DOMINION AND DEGENERACY
“It was not merely that the disasters of the war had opened the eyes of
public men to abuses which had grown up among them; it was not that they
hastened to take measures by which such disasters might be prevented
from occurring again. Not so much foresight as this was required. The
question was at once simpler and more urgently pressing: it was how to
prevent the cultivation of the country from falling into a condition of
permanent decay.... Not only did it become necessary to inquire of
political economy what means there were of increasing the wealth of a
whole nation at once, but other reforms, less obviously adapted to the
immediate need, were now eagerly carried into effect.”[7]
This passage does not refer to Italy and the Roman government after the
great war, but to Prussia after she had succumbed to Napoleon and was
forced to rest from sheer exhaustion. This rest, skilfully used by
statesmen of genius, meant for Prussia recovery, and the opening of a
great era of prosperity. If Rome in like manner could have given rest to
a weary Italy, and brought all her practical skill to bear on the work
of healing and mending, the next two centuries might have been far
happier ones for her and for the world. But it is hard for young
nations, as for young men, to realise the need of rest, and all the
harder in ancient Italy, where fighting had hardly ceased to be looked
on as “the natural industry of a vigorous State.” The Roman Senate was
not ripe enough in knowledge of human nature to understand the mischief,
moral as well as material, that a long war can cause, especially if the
enemy has been in your country harrying and devouring, no one knowing
when his turn will come to be ruined. And, indeed, we may doubt whether
even if Rome’s leading men had been able to understand the nature of the
mischief, they would have had the skill to discover and apply the
necessary remedies.
This mischief and its results must be the subject of this chapter, for
without getting some idea of it we cannot understand the perils to which
civilisation was exposed in the next two hundred years by Roman
degeneracy, or the way in which they were eventually overcome. But I
must just glance, to start with, at the policy actually pursued by the
Senate in the period following the war, which placed Rome in the
position of arbiter of the whole Mediterranean world, and mistress of a
territory many times as large as Italy.
The two recent invasions of Italy by formidable enemies must have taught
the Senate the necessity of making it impossible that there should be
another. But another might yet be looked for—so at least they
believed—not from Spain or Africa, but from the great military power of
Macedon. Philip of Macedon had been among Rome’s enemies since Cannæ;
but not even Hannibal could persuade him to attack her with vigour, and
he missed his chance. Roman diplomacy had stirred up the Greeks against
him, and he had plenty to do at home. But no sooner was Carthage crushed
than the Senate coaxed the tired and unwilling people into declaring war
against him, and this led in the course of the next half-century to the
overthrow of the Macedonian kingdom, and finally to its absorption into
what we must now begin to call the Roman Empire. At the same time, Rome
acquired a protectorate over the whole of Greece, at first honestly
meant to defend her against Macedon, but destined to pass rapidly into
dominion. The Greeks in their leagues and cities were never again really
free. If they could have kept from quarrelling among themselves, they
might have endured this protectorate with profit; but ere Rome had done
with them they were to feel her heavy hand.
Thus the “peasants of the Tiber” became masters of the Balkan peninsula
as well as of that of Italy. In the same period they completed the
conquest of Italy up to the Alps, not without difficulties and defeats,
and went on driving their roads and planting colonies in all parts. In
the Spanish peninsula, from which the Carthaginians had been finally
driven, they now established two permanent commands (_provinciæ_), one
in the basin of the Ebro in the north-east, and the other in the fertile
valleys of the Guadiana and Guadalquivir, as the two great rivers of
southern Spain are now called. From these they slowly but persistently,
after their manner, and in spite of many defeats and even disgraces,
pushed up into the high tablelands of central Spain, until they had
brought the greater part of the peninsula under their sway. Here they
had to deal with a people very different from the weary and exhausted
Greeks and Macedonians; a people only half civilised, but lively,
intelligent and capable of making excellent soldiers, as Hannibal had
found. It is to the credit of the Romans that, in spite of much cruelty
and misgovernment, they gave this peninsula a real civilisation, of
which the traces are still abundant especially in the south, and a
beautiful language, which descends directly from their own.
In order to maintain their communications with Spain by land as well as
by sea, they also had to look to the coast between the western Alps and
the Pyrenees. Here they made a lasting alliance with the ancient and
flourishing Greek colony, Massilia (Marseille); and in defending
Massilia from the attacks of mountain tribes they were gradually drawn
into the acquisition of a permanent hold on the lower valley of the
Rhone. This, again, in due time very naturally became the starting-point
for fresh advance into the heart of modern France. No one who has seen
the Rhone from Lyons to Marseilles can resist the conclusion that a
power in possession of its lower reaches must inevitably advance along
it northward.
There is yet a fourth peninsula in this land-locked sea, known for want
of a better name as Asia Minor, which juts out from the Asiatic
continent, and forms a meeting-place for Eastern and Western
civilisations. This was in the last three centuries B.C. the
fighting-ground of the successors of Alexander the Great, kings of
Macedon, Pergamum, Syria and Egypt, who wasted the vigour of humanity in
wars that to us seem needless. The Romans were soon drawn into a war
with the king of Syria, an ally of Philip of Macedon, and won a great
victory in this peninsula in the year 190 B.C. But they annexed no
territory here until the last king of Pergamum left his kingdom to Rome
by will some sixty years later. The Senate preferred to act as
arbitrator, to make alliances, to reward friendly states, to use
diplomacy rather than force; and on the whole they succeeded. Their
policy was often tortuous, sometimes even mean, but in the long run it
did more good than harm to humanity that a young and virile people
should interfere among these monarchies.
Thus, whether we look west or east in the Mediterranean, we find the
Roman power predominant everywhere within eighty years from the end of
the war with Hannibal. It is not easy to explain in a few words what
drove this power onwards. It was not simply the commercial motive, as
with Carthage. It was not simply the desire to conquer and annex, for
the Senate was slow to undertake new duties of government abroad if
their object could be attained in some other way. But what was that
object? Undoubtedly it was self-defence to begin with; but self-defence,
once successful, only too easily slips into self-assertion. This
self-assertion, as we see it in Roman policy, may perhaps be compared
with that which governs German foreign policy now—the determination to
have a voice in all matters within her “sphere of interest.” No Roman
senator had a doubt that his people were the strongest and most
competent to control the world, which is exactly what the patriotic
German believes now. And the constant assertion of this proud conviction
brought many suitors and suppliants to Rome, whose presence flattered
Roman pride, and whose diplomacy sometimes involved the government in
new wars, giving ambitious consuls their opportunity of increasing the
fame and the wealth of themselves and their families. So in due time
there arose a dominion of the following military commands or provinces:
one in Sicily, one in Sardinia, two in Spain, one in southern Gaul, one
in Macedonia with Greece attached to it, one in Asia Minor, and one in
Africa, after the destruction of Carthage by her old enemy in 146 B.C.
Of the method of governing these provinces I will say something in
another chapter. Now let us try to estimate some of the results of these
continuous wars in distant parts, taken together with the long struggle
with Carthage. We shall find a change in every department of the
people’s life, and in almost all a change for the worse.
First, let us look at that family life which formed the essential fibre
of the old body politic, and provided the most powerful factor in the
Roman character. We have but to think of the immense numbers of citizens
killed or captured in war, or carried off by the pestilences that always
follow war, to see what paralysis of family life there must have been.
Fathers and grown-up sons innumerable never came home at all; and long
service far from home would, in any case, deprive the family of the
natural influence and authority of its head. Mothers might do much to
fill up the gap, and the tradition of the dignified and righteous Roman
lady was not as yet wholly weakened; but there are signs that the women
in this period were getting steadily more excitable, more
self-asserting, more luxurious. It is in this age that divorce begins to
make its appearance, a sure sign of the decay of the old family life.
There were rumours, too, of the poisoning of husbands by their wives,
and on one occasion two noble ladies were put to death for this crime by
the verdict of a council of relations. In an extraordinary attempt to
introduce into Italy the exciting orgies of the Greek religion of
Dionysus, women were among the most prominent offenders. The changing
position of women at this time is illustrated by a famous saying of
Cato, that “all men rule over women, we Romans rule over all men, and
our wives rule over us.”
With the decay of the old family life, the wholesome training of the
children in manly conduct (_virtus_) and sense of duty (_pietas_) could
not but suffer, too. Old-fashioned families would keep it up, but among
the lower classes it was hard to do so owing to bad housing and crowding
in the city; and in the noble families there was undoubtedly a change
for the worse, though we know of one or two great men of this age who
took pains with the moral as well as the intellectual training of their
boys.[8] For a people controlling the Mediterranean world it was
necessary to educate the mental faculties, and more especially to teach
a boy to speak and read Greek, which was the language of half the
civilised world, and the language of commerce everywhere. Now Rome could
not supply teachers for this kind of education; Romans were not
competent, nor would they have condescended to such work. The Greeks
were the one people who could undertake what we call the higher
education, and they were now beginning to swarm in Rome. Some Greek
teachers were free men, but the greater number were slaves captured in
the wars; and thus the first requisite in a school-master, that he
should be looked up to and willingly obeyed, was too often absent in
this new education. It is men, not methods, that really tell in
education. In his heart, as we know from many striking passages in Roman
literature, the grown-up Roman despised the Greek, and we may be sure
that the Roman boy did too. Greek literature and rhetoric, now fast
becoming the staple of the higher education, could never make up for the
lack of moral discipline. If we find a spirit of lawlessness in the
coming age, and a want of self-restraint in dealing with enemies or
opponents, we shall not be far wrong in ascribing it in great part to
the loss of the wholesome home influence, and to the introduction of an
education outside the home, which entirely failed to make up for the
decay of the simple old training in duty and discipline.
The fact is that the Romans were now coming under the influence of a new
idea of life, in which the individual played a more important part than
ever before at Rome. The Roman of the past had grown up modelled on a
type and fixed in a group, so that the individual had little chance of
asserting himself; but now we find him asserting himself in every
direction, and in every class of society. To think for oneself, even in
matters of religion; to speak from personal motives in the senate or
law-courts; to aim at one’s own advancement in position or wealth—all
this seemed natural and inevitable to the men of that day. And so by
degrees the individual became the mainspring of action instead of the
State. There were some noble exceptions, but most of the leading men
played their own game, and often won it at the expense of the State.
Many a general hurried on operations towards the close of his command so
as not to be superseded before he could earn a triumph, and pass in
splendid procession up to the temple on the Capitol, with chained
captives following his chariot. And the small men became more and more
unwilling to serve as soldiers in distant lands, and more and more
rebellious against discipline. In little more than half-a-century after
Hannibal had left Italy the Roman armies were beginning to be incapable
of their work.
Along with this too rapid growth of the individual, we have to take
account of the sudden incoming of wealth and growth of capital. The old
Roman family group had no capital except its land and stock. But now, as
the result of plunder and extortion in the provinces, most men of the
upper classes had some capital in money, and this was almost always
invested in public works and State undertakings of all kinds, _e.g._ the
raising of taxes and the fitting out of fleets and armies. These things
were all done by contract, and the contracts were taken by companies, in
which every man was a shareholder who had anything to invest. Thus the
inflow of wealth brought with it the desire of making money, and the
forum of Rome became a kind of stock-exchange in which the buying and
selling of shares was always going on, and where every man was trying to
outwit his neighbour. Of a really productive use of capital in industry
or commerce we hear very little; and it would seem that the Roman of
that day had no idea of using his means or opportunities in ways likely
to produce well-being in the world.
If we turn to rural Italy, the prospect is hardly less dreary.
Incalculable damage had been done to agriculture in the great war, and
agriculture, in the broad sense of the word, was almost the only Italian
industry. Corn, wine, oil, wool and leather had formerly been produced
in sufficient quantities to keep the inhabitants in food and clothing,
each community growing what it needed, as in mediæval England. But this
simple form of agricultural economy must have suffered a severe shock,
not only from the ravages of armies, but from the decrease of the
working population owing to war and pestilence.
In order to restore a decaying industry you must have the men to work
it. Depopulation as the result mainly of war was a disease epidemic in
the Mediterranean in this age; and in Italy we know for certain how rife
it was, for we have the records of the census of the body of Roman
citizens, which show a steady falling-off in this period, and we must
suppose that the same causes were at work among the non-Roman population
of the peninsula. There was, indeed, a remedy, but it was almost worse
than the disease—I mean the vast numbers of slaves now available for
labour. The unskilled slaves, captured or kidnapped in Spain, Gaul,
Epirus, Thrace or Asia Minor, were cheap in the Roman market, and would
do well enough to run a farm with, especially if that farm were chiefly
a pastoral one, with flocks and herds needing no great experience or
skill to look after. This cheapness, and the physical conditions of
rural life in a mountainous country, made cattle-running and
sheep-tending a profitable industry. Large districts of Italy,
especially in the centre and south, became covered in this period with
huge estates owned by capitalists, and worked by rough and often savage
slaves, who were locked up at night in underground prisons and treated
simply as “living tools.” No ray of hope ever broke in on these
miserable beings; no free citizen gave a thought either to their
condition or the economic danger of the system; philanthropy and
political economy were unknown in the Roman world, for imagination and
reflection were alike foreign to the Roman mental habit
Even on the estates of moderate size which were not entirely pastoral,
slave-labour was the rule. We know something of such a farm from the
treatise on agriculture written by Cato at this time, which has come
down to us entire; and it is plain from what he says that though free
labour might be employed at certain seasons, _e.g._ at harvest, the
economic basis of the business was slave-labour. There is no doubt that
all over Italy the small farm and the free cultivator were fast
disappearing, with the rapid growth of capital and the cheapness of
slaves. In the city of Rome, now beginning to harbour a vast population
of many races, the number of domestic slaves tended constantly to
increase; they were employed in every capacity by men of wealth and
business. Many of them were cultivated men, Greeks for example, who
could act as clerks, secretaries or teachers, and these had a fair
chance of earning their freedom in time; but great numbers were low and
vicious beings, who had no moral standard but that of obedience to a
master, no moral sanction except punishment.
Thus, though the shrinkage of the free population was evil enough, the
remedy for it was even worse. The slave, plucked up by the roots from
the soil in which he had flourished in his native land, deprived of
family, property, religion, must in the majority of cases become a
demoralised and hopeless being. In the plays of Plautus, which date from
this period, the slave is a liar and a thief, and apparently without a
conscience. For the slave-owner, too, the moral results were bad enough,
though not so obvious at first sight. A man who is served by scores of
fellow-creatures who are absolutely at his mercy is liable to have his
sense of duty gradually paralysed. Towards them he has no obligations,
only rights; and thus his sense of duty towards his free fellow-citizens
is apt to be paralysed too. A habit of mind acquired in dealing with one
set of men naturally extends itself and affects all human relations. And
so the Roman character, naturally hard enough, came in the later days of
the Republic to be harder than ever. In our next two chapters we shall
meet with unmistakable proofs of this. Incredible cruelty, recklessness
of human life, callousness in dealing with the vanquished and the
subject peoples, meet us at every turn in that dark age of Mediterranean
history. Under the baleful influence of slavery the hard Roman nature
had become brutalised; and we have to wait for the Christian era before
we find any sign of sympathy with that vast mass of suffering humanity
with which the Roman dominion was populated.
We must glance in the last place at the change brought about by the wars
in another department of Roman life, viz. in the working of the
constitution. The reader will remember that in early Rome the salient
feature in that constitution was the _imperium_ of the magistrate, just
as in private life the salient feature was the discipline of the family
under the rule of the head of the household. The man who held the
_imperium_ was irresistible so long as he held it, though a wise custom
made it necessary for him to seek the advice of his council, the Senate,
in all questions of grave importance. But now the long wars took the
consul and his _imperium_ away from the city for long periods, and as
the Empire began to grow up and include provinces beyond sea, those
periods became longer and longer. There were, indeed, always two
magistrates with _imperium_ in Rome, the prætors, who for long past had
been elected yearly to help the consuls in judicial business; but the
prestige of their _imperium_ never reached the level of that of the
consuls. And even when a consul returned home, though the majesty of the
_imperium_ was present in his person as ever, it was not his hand that
was really on the helm. The decision of great questions did not lie with
him, but with his Council, whose knowledge of affairs and whose “courage
never to submit or yield,” had carried Rome safely through a long series
of unexampled trials.
In the period after the war with Hannibal, the Senate, not the
_imperium_, is clearly the paramount power in the working of the
constitutional machinery. To take a single instance: when the people
declined to sanction the war with Philip of Macedon, the Senate directed
the consul to convince them that they were wrong, and both consul and
people bowed to its will. They had other agents in the tribunes of the
people, if the consuls failed them, and would now and then even coerce a
consul by means of the power of the tribune. But what chiefly gave the
Senate its power was the fact that it was the only permanent part of the
government. A senator held office for life unless ejected by the Censor
for immorality, while all the magistrates were elected for a year only.
In the Senate there sat for life every man who had held high office and
done the State good service, and as there were some three hundred of
these, it was almost impossible for the yearly holders of _imperium_ to
resist their deliberate judgments. And for those judgments the Senate
was responsible to no man.
Probably no assembly has ever comprised so much practical wisdom and
experience as the Roman Senate of this period; but that wisdom and that
experience was limited to the working of the constitution, the control
of foreign affairs, and the direction and supply of armies. As has
already been hinted, when it came to providing remedies for economic and
moral evils such as I have been sketching, the Senators were useless;
they had no training in the art of the State physician, and no desire to
learn how to diagnose disease. They were almost all men of the same
type, and with the same public and private interests. They belonged, in
fact, to a few noble families, and new blood was seldom to be found in
their ranks; for though they had all at one time or other been elected
to office by the people, the choice of the people almost always fell
upon members of the old tried families. The principle that the son of a
family that has done good service to the State will be likely himself to
do such service, seems to have taken firm hold of the mind of the Roman
voter; and thus it came about that the Senate, in spite of its great
capacity for business, gradually became an _oligarchical_ body—the
mouthpiece of one class of society. The principle is by no means a bad
one in some stages of social growth, but it is sure in the long run to
produce the vices as well as the virtues of oligarchy—the dislike of any
kind of change, the narrow view of social life, the want of sympathy
with other classes and of the desire to understand their needs. We shall
see in the next two chapters how these oligarchical weaknesses brought
the Senatorial government to an ignominious end. It had saved the State
from its deadliest enemy; it had laid the foundations of the Roman
Empire; but it failed utterly when called on to do the nobler work of
justice and humanity.
This aptly brings us to our last point in this chapter. As the Roman
oligarchy stood to the people, so Rome herself stood as an oligarchy to
the populations of her Empire. The Roman citizen was the one most highly
privileged person in the civilised world of that day. The great prize of
his citizenship was not, as we might suppose it would be, the right to
vote in the assemblies, to choose magistrates and pass or reject laws,
nor the right to hold office if elected, for to that distinction very
few could aspire; it was really the legal protection of his person and
his property wherever he might be in the Empire. No one could maltreat
his person with impunity; a fact well illustrated in the life of St.
Paul (Acts xxii. 25 foll.). He could do business everywhere with the
certainty that his sales, purchases, contracts, would be recognised and
defended by Roman law, while the non-citizen had no such guarantees for
his transactions. No other city in the Mediterranean had a citizenship
to compare with this in practical value, for the Roman law was gradually
becoming the only system of law with a real force behind it. To live a
life of security and prosperity you must be a Roman citizen.
We, in these days of comparative enlightenment, might perhaps imagine
that with a gift like this citizenship in their hands the Romans would
have been quick to reward their faithful Italian allies, who had served
in their armies all through these wars, by lifting them to their own
level of social and political privilege. But if so, we should be
ascribing to the human nature of Roman times a degree of generosity and
sympathy which was, in fact, almost unknown. We might fancy that they
would have grasped the fact that their old city-state had outgrown its
cradle, that Italy and not the city of Rome now really supplied the
force with which the world was ruled, and that they would put the
Italians on the same level of advantage as themselves, at least as
regards the protection of person and property. But after the war with
Hannibal the tendency was rather in the other direction. All allied
Italian cities continued to have to supply contingents to Roman armies
and fleets; yet Rome offered them no privileges to make up for these
burdens, and her magistrates got more and more into the habit of
treating them as inferiors. The Latins, too, that is the old cities of
the Latin league, and the colonies with Latin _right_, as it was now
called, who already had some of the privileges of citizenship, were
carefully prevented from acquiring more, from becoming full citizens of
Rome. In this exclusive policy, which seems to us mean and ungrateful,
the Roman government undoubtedly lost a great chance, and had to pay
dearly later on for her negligence.
The fact was that the imperial idea had taken hold of the governing
Romans with a force to which that of our British “imperialism” cannot
compare for a moment. They were so busy governing, negotiating,
arbitrating and making money, that the condition and claims of their own
city and country failed to attract the attention of any but a very few
among the educated aristocracy. Depopulation, decline of agriculture,
slavery and its accompanying evils, injustice to the Italian allies and
the ever-growing discontent occasioned by it, misgovernment and plunder
in the provinces, all these sources of mischief were now accumulating
force, and were before long to bring the whole Roman system to the brink
of ruin. But Rome on the brink of ruin meant civilisation in imminent
danger; for no other power could any longer withstand the barbarians of
northern Europe, who were even now beginning to press down into sunny
southern lands. So it is that the story of the succeeding century, the
last before the Christian era, is one of the most thrilling interest.
How did Rome survive and overcome these dangers with renewed strength,
and succeed in organising an Empire on the firm foundations of law and
justice, destined to hold the barbarians at bay long enough to inspire
them with profound respect for the civilisation they were attacking?
This question we will try to answer in the remaining chapters of this
book.