HOW THE REPUBLIC OF ROME AFTER CENTURIES OF UNREST AND REVOLUTION BECAME
AN EMPIRE
WHEN the Roman armies returned from these many victorious campaigns,
they were received with great jubilation. Alas and alack! this sudden
glory did not make the country any happier. On the contrary. The endless
campaigns had ruined the farmers who had been obliged to do the hard
work of Empire making. It had placed too much power in the hands of the
successful generals (and their private friends) who had used the war as
an excuse for wholesale robbery.
The old Roman Republic had been proud of the simplicity which had
characterised the lives of her famous men. The new Republic felt ashamed
of the shabby coats and the high principles which had been fashionable
in the days of its grandfathers. It became a land of rich people ruled
by rich people for the benefit of rich people. As such it was doomed to
disastrous failure, as I shall now tell you.
Within less than a century and a half. Rome had become the mistress of
practically all the land around the Mediterranean. In those early days
of history a prisoner of war lost his freedom and became a slave. The
Roman regarded war as a very serious business and he showed no mercy to
a conquered foe. After the fall of Carthage, the Carthaginian women and
children were sold into bondage together with their own slaves. And a
like fate awaited the obstinate inhabitants of Greece and Macedonia and
Spain and Syria when they dared to revolt against the Roman power.
Two thousand years ago a slave was merely a piece of machinery. Nowadays
a rich man invests his money in factories. The rich people of Rome
(senators, generals and war-profiteers) invested theirs in land and in
slaves. The land they bought or took in the newly-acquired provinces.
The slaves they bought in open market wherever they happened to be
cheapest. During most of the third and second centuries before Christ
there was a plentiful supply, and as a result the landowners worked
their slaves until they dropped dead in their tracks, when they bought
new ones at the nearest bargain-counter of Corinthian or Carthaginian
captives.
And now behold the fate of the freeborn farmer!
He had done his duty toward Rome and he had fought her battles without
complaint. But when he came home after ten, fifteen or twenty years, his
lands were covered with weeds and his family had been ruined. But he was
a strong man and willing to begin life anew. He sowed and planted and
waited for the harvest. He carried his grain to the market together with
his cattle and his poultry, to find that the large landowners who worked
their estates with slaves could underbid him all along the line. For a
couple of years he tried to hold his own. Then he gave up in despair. He
left the country and he went to the nearest city. In the city he was as
hungry as he had been before on the land. But he shared his misery with
thousands of other disinherited beings. They crouched together in filthy
hovels in the suburbs of the large cities. They were apt to get sick and
die from terrible epidemics. They were all profoundly discontented. They
had fought for their country and this was their reward. They were always
willing to listen to those plausible spell-binders who gather around a
public grievance like so many hungry vultures, and soon they became a
grave menace to the safety of the state.
But the class of the newly-rich shrugged its shoulders. "We have our
army and our policemen," they argued, "they will keep the mob in order."
And they hid themselves behind the high walls of their pleasant villas
and cultivated their gardens and read the poems of a certain Homer which
a Greek slave had just translated into very pleasing Latin hexameters.
In a few families however the old tradition of unselfish service to the
Commonwealth continued. Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus,
had been married to a Roman by the name of Gracchus. She had two sons,
Tiberius and Gaius. When the boys grew up they entered politics and
tried to bring about certain much-needed reforms. A census had shown
that most of the land of the Italian peninsula was owned by two thousand
noble families. Tiberius Gracchus, having been elected a Tribune, tried
to help the freemen. He revived two ancient laws which restricted the
number of acres which a single owner might possess. In this way he hoped
to revive the valuable old class of small and independent freeholders.
The newly-rich called him a robber and an enemy of the state. There were
street riots. A party of thugs was hired to kill the popular Tribune.
Tiberius Gracchus was attacked when he entered the assembly and was
beaten to death. Ten years later his brother Gaius tried the experiment
of reforming a nation against the expressed wishes of a strong
privileged class. He passed a "poor law" which was meant to help the
destitute farmers. Eventually it made the greater part of the Roman
citizens into professional beggars.
He established colonies of destitute people in distant parts of the
empire, but these settlements failed to attract the right sort of
people. Before Gaius Gracchus could do more harm he too was murdered and
his followers were either killed or exiled. The first two reformers had
been gentlemen. The two who came after were of a very different stamp.
They were professional soldiers. One was called Marius. The name of the
other was Sulla. Both enjoyed a large personal following.
Sulla was the leader of the landowners. Marius, the victor in a great
battle at the foot of the Alps when the Teutons and the Cimbri had been
annihilated, was the popular hero of the disinherited freemen.
Now it happened in the year 88 B.C. that the Senate of Rome was greatly
disturbed by rumours that came from Asia. Mithridates, king of a country
along the shores of the Black Sea, and a Greek on his mother's side,
had seen the possibility of establishing a second Alexandrian Empire.
He began his campaign for world-domination with the murder of all Roman
citizens who happened to be in Asia Minor, men, women and children.
Such an act, of course, meant war. The Senate equipped an army to march
against the King of Pontus and punish him for his crime. But who was to
be commander-in-chief? "Sulla," said the Senate, "because he is Consul."
"Marius," said the mob, "because he has been Consul five times and
because he is the champion of our rights."
Possession is nine points of the law. Sulla happened to be in actual
command of the army. He went west to defeat Mithridates and Marius fled
to Africa. There he waited until he heard that Sulla had crossed into
Asia. He then returned to Italy, gathered a motley crew of malcontents,
marched on Rome and entered the city with his professional highwaymen,
spent five days and five nights, slaughtering the enemies of the
Senatorial party, got himself elected Consul and promptly died from the
excitement of the last fortnight.
There followed four years of disorder. Then Sulla, having defeated
Mithridates, announced that he was ready to return to Rome and settle
a few old scores of his own. He was as good as his word. For weeks his
soldiers were busy executing those of their fellow citizens who were
suspected of democratic sympathies. One day they got hold of a young
fellow who had been often seen in the company of Marius. They were going
to hang him when some one interfered. "The boy is too young," he said,
and they let him go. His name was Julius Caesar. You shall meet him
again on the next page.
As for Sulla, he became "Dictator," which meant sole and supreme ruler
of all the Roman possessions. He ruled Rome for four years, and he died
quietly in his bed, having spent the last year of his life tenderly
raising his cabbages, as was the custom of so many Romans who had spent
a lifetime killing their fellow-men.
But conditions did not grow better. On the contrary, they grew worse.
Another general, Gnaeus Pompeius, or Pompey, a close friend of Sulla,
went east to renew the war against the ever troublesome Mithridates. He
drove that energetic potentate into the mountains where Mithridates took
poison and killed himself, well knowing what fate awaited him as a
Roman captive. Next he re-established the authority of Rome over Syria,
destroyed Jerusalem, roamed through western Asia, trying to revive the
myth of Alexander the Great, and at last (in the year 62) returned to
Rome with a dozen ship-loads of defeated Kings and Princes and Generals,
all of whom were forced to march in the triumphal procession of this
enormously popular Roman who presented his city with the sum of forty
million dollars in plunder.
It was necessary that the government of Rome be placed in the hands of
a strong man. Only a few months before, the town had almost fallen
into the hands of a good-for-nothing young aristocrat by the name of
Catiline, who had gambled away his money and hoped to reimburse himself
for his losses by a little plundering. Cicero, a public-spirited lawyer,
had discovered the plot, had warned the Senate, and had forced Catiline
to flee. But there were other young men with similar ambitions and it
was no time for idle talk.
Pompey organised a triumvirate which was to take charge of affairs. He
became the leader of this Vigilante Committee. Gaius Julius Caesar, who
had made a reputation for himself as governor of Spain, was the second
in command. The third was an indifferent sort of person by the name of
Crassus. He had been elected because he was incredibly rich, having been
a successful contractor of war supplies. He soon went upon an expedition
against the Parthians and was killed.
As for Caesar, who was by far the ablest of the three, he decided that
he needed a little more military glory to become a popular hero. He
crossed the Alps and conquered that part of the world which is now
called France. Then he hammered a solid wooden bridge across the Rhine
and invaded the land of the wild Teutons. Finally he took ship and
visited England. Heaven knows where he might have ended if he had not
been forced to return to Italy. Pompey, so he was informed, had been
appointed dictator for life. This of course meant that Caesar was to
be placed on the list of the "retired officers," and the idea did not
appeal to him. He remembered that he had begun life as a follower of
Marius. He decided to teach the Senators and their "dictator" another
lesson. He crossed the Rubicon River which separated the province of
Cis-alpine Gaul from Italy. Everywhere he was received as the "friend of
the people." Without difficulty Caesar entered Rome and Pompey fled to
Greece Caesar followed him and defeated his followers near Pharsalus.
Pompey sailed across the Mediterranean and escaped to Egypt. When he
landed he was murdered by order of young king Ptolemy. A few days later
Caesar arrived. He found himself caught in a trap. Both the Egyptians
and the Roman garrison which had remained faithful to Pompey, attacked
his camp.
Fortune was with Caesar. He succeeded in setting fire to the Egyptian
fleet. Incidentally the sparks of the burning vessels fell on the
roof of the famous library of Alexandria (which was just off the water
front,) and destroyed it. Next he attacked the Egyptian army, drove
the soldiers into the Nile, drowned Ptolemy, and established a new
government under Cleopatra, the sister of the late king. Just then word
reached him that Pharnaces, the son and heir of Mithridates, had gone
on the war-path. Caesar marched northward, defeated Pharnaces in a war
which lasted five days, sent word of his victory to Rome in the famous
sentence "veni, vidi, vici," which is Latin for "I came, I saw, I
conquered," and returned to Egypt where he fell desperately in love with
Cleopatra, who followed him to Rome when he returned to take charge of
the government, in the year 46. He marched at the head of not less than
four different victory-parades, having won four different campaigns.
Then Caesar appeared in the Senate to report upon his adventures, and
the grateful Senate made him "dictator" for ten years. It was a fatal
step.
The new dictator made serious attempts to reform the Roman state.
He made it possible for freemen to become members of the Senate. He
conferred the rights of citizenship upon distant communities as had been
done in the early days of Roman history. He permitted "foreigners" to
exercise influence upon the government. He reformed the administration
of the distant provinces which certain aristocratic families had come to
regard as their private possessions. In short he did many things for
the good of the majority of the people but which made him thoroughly
unpopular with the most powerful men in the state. Half a hundred young
aristocrats formed a plot "to save the Republic." On the Ides of March
(the fifteenth of March according to that new calendar which Caesar had
brought with him from Egypt) Caesar was murdered when he entered the
Senate. Once more Rome was without a master.
There were two men who tried to continue the tradition of Caesar's
glory. One was Antony, his former secretary. The other was Octavian,
Caesar's grand-nephew and heir to his estate. Octavian remained in
Rome, but Antony went to Egypt to be near Cleopatra with whom he too had
fallen in love, as seems to have been the habit of Roman generals.
A war broke out between the two. In the battle of Actium, Octavian
defeated Antony. Antony killed himself and Cleopatra was left alone to
face the enemy. She tried very hard to make Octavian her third Roman
conquest. When she saw that she could make no impression upon this very
proud aristocrat, she killed herself, and Egypt became a Roman province.
As for Octavian, he was a very wise young man and he did not repeat the
mistake of his famous uncle. He knew how people will shy at words. He
was very modest in his demands when he returned to Rome. He did not want
to be a "dictator." He would be entirely satisfied with the title of
"the Honourable." But when the Senate, a few years later, addressed him
as Augustus--the Illustrious--he did not object and a few years later
the man in the street called him Caesar, or Kaiser, while the soldiers,
accustomed to regard Octavian as their Commander-in-chief referred to
him as the Chief, the Imperator or Emperor. The Republic had become an
Empire, but the average Roman was hardly aware of the fact.
In 14 A.D. his position as the Absolute Ruler of the Roman people had
become so well established that he was made an object of that divine
worship which hitherto had been reserved for the Gods. And his
successors were true "Emperors"--the absolute rulers of the greatest
empire the world had ever seen.
If the truth be told, the average citizen was sick and tired of anarchy
and disorder. He did not care who ruled him provided the new master gave
him a chance to live quietly and without the noise of eternal street
riots. Octavian assured his subjects forty years of peace. He had no
desire to extend the frontiers of his domains, In the year 9 A.D. he
had contem-plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was
inhabited by the Teutons. But Varrus, his general, had been killed with
all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that the Romans made no
further attempts to civilise these wild people.
They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem of internal
reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two centuries of revolution
and foreign war had repeatedly killed the best men among the younger
generations. It had ruined the class of the free farmers. It had
introduced slave labor, against which no freeman could hope to compete.
It had turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized
and unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large
bureaucracy--petty officials who were underpaid and who were forced to
take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for their families.
Worst of all, it had accustomed people to violence, to blood-shed, to a
barbarous pleasure in the pain and suffering of others.
Outwardly, the Roman state during the first century of our era was a
magnificent political structure, so large that Alexander's empire became
one of its minor provinces. Underneath this glory there lived millions
upon millions of poor and tired human beings, toiling like ants who have
built a nest underneath a heavy stone. They worked for the benefit of
some one else. They shared their food with the animals of the fields.
They lived in stables. They died without hope.
It was the seven hundred and fifty-third year since the founding of
Rome. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus was living in the palace
of the Palatine Hill, busily engaged upon the task of ruling his empire.
In a little village of distant Syria, Mary, the wife of Joseph the
Carpenter, was tending her little boy, born in a stable of Bethlehem.
This is a strange world.
Before long, the palace and the stable were to meet in open combat.
And the stable was to emerge victorious.