THE ADVANCE OF ROME IN ITALY
I said in the last chapter that if Rome could only hold the line of the
lower Tiber against the Etruscans, great possibilities of advance were
open to her. How long she held it we do not know; but there is hardly a
doubt that in course of time—some time probably in the sixth century
B.C.—she lost it, and even herself fell into the hands of the enemy. The
tale is not told in her legendary annals; but we have other convincing
evidence. The last three kings of Rome seem to have been Etruscans. The
great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill, which was founded at
this time, was in the Etruscan style, and built on foundations of
Etruscan masonry, some of which can still be seen in the garden of the
German embassy in modern Rome. Below this temple, as you go to the
river, was a street called the street of the Etruscans, and there are
other signs of the conquest which need not be given here. On the whole
we may believe that this persistent enemy crossed the Tiber higher up,
where she already had a footing, and so took the city in flank and rear.
Fortunately, the Etruscans were not in the habit of destroying the
cities they took: they occupied and made use of them. They seem to have
used Rome to spread their influence over Latium: they built a temple of
Jupiter on the Alban hill, the old centre of a Latin league: and there
is strong evidence that they made Rome the head of another and later
league, with a religious centre in a temple of Diana, who was not
originally a Roman deity, on the Aventine hill overlooking the Tiber.
All events in this Etruscan period are very dim and doubtful, but it
looks as if the very loss of the line of defence had only given the
conquered city a new lease of life, with a widened outlook and fresh
opportunities. But was she to continue as an Etruscan city? The question
reminds us of a crisis in our own history: was England to become a
Norman-French country after the Conquest?
At this time it seems that the Etruscans were being harassed from the
north by Gallic tribes, who had already spread over northwest Europe,
and were conquering the valley of the Po and pressing farther south.
This may account for the undoubted fact that about the end of the sixth
century B.C. Rome did succeed in throwing off the Etruscan yoke: that
the old Roman families united to expel their foreign king, and to
establish an aristocratic republic. Henceforward the very name of king
(_rex_) was held in abhorrence by the Romans, and the government passed
into the hands of two yearly elected magistrates, with absolute power as
leaders in war, and a limited power within the city. In the next chapter
I will explain this new form of government more fully: here it will be
enough to say that they were called consuls, and that they had an
advising body (as the kings probably had before them) of the heads of
noble families, called _senatus_, or a body of elderly men. At present
let us go on with the story of Rome’s advance in Italy.
According to the legend, the Etruscans made a vigorous attempt to
recover Rome. This is a picturesque story, and is admirably told in one
of Macaulay’s famous _Lays of Ancient Rome_. But we must pass it over
here, for we have no means of testing the truth of it. Soon afterwards
we come upon what seems to be a real historical fact, a treaty between
Rome and the other Latin cities, the text of which was preserved for
many centuries. This treaty shows plainly that henceforward we have to
reckon Rome and Latium as one power in Italy; and this is the first real
forward step in the advance of Rome. It guaranteed in the first place
mutual support in war; Rome needed support against the Etruscans, and
the Latin cities at the southern end of the plain were liable to be
attacked by hill tribes from the east and south. Still more important as
showing the advance of civilisation was the sanction of a common system
of private law. Any citizen of a Latin city (including, of course, Rome
) was to be able to buy and sell, to hold and inherit property, in any
other city, in full confidence that he would be protected by the law of
that city in so doing; and if he married a woman of another city his
marriage was legitimate and his children could inherit his property
according to law.[2] This was going a long way towards making a single
state of the whole of Latium. All the communities were on equal terms,
and all had certain legal relations with each other; and these are two
of the chief features of a true federation. Now all federations were an
improvement on the isolation of the single city-state, which was
helpless in those days of turbulence and invasion. This one looks like
the work of a statesman; and if that statesman was a Roman, Spurius
Cassius, as tradition asserted, then Rome had achieved her first victory
in the arts of statesmanship and diplomacy with which she was destined
to rule the world.
Before we go on with our story let us notice how well Latium was
geographically fitted to develop a federation, as compared with the more
mountainous districts of Italy. Latium was a plain, as its name seems to
imply; and like Bœotia in Greece it was naturally suited for federative
union, while tribes living in the highlands always found it difficult to
unite. Again, the Latins were jammed into a comparatively small space
between the hills and the sea, and their strength was concentrated by
their position: while the Etruscans, and the various Italian stocks,
were continually moving onward to look for better quarters, and losing
their strength and their cohesion in doing so.
In these early federations of cities there was always a tendency for one
particular city to slip into the position of leader, just as in modern
federations, that of Switzerland for example, there is a continual
tendency for the central authority to extend its influence. In Latium
there can be no doubt that Rome very soon began to assume some kind of
headship. Her position on the Tiber, and the constant strain that she
had to undergo in resisting the Etruscans, gave her an advantage over
the other Latin cities, who had to resist less constant annoyance from
less highly civilised enemies. I mean that the Roman people had both
nerve and brain so continually exercised that they developed not only
brute courage, but endurance, diplomatic skill and forethought. For a
whole century after they expelled their Etruscan kings they had to keep
up a continual struggle with the great Etruscan city of Veii, which was
only a few miles to the north of the river, on very high ground, and
with the smaller town of Fidenæ on the Tiber above Rome, which the
Veians could make use of to attack them from that side. No wonder that
when at last they succeeded in taking Veii they burnt it to the ground.
It is said that they thought of migrating to that lofty site themselves,
and abandoning the position on the Tiber; but they wisely gave up the
idea, and Veii was sacked and her goddess Juno brought to Rome. The site
is a deserted spot at the present day.
It was this prolonged struggle, in which the Latins were of course
called upon to help, that placed Rome in the position of leader of the
league, and from the moment it was over we find her attitude towards the
Latins a changed one. It is likely enough that she had long been growing
overbearing and unpopular with the other cities, but of this, if it was
so, we have no certain details. What we do know is that at the beginning
of the fourth century B.C., when a terrible disaster overtook Rome, the
Latins failed to serve her.
This disaster was the capture and sack of Rome by a wandering tribe of
Gauls from the north, who descended the valley of the Tiber, took the
Romans by surprise, and utterly routed them at the little river Allia,
twelve miles from the city. These Gauls were formidable in battle and
fairly frightened the Romans; but, like other Celtic peoples, they were
incapable of settling down into a solid State, or of making good use of
their victories. They vanished as quickly as they had come, and left
nothing behind them but an indelible memory of the terror they had
inspired, and many stories of the agony of that catastrophe. The most
characteristic of these shows the veneration of the Romans for what was
perhaps their greatest political institution, the Senate. The citizens
had fled to the Capitol, where they contrived to hold out till relief
came; but meanwhile the older Senators, men who were past the age of
fighting, determined to meet their death, and devoted themselves,
according to an old religious practice resorted to in extreme peril, to
the infernal deities. Each then took his seat in state robes at the door
of his house. There the Gauls found them and marvelled, taking them for
more than human. At last a Gaul ventured to stroke the beard of one of
them named Papirius, who immediately struck him with his ivory wand: he
was instantly slain, and of the rest not one survived. We need not ask
whether this story is true or not, for it is impossible to test it: but
it is truly Roman in feeling, and from a religious point of view it
falls in line with others that were told of the sacrifice of the
individual for the State.
This experience was a terrible discipline for the Romans, but no sooner
had the Gauls departed than they began to turn it to practical account.
They saw that they must secure the country to the north of them more
effectually, and they did so by making large portions of it Roman
territory, and by establishing two colonies there, _i.e._ garrisoned
fortresses on military roads. Then they turned to deal with their own
confederates, who perhaps had felt a secret satisfaction in the
humiliation of a leader of whom they were jealous, and were now,
especially the two great neighbouring cities of Tibur and Præneste
(Tivoli and Palestrina), beginning to rise in open revolt. Knowing what
happened afterwards, we can say that these Latin cities were standing in
the way of Italian progress: but to the ancient city-state independence
was the very salt of life.
All public records and materials for history, except those engraved on
stone, were destroyed in the capture and burning of Rome by the Gauls,
so that up to this time Roman “history” is not really worthy of the
name. But from this time onward certain official records were preserved,
and we gradually pass into an age which may truly be called historical.
In detail it will still be questionable, chiefly owing to the tendency
of Roman leading families to glorify the deeds of their own ancestors at
the expense of truth, and so to hand on false accounts to the age when
history first came to be written down. But in the fourth and third
centuries B.C. it becomes fairly clear in outline. I said in the last
chapter that the Romans were curiously destitute of the imaginative
faculty. But no people is entirely without imagination, and it is most
interesting to find the Romans using their moderate allowance in
inventing the details of noble deeds and honourable services to the
State. Provoking as it is to us, and provoking even to the Roman
historian Livy himself, who was well aware of it, this habit has its own
value as a feature of old Roman life and character.
But I must return to the story of the advance of Rome in Italy. It seems
clear that after the Gallic invasion the Latins became more and more
discontented with Roman policy, which probably aimed at utilising all
the resources of the league and at the same time getting complete
control of its relations to other powers. We have the text in Greek,
preserved by the historian Polybius, of a treaty with Carthage, then the
greatest naval power in the Mediterranean, which well illustrates this:
the date is 348 B.C. Rome acts for Latium in negotiating this treaty;
and Carthage undertook not to molest the Latin cities, _provided that
they remained faithful to Rome_; nay, even to restore to the power of
the leading city any revolting Latin community that might fall into
their hands. This plainly shows that revolt was expected, and a few
years later it became general. But in spite of the support of the
Campanians in the rich volcanic plain farther south, and indeed of
danger so great that it gave rise to another story of the “devotio” of a
Roman consul to the infernal deities on behalf of the State, the Latins
were completely beaten at the battle of Mount Vesuvius, and the Romans
were able so to alter the league as to deprive it of all real claim to
be called a federation.
We saw that any citizen of a Latin city could buy and hold property,
marry and have legitimate children, in any other Latin city, knowing
that he was protected by the law in the enjoyment of these rights. But
after the rebellion this was all changed. A citizen could enjoy these
rights in his own city, or at Rome, but nowhere else, while a Roman
could enjoy them everywhere. A citizen of Præneste, for example, could
enjoy them at Præneste or Rome, but not in the neighbouring cities of
Tibur or Tusculum: while a Roman could do business in all these cities,
and be supported in all his dealings by the Roman law, which now began
gradually to permeate the whole of Latium. Rome thus had a monopoly of
business with the other cities, which were effectually isolated from
each other. To us this seems a cruel and selfish policy, and so in
itself it was. But we must remember that Rome had been all but destroyed
off the face of the earth, and that the Latins had done nothing, so far
as we know, to help her. To resist another such attack as that of the
Gauls, it was absolutely necessary for Rome to control the whole
military resources of Latium, and this she could not do in a loose and
equal federation. She was liable not only to assaults from the Gauls,
but from Etruscans, and, as we shall see directly, from Samnites, and,
if we find that in the struggle for existence she was at times unjust,
we may remember that there has hardly been a successful nation of which
the same might not be said. She saw that Latium must become Roman if
either Rome or the Latins were to survive, and she devised the principle
of isolation with this object.
From this time all Latins served in Roman armies nominally as allies,
but in reality as subjects; and all Latins who became Roman citizens
served in the Roman legions. When a military colony was founded, it
might be either Roman or Latin; but a Latin colony meant not necessarily
a collection of Latins; it might admit any one—Roman, Latin or other,
who threw in his lot with the new city and accepted the two rights of
trade and marriage described above. Thus the term Latin came to mean not
so much a man of a certain stock as a man with a certain legal position,
and so it continued for many centuries, while the new power rising to
prominence in the world came to be known not as Latin, but as Roman.
The last and decisive battle with the Latins took its name, as we saw,
from Mount Vesuvius, and the reader who knows the map of Italy will ask
how it came to be fought so far south of Latium, in the large and
fertile plain of Campania, near the modern city of Naples. The answer is
that a powerful State, such as Rome was now becoming, is liable to be
appealed to by weaker communities when in trouble; and the Campanians,
attacked by the hill-men from the central mountainous region of the
Samnites, had appealed for help to Rome. This was given, but the Romans
found it necessary to make peace with these Samnites, and left the
Campanians in the lurch, and then the latter threw in their lot with the
Latins, and the Latin war drifted south to Campania. At the end of that
war they were treated in much the same way as the Latins; and thus Rome
now found herself presiding with irresistible force over a territory
that included both the plains of western Italy and all its most valuable
land, and over a confederacy in which all the advantages were on her
side, and all the resources of the members under her control.
But to be mistress of these two plains was not as yet to be mistress of
Italy. Those plains, and especially the southern and more valuable one,
had to be defended from the mountaineers of the central highlands of the
peninsula: a region which the reader should at this point of our story
study carefully in his map. Towards the end of the Latin war these
highlanders, Samnites, as the Romans called them, had ceased raiding the
Campanian plain, for they in their turn had to defend southern Italy
against an unexpected enemy. The strong and wealthy Greek merchant-city
of Tarentum, just inside the “heel” of Italy, destined to play an
important part in Italian history for the next century, had lately had
its lands raided by the Samnites and their kin the Lucanians to the
south of them, and had called in Greeks from oversea to help them. Here
we come into touch with Greek history, just at the time when Alexander
the Great was the leading figure in the Greek world. A Spartan king came
over to aid Tarentum, and lost his life in so doing; then Alexander of
Epirus was induced to come, an uncle of the great conqueror: and after a
period of success against the Samnites, he was assassinated. It is said
that Rome came to an understanding with him, and it is likely enough;
there must have been men in the great Council at Rome who were already
accustomed to look far ahead, and keep themselves informed of what was
going on far away in Italy and even beyond the Italian seas. Her long
struggle for existence had taught her venerable statesmen the arts of
diplomacy, and we are not surprised to learn that after the death of
Alexander she began to form alliances in that far country between the
Samnites and Tarentum, much of which was rich and fertile, in order that
when the inevitable struggle with the hill-men should come, she might
have them enclosed between two foes—herself and Latium on the north and
west, and the Apulians and Greeks in the south and east. It seemed as if
her power and prestige must continually go forward, or collapse
altogether; the same alternative that faced the English in India in the
eighteenth century and later. In neither case did the advancing power
fully realise what the future was to be.
The inevitable struggle with the Samnites came, and lasted many years.
We need not pursue it in detail, and indeed the details are quite
untrustworthy as they have come down to us; but one episode in it is
told so explicitly and has become so famous, that it deserves a place in
our sketch as showing that hard feeling of national self-interest,
without a touch of chivalry, that is gradually emerging as the guide of
Roman action in her progress towards universal dominion.
A strong Roman army, under the command of both consuls, was pushing to
the south through the mountains, and fell into a trap in a defile called
the Caudine Forks,[3] a name never forgotten by the Romans. All attempts
to escape were vain, and they were forced to capitulate. The terms
dictated by Pontius the Samnite general were these: the consuls were to
bind themselves on behalf of the Senate to agree to evacuate Samnium and
Campania and the fortresses (_coloniæ_) which had been planted there,
and to make peace with the Samnites as with an equal power. The consuls
bound themselves by a solemn rite, and the army was allowed to go home,
after being sent under the yoke, _i.e._ under a kind of archway
consisting of one spear resting on two upright ones: this was an old
Italian custom of dealing with a conquered army, which may have
originally had a religious signification. When the disgraced legions
reached Rome, and the consuls summoned the Senate to ratify their bond
with Pontius, the Fathers, as they were called, positively refused to do
so. The consuls and all who had made themselves responsible for the
terms were sent back to Pontius as his prisoners, _but not the army_.
His indignation was great, for he knew that Samnium had lost her chance,
and would never have it again. The consuls, of course, had no power to
bind the Senate, and the Samnite terms were such as the Senate could not
accept as the result of a single disaster caused by a general’s blunder:
that was not the way in which the Romans carried on war. But the
disgraced army should have been sent back too, and the Senate and people
knew it. The speech which the later Roman historian puts into the mouth
of Pontius to express his indignation, shows that some feeling of shame
at this dishonourable action had come down in the minds of many
generations.
The last effort of this long struggle against Rome was a desperate
attempt to combine the forces of Samnites, Etruscans and Gauls: the idea
was to separate her armies and thus crush her in detail. Even this was a
failure, and without going into the doubtful stories of the fighting, we
may ask why it was so. Beyond all doubt the Roman power was for a time
in very great peril; but in the end it prevailed, and this is a good
moment for pausing to think about the advantages that Rome’s genius for
organisation had secured for herself; advantages which no other Italian
stock seemed able to acquire.
First, she had learnt how to use with profit her geographical position;
to north, south and east she could send armies to strike in different
directions at the same time; and she must have devised some means
(though we do not know the method) of keeping up communication between
these armies. The stories seem to suggest that the commanders of this
period belonged to a very few noble families whose members had spent
their whole lives in fighting—not indeed merely in fighting battles, but
in carrying on war: the Fabii and Papirii are particularly prominent.
These veterans must have come to know the art of war thoroughly, as it
could then be applied in Italy, and also the details of the country in
which they had to fight.
Secondly, the efforts of these tough old heroes were admirably seconded
by the home government, _i.e._ the Senate, because this assembly
consisted of men of the like military experience, and the leaders among
them were themselves generals, men who had been consuls and had led
armies. Though at this very time, as we shall see, there was a strong
tendency towards popular government, yet in the direction of war we find
no sign that the monopoly of the old families was questioned; and as
their interests and their experience were all of the same type, they
could act together with a unanimity which was probably unknown to their
enemies. The fact that Rome always at this time, and indeed at all
times, negotiated and kept in touch with the _aristocracies_ in the
Italian cities, shows how completely the noble families had gained
control over the management of diplomacy as well as war.
Thirdly, Rome was now beginning to learn the art of securing the
conquered country by means of military roads and fortresses (_coloniæ_):
an art to which she held firmly throughout her history, and to which the
geography even of Roman Britain bears ample testimony. My readers will
do well to fix their attention for a moment on three of these colonies
which were founded during this long war; they are by no means the only
ones, but they serve well to show the extent of the Roman power in Italy
at this time, as well as the means taken to secure it. The first is
Narnia, far up the Tiber valley (founded 299 B.C.) on a military road
afterwards known as the Flaminian Way: this was an outpost, with quick
communication with Rome, against both Etruscans and Gauls. The second,
Fregellæ, a city with a sad future, was some seventy miles to the
south-east of Rome, on a road called the Latin Way, but beyond the
limits of Latium proper, commanding, in fact, the passes between Latium
and Campania; it was in a beautiful situation near the junction of two
rivers, and became in time a most prosperous city. For the third colony
we must look much further south on the map, at the south-eastern end of
the mass of the Samnite highlands: this was Venusia, with 20,000
colonists, destined to separate the Samnites from the Greeks and other
inhabitants of the heel and toe of Italy. It stood on the most famous of
all the great roads, the Via Appia, which after leaving Rome ran nearer
the coast than the Latin Way, but joined it in Campania, and then ran
across the hilly country to Venusia, and eventually to Brundisium
(Brindisi), which also became a colony fifty years later.
These three advantages, duly considered, will help the reader to
understand to some extent how the prize of Italian presidency fell to
Rome and not to another city: and they will also explain why Rome
emerged safe and stronger than ever from another peril that was now to
threaten her existence.
The great colony of Venusia, as we saw, was meant to separate the Greeks
of southern Italy from the highlanders of Samnium. Of the Greek cities
by far the most powerful was Tarentum, then ruled by a selfish and
ill-conditioned democracy, apt to be continually worrying its
neighbours. That Rome should sooner or later come into collision with
Tarentum was inevitable; but the Senate tried to avoid this, knowing
that the Tarentines would appeal to some Greek power beyond sea to help
them. Now just across the Adriatic, in Epirus, there was a king of Greek
descent who was looking out for a chance of glory by imitating Alexander
the Great; for Alexander’s marvellous career had stirred up a restless
spirit of adventure in the free-lances of the generation that succeeded
him. Pyrrhus seems to have fancied that he could act the part of a
knight-errant in freeing the Greeks of the west from the barbarians—from
the Romans that is, and the Carthaginians, who were at the moment in
alliance. When the inevitable quarrel with Rome came, and Tarentum
invited him, he crossed the sea with a small but capable force,
determined to put an end to this new power that was threatening to
swallow up the Greek cities. But he had to learn, and through him the
Greek world had to learn as a whole, that the new power was made of
sterner stuff than any that had yet arisen in the Mediterranean basin.
Pyrrhus began with a victory, not far from Tarentum; it was won chiefly
by some elephants which he had brought with him to frighten the Roman
cavalry. This shook the loyalty of many Italian communities, but the
Senate was unmoved. The ablest diplomatist in Pyrrhus’s service made no
impression on that body of resolute men, trained by long experience to
look on a single defeat as only a “regrettable incident” in a long war.
“Rome never negotiates while foreign troops are on Italian soil;” so,
according to the story, the aged Appius Claudius told the Greek envoy in
the Senate-house. Then Pyrrhus tried a march on Rome; but he had to
learn, like another invader after him, that the nearer he drew to the
city the more difficult his task became. A second victory was far less
decisive and almost fruitless, and Pyrrhus most unwisely evacuated
Italy. Tarentum had turned against him, unwilling to submit to his
discipline, and now that wayward city fell a victim to the Roman power.
The king crossed to Sicily to deliver the Sicilian Greeks from Carthage,
and this he did brilliantly, but there, too, the fickle Greeks grew
tired of him. Returning to Italy, he fought one more battle with the
Romans, at Beneventum in Samnium, and lost it. Foiled everywhere, he
left Italy, with Rome more firmly established than ever in the supremacy
of the whole peninsula: for Tarentum, with its fine harbour, its almost
impregnable citadel, and its fleet, fell soon afterwards into the hands
of the Romans.
Almost the whole Italian peninsula was now Roman; or perhaps it is truer
to say that Rome had become an Italian state. It was a wonderful work:
perhaps the most wonderful that Rome ever achieved. The military part of
it was the result mainly of _constantia_, steady perseverance and
refusal to accept defeat; the political organisation was the result of
good sense and good temper combined with an inflexible will, and a
shrewd perception of the real and permanent interests of Rome. In the
third century B.C., at which we have now arrived, Italy may be described
as a kind of federation, in which each city has its own alliance with
the leading one, and no alliance with any other. Each has its own
government and administers its own law, but places all its military
resources at the disposal of the Roman government. The fighting power of
the future was to be Italy under Roman leadership, and all questions of
foreign policy were decided by Rome alone. There was no general council
of the whole confederacy. The Roman Senate controlled an ever-increasing
mass of detailed and varied business, having to deal with Latins,
Italians of the old stocks, Etruscans, Greeks and Gauls. How the
business was done we cannot tell: not a single contemporary record of it
is left. One glimpse of that wonderful Senate at work would be worth all
descriptions of the battles of that century.
Before the close of the third century B.C. that Senate, instead of
directing a further steady advance, had been forced to defend the State
against an invader, in the most terrible life and death struggle ever
experienced by any people. But in the next chapter I must pause to try
and explain wherein consisted the nerve-power, the mental and material
fibre, of the people destined to rule the world.