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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
No. 30
_Editors_:
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A.
Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
16mo cloth, 50 cents _net_, by mail 56 cents
_HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY_
_Already Published_
THE DAWN OF HISTORY By J. L. Myres
ROME By W. Warde Fowler
THE PAPACY AND MODERN TIMES By William Barry
MEDIEVAL EUROPE By H. W. C. Davis
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION By Hilaire Belloc
THE IRISH NATIONALITY By Mrs. J. R. Green
CANADA By A. G. Bradley
THE CIVIL WAR By Frederic L. Paxson
HISTORY OF OUR TIME (1885-1911) By C. P. Gooch
POLAR EXPLORATION (with maps) By W. S. Bruce
THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA By Sir H. H. Johnston
THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA By H. A. Giles
A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE By G. H. Perris
MODERN GEOGRAPHY By Marion Newbigin
_Future Issues_
A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE By Herbert Fisher
ANCIENT GREECE By Gilbert Murray
THE REFORMATION By Principal Lindsay
A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA By Prof. Milyoukov
PEOPLES AND PROBLEMS OF INDIA By Sir T. W. Holderness
FRANCE OF TO-DAY By Gabriel Monod
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES By Patrick Geddes
ANCIENT EGYPT By F. L. Griffith
THE COLONIAL PERIOD By Charles M. Andrews
FROM JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN By William MacDonald
RECONSTRUCTION AND UNION (1865-1912) By Paul L. Haworth
LATIN AMERICA By W. R. Shepherd
ROME
BY
W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A.
AUTHOR OF “LIFE OF JULIUS CÆSAR,” “THE CITY-STATE OF THE GREEKS AND
ROMANS,” “SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME IN THE AGE OF CICERO,” ETC.
[Illustration: Οὐ πολλὰ ἀλλὰ πολύ]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
Copyright, 1912,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I Introductory 7
II The Advance of Rome in Italy 28
III The Training of the Roman Character 55
IV The Struggle with Carthage and Hannibal 84
V Dominion and Degeneracy 111
VI The Revolution: Act I. 136
VII The Revolution: Act II. 161
VIII Augustus—The Revival of the Roman Spirit 187
IX Life in the Roman Empire 212
X The Empire under the Antonines—Conclusion 229
Bibliography 253
Index 255
ROME
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Let us suppose an ordinary Englishman, with no special knowledge of
classical history, to be looking at a collection of Roman antiquities in
the cases of a museum. He will probably not linger long over these
cases, but will pass on to something more likely to attract his
interest. The objects he is looking at are, for the most part, neither
striking nor beautiful, and the same are presented for his inspection
over and over again as collections from various Roman sites. They are
chiefly useful things, implements and utensils of all kinds, and
fragments of military weapons and armour. In the coins he can take no
delight, because, apart from the fact that, uninterpreted, they have no
tale to tell him, they do not excite his admiration by beauty of design
and workmanship. If, indeed, he were visiting a museum at Rome, he would
find plenty of beautiful things in it; but these are works of Greek
artists, imported by wealthy or tasteful Romans in the later ages of
Rome’s history. A typical collection of genuine Roman antiquities would
probably have the effect I describe. Utility, not beauty, would seem to
have been the motive of the people who left these things behind them.
The same motive will also be suggested to us if we visit any of the
larger Roman works either in this country or on the Continent. Most of
us know the look of a Roman road running straight over hill and valley,
and meant mainly for military purposes, to enable troops to move rapidly
and to survey the country as they marched. In the towns which have been
excavated, we usually find that the most spacious and striking buildings
must have been the meeting-halls (_basilicæ_), in which business of all
kinds was transacted, and especially business connected with law and
government. Very often, though not in the comparatively poor province of
Britain, this characteristic of utility is combined with
another—solidity and imposing size. In this well-watered island the
Romans did not need aqueducts to bring a constant supply of water to
their towns, but in Italy and the south of France these great works are
sometimes unnecessarily huge and imposing. Even when they left the path
of strict utility, as in their triumphal arches and gateways, for which
we must go to Trier in Germany, or to Orange in the south of France, or
to Italy itself, they held strongly to the principles of solidity and
imposing size. A writer who knew their art well has said that their
notion of the highest of all things, their _summum bonum_, was not the
beautiful, but the powerful, and that they thought they had as a people
received this notion from heaven.
It would, indeed, be wrong to say that there is no beauty in Roman art;
but it is quite in accordance with what has just been said, that even in
the best of it there is a strong tendency to realism, to matter of fact.
In their sculpture they were especially strong in portraiture, and in
depicting scenes of human life they never or rarely idealise. A battle
scene, or a picture on stone of life in a city, is crowded with figures,
just because it really was so, and the work is without that restfulness
for the eye which the perfect grouping of a Greek artist so often
supplies. So, too, in literature; all their greatest poetry has a
strictly practical object, and bears directly on human life. The great
philosophical poem of Lucretius was meant to rescue the Romans from
religious superstition; the object of the _Æneid_ of Virgil, of which I
shall have more to say in another chapter, was to recall the degenerate
Roman of that day to the sense of duty in the home and in the State.
Their one original invention in literary form was satire, by which they
meant comment, friendly or hostile, on the human life around them. Their
myths and legends, of which there was no such abundant crop as in
Greece, dealt chiefly with the founding of cities, or with the heroic
deeds of human beings.[1] On the whole they excelled most in oratory and
history; and their prose came to perfection earlier than their poetry.
One other feature of their character shall be mentioned here, which is
entirely in keeping with the rest, and often escapes notice. If in the
works of their hands and their brains they were not an imaginative
people, we can well understand that they had not this gift in practical
life. Imagination in action takes the form of adventurousness, as we may
see in our own history; the literary imaginativeness of Elizabethan
England has its counterpart in the adventurous voyages of Elizabethan
seamen. The Romans were not an adventurous people; they were not
imaginative enough to be so. They penetrated, indeed, into unknown
countries; Cæsar reached Britain and bridged the Rhine, but that great
man, a true Roman born, had a temperament rather scientific than
romantic. He did as almost all conquering Romans had done before him,
and were to do after him—he advanced solidly, making his way safe behind
him and feeling carefully in front of him. His book about his wars in
Gaul was written without a touch of imagination, and for strictly
practical purposes. There is, indeed, in the generation before Cæsar, an
exception so striking that it may be said to prove the rule; he who
reads Plutarch’s charming life of Sertorius, an Italian from the
mountains of central Italy, will find both romance and adventure in his
story.
It is plain, then, that we have to do in this volume with a people not
of imagination, but of action: a people intensely alive to the
necessities and difficulties of human life. The Romans were, in fact,
the most practical people in history; and this enabled them to supply
what was wanting to the civilisation of the Mediterranean basin in the
work of the Greeks. They themselves were well aware of this quality, and
proud of it. We find it expressed by the elder Cato quite at the
beginning of the best age of Roman literature; his ideal Roman is _vir
fortis et strenuus_—a man of strong courage and active energy. Tacitus,
in the later days of that literature, says that all designs and deeds
should be directed to the practical ends of life (_ad utilitatem vitæ_).
Midway between these two, we have the great Latin poets constantly
singing of the hardihood and the practical virtues which had made Rome
great, and Italy great under Rome’s leadership. “A race of hardy breed,
we carry our children to the streams and harden them in the bitter, icy
water; as boys they spend wakeful nights over the chase, and tire out
the whirlwind, but in manhood, unwearied by toil and trained to poverty,
they subdue the soil with their mattocks, or shake towns in war” (Virg.,
_Æn._ ix. 607 foll.). These lines, though applied to an Italian stock,
were meant to remind the Roman of a life that had once been his. The
words in which the Romans delighted as expressing their national
characteristics, all tell the same tale: _gravitas_, the seriousness of
demeanour which is the outward token of a steadfast purpose;
_continentia_, self-restraint; _industria_ and _diligentia_, words which
we have inherited from them, needing no explanation; _constantia_,
perseverance in conduct; and last, not least, _virtus_, manliness, which
originally meant activity and courage, and with ripening civilisation
took on a broader and more ethical meaning. Quotations might be
multiplied a thousandfold to prove the honest admiration of this people
for their own nobler qualities. As exemplified in an individual,
Plutarch’s life of the elder Cato, which can be read as well in English
as in the original Greek, will give a good idea of these.
But it is essential to note that this hard and practical turn of the
Roman mind was in some ways curiously limited. It cannot be said that
they excelled either in industrial or commercial pursuits. Agriculture
was their original occupation, and trade-gilds existed at Rome very
early in her history; but the story of their agriculture is rather a sad
one, and Rome has never become a great industrial city. Their first book
about husbandry was translated from the Carthaginian, and their methods
of commerce they learnt chiefly from the Greeks. It was in another
direction that their genius for practical work drew them: to the arts
and methods of discipline, law, government.
We can see this peculiar gift showing itself at all stages of their
development: in the agricultural family which was the germ of all their
later growth, in the city-state which grew from that germ, and in the
Empire, founded by the leaders of the city-state, and organised by
Augustus and his successors. It is seen, too, in their military system,
which won them their empire; they did not fight merely for spoil or
glory, but for clearly realised practical purposes. As Tacitus says of a
single German tribe which possessed something of this gift, the Romans
did not so much go out to battle as to war. True, they constantly made
blunders and suffered defeat; they often “muddled through” difficulties
as we do ourselves; but they refused to recognise defeat, and profited
by adverse fortune. Listen once more to a few words of old Cato; in his
_Origins of Rome_, written for his son, he wrote: “Adversity tames us,
and teaches us our true line of conduct, while good fortune is apt to
warp us from the way of prudence.” Thus they went on from defeat to
victory, conquest, and government. It is worth while not only to lay to
heart, but to learn by heart, the famous lines in which Virgil sums up
the Roman’s conception of his own work in the world—
“Others will mould their bronzes to breathe with a tenderer grace,
Draw, I doubt not, from marble a vivid life to the face,
Plead at the bar more deftly, with sapient wands of the wise,
Trace heaven’s courses and changes, predict us stars to arise.
Thine, O Roman, remember, to reign over every race!
These be thine arts, thy glories, the ways of peace to proclaim,
Mercy to show to the fallen, the proud with battle to tame!”
_Æneid_, vi. 847-853
(Bowen’s translation).
It was this power of ruling, which itself implies a habit of discipline,
that marked out Rome as the natural successor of Greece in European
civilisation; and it grew naturally out of the purely practical bent of
the early Romans, who were unhampered in their constant activity by
fancy, reflection, or culture. Without it, we may doubt if the work of
the Greeks would have been saved for us when the storms from the north,
invasions of barbarian peoples, fell at last upon the sunny lands filled
with the spirit of Greek thought and the divine works of Greek artists.
To Roman discipline, law, and government, we owe not only much that even
now is every day of practical benefit to us, but the preservation of
what we still possess of the treasures of Hellenic genius.
For this reason I assume that this book will be taken up by most readers
after they have made some acquaintance with the history and thought of
the Greeks. It is true that the history of the two peoples is best
looked at as one great whole; there is a general likeness in their
institutions; the form of the State, and the ideas of government, with
which each grew to maturity, were in the main the same. But Roman mental
development was much slower than Greek; and Greece was already beginning
to lose her vitality when Rome was still illiterate and unable to record
her own history adequately. Thus Greek influence was the first to tell
upon the world; the basin of the Mediterranean was already permeated by
the Greek spirit when Roman influence began to work upon it; and there
can be no doubt that he who begins with Roman history and then goes on
to Greek is reversing the natural order of things.
I will also assume that those who have begun to read this book are
provided with some knowledge of that Mediterranean basin which is the
scene of Græco-Roman history; such as can be gained by frequent
contemplation of a good map. They will be familiar with Sicily and south
Italy, which were teeming with Greek settlements when Roman history
really begins. They will probably have realised how short a step it is
from Italy to Africa, whether or no Sicily be taken as a stepping-stone;
Cato could show fresh figs in the Roman senate which had been grown in
Carthaginian territory. They will have realised that you can pass from
the “heel” of Italy to the Hellenic peninsula in a single night, as
Cæsar did when he embarked his army at Brindisi to attack his rival;
such geographical facts are of immense importance in explaining not only
the foreign policy of Rome, but also the development of her culture. And
thus furnished, they will begin to be curious about the destiny of the
Italian peninsula, of which Greek history has had little to tell them.
Leaving that question for the present, they will wish to know why the
Greeks did not colonise the centre and north of Italy as they did the
south and south-west, but left room enough for a new type of
civilisation to grow up there. And above all, they will wish to know how
and why a single city on the western coast should have succeeded in
building up a great power in Italy quite independent of Greece, and
destined eventually to supersede her, which may be reckoned as a factor
almost as important in the making of our modern civilisation as Hellas
herself.
This last question is the one which I must try to answer in the earlier
part of this book; in the later chapters I shall have to deal with
another one—how this single city-state contrived to weld together the
whole Mediterranean civilisation, strongly enough to give it several
centuries of security against uncivilised enemies in the north, and
half-civilised enemies in the east. But for the moment let us see why
the Greeks did not permeate Italy with their own civilisation as they
did Sicily: how it was that they left room for a new power, capable
eventually of shielding them and their work from destruction. To answer
this question we must consider the nature of the Italian peninsula, and
the character of the races then living in it.
The simple fact is, that though the shrewd commercial Greek had seized
on all the best harbours in the long, narrow peninsula, these harbours
were all in the south coast, about the “heel” of Italy, or in the
south-west coast, in the volcanic region of the modern Naples, which was
itself one of these Greek settlements. The east coast north of the
“heel” is almost harbourless, as will be realised by any one who takes
the route by rail to Brindisi on his way to Egypt or India. _Italy is a
mountainous country_—a fact never to be forgotten in Roman history—and
its mountains, the long chain of the Apennines, have their spinal ridge
much nearer the east than the west coast, and descend upon the sea so
sharply on that side that for long distances road or railway only just
finds a passage. All along this east coast there was nothing to tempt
Greeks to settle, and as they rarely or never penetrated far inland from
their settlements, their influence never spread into this mountainous
region from the many seacoast towns of Magna Græcia, as their part of
Italy was called. On the Bay of Naples they had, indeed, a better
chance; here there was a rich fertile plain stretching away to the
hills, which on this side come down less steeply than on the eastern;
this we shall hear of again as the Plain of Campania, in which Greek
influence was very strong and active, capable of penetrating beyond its
limits northward. But north of this again they left no permanent
settlements; good harbours are wanting, and such as there are were
occupied about the eighth century B.C. by a people at that time as
enterprising as themselves, the Etruscans. These, too, had been recent
immigrants into the peninsula from the east, and together with the
Greeks they formed the only obstacles to the growth of a native Italian
power—a power, that is, belonging to the older races that had long been
settled there. The Greeks were not likely to interfere with such a
growth, as we have seen; whether the Etruscans were to do so we have yet
to see.
It was, in fact, this Etruscan people who first gave an Italian stock
the chance of rising into a great Mediterranean power; and in order to
understand how this was, we must look at a good map of central Italy,
which gives a fair idea of the elevations in this part of the peninsula.
Looking at such a map, it is easy to see that the long, narrow leg of
Italy is cloven in twain about the middle by a river, the Tiber, the
only river of considerable size and real historical importance, south of
the Po. It is formed of several streams which descend from the central
mass of the Apennines, now called the Abruzzi, but soon gathers into a
swift though not a wide river, and emerges from that mountainous
district some five-and-twenty miles from the sea, into what we now call
the Roman Campagna, the Latium of ancient times; skirting the northern
edge of this comparatively level district it falls into the sea, without
forming a natural harbour, about half-way up the western coast of the
peninsula. To the north of it and of the plain were settled a number of
cities, more or less independent of each other, forming the Etruscan
people, whose origin we do not yet know for certain, and whose language
has never been deciphered from the inscriptions they have left behind
them; a mysterious race, active in war and commerce, who had subdued but
not exterminated the native population around them. To the east and
south of the Tiber, stretching far along the mountainous region and its
western outskirts, was a race of hardy mountaineers, broken up, as hill
peoples usually are, into a number of communities without any principle
of cohesion except that of the various tribes to which they belonged.
The northern part of this sturdy hill-folk was known as Umbrians and
Sabines; the southern part as Samnites or Oscans. They all spoke
dialects of the same tongue, a tongue akin to those which most European
peoples still speak. Lastly, immediately to the south of the Tiber in
the last part of its course, occupying the plain which stretches here
between the mountains, the river, and the sea, there was settled another
branch of this same stock, speaking another dialect destined to be known
for ever as Latin. These three sub-races of a great stock—Umbrians,
Samnites, and Latins—are meant when we speak of a native Italian
population as opposed to Greek or Etruscan immigrants. Doubtless they
were not the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, but of older stocks
history knows nothing that concerns us in this book. These are the
peoples who were destined to be supreme in the Mediterranean basin, and
eventually to govern the whole civilised world.
It is as well to be quite clear at once that the acquisition of this
supremacy was not the work of one only of these peoples, the Latins, or
of one city only of the Latins, _i.e._ Rome. It was the work of all
these stocks which I have called native Italian. Roman is a convenient
word, and Rome was all along the leader in action and the organising
power; but the material, and in a great part as time went on the
brain-power also, was contributed by all these peoples taken together.
They had first to submit to the great leader and organiser, Rome, a fate
against which, as we shall see, they struggled long; but no sooner had
they submitted than they were added to the account of Italian
development, and with few exceptions played their new part with a good
courage.
So much, then, for the Italian peoples who were to supersede the Greeks
in the world’s history. But let us now return for a moment to the Tiber,
and fix our eyes on the last five-and-twenty miles of its course, where
it separates the plain of Latium from the Etruscan people to the north.
The Latin-speaking stock were far more in danger from these Etruscans
than the Umbrian and Samnite mountaineers; nothing but the river was
between them and their enemies, for enemies they undoubtedly were, bent
on pushing farther south, like the Danes in England in the ninth century
of our era. The Latins had, indeed, a magnificent natural fortress in
the middle of their plain, in the extinct volcano of the Alban mountain,
some 3000 feet above sea-level; and here, according to a sure tradition,
was their original chief city, Alba Longa. But this was of no avail
against an invader from the north; it was the river that was the vital
concern of Latium when once the Etruscans had become established to the
north of it. Now at one point, some twenty miles by water from the
river’s mouth, was a group of small hills, rising to a height of about
160 feet, three of them almost isolated and abutting on the stream, and
the others in reality a part of the plain to the south, with their
northern sides falling somewhat steeply towards the Tiber. Here, too,
was an island in the river, which might give an enemy an easy chance of
crossing. On this position there arose at some uncertain date, but
beyond doubt as a fortress against the Etruscan power, a city called
_Roma_; and there a city has been ever since, known by the same name. It
is likely enough that it was an outpost founded by the city of Alba
Longa, which eventually itself vanished out of history; and this was the
tradition of later days. If we can accept the motive of the
foundation—the defence of Latium against her foe, we need not trouble
about the many legends of it.
Rome started on her wonderful career as a military outpost of a people
akin to her, and face to face with an enemy with whom she had no sort of
relationship. If she could but hold her position there was obviously a
great future for her. The position on the Tiber was, in fact,
strategically the best in Italy. It is, as a great Roman historian said,
just in the centre of the peninsula. There was easy access to the sea
both by land and water, and a way open into central Italy up the Tiber
valley—the one great natural entrance from the sea. She was far enough
from the sea to be safe from raiders, yet near enough to be in
communication with other peoples by means of shipping. If enemies
attacked her from different directions inland, she could move against
them on what in military language we may call “inner lines”—she could
strike simultaneously from a common base. From the sea no power dared
attack her, until in her degenerate days Genseric landed at Ostia in
A.D. 455. On the whole, we may say that no other city in Italy had the
same chance, as regards position, of dominating the whole of Italy, and
that in those early days of her history the Etruscans unwittingly taught
her how to use this great advantage. Just as the kingdom of the West
Saxons, and their supremacy in England, was built up by the stern
necessity of having to resist the Danes, so the Romans became a leading
people in Italy by virtue of having to withstand the Etruscans.
In my next chapter I propose to tell the story in outline (and in detail
it cannot be told for want of knowledge) of the advance of the Roman
power to the leadership of Italy. Then I will try and explain the
qualities and the organisation which enabled her to turn her chances to
account.