THE REVOLUTION: ACT II
With the death of Sulla ends what we may call the first act of the Roman
Revolution. We are now in the middle of a revolution in more than one
sense of that word. The constitution and the government of Rome are
being slowly but surely changed, and at the same time the era of the
free and independent city-state of the Græco-Roman world is being
brought to an end. Both these changes, as we can see now, were
inevitable; without them the civilised world could not have been
defended against barbarian invasion, or Italy united into a contented
whole possessed of Roman citizenship. In the first act, as I have called
it, the immediate danger of invasion was checked, both in north and
east, and Italy had become Roman, enjoying perfect equality with Rome
under the great body of Roman law now being rapidly developed.
But, in truth, this inevitable work of change was not as yet half done.
It was soon found that both in north and east some definite system of
frontier must be fixed, or the Empire would be in continual peril from
without. It was also found that Sulla’s constitution would not work, and
that to defend the frontiers of civilisation effectively there must be a
government of sterner force, whatever form that force might take. Thus
in the second act of the Revolution we have two main points to attend
to: first, the settlement of the frontiers against Oriental despots and
wandering hordes of Germans: secondly, the acquisition of power by a
great soldier-statesman, Julius Cæsar, and the abandonment, as a working
power, of the ancient polity of Senate and people. And inasmuch as this
period of revolution was also the age of the best and purest bloom of
Latin literature, I must find space for a few words about Cicero,
Lucretius, and Catullus.
I said in the last chapter that there was a very dangerous enemy
threatening the eastern or Greek part of the Empire. This was
Mithradates, king of Pontus, that part of Asia Minor which borders on
the Euxine (Black Sea) eastwards: a man of genius and ambition, and by
no means to be reckoned a barbarian. It is curious that he began his
great career by protecting Greek cities against their enemies, and one
is tempted to ask whether he might not have been at least as beneficent
a champion and master for the Greek world as Rome herself. But we must
look at things with Roman eyes if we are to understand the work of Rome
in the world; we must think of Mithradates as the Romans then did, as
the deadly enemy alike of Greek freedom and of Roman interests.
His armies had invaded Greece in 87 B.C. and had even occupied Athens,
while the Greek cities of Asia Minor had willingly submitted to him: the
whole Hellenic world was fast coming under his sway. Then Sulla had
expelled his generals from Greece proper, and had forced him to accept
such conditions of peace as kept him quiet for a few years. But when
Sulla was dead he started on a fresh career of conquest, and once more
the Roman protectorate of Greek civilisation was broken down. For a time
it looked as if no power could restore it. The sea was swarming with
pirates from Cilicia, who constantly harassed the Roman fleets, and
ventured even as far as Italy, snapping up prisoners for sale as slaves
in the great slave-market at Delos. And behind Mithradates and these
pirates there was another power even more formidable. Tigranes, king of
Armenia, had also been extending his dominions southward, and was even
in possession of Syria and Judæa at the time of which we are now
speaking, 75 B.C. Should the two kings unite their forces and policy, it
would be all but impossible for Rome to remain the mistress of the
eastern Mediterranean and the Hellenic world. It was another example of
Rome’s wonderful good fortune that this alliance was never solidly
effected till too late.
The Senate, left by Sulla to govern the world, soon showed that it was
incapable of grasping the necessity of vigorous action in the East. It
was not till 74, four years after Sulla’s death, that they sent out a
really capable general with an adequate force. Lucullus, whose name has
become a by-word for wealth and luxury, was in his prime a soldier of
great ability, and he soon broke the power of Mithradates, who
immediately fled for refuge to Tigranes. This made it absolutely
necessary to deal with that king also; and Lucullus invaded Armenia and
captured the king’s new capital, Tigranocerta. Unluckily, he had not
that supreme gift of a great commander which enables him, as it
afterwards enabled Cæsar, to lead his men where and when he will; the
army mutinied, refusing to go farther into the wild Armenian mountains,
the most distant and formidable region a Roman army had as yet
penetrated. Lucullus had to retreat.
Then, under pressure from the men of business who were losing money by
the instability of Roman dominion in Asia, Senate and people agreed to
supersede Lucullus by a younger man, reckoned the best soldier of the
day, and a military pupil of Sulla. This was the famous Gnæus Pompeius,
known to us familiarly as Pompey. In 67 he had been commissioned to
clear the sea of pirates, and did it effectually. Now, with a
combination of civil and military power such as no Roman had yet
enjoyed, he took over Lucullus’s army, made short work of Mithradates,
and utterly broke up the empire of Tigranes. He overran Syria, the
region between the Mediterranean and the desert stretching to the
Euphrates, penetrated to Judæa and took Jerusalem. This famous event is
the first in the long and sad story of the relations of Rome with Judæa.
At Jericho, before he reached the holy city, he received the dispatch
which told him of the death of Mithradates, the removal from the scene
of one who had been for thirty years Rome’s most dangerous enemy.
The result of the efforts of Lucullus and Pompey was the establishment
of a frontier system in the East which may be said to have held good for
the rest of Roman history. The principle of it is not easy to explain;
but if the reader will take a map and trace the river Euphrates from its
sources in western Armenia to the Arabian desert, and then make it clear
to himself that all within that line was to be either Roman or under
Roman suzerainty, he will be able to form some idea of its importance in
history. There were to be three new Roman provinces: Pontus with
Bithynia in the north of Asia Minor, Cilicia on its south-eastern coast,
and Syria, the coast region from Cilicia southwards to the frontier of
Egypt. But between these and the Euphrates there were two kingdoms,
Cappadocia and Galatia, and other smaller ones, which formed _a Roman
sphere of influence_ where Rome herself could not as yet be constantly
present. Imperfect as this system seems, it was quite strong enough to
spread the prestige of the Roman Empire far and wide in the East, and
the great king of Parthia, beyond the Euphrates, might well begin to be
alarmed for his own safety.
Now in settling this frontier system Pompey had, of course, to attend to
an infinite number of details, and to make decisions, convey privileges,
negotiate treaties, and grant charters, in dealing with those cities new
and old which formed a most important part of his plan of settlement and
defence. All this had to be done on his own responsibility, but would
need the sanction of the Senate to be recognised as legally valid. When
he returned home in 62 B.C. he expected that the Senate would give this
sanction, especially as he had just disbanded his army, with which he
might, if he had chosen, have enforced his claims. But the Senatorial
government was reduced to such a state of imbecility that the majority
would have nothing to do with Pompey’s invaluable work: they were
jealous, they were lazy, and, above all, they were ignorant. So he had
to fall back after a year or two on the consul of 59, C. Julius Cæsar,
who undertook to get the necessary sanction from the people if not from
the Senate. In return Pompey was to help him to get a long command in
Gaul, so that the work of frontier defence there begun by Marius might
be resumed and completed. At this very moment a German people, the
Suebi, whose name still survives in the modern Swabia, were threatening
the rich plains of what is now eastern France: and then, just as a peace
had been patched up with them, a Gallic tribe, the Helvetii, suddenly
issuing from its home in (modern) Switzerland in search of new
settlements, or pressed on by other tribes beyond it, was about to break
into the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul. But Cæsar had now done his
part by Pompey, though not, indeed, without straining the constitution;
and moving with the wonderful swiftness that afterwards became
characteristic of him as a general, he reached Geneva just in time to
stop them, and soon afterwards beat them in a great battle and forced
them back to their homes.
This was the beginning of a career of conquest which made the glorious
country we know as France into the most valuable part of the Roman
Empire, and later on into the most compact and gifted nationality in
Europe. What motives inspired Cæsar in all he did during the nine years
he spent there we need not ask, for we can only guess the answer; though
he has left us his own story of his campaigns in simple straightforward
Latin, he has not chosen to tell us what was all along at the back of
his mind. Ambition, says the superficial historian; the desire to make
himself in due time tyrant of Rome and the Empire. But we may take it as
certain that Cæsar, a man whose health was never strong, would not have
exposed himself to constant peril of his life for nine successive years
had he really all the time been nursing a secret ambition which death or
serious illness might at any time destroy. What he really seems to have
loved, like C. Gracchus, was work—steady, hard work with no one to
hinder him, and with a definite practical object before him. Doubtless
further hopes or fears were in his mind, but this great practical
genius, with an intellect characteristically Roman,[10] though more
scientific in its tendency than that of any other Roman known to us, was
always bent on the work immediately in front of him, and never rested
till it was completed to his satisfaction.
When Cæsar hurried up to check the Helvetii in 58 B.C. there was but one
Roman province in Gaul, the south-eastern part of modern France (which
still teems with Roman remains and inscriptions), together with a
considerable district to the west of it at the foot of the Pyrenees.
When he finally left Gaul at the end of 50, the whole of modern France
and Belgium had been added to the Empire, though not as yet organised
into provinces. He did not take long to reach our Channel and to subdue
the tribes on the coast; he began the written history of our island by
invading it twice, and recording such information as he could gain about
its geography and inhabitants. He crossed the Rhine into Germany by a
bridge constructed for him by his engineers: and the method of building
this bridge survives in his book to puzzle the ingenuity of scholars as
well as school-boys. The Gauls were doubtless amazed at these
performances, as he meant them to be; and, after one heroic effort to
save themselves from becoming an appendage of a Mediterranean empire,
they had to submit. While we can feel with these noble efforts for
freedom, or blame Cæsar for what sometimes seems unnecessary cruelty, we
must remember that from this time forward the country from the Rhine to
the ocean becomes a great factor in European civilisation.
There was still, indeed, a gap in the line of frontier; how was the
eastern end of the Alps to be protected from invasion? There, as we saw,
the great rampart was lowest, and beyond it the barbarians were an
unknown quantity. Here the river Danube eventually became the frontier,
and was carefully connected with that of the Rhine; but this completion
of the great work had to wait for half-a-century, and in the meantime
luckily no inroad was made or threatened. It was Tiberius, afterwards
emperor, another great soldier, with an army almost as devoted to its
general as that of Cæsar who after long steady effort planted the Roman
power firmly in this region. From a military point of view the Roman
Empire, and therefore Western civilisation as a whole, owed its very
existence for centuries to Pompey, Cæsar and Tiberius, with their
splendidly trained armies and their skilful engineers.
All this work of conquest and settlement was not the work of the State,
or due to the old civic sense of duty and discipline; it was the work of
the armies, due to their good discipline, and to their loyalty to their
leaders. This being so, it was of course only natural that the armies
and their leaders should claim to control the action and policy of an
enfeebled State, as Sulla had already claimed it. This is really, put in
a very few words, the secret of the Roman imperial system that was to
come; so, too, in England, in Cromwell’s time, the State passed into the
hands of the army, because that army (though in our case but for a short
time) represented the best instincts and purposes of the nation. But the
question of the moment was whether the commander of one of these Roman
armies could so identify himself and his soldiers with the State and its
true interests, as to become the means of establishing a sound and
efficient government for the Mediterranean world. Sulla had failed so to
identify himself: he had neither knowledge enough nor sympathy enough.
The chance had been open to Pompey when he returned from the East in 62,
but he had disbanded his army and declined it; he was in many ways a
valuable man, but he was not the stuff that real statesmen are made of.
After the long war in Gaul the chance was open to Cæsar, and he accepted
it without hesitation.
He accepted it, but in truth he had to fight for it. For years his
operations in Gaul had been looked on at Rome with suspicion, especially
by a clique of personal enemies led by the famous Cato, a descendant of
the old Cato whom we met in the previous century. These men looked on
Cæsar as dangerous to the State—and dangerous indeed he was, to that old
form of State which neither they nor he could make vigorous and
efficient. They clung to the worn-out machinery of the constitution, to
the checks, the vetoes, the short tenure of office, to the exclusive
right of the Senate to deal with the ever-increasing administrative
business of the Empire. Knowing, or guessing, that Cæsar, like Gaius
Gracchus, would force his personal will on the State if he judged it
necessary, they were determined to prevent his becoming a political
power, and they brought Pompey to the same view, and armed him with
military force to be used against Cæsar—against the man, that is, who
had spent the best years of his life in indefatigable work for the
Empire and civilisation. The result was civil war once more; civil war
that might unquestionably have been averted by a wider outlook, a more
generous feeling, a spirit of compromise, on the part of the high
aristocrats who, like Cato, believed themselves to be struggling for
liberty. The liberty they were struggling for was in reality the liberty
to misgovern the Empire, and to talk without acting efficiently.
It is plain, as we may learn from the abundant correspondence of the
time,[11] that they did not know the man they had to deal with. Cæsar
took them completely by surprise; in a few weeks he had cleared Pompey
and Senate and their army out of Italy, had provided for the government,
and gone off to Spain to secure the West by turning the Pompeian armies
out of that peninsula also. After a brilliant campaign of six weeks,
admirably described by himself in his work on the Civil War, he forced
those armies to surrender and then let them go, as he had done just
before in Italy. His clemency took the world by surprise as much as his
generalship.
But the worst was not over for him. Pompey was gathering all the
resources of the East against him, and concentrating them in Epirus with
a view to the re-conquest of Italy. Again Cæsar’s rapidity saved him; he
was just in time to strike the first blow by crossing the sea from
Brindisi—a rash expedient—and hampering Pompey before his concentration
was effected. Here, however, in his eagerness to bring the campaign to
an issue, he made a serious blunder, and had to pay for it by defeat and
a retreat to the corn-growing plain of Thessaly. Pompey unwisely
followed him, instead of invading Italy; and here, in August 48, was
utterly beaten at the battle of Pharsalia. The worn-out old soldier fled
to Egypt, where he was treacherously murdered by one of the king’s
generals. He was an estimable man with many excellent qualities, and in
a more tranquil age might have well become what Cicero wished to make
him, the presiding genius of the Roman State.
Cæsar had yet much war before him—war in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Africa
and in Spain, against the supporters of the old régime, for nothing he
could do in the way of conciliation would persuade them to forgive him
the crime of seeking to identify himself with the State. In doing so
they deprived him of the time which he might have spent to far better
purpose at Rome on the work of efficient government. As it was, he had
been able to spend but a few months in all at home, when on March 15, 44
B.C., he was murdered at a meeting of the Senate, at the feet of
Pompey’s statue, by a small group of assassins, some of whom were
intimate friends of his own. They thought he was on the point of
assuming a visible despotism, and they had some justification for the
suspicion, though it was probably a delusion. To kill a tyrant, they
thought, was to do a noble work in true old Roman fashion. So did the
murderers of the Gracchi.
From what little we know about such work of reform as Cæsar had time
for, we may take it as certain that these deluded assassins made a sad
blunder. Cæsar’s legislative work was fragmentary, but every item of it
shows intelligence and political insight. He did not attempt to turn out
a new constitution in black and white; he did the work of government
mainly himself for the time being, and we do not know how he meant to
provide for it after his death. In the most important matter of all, the
adjustment of the Empire to the home government, and especially the
subordination of the provincial governors to a central authority, he
forestalled the imperial system of the future: he made himself the
central authority, to whom the governors were to be responsible. The
other most important question of government, that of the power and
composition of the Senate, he answered by raising the number of Senators
to 900, as Gaius Gracchus had wished to do, and thus destroying the
power of the old narrow oligarchical cliques. But perhaps his practical
wisdom is best seen in his economic legislation for Rome and Italy. He
was the first statesman to try and check the over-abundance of
slave-labour; the first, too, to lay the foundation of a reasonable
bankruptcy law. He regulated the corn-supply in the city, and brought
down the number of recipients of corn-doles to less than one-half of
what it had lately been. Again, he laid down general rules for the
qualification of candidates for municipal office in Italy, and arranged
for the taking of a census in all the cities every five years, the
records of which were to be deposited at Rome. It would seem as if he
meant to work out the enfranchisement of Italy to its natural
conclusion: for he not only completed it by extending it to the Alps,
which had never yet been done, but went beyond the bounds of Italy,
offering the citizenship freely both to Gauls and Sicilians.
Attempts have been made to depict Cæsar as almost more than human; and
of late again there has been a reaction against him of no less
absurdity, holding him up to contempt as a weak but lucky opportunist.
As we have his own military writings, a life by Plutarch, a few letters
written by or addressed to him, and innumerable allusions to him in
contemporary literature, we ought to be able to form some just idea of
him. As one who has been familiar with all these materials, and many
others of less value, during the greater part of a lifetime, I say
without hesitation that Cæsar was the one man of his time really gifted
with _scientific intelligence_—with the power of seeing the facts before
him and adjusting his action to them. This intelligence, combined with
great strength of will, made him master of the Roman Empire; and though
his character was by no means perfect, he seems to have used his
mastership, not like a capricious Oriental despot, but with a real sense
of responsibility. A man who combines the qualities of an intelligent
statesman in bad times with a generous temper, good taste and good
scholarship, surely deserves to be thought of as one altogether out of
the common. In Shakespeare’s picture of him, derived from Plutarch’s
biography, and representing only the last two days of his life, he seems
weak in body and overweening in spirit, and is probably meant to seem so
by the dramatist for his own purposes. But no sooner have the murderers
done with him than the true greatness of the man begins to make itself
felt, and is impressed on us in page after page to the end of the play,
of which the action may be said to be pivoted on the idea of the horror
and the uselessness of their deed.
So far in this chapter and the last I have been treating of this age as
one of action. It is indeed filled full of human activity, in spite of
the laziness of the governing class as a whole. But this activity was
shown not only in war and politics; this is also an age of great poets
and real men of letters. I must say a word about the two greatest poets,
Lucretius and Catullus; but among the men of letters there stands out
one far above the rest whose life and genius it would take a long
chapter to explain. Cicero’s pre-eminence is not easy to understand even
after long study of his voluminous works: yet I must try to make it
clear that he was, in fact, one of the greatest of all Romans.
Of Lucretius it is our fate to know nothing except his poem in six books
on “The Nature of Things.” But his name is Roman, and the poem has the
true Roman characteristic of being essentially practical in its object.
That object will seem a singular one to those who are unacquainted with
the Greek and Roman culture of this age. What roused a poet’s passion in
this man’s mind was simply the desire to free others, as he had freed
himself, from the fetters of superstition, or, as he calls it,
_religion_; to make them abandon the delusive dream of a life after
death, to repudiate the old stories of torment in Hades, and all foolish
legends of the gods, who in his view took no interest whatever in human
life. All this was, of course, derived from Greek philosophy, the
doctrine of the Epicurean school, but no Greek had ever put such passion
into a creed as Lucretius. His poetry at times almost reminds us of the
grandeur and authority of the Hebrew prophets, so ardently did he
believe in his own creed, and in his mission to enforce it on others.
Uncouth and dry as much of it is—for he has to explain that Epicurean
theory of the universe known still to science as the atomic theory—he
breaks out now and again into strains of magnificent verse which reveal
a mind all burning within. Here is a specimen: it must be in prose, for
no verse translation seems adequate—
“What hast thou, O mortal, so much at heart, that thou goest such
lengths in sickly sorrows? Why bemoan and bewail death? for say that
thy life past and gone has been welcome to thee, and that thy
blessings have not all, as if they were poured into a sieve, run
through and been lost without avail: why not then take thy departure
like a guest filled with life, and with resignation, thou fool, enter
upon untroubled rest? But if all that thou hast enjoyed has been
squandered and lost, and if life is a grievance, why seek to make any
addition, ... why not rather make an end of life and travail? for
there is nothing which I can contrive or discover for thee to give
pleasure: all things are ever the same” (iii. 933 foll.).
The other poet, Catullus, was not of Roman birth, but, like so many
literary men of this and the following age, an Italian from the basin of
the Po. He had no practical aim in writing poetry: he simply wrote
because he could not help it, about himself and his friends and his
loves. It was his own self that inspired him chiefly, and it is still
himself that interests us. According to his own mood, now fresh with the
happiness of an artist, now darkened by anger or self-indulgence, his
poems are exquisite or repulsive; but they are always true and honest
lyrics, and interesting because they are so full of life and passion.
Catullus is one of the world’s best lyric poets. Here is one of his
gems—
“Is aught of pleasure, aught of solace sweet
Permitted, Calvus, to the silent grave,
What time the tale of sorrow we repeat,
Yearning o’er memories we fain would save?
Know this. From Love and Friendship if a tear
Can make its way into that silentness,
Quintilia feels untimely Death less drear,
For hearing of the love that still can bless.”
Catullus, xcvi. (by S. T. I).
Lastly, we come to the man of letters who has given his name to this
period of literature, which indeed draws more than half its interest
from him and from his works. Marcus Tullius Cicero was an Italian, and
had little of the Roman character in his make; he came from the town of
Arpinum, among the foothills of the Apennines some sixty miles
south-east of Rome. He made his way into Roman society by his social and
conversational powers, and by his capacity for friendship, and into the
field of politics by his great gift of oratory, which was now
indispensable for public men. As a “new man” he never was really at home
with the high aristocracy, but he was a man of many friends for all
that, and reckoned among them all the great men of his time, including
both Cæsar and Pompey. His best and truest friend, who worked for him
all his life with unsparing care, was a man of business who stood
outside of politics, Pomponius Atticus; and of Cicero’s letters to this
faithful friend and adviser nearly four hundred survive to prove the
reality of that lifelong devotion. Some five hundred letters to and from
other correspondents are also extant, and the whole collection forms the
most fascinating record of a great man’s life and thoughts that has come
down to us from classical antiquity.
Since Mommsen wrote his famous _History of Rome_, in which he was almost
ignored, Cicero has often been treated with contempt as a shallow
thinker, deriving all his inspiration from Greek originals, and as a
feeble statesman, brilliant only as an orator. It is true that there is
a want of _grit_ in much that Cicero wrote: he was the child of his age,
never tired of writing and talking, little used to profound thinking,
and rarely acting with independent vigour. But he has two claims on the
gratitude of posterity which should never be forgotten. First, he made
Latin into the most perfect language of prose that the world as yet has
known. The echoes of his beautiful style can be heard centuries
afterwards in the Latin fathers of Christianity, especially St.
Augustine and Lactantius, and they are still audible in the best French
and Italian prose-writers of to-day. Secondly, of all Romans Cicero is
the one best known to us as an individual human being: and few indeed
who have had the chance to become really familiar with him can fail to
love him as his own friends loved him. He was not the stuff of which
strong statesmen are made; he was too dependent on the support and
approval of others to inspire men with zeal for a cause—especially for a
losing cause. His own consulship was brilliant, for he was able to
combine the best elements in the State in the cause of order as against
anarchy—anarchy which threatened the very existence of Rome as a city;
and at the end of his life he showed the same ability to use a strong
combination to good purpose in the political field. But he was not of
such strong growth as to mark out a line of his own, and at some unhappy
moments of his life his weakness is apt to move our pity, if not our
contempt.
But with all his weak points Cicero is one of the best and greatest of
all Romans. His gifts were rich, and he used them well. We know him as a
man of pure life in an impure age, and as one who never used his gifts
or opportunities to do harm to others, whether political enemies or
helpless provincials. We know him, too, as a faithful husband and a
devoted father. And lastly, we know that he was not lacking in courage
when the assassin overtook him—the last of a long list of great men of
that age to die a violent death.