civilizations in spite of the effectual separation caused by the great
barriers of the Indian north-west frontier and of the mountain masses
of Central Asia and further India. First for thousands of years the
heliolithic culture spread over all the warm and fertile river valleys
of the old world and developed a temple system and priest rulers about
its sacrificial traditions. Apparently its first makers were always
those brunette peoples we have spoken of as the central race of
mankind. Then the nomads came in from the regions of seasonal grass and
seasonal migrations and superposed their own characteristics and often
their own language on the primitive civilization. They subjugated and
stimulated it, and were stimulated to fresh developments and made it
here one thing and here another. In Mesopotamia it was the Elamite and
then the Semite, and at last the Nordic Medes and Persians and the
Greeks who supplied the ferment; over the region of the Ægean peoples
it was the Greeks; in India it was the Aryan-speakers; in Egypt there
was a thinner infusion of conquerors into a more intensely saturated
priestly civilization; in China, the Hun conquered and was absorbed and
was followed by fresh Huns. China was Mongolized just as Greece and
North India were Aryanized and Mesopotamia Semitized and Aryanized.
Everywhere the nomads destroyed much, but everywhere they brought in a
new spirit of free enquiry and moral innovation. They questioned the
beliefs of immemorial ages. They let daylight into the temples. They
set up kings who were neither priests nor gods but mere leaders among
their captains and companions.
THE DYING GAUL
THE DYING GAUL
The statue in the National Museum, Rome, depicting a Gaul stabbing
himself, after killing his wife, in the presence of his enemies
_Photo: Anderson_
In the centuries following the sixth century B.C. we find everywhere a
great breaking down of ancient traditions and a new spirit of moral and
intellectual enquiry awake, a spirit never more to be altogether
stilled in the great progressive movement of mankind. We find reading
and writing becoming common and accessible accomplishments among the
ruling and prosperous minority; they were no longer the jealously
guarded secret of the priests. Travel is increasing and transport
growing easier by reason of horses and roads. A new and easy device to
facilitate trade has been found in coined money.
Let us now transfer our attention back from China in the extreme east
of the old world to the western half of the Mediterranean. Here we
have to note the appearance of a city which was destined to play at
last a very great part indeed in human affairs, Rome.
Hitherto we have told very little about Italy in our story. It was
before 1000 B.C. a land of mountain and forest and thinly populated.
Aryan-speaking tribes had pressed down this peninsula and formed little
towns and cities, and the southern extremity was studded with Greek
settlements. The noble ruins of Pæstum preserve for us to this day
something of the dignity and splendour of these early Greek
establishments. A non-Aryan people, probably akin to the Ægean
peoples, the Etruscans, had established themselves in the central part
of the peninsula. They had reversed the usual process by subjugating
various Aryan tribes. Rome, when it comes into the light of history,
is a little trading city at a ford on the Tiber, with a Latin-speaking
population ruled over by Etruscan kings. The old chronologies gave 753
B.C. as the date of the founding of Rome, half a century later than the
founding of the great Phœnician city of Carthage and twenty-three years
after the first Olympiad. Etruscan tombs of a much earlier date than
753 B.C. have, however, been excavated in the Roman Forum.
In that red-letter century, the sixth century B.C., the Etruscan kings
were expelled (510 B.C.) and Rome became an aristocratic republic with
a lordly class of “patrician” families dominating a commonalty of
“plebeians.” Except that it spoke Latin it was not unlike many
aristocratic Greek republics.
For some centuries the internal history of Rome was the story of a long
and obstinate struggle for freedom and a share in the government on the
part of the plebeians. It would not be difficult to find Greek
parallels to this conflict, which the Greeks would have called a
conflict of aristocracy with democracy. In the end the plebeians broke
down most of the exclusive barriers of the old families and established
a working equality with them. They destroyed the old exclusiveness,
and made it possible and acceptable for Rome to extend her citizenship
by the inclusion of more and more “outsiders.” For while she still
struggled at home, she was extending her power abroad.
REMAINS OF THE ANCIENT ROMAN CISTERNS AT CARTHAGE
REMAINS OF THE ANCIENT ROMAN CISTERNS AT CARTHAGE
_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_
The extension of Roman power began in the fifth century B.C. Until
that time they had waged war, and generally unsuccessful war, with the
Etruscans. There was an Etruscan fort, Veii, only a few miles from
Rome which the Romans had never been able to capture. In 474 B.C.,
however, a great misfortune came to the Etruscans. Their fleet was
destroyed by the Greeks of Syracuse in Sicily. At the same time a wave
of Nordic invaders came down upon them from the north, the Gauls.
Caught between Roman and Gaul, the Etruscans fell—and disappear from
history. Veii was captured by the Romans, The Gauls came through to
Rome and sacked the city (390 B.C.A.D.) but could not capture the
Capitol. An attempted night surprise was betrayed by the cackling of
some geese, and finally the invaders were bought off and retired to the
north of Italy again.
The Gaulish raid seems to have invigorated rather than weakened Rome.
The Romans conquered and assimilated the Etruscans, and extended their
power over all central Italy from the Arno to Naples. To this they had
reached within a few years of 300 B.C. Their conquests in Italy were
going on simultaneously with the growth of Philip’s power in Macedonia
and Greece, and the tremendous raid of Alexander to Egypt and the
Indus. The Romans had become notable people in the civilized world to
the east of them by the break-up of Alexander’s empire.
To the north of the Roman power were the Gauls; to the south of them
were the Greek settlements of Magna Græcia, that is to say of Sicily
and of the toe and heel of Italy. The Gauls were a hardy, warlike
people and the Romans held that boundary by a line of forts and
fortified settlements. The Greek cities in the south headed by
Tarentum (now Taranto) and by Syracuse in Sicily, did not so much
threaten as fear the Romans. They looked about for some help against
these new conquerors.
We have already told how the empire of Alexander fell to pieces and was
divided among his generals and companions. Among these adventurers was
a kinsman of Alexander’s named Pyrrhus, who established himself in
Epirus, which is across the Adriatic Sea over against the heel of
Italy. It was his ambition to play the part of Philip of Macedonia to
Magna Græcia, and to become protector and master-general of Tarentum,
Syracuse and the rest of that part of the world. He had what was then
it very efficient modern army; he had an infantry phalanx, cavalry from
Thessaly—which was now quite as good as the original Macedonian
cavalry—and twenty fighting elephants; he invaded Italy and routed the
Romans in two considerable battles, Heraclea (280 B.C.) and Ausculum
(279 B.C.), and having driven them north, he turned his attention to
the subjugation of Sicily.
But this brought against him a more formidable enemy than were the
Romans at that time, the Phœnician trading city of Carthage, which was
probably then the greatest city in the world. Sicily was too near
Carthage for a new Alexander to be welcome there, and Carthage was
mindful of the fate that had befallen her mother city Tyre half a
century before. So she sent a fleet to encourage or compel Rome to
continue the struggle, and she cut the overseas communications of
Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus found himself freshly assailed by the Romans, and
suffered a disastrous repulse in an attack he had made upon their camp
at Beneventum between Naples and Rome.
And suddenly came news that recalled him to Epirus. The Gauls were
raiding south. But this time they were not raiding down into Italy;
the Roman frontier, fortified and guarded, had become too formidable
for them. They were raiding down through Illyria (which is now Serbia
and Albania) to Macedonia and Epirus. Repulsed by the Romans,
endangered at sea by the Carthaginians, and threatened at home by the
Gauls, Pyrrhus abandoned his dream of conquest and went home (275
B.C.), and the power of Rome was extended to the Straits of Messina.
On the Sicilian side of the Straits was the Greek city of Messina, and
this presently fell into the hands of a gang of pirates. The
Carthaginians, who were already practically overlords of Sicily and
allies of Syracuse, suppressed these pirates (270 B.C.) and put in a
Carthaginian garrison there. The pirates appealed to Rome and Rome
listened to their complaint. And so across the Straits of Messina the
great trading power of Carthage and this new conquering people, the
Romans, found themselves in antagonism, face to face.
XXXII
ROME AND CARTHAGE
It was in 264 B.C. that the great struggle between Rome and Carthage,
the Punic Wars, began. In that year Asoka was beginning his reign in
Behar and Shi- Hwang-ti was a little child, the Museum in Alexandria
was still doing good scientific work, and the barbaric Gauls were now
in Asia Minor and exacting a tribute from Pergamum. The different
regions of the world were still separated by insurmountable distances,
and probably the rest of mankind heard only vague and remote rumours of
the mortal fight that went on for a century and a half in Spain, Italy,
North Africa and the western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold
of Semitic power and Rome, this newcomer among Aryan-speaking peoples.
That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the world.
Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of Aryan and Semite was
to merge itself later on in the conflict of Gentile and Jew. Our
history now is coming to events whose consequences and distorted
traditions still maintain a lingering and expiring vitality in, and
exercise a complicating and confusing influence upon, the conflicts and
controversies of to-day.
The First Punic War began in 264 B.C. about the pirates of Messina. It
developed into a struggle for the possession of all Sicily except the
dominions of the Greek king of Syracuse. The advantage of the sea was
at first with the Carthaginians. They had great fighting ships of what
was hitherto an unheard-of size, quinqueremes, galleys with five banks
of oars and a huge ram. At the battle of Salamis, two centuries
before, the leading battleships had only been triremes with three
banks. But the Romans, with extraordinary energy and in spite of the
fact that they had little naval experience, set themselves to outbuild
the Carthaginians. They manned the new navy they created chiefly with
Greek seamen, and they invented grappling and boarding to make up for
the superior seamanship of the enemy. When the Carthaginian came up to
ram or shear the oars of the Roman, huge grappling irons seized him and
the Roman soldiers swarmed aboard him. At Mylæ (260 B.C.) and at
Ecnomus (256 B.C.) the Carthaginians were disastrously beaten. They
repulsed a Roman landing near Carthage but were badly beaten at
Palermo, losing one hundred and four elephants there—to grace such a
triumphal procession through the Forum as Rome had never seen before.
But after that came two Roman defeats and then a Roman recovery. The
last naval forces of Carthage were defeated by it last Roman effort at
the battle of the Ægatian Isles (241 B.C.) and Carthage sued for peace.
All Sicily except the dominions of Hiero, king of Syracuse, was ceded
to the Romans.
HANNIBAL
HANNIBAL
Bust in the National Museum at Naples
_Photo: Mansell_
For twenty-two years Rome and Carthage kept the peace. Both had
trouble enough at home. In Italy the Gauls came south again,
threatened Rome—_which in a state of panic offered human sacrifices to
the Gods!_—and were routed at Telamon. Rome pushed forward to the
Alps, and even extended her dominions down the Adriatic coast to
Illyria. Carthage suffered from domestic insurrections and from revolts
in Corsica and Sardinia, and displayed far less recuperative power.
Finally, an act of intolerable aggression, Rome seized and annexed the
two revolting islands.
Spain at that time was Carthaginian as far north as the river Ebro. To
that boundary the Romans restricted them. Any crossing of the Ebro by
the Carthaginians was to be considered an act of war against the
Romans. At last in 218 B.C. the Carthaginians, provoked by new Roman
aggressions, did cross this river under a young general named Hannibal,
one of the most brilliant commanders in the whole of history. He
marched his army from Spain over the Alps into Italy, raised the Gauls
against the Romans, and carried on the Second Punic War in Italy itself
for fifteen years. He inflicted tremendous defeats upon the Romans at
Lake Trasimere and at Cannæ, and throughout all his Italian campaigns
no Roman army stood against him and escaped disaster. But a Roman army
had landed at Marseilles and cut his communications with Spain; he had
no siege train, and he could never capture Rome. Finally the
Carthaginians, threatened by the revolt of the Numidians at home, were
forced back upon the defence of their own city in Africa, a Roman army
crossed into Africa, and Hannibal experienced his first defeat under
its walls at the battle of Zama (202 B.C. at the hands of Scipio
Africanus the Elder. The battle of Zama ended this Second Punic War.
Carthage capitulated; she surrendered Spain and her war fleet; she paid
an enormous indemnity and agreed to give up Hannibal to the vengeance
of the Romans. But Hannibal escaped and fled to Asia where later,
being in danger of falling into the hands of his relentless enemies, he
took poison and died.
For fifty-six years Rome and the shorn city of Carthage were at peace.
And meanwhile Rome spread her empire over confused and divided Greece,
invaded Asia Minor, and defeated Antiochus III, the Seleucid monarch,
at Magnesia in Lydia. She made Egypt, still under the Ptolemies, and
Pergamum and most of the small states of Asia Minor into “Allies,” or,
as we should call them now, “protected states.”
Meanwhile Carthage, subjugated and enfeebled, had been slowly regaining
something of her former prosperity. Her recovery revived the hate and
suspicion of the Romans. She was attacked upon the most shallow and
artificial of quarrels (149 B.C.), she made an obstinate and bitter
resistance, stood a long siege and was stormed (146 B.C.). The street
fighting, or massacre, lasted six days; it was extraordinarily bloody,
and when the citadel capitulated only about fifty thousand of the
Carthaginian population remained alive out of a quarter of a million.
They were sold into slavery, and the city was burnt and elaborately
destroyed. The blackened ruins were ploughed and sown as a sort of
ceremonial effacement.
Map: The Extent of the Roman Power & its Alliances about 150 B.C.
So ended the Third Punic War. Of all the Semitic states and cities
that had flourished in the world five centuries before only one little
country remained free under native rulers. This was Judea, which had
liberated itself from the Seleucids and was under the rule of the
native Maccabean princes. By this time it had its Bible almost
complete, and was developing the distinctive traditions of the Jewish
world as we know it now. It was natural that the Carthaginians,
Phoenicians and kindred peoples dispersed about the world should find a
common link in their practically identical language and in this
literature of hope and courage. To a large extent they were still the
traders and bankers of the world. The Semitic world had been submerged
rather than replaced.
Jerusalem, which has always been rather the symbol than the centre of
Judaism, was taken by the Romans in 65 B.C.; and after various
vicissitudes of quasi- independence and revolt was besieged by them in
70 A.D. and captured after a stubborn struggle. The Temple was
destroyed. A later rebellion in 132 A.D. completed its destruction,
and the Jerusalem we know to-day was rebuilt later under Roman
auspices. A temple to the Roman god, Jupiter Capitolinus, stood in the
place of the Temple, and Jews were forbidden to inhabit the city.
XXXIII
THE GROWTH OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Now this new Roman power which arose to dominate the western world in
the second and first centuries B.C. was in several respects a different
thing from any of the great empires that had hitherto prevailed in the
civilized world. It was not at first a monarchy, and it was not the
creation of any one great conqueror. It was not indeed the first of
republican empires; Athens had dominated a group of Allies and
dependents in the time of Pericles, and Carthage when she entered upon
her fatal struggle with Rome was mistress of Sardinia and Corsica,
Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and most of Spain and Sicily. But it was the
first republican empire that escaped extinction and went on to fresh
developments.
The centre of this new system lay far to the west of the more ancient
centres of empire, which had hitherto been the river valleys of
Mesopotamia and Egypt. This westward position enabled Rome to bring in
to civilization quite fresh regions and peoples. The Roman power
extended to Morocco and Spain, and was presently able to thrust
north-westward over what is now France and Belgium to Britain and
north-eastward into Hungary and South Russia. But on the other hand it
was never able to maintain itself in Central Asia or Persia because
they were too far from its administrative centres. It included
therefore great masses of fresh Nordic Aryan- speaking peoples, it
presently incorporated nearly all the Greek people in the world, and
its population was less strongly Hamitic and Semitic than that of any
preceding empire.
For some centuries this Roman Empire did not fall into the grooves of
precedent that had so speedily swallowed up Persian and Greek, and all
that time it developed. The rulers of the Medes and Persians became
entirely Babylonized in a generation or so; they took over the tiara of
the king of kings and the temples and priesthoods of his gods;
Alexander and his successors followed in the same easy path of
assimilation; the Seleucid monarchs had much the same court and
administrative methods as Nebuchadnezzar; the Ptolemies became Pharaohs
and altogether Egyptian. They were assimilated just as before them the
Semitic conquerors of the Sumerians had been assimilated. But the
Romans ruled in their own city, and for some centuries kept to the laws
of their own nature. The only people who exercised any great mental
influence upon them before the second or third century A.D. were the
kindred and similar Greeks. So that the Roman Empire was essentially a
first attempt to rule a great dominion upon mainly Aryan lines. It was
so far a new pattern in history, it was an expanded Aryan republic.
The old pattern of a personal conqueror ruling over a capital city that
had grown up round the temple of a harvest god did not apply to it.
The Romans had gods and temples, but like the gods of the Greeks their
gods were quasi-human immortals, divine patricians. The Romans also
had blood sacrifices and even made human ones in times of stress,
things they may have learnt to do from their dusky Etruscan teachers;
but until Rome was long past its zenith neither priest nor temple
played a large part in Roman history.
The Roman Empire was a growth, an unplanned novel growth; the Roman
people found themselves engaged almost unawares in a vast
administrative experiment. It cannot be called a successful
experiment. In the end their empire collapsed altogether. And it
changed enormously in form and method from century to century. It
changed more in a hundred years than Bengal or Mesopotamia or Egypt
changed in a thousand. It was always changing. It never attained to
any fixity.
In a sense the experiment failed. In a sense the experiment remains
unfinished, and Europe and America to-day are still working out the
riddles of world-wide statescraft first confronted by the Roman people.
It is well for the student of history to bear in mind the very great
changes not only in political but in social and moral matters that went
on throughout the period of Roman dominion. There is much too strong a
tendency in people’s minds to think of the Roman rule as something
finished and stable, firm, rounded, noble and decisive. Macaulay’s
_Lays of Ancient Rome_, S.P.Q.R. the elder Cato, the Scipios, Julius
Cæsar, Diocletian, Constantine the Great, triumphs, orations,
gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrs are all mixed up together in
a picture of something high and cruel and dignified. The items of that
picture have to be disentangled. They are collected at different
points from a process of change profounder than that which separates
the London of William the Conqueror from the London of to-day.
We may very conveniently divide the expansion of Rome into four stages.
The first stage began after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 390 B.C.
and went on until the end of the First Punic War (240 B.C,). We may
call this stage the stage of the Assimilative Republic. It was perhaps
the finest, most characteristic stage in Roman history. The age-long
dissensions of patrician and plebeian were drawing to it close, the
Etruscan threat had come to an end, no one was very rich yet nor very
poor, and most men were public-spirited. It was a republic like the
republic of the South African Boers before 1900 or like the northern
states of the American union between 1800 and 1850; a free- farmers
republic. At the outset of this stage Rome was a little state scarcely
twenty miles square. She fought the sturdy but kindred states about
her, and sought not their destruction but coalescence. Her centuries
of civil dissension had trained her people in compromise and
concessions. Some of the defeated cities became altogether Roman with
a voting share in the government, some became self-governing with the
right to trade and marry in Rome; garrisons full of citizens were set
up at strategic points and colonies of varied privileges founded among
the freshly conquered people. Great roads were made. The rapid
Latinization of all Italy was the inevitable consequence of such a
policy. In 89 B.C. all the free inhabitants of Italy became citizens
of the city of Rome. Formally the whole Roman Empire became at last an
extended city. In 212 A.D. every free man in the entire extent of the
empire was given citizenship; the right, if he could get there, to vote
in the town meeting in Rome.
This extension of citizenship to tractable cities and to whole
countries was the distinctive device of Roman expansion. It reversed
the old process of conquest and assimilation altogether. By the Roman
method the conquerors assimilated the conquered.
THE FORUM AT ROME AS IT IS TO-DAY
THE FORUM AT ROME AS IT IS TO-DAY