounds of legality, and

stood for the tribuneship a second time; the peasants who came in from

the countryside to vote for him came in armed; the cry that he was

aiming at a tyranny, the cry that had long ago destroyed Mælius and

Manlius, was raised in the Senate, the friends of “law and order” went

to the Capitol in state, accompanied by a rabble of dependents armed

with staves and bludgeons; there was a conflict, or rather a massacre of

the revolutionaries, in which nearly three hundred people were killed,

and Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death with the fragments of a broken

bench by two Senators.

Thereupon the Senators attempted a sort of counter-revolution, and

proscribed many of the followers of Tiberius Gracchus; but the state of

public opinion was so sullen and threatening that this movement was

dropped and Scipio Nasica, who was implicated in the death of Tiberius,

though he occupied the position of pontifex maximus and should have

remained in Rome for the public sacrifices which were the duties of that

official, went abroad to avoid trouble.

The uneasiness of Italy next roused Scipio Africanus the Younger to

propose the enfranchisement of all Italy. But he died suddenly before he

could carry the proposal into effect.

Then followed the ambiguous career of Caius Gracchus, the brother of

Tiberius, who followed some tortuous “policy” that still exercises the

mind of historians. He increased the burthens of taxation laid upon the

provinces, it is supposed with the idea of setting the modern financiers

(the Equites) against the senatorial landowners. He gave the former the

newly bequeathed taxes of Asia to farm, and, what is worse, he gave them

control of the special courts set up to prevent extortion. He started

enormous public works and particularly the construction of new roads,

and he is accused of making a political use of the contracts. He revived

the proposal to enfranchise Italy. He increased the distribution of

subsidized cheap corn to the Roman citizens.... Here we cannot attempt

to disentangle his schemes, much less to judge him. But that his policy

was offensive to the groups that controlled the Senate there can be no

doubt whatever. He was massacred by the champions of “law and order,”

with about three thousand of his followers, in the streets of Rome in

121 B.C. His decapitated head was carried to the Senate on the point of

a pike.

(A reward of its weight in gold, says Plutarch, had been offered for

this trophy; and its captor, acting in the true spirit of a champion of

“big business,” filled the braincase with lead on its way to the

scales.)

In spite of these prompt firm measures the Senate was not to enjoy the

benefits of peace and the advantages of a control of the imperial

resources for long. Within ten years the people were in revolt again.

In 118 B.C. the throne of Numidia, the semi-barbaric kingdom that had

arisen in North Africa upon the ruins of the civilized Carthaginian

power, was seized by a certain able Jugurtha, who had served with the

Roman armies in Spain, and had a knowledge of the Roman character. He

provoked the military intervention of Rome. But the Romans found that

their military power, under a Senate of financiers and landlords, was

very different from what it had been even in the days of the younger

Scipio Africanus. “Jugurtha bought over the Commissioners sent out to

watch him, the Senators charged with their prosecution, and the generals

in command against him.”[248] There is a mistaken Roman proverb:

“_pecunia non olet_” (money does not stink), for the money of Jugurtha

stank even in Rome. There was an angry agitation; and a capable soldier

of lowly origin, Marius, was carried to the consulship (107 B.C.) on the

wave of popular indignation. Marius made no attempt on the model of the

Gracchi to restore the backbone of the army by rehabilitating the yeoman

class. He was a professional soldier with a high standard of efficiency

and a disposition to take short cuts. He simply raised troops from among

the poor, whether countrymen or townsmen, paid them well, disciplined

them thoroughly, and (106 B.C.) ended the seven years’ war with Jugurtha

by bringing that chieftain in chains to Rome. It did not occur to

anybody that incidentally Marius had also created a professional army

with no interest to hold it together but its pay. He then held on to the

consulship more or less illegally for several years, and in 102 and 101

B.C. repelled a threatening move of the Germans (who thus appear in our

history for the first time), who were raiding through Gaul towards

Italy. He gained two victories; one on Italian soil. He was hailed as

the saviour of his country, a second Camillus (100 B.C.).

The social tensions of the time mocked that comparison with Camillus.

The Senate benefited by the greater energy in foreign affairs and the

increased military efficiency that Marius had introduced, but the

sullen, shapeless discontent of the mass of the people was still seeking

some effective outlet. The rich grew richer and the poor poorer. It was

impossible to stifle the consequences of that process for ever by

political trickery. The Italian people were still unenfranchised. Two

extreme democratic leaders, Saturninus and Glaucia, were assassinated,

but that familiar senatorial remedy failed to assuage the populace on

this occasion. In 92 B.C. an aristocratic official, Rutilius Rufus, who

had tried to restrain the exactions of the financiers in Asia Minor, was

condemned on a charge of corruption so manifestly trumped up that it

deceived no one; and in 91 B.C., Livius Drusus, a newly elected tribune

of the people, who was making capital out of the trial of Rutilius

Rufus, was assassinated. He had proposed a general enfranchisement of

the Italians, and he had foreshadowed not only another land law, but a

general abolition of debts. Yet for all this vigour on the part of the

senatorial usurers, landgrabbers, and forestallers, the hungry and the

anxious were still insurgent. The murder of Drusus was the last drop in

the popular cup; Italy blazed into a desperate insurrection.

There followed two years of bitter civil war, the Social War. It was a

war between the idea of a united Italy and the idea of the rule of the

Roman Senate. It was not a “social” war in the modern sense, but a war

between Rome and her Italian allies (allies = Socii). “Roman generals,

trained in the traditions of colonial warfare, marched ruthlessly up and

down Italy, burning farms, sacking towns, and carrying off men, women,

and children, to sell them in the open market or work them in gangs upon

their estates.”[249] Marius and an aristocratic general, Sulla, who had

been with him in Africa and who was his bitter rival, both commanded on

the side of Rome. But though the insurgents experienced defeats and

looting, neither of these generals brought the war to an end. It was

ended in a manner (89 B.C.) by the practical surrender of the Roman

Senate to the idea of reform. The spirit was taken out of the

insurrection by the concession of their demands “in principle”; and then

as soon as the rebels had dispersed, the usual cheating of the new

voters, by such methods as we have explained in § 1 of this chapter, was

resumed.

By the next year (88 B.C.) the old round had begun again. It was mixed

up with the personal intrigues of Marius and Sulla against each other;

but the struggle had taken on another complexion through the army

reforms of Marius, which had created a new type of legionary, a landless

professional soldier with no interest in life but pay and plunder, and

with no feeling of loyalty except to a successful general. A popular

tribune, Sulpicius, was bringing forward some new laws affecting debt,

and the consuls were dodging the storm by declaring a suspension of

public business. Then came the usual resort to violence, and the

followers of Sulpicius drove the consuls from the forum. But here it is

that the new forces which the new army had made possible came into play.

King Mithridates of Pontius, the Hellenized king of the southern shores

of the Black Sea east of Bithynia, was pressing Rome into war. One of

the proposed laws of Sulpicius was that Marius should command the armies

sent against this Mithridates. Whereupon Sulla marched the army he had

commanded throughout the Social War to Rome, Marius and Sulpicius fled,

and a new age, an age of military pronunciamentos, began.

Of how Sulla had himself made commander against Mithridates and

departed, and of how legions friendly to Marius then seized power, how

Marius returned to Italy and enjoyed a thorough massacre of his

political opponents and died, sated, of fever, we cannot tell in any

detail. But one measure during the Marian reign of terror did much to

relieve the social tension, and that was the abolition of three-quarters

of all outstanding debts. Nor can we tell here how Sulla made a

discreditable peace with Mithridates (who had massacred a hundred

thousand Italians in Asia Minor) in order to bring his legions back to

Rome, defeat the Marians at the battle of the Colline Gate of Rome, and

reverse the arrangements of Marius. Sulla restored law and order by the

proscription and execution of over five thousand people. He desolated

large parts of Italy, restored the Senate to power, repealed many of the

recent laws, though he was unable to restore the cancelled burden of

debt, and then, feeling bored by politics and having amassed great

riches, he retired with an air of dignity into private life, gave

himself up to abominable vices, and so presently died, eaten up with

some disgusting disease produced by debauchery.[250]

§ 4

Political life in Italy was not so much tranquillized as stunned by the

massacres and confiscations of Marius and Sulla. The scale upon which

this history is planned will not permit us to tell here of the great

adventurers who, relying more and more on the support of the legions,

presently began to scheme and intrigue again for dictatorial power in

Rome. In 73 B.C. all Italy was terrified by a rising of the slaves, and

particularly of the gladiators, led by a gladiator from Thessaly,

Spartacus. He and seventy others had fled out from a gladiatorial “farm”

at Capua. Similar risings had already occurred in Sicily. The forces

under Spartacus necessarily became a miscellaneous band drawn from east

and west, without any common idea except the idea of dispersing and

getting home; nevertheless, he held out in southern Italy for two years,

using the then apparently extinct crater of Vesuvius for a time as a

natural fortress. The Italians, for all their love of gladiatorial

display, failed to appreciate this conversion of the whole country into

an arena, this bringing of the gladiatorial sword to the door, and when

at last Spartacus was overthrown, their terror changed to frantic

cruelty, six thousand of his captured followers were crucified--long

miles of nailed and drooping victims--along the Appian Way.

Here we cannot deal at any length with Lucullus, who invaded Pontus and

fought Mithridates, and brought the cultivated cherry-tree to Europe;

nor can we tell how ingeniously Pompey the Great stole the triumph and

most of the prestige Lucullus had won in Armenia beyond Pontus.

Lucullus, like Sulla, retired into an opulent private life, but with

more elegance and with a more gracious end. We cannot relate in any

detail how Julius Cæsar accumulated reputation in the west, by

conquering Gaul, defeating the German tribes upon the Rhine, and

pushing a punitive raid across the Straits of Dover into Britain. More

and more important grow the legions; less and less significant are the

Senate and the assemblies of Rome. But there is a certain grim humour

about the story of Crassus that we cannot altogether neglect.

[Illustration: The ROMAN POWER about 50 B.C.]

This Crassus was a great money-lender and forestaller. He was a typical

man of the new Equestrian type, the social equivalent of a modern

munition profiteer. He first grew rich by buying up the property of

those proscribed by Sulla. His earliest exploits in the field were

against Spartacus, whom finally he crushed by great payments and

exertions after a prolonged and expensive campaign. He then, as the

outcome of complicated bargains, secured the command in the east and

prepared to emulate the glories of Lucullus, who had pushed east from

Pergamum and Bithynia into Pontus, and of Pompey, who had completed the

looting of Armenia.

His experiences serve to demonstrate the gross ignorance with which the

Romans were conducting their affairs at that time. He crossed the

Euphrates, expecting to find in Persia another Hellenized kingdom like

Pontus. But, as we have already intimated, the great reservoirs of

nomadic peoples that stretched round from the Danube across Russia into

Central Asia, had been raining back into the lands between the Caspian

Sea and the Indus that Alexander had conquered for Hellenism. Crassus

found himself against the “Scythian” again; against mobile tribes of

horsemen led by a monarch in Median costume.[251] The particular variety

of “Scythian” he encountered was called the Parthian. It is possible

that in the Parthians a Mongolian (Turanian) element was now mingled

with the Aryan strain; but the campaign of Crassus beyond the Euphrates

is curiously like the campaign of Darius beyond the Danube; there is the

same heavy thrusting of an infantry force against elusive light

horsemen. But Crassus was less quick than Darius to realize the need of

withdrawal, and the Parthians were better bowmen than the Scythians

Darius met. They seemed to have had some sort of noisy projectile of

unusual strength and force, something different from an ordinary

arrow.[252] The campaign culminated in that two days’ massacre of the

hot, thirsty, hungry, and weary Roman legions, which is known as the

battle of Carrhæ (53 B.C.). They toiled through the sand, charging an

enemy who always evaded their charge and rode round them and shot them

to pieces. Twenty thousand of them were killed, and ten thousand marched

on eastward as prisoners into slavery in Iran.

What became of Crassus is not clearly known. There is a story, probably

invented for our moral benefit and suggested by his usuries, that he

fell alive into the hands of the Parthians and was killed by having

molten gold poured down his throat.

But this disaster has a very great significance indeed to our general

history of mankind. It serves to remind us that from the Rhine to the

Euphrates, all along to the north of the Alps and Danube and Black Sea,

stretched one continuous cloud of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, whom

the statescraft of imperial Rome was never able to pacify and civilize,

nor her military science subdue. We have already called attention to a

map showing how the Second Babylonian Empire, the Chaldean Empire, lay

like a lamb in the embrace of the Median power. In exactly the same way

the Roman Empire lay like a lamb in the embrace of this great crescent

of outer barbarians. Not only was Rome never able to thrust back or

assimilate that superincumbent crescent, but she was never able to

organize the Mediterranean Sea into a secure and orderly system of

communication between one part of her empire and another. Quite unknown

as yet to Rome, the Mongolian tribes from northeastern Asia, the Huns

and their kin, walled back and driven out from China by the Tsi and Han

dynasties, were drifting and pressing westward, mixing with the

Parthians, the Scythians, the Teutons and the like, or driving them

before them.

Never at any time did the Romans succeed in pushing their empire beyond

Mesopotamia, and upon Mesopotamia their hold was never very secure.

Before the close of the republic that power of assimilation which had

been the secret of their success was giving way to “patriotic”

exclusiveness and “patriotic” greed. Rome plundered and destroyed Asia

Minor and Babylonia, which were the necessary basis for an eastward

extension to India, just as she had destroyed and looted Carthage and so

had no foothold for extension into Africa, and just as she had destroyed

Corinth and so cut herself off from an easy way into the heart of

Greece. Western European writers, impressed by the fact that later on

Rome Romanized and civilized Gaul and South Britain and restored the

scene of her earlier devastations in Spain to prosperity, are apt to

ignore that over far greater areas to the south and east her influence

was to weaken and so restore to barbarism the far wider conquests of

Hellenic civilization.

§ 5

But among the politicians of Italy in the first century B.C. there were

no maps of Germany and Russia, Africa and central Asia, and no

sufficient intelligence to study them had they existed. Rome never

developed the fine curiosities that sent Hanno and the sailors of

Pharaoh Necho down the coasts of Africa. When, in the first century

B.C., the emissaries of the Han dynasty reached the eastern shores of

the Caspian Sea, they found only stories of a civilization that had

receded. The memory of Alexander still lived in these lands, but of Rome

men only knew that Pompey had come to the western shores of the Caspian

and gone away again, and that Crassus had been destroyed. Rome was

preoccupied at home. What mental energy remained over in the Roman

citizen from the attempt to grow personally rich and keep personally

safe was intent upon the stratagems and strokes and counter-strokes of

the various adventurers who were now manifestly grappling for the

supreme power.

It is the custom of historians to treat these struggles with extreme

respect. In particular the figure of Julius Cæsar is set up as if it

were a star of supreme brightness and importance in the history of

mankind.[253] Yet a dispassionate consideration of the known facts fails

altogether to justify this demi-god theory of Cæsar. Not even that

precipitate wrecker of splendid possibilities, Alexander the Great, has

been so magnified and dressed up for the admiration of careless and

uncritical readers. There is a type of scholar who, to be plain, sits

and _invents_ marvellous world policies for the more conspicuous figures

in history with the merest scraps of justification or with no

justification at all. We are told that Alexander planned the conquest of

Carthage and Rome and the complete subjugation of India, and that only

his death shattered these schemes. What we know for certain is that he

conquered the Persian Empire, and never went far beyond its boundaries;

and that when he was supposed to be making these vast and noble plans,

he was in fact indulging in such monstrous antics as his mourning for

his favourite Hephæstion, and as his main occupation he was drinking

himself to death. So too Julius Cæsar is credited with the intention of

doing just that one not impossible thing which would have secured the

Roman Empire from its ultimate collapse--namely, the systematic conquest

and civilization of Europe as far as the Baltic and the Dnieper. He was

to have marched upon Germany, says Plutarch, through Parthia and

Scythia, round the north of the Caspian and Black Seas. Yet the fact we

have to reconcile with this wise and magnificent project is that at the

crest of his power, Cæsar, already a bald, middle-aged man, past the

graces and hot impulses of youthful love, spent the better part of a

year in Egypt, feasting and entertaining himself in amorous pleasantries

with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. And afterwards he brought her with

him to Rome, where her influence over him was bitterly resented. Such

complications with a woman mark the elderly sensualist or

sentimentalist--he was fifty-four at the commencement of the

_affaire_--rather than the master-ruler of men.

On the side of the superman idea of Cæsar, we have to count a bust in

the Naples Museum. It represents a fine and intellectual face, very

noble in its expression, and we can couple with that the story that his

head, even at birth, was unusually large and finely formed. But there is

really no satisfying evidence that this well-known bust does represent

Cæsar, and it is hard to reconcile its austere serenity with the

reputation for violent impulse and disorderliness that clung to him.

Other busts of a quite different man are also, with more probability,

ascribed to him.

There can be little doubt that he was a dissolute and extravagant young

man--the scandals cluster thick about his sojourn in Bithynia, whither

he fled from Sulla; he was the associate of the reprobate Clodius and

the conspirator Catiline, and there is nothing in his political career

to suggest any aim higher or remoter than his own advancement to power,

and all the personal glory and indulgence that power makes possible. We

will not attempt to tell here of the turns and devices of his career.

Although he was of an old patrician family, he came into politics as the

brilliant darling of the people. He spent great sums and incurred heavy

debts to provide public festivals on the most lavish scale. He opposed

the tradition of Sulla, and cherished the memory of Marius, who was his

uncle by marriage. For a time he worked in conjunction with Crassus and

Pompey, but after the death of Crassus he and Pompey came into conflict.

By 49 B.C. he and Pompey, with their legions, he from the west and

Pompey from the east, were fighting openly for predominance in the Roman

state. He had broken the law by bringing his legions across the Rubicon,

which was the boundary between his command and Italy proper. At the

battle of Pharsalos in Thessaly (48 B.C.) Pompey was routed, and,

fleeing to Egypt, was murdered, leaving Cæsar more master of the Roman

world than ever Sulla had been.

He was then created dictator for ten years in 46 B.C., and early in 45

B.C. he was made dictator for life. This was monarchy; if not hereditary

monarchy, it was at least electoral life monarchy. It was unlimited

opportunity to do his best for the world. And by the spirit and quality

of his use of this dictatorial power during these four years we are

bound to judge him. A certain reorganization of local administration he

effected, and he seems to have taken up what was a fairly obvious

necessity of the times, a project for the restoration of the two

murdered seaports of Corinth and Carthage, whose destruction had

wrecked the sea-life of the Mediterranean. But much more evident was the

influence of Cleopatra and Egypt upon his mind. Like Alexander before

him, his head seems to have been turned by the king-god tradition,

assisted no doubt in his case by the adulation of that charming

hereditary goddess, Cleopatra. We find evidence of exactly that same

conflict upon the score of divine pretensions, between him and his

personal friends, that we have already recorded in the case of

Alexander. So far as the Hellenized east was concerned, the paying of

divine honours to rulers was a familiar idea; but it was still repulsive

to the lingering Aryanism of Rome.

[Illustration: JVLIVS CÆSAR

(from the Naples bust)]

Antony, who had been his second in command at Pharsalos, was one of the

chief of his flatterers. Plutarch describes a scene at the public games

in which Antony tried to force a crown upon Cæsar, which Cæsar, after a

little coyness and in face of the manifested displeasure of the crowd,

refused. But he had adopted the ivory sceptre and throne, which were the

traditional insignia of the ancient kings of Rome. His image was carried

amidst that of the gods in the opening _pompa_ of the arena, and his

statue was set up in a temple with an inscription, “To the Unconquerable

God!” Priests even were appointed for his godhead. These things are not

the symptoms of great-mindedness, but of a common man’s megalomania.

Cæsar’s record of vulgar scheming for the tawdriest mockeries of

personal worship is a silly and shameful record; it is incompatible

with the idea that he was a wise and wonderful superman setting the

world to rights.

Finally (44 B.C.) he was assassinated by a group of his own friends and

supporters, to whom these divine aspirations had become intolerable. He

was beset in the Senate, and stabbed in three and twenty places, dying

at the foot of the statue of his fallen rival Pompey the Great. The

scene marks the complete demoralization of the old Roman governing body.

Brutus, the ringleader of the murderers, would have addressed the

senators, but, confronted by this crisis, they were scuttling off in

every direction. For the best part of a day Rome did not know what to

make of this event; the murderers marched about with their bloody

weapons through an undecided city, with no one gainsaying them and only

a few joining them; then public opinion turned against them, some of

their houses were attacked, and they had to hide and fly for their

lives.

§ 6

But the trend of things was overwhelmingly towards monarchy. For

thirteen years more the struggle of personalities went on. One single

man is to be noted as inspired by broad ideas and an ambition not

entirely egoistic, Cicero. He was a man of modest origin, whose

eloquence and literary power had won him a prominent place in the

Senate. He was a little tainted by the abusive tradition of Demosthenes,

nevertheless he stands out, a noble and pathetically ineffective figure,

pleading with the now utterly degenerate, base, and cowardly Senate for

the high ideals of the Republic. He was a writer of great care and

distinction, and the orations and private letters he has left us make

him one of the most real and living figures of this period to the modern

reader.[254] He was proscribed and killed in 43 B.C., the year after the

murder of Julius Cæsar, and his head and hands were nailed up in the

Roman forum. Octavian, who became at last the monarch of Rome, seems to

have made an effort to save Cicero; that murder was certainly not his

crime.

Here we cannot trace out the tangle of alliances and betrayals that

ended in the ascendancy of this Octavian, the adopted heir of Julius

Cæsar. The fate of the chief figures is interwoven with that of

Cleopatra.

After the death of Cæsar, she set herself to capture the emotions and

vanity of Antony, a much younger man than Cæsar, with whom she was

probably already acquainted. For a time Octavian and Antony and a third

figure, Lepidus, divided the Roman world just as Cæsar and Pompey had

divided it before their final conflict. Octavian took the hardier west,

and consolidated his power; Antony had the more gorgeous east--and

Cleopatra. To Lepidus fell that picked bone, Carthaginian Africa. He

seems to have been a good man of good traditions, set upon the

restoration of Carthage rather than upon wealth or personal vanities.

The mind of Antony succumbed to those same ancient ideas of divine

kingship that had already proved too much for the mental equilibrium of

Julius Cæsar. In the company of Cleopatra he gave himself up to love,

amusements, and a dream of sensuous glory, until Octavian felt that the

time was ripe to end these two Egyptian divinities.

In 32 B.C. Octavian induced the Senate to depose Antony from the command

of the east, and proceeded to attack him. A great naval battle at Actium

(31 B.C.) was decided by the unexpected desertion of Cleopatra with

sixty ships in the midst of the fight. It is quite impossible for us to

decide now whether this was due to premeditated treachery or to the

sudden whim of a charming woman. The departure of these ships threw the

fleet of Antony into hopeless confusion, which was increased by the

headlong flight of this model lover in pursuit. He went off in a swift

galley after her without informing his commanders. He left his followers

to fight and die as they thought fit, and for a time they were

incredulous that he had gone. The subsequent encounter of the two lovers

and their reconciliation is a matter for ironical speculation on the

part of Plutarch.

Octavian’s net closed slowly round his rival. It is not improbable that

there was some sort of understanding between Octavian and Cleopatra, as

perhaps in the time of Julius Cæsar there may have been between the

queen and Antony. Antony gave way to much mournful posturing, varied by

love scenes, during this last stage of his little drama. For a time he

posed as an imitator of the cynic Timon, as one who had lost all faith

in mankind, though one may think that his deserted sailors at Actium had

better reason for such an attitude. Finally he found himself and

Cleopatra besieged by Octavian in Alexandria. There were some sallies

and minor successes, and Antony was loud with challenges to Octavian to

decide the matter by personal combat. Being led to believe that

Cleopatra had committed suicide, this star of romance stabbed himself,

but so ineffectually as to die lingeringly, and he was carried off to

expire in her presence (30 B.C.).

Plutarch’s account of Antony, which was derived very largely from

witnesses who had seen and known him, describes him as of heroic mould.

He is compared to the demi-god Hercules, from whom indeed he claimed

descent, and also to the Indian Bacchus. There is a disgusting but

illuminating description of a scene in the Senate when he attempted to

speak while drunk, and was overtaken by one of the least dignified

concomitants of intoxication.

For a little while Cleopatra still clung to life, and perhaps to the

hope that she might reduce Octavian to the same divine rôle that had

already been played by Julius Cæsar and Antony. She had an interview

with Octavian, in which she presented herself as beauty in distress and

very lightly clad. But when it became manifest that Octavian lacked the

godlike spark, and that his care for her comfort and welfare was

dictated chiefly by his desire to exhibit her in a triumphal procession

through the streets of Rome, she also committed suicide. An asp was

smuggled to her past the Roman sentries, concealed in a basket of figs,

and by its fangs she died.

Octavian seems to have been almost entirely free from the divine

aspirations of Julius Cæsar and Antony. He was neither God nor romantic

hero; he was a man. He was a man of far greater breadth and capacity

than any other player in this last act of the Republican drama in Rome.

All things considered, he was perhaps the best thing that could have

happened to Rome at that time. He “voluntarily resigned the

extraordinary powers which he had held since 43, and, to quote his own

words, ‘handed over the republic to the control of the Senate and the

people of Rome.’ The old constitutional machinery was once more set in

motion; the Senate, assembly, and magistrates resumed their functions,

and Octavian himself was hailed as the ‘restorer of the commonwealth and

the champion of freedom.’ It was not so easy to determine what relation

he himself, the actual master of the Roman world, should occupy towards

this revived republic. His abdication, in any real sense of the word,

would have simply thrown everything back into confusion. The interests

of peace and order required that he should retain at least the

substantial part of his authority; and this object was in fact

accomplished, and the rule of the emperors founded, in a manner which

has no parallel in history. Any revival of the kingly title was out of

the question, and Octavian himself expressly refused the dictatorship.

Nor was any new office created or any new official title invented for

his benefit. But by Senate and people he was invested according to the

old constitutional forms with certain powers, as many citizens had been

before him, and so took his place by the side of the lawfully appointed

magistrates of the republic; only, to mark his pre-eminent dignity, as

the first of them all, the Senate decreed that he should take as an

additional cognomen that of ‘Augustus,’ while in common parlance he was

henceforth styled Princeps, a simple title of courtesy, familiar to

republican usage and conveying no other idea than that of a recognized

primacy and precedence over his fellow-citizens. The ideal sketched by

Cicero in his _De Republica_, of a constitutional president of a free

republic, was apparently realized; but it was only in appearance. For in

fact the special prerogatives conferred upon Octavian gave him back in

substance the autocratic authority he had resigned, and as between the

restored republic and its new _princeps_ the balance of power was

overwhelmingly on the side of the latter.”[255]

§ 7

In this manner it was that Roman republicanism ended in a _princeps_ or

ruling prince, and the first great experiment in a self-governing

community on a scale larger than that of tribe or city, collapsed and

failed.

The essence of its failure was that it could not sustain unity. In its

early stages its citizens, both patrician and plebeian, had a certain

tradition of justice and good faith, and of the loyalty of all citizens

to the law, and of the goodness of the law for all citizens; it clung to

this idea of the importance of the law and of law-abidingness nearly

into the first century B.C. But the unforeseen invention and development

of money, the temptations and disruptions of imperial expansion, the

entanglement of electoral methods, weakened and swamped this tradition

by presenting old issues in new disguises under which the judgment did

not recognize them, and by enabling men to be loyal to the professions

of citizenship and disloyal to its spirit. The bond of the Roman people

had always been a moral rather than a religious bond; their religion was

sacrificial and superstitious; it embodied no such great ideas of a

divine leader and of a sacred mission as Judaism was developing. As the

idea of citizenship failed and faded before the new occasions, there

remained no inner, that is to say no real, unity in the system at all.

Every man tended more and more to do what was right in his own eyes.

Under such conditions there was no choice between chaos and a return to

monarchy, to the acceptance of some chosen individual as the one

unifying will in the state. Of course in that return there is always

hidden the expectation that the monarch will become as it were magic,

will cease to be merely a petty human being, and will think and feel as

something greater and more noble, as indeed a state personage; and of

course monarchy invariably fails to satisfy that expectation. We shall

glance at the extent of this failure in the brief review we shall

presently make of the emperors of Rome. We shall find at last one of the

more constructive of these emperors, Constantine the Great, conscious of

his own inadequacy as a unifying power, turning to the faith, the

organization, and teaching network of one of the new religious movements

in the empire, to supply just that permeating and correlating factor in

men’s minds that was so manifestly wanting.

[Illustration: The ROMAN EMPIRE at the death of AUGUSTUS. A.D. 14]

With Cæsar, the civilization of Europe and Western Asia went back to

monarchy, and, through monarchy, assisted presently by organized

Christianity, it sought to achieve peace, righteousness, happiness, and

world order for close upon eighteen centuries. Then almost suddenly it

began reverting to republicanism, first in one country and then in

another, and, assisted by the new powers of printing and the press and

of organized general education, and by the universalist religious ideas

in which the world had been soaked for generations, it has now resumed

again the effort to create a republican world-state and a world-wide

scheme of economic righteousness which the Romans had made so

prematurely and in which they had so utterly and disastrously failed.

Certain conditions, we are now beginning to perceive, are absolutely

necessary to such a creation; conditions which it is inconceivable that

any pre-Christian Roman could have regarded as possible. We may still

think the attainment of these conditions a vastly laborious and

difficult and uncertain undertaking, but we understand that the attempt

must be made because no other prospect before us gives even a promise of

happiness or self-respect or preservation of our kind. The first of

these conditions is that there should be a common political idea in the

minds of all men, an idea of the state thought of as the personal

possession of each individual and as the backbone fact of his scheme of

duties. In the early days of Rome, when it was a little visible state,

twenty miles square, such notions could be and were developed in

children in their homes, and by what they saw and heard of the political

lives of their fathers; but in a larger country such as Rome had already

become before the war with Pyrrhus, there was a need of an organized

teaching of the history, of the main laws, and of the general intentions

of the state towards everyone if this moral unity was to be maintained.

But the need was never realized, and no attempt at any such teaching was

ever made. At the time it could not have been made. It is inconceivable

that it could have been made. The knowledge was not there, and there

existed no class from which the needed teachers could be drawn and no

conception of an organization for any such systematic moral and

intellectual training as the teaching organization of Christianity, with

its creeds and catechisms and sermons and confirmations, presently

supplied.

Moreover, we know nowadays that even a universal education of this sort

supplies only the basis for a healthy republican state. Next to

education there must come abundant, prompt, and truthful information of

what is going on in the state, and frank and free discussion of the

issues of the time. Even nowadays these functions are performed only

very imperfectly and badly by the press we have and by our publicists

and politicians; but badly though it is done, the thing is done, and the

fact that it is done at all argues that it may ultimately be done well.

In the Roman state it was not even attempted. The Roman citizen got his

political facts from rumour and the occasional orator. He stood wedged

in the forum, imperfectly hearing a distant speaker. He probably

misconceived every issue upon which he voted.

And of the monstrous ineffectiveness of the Roman voting system we have

already written.

Unable to surmount or remove these obstacles to a sane and effective

popular government, the political instincts of the Roman mind turned

towards monarchy. But it was not monarchy of the later European type,

not hereditary monarchy, which was now installed in Rome. The _princeps_

was really like an American war-time president elected not for four

years, but for life, able to appoint senators instead of being

restrained by an elected senate, and with a rabble popular meeting in

the place of the house of representatives. He was also _pontifex

maximus_, chief of the sacrificial priests, a function unknown at

Washington; and in practice it became usual for him to designate and

train his successor and to select for that honour a son or an adopted

son or a near relation whom he could trust. The power of the _princeps_

was in itself enormous to entrust to the hands of a single man without

any adequate checks, but it was further enhanced by the tradition of

monarch-worship which had now spread out from Egypt over the entire

Hellenized east, and which was coming to Rome in the head of every

Oriental slave and immigrant. By natural and imperceptible degrees the

idea of the god emperor came to dominate the whole Romanized world.

Only one thing presently remained to remind the god emperor that he was

mortal, and that was the army. The god emperor was never safe upon the

Olympus of the Palatine Hill at Rome. He was only secure while he was

the beloved captain of his legions. And as a consequence only the

hardworking emperors who kept their legions active and in close touch

with themselves had long reigns. The sword overhung the emperor and

spurred him to incessant activity. If he left things to his generals,

one of those generals presently replaced him. This spur was perhaps the

redeeming feature of the Roman Imperial system. In the greater,

compacter, and securer empire of China there was not the same need of

legions, and so there was not the same swift end for lazy or dissipated

or juvenile monarchs that overtook such types in Rome.

XXIX

THE CÆSARS BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE GREAT PLAINS OF THE OLD WORLD[256]

§ 1. _A Short Catalogue of Emperors._ § 2. _Roman Civilization at

its Zenith._ § 3. _Limitations of the Roman Mind._ § 4. _The Stir

of the Great Plains._ § 5. _The Western (true Roman) Empire

crumples up._ § 6. _The Eastern (revived Hellenic) Empire._

§ 1