old process of assimilation still went on, another process arose by its
side. Sicily for instance was treated as a conquered prey. It was
declared an “estate” of the Roman people. Its rich soil and
industrious population was exploited to make Rome rich. The patricians
and the more influential among the plebeians secured the major share of
that wealth. And the war also brought in a large supply of slaves.
Before the First Punic War the population of the republic had been
largely a population of citizen farmers. Military service was their
privilege and liability. While they were on active service their farms
fell into debt and a new large-scale slave agriculture grew up; when
they returned they found their produce in competition with slave-grown
produce from Sicily and from the new estates at home. Times had
changed. The republic had altered its character. Not only was Sicily
in the hands of Rome, the common man was in the hands of the rich
creditor and the rich competitor. Rome had entered upon its second
stage, the Republic of Adventurous Rich Men.
For two hundred years the Roman soldier farmers had struggled for
freedom and a share in the government of their state; for a hundred
years they had enjoyed their privileges. The First Punic War wasted
them and robbed them of all they had won.
RELICS OF ROMAN RULE
RELICS OF ROMAN RULE
Ruins of Coliseum in Tunis
_Photo: Jacques Boyer_
The value of their electoral privileges had also evaporated. The
governing bodies of the Roman republic were two in number. The first
and more important was the Senate. This was a body originally of
patricians and then of prominent men of all sorts, who were summoned to
it first by certain powerful officials, the consuls and censors. Like
the British House of Lords it became a gathering of great landowners,
prominent politicians, big business men and the like. It was much more
like the British House of Lords than it was like the American Senate.
For three centuries, from the Punic Wars onward, it was the centre of
Roman political thought and purpose. The second body was the Popular
Assembly. This was supposed to be an assembly of _all_ the citizens of
Rome. When Rome was a little state twenty miles square this was a
possible gathering. When the citizenship of Rome had spread beyond the
confines in Italy, it was an altogether impossible one. Its meetings,
proclaimed by horn-blowing from the Capitol and the city walls, became
more and more a gathering of political hacks and city riff-raff. In
the fourth century B.C. the Popular Assembly was a considerable check
upon the Senate, a competent representation of the claims and rights of
the common man. By the end of the Punic Wars it was an impotent relic
of a vanquished popular control. No effectual legal check remained
upon the big men.
THE GREAT ROMAN ARCH AT CTESIPHON NEAR BAGDAD
THE GREAT ROMAN ARCH AT CTESIPHON NEAR BAGDAD
Nothing of the nature of representative government was ever introduced
into the Roman republic. No one thought of electing delegates to
represent the will of the citizens. This is a very important point for
the student to grasp. The Popular Assembly never became the equivalent
of the American House of Representatives or the British House of
Commons. In theory it was all the citizens; in practice it ceased to
be anything at all worth consideration.
The common citizen of the Roman Empire was therefore in a very poor
case after the Second Punic War; he was impoverished, he had often lost
his farm, he was ousted from profitable production by slaves, and he
had no political power left to him to remedy these things. The only
methods of popular expression left to a people without any form of
political expression are the strike and the revolt. The story of the
second and first centuries B.C., so far as internal politics go, is a
story of futile revolutionary upheaval. The scale of this history will
not permit us to tell of the intricate struggles of that time, of the
attempts to break up estates and restore the land to the free farmer,
of proposals to abolish debts in whole or in part. There was revolt
and civil war. In 73 B.C., the distresses of Italy were enhanced by a
great insurrection, of the slaves under Spartacus. The slaves of Italy
revolted with some effect, for among them were the trained fighters of
the gladiatorial shows. For two years Spartacus held out in the crater
of Vesuvius, which seemed at that time to be an extinct volcano. This
insurrection was defeated at last and suppressed with frantic cruelty.
Six thousand captured Spartacists were crucified along the Appian Way,
the great highway that runs southward out of Rome (71 B.C.).
The common man never made head against the forces that were subjugating
and degrading him. But the big rich men who were overcoming him were
even in his defeat preparing a new power in the Roman world over
themselves and him, the power of the army.
Before the Second Punic War the army of Rome was a levy of free
farmers, who, according to their quality, rode or marched afoot to
battle. This was a very good force for wars close at hand, but not the
sort of army that will go abroad and bear long campaigns with patience.
And moreover as the slaves multiplied and the estates grew, the supply
of free- spirited fighting farmers declined. It was a popular leader
named Marius who introduced a new factor. North Africa after the
overthrow of the Carthaginian civilization had become a semi-barbaric
kingdom, the kingdom of Numidia. The Roman power fell into conflict
with Jugurtha, king of this state, and experienced enormous
difficulties in subduing him. Marius was made consul, in a phase of
public indignation, to end this discreditable war. This he did by
raising _paid troops_ and drilling them hard. Jugurtha was brought in
chains to Rome (106 B.C.) and Marius, when his time of office had
expired, held on to his consulship illegally with his newly created
legions. There was no power in Rome to restrain him.
With Marius began the third phase in the development of the Roman
power, the Republic of the Military Commanders. For now began a period
in which the leaders of the paid legions fought for the mastery of the
Roman world. Against Marius was pitted the aristocratic Sulla who had
served under him in Africa. Each in turn made a great massacre of his
political opponents. Men were proscribed and executed by the thousand,
and their estates were sold. After the bloody rivalry of these two and
the horror of the revolt of Spartacus, came a phase in which Lucullus
and Pompey the Great and Crassus and Julius Cæsar were the masters of
armies and dominated affairs. It was Crassus who defeated Spartacus.
Lucullus conquered Asia Minor and penetrated to Armenia, and retired
with great wealth into private life. Crassus thrusting further invaded
Persia and was defeated and slain by the Parthians. After a long
rivalry Pompey was defeated by Julius Cæsar (48 B.C.) and murdered in
Egypt, leaving Julius Cæsar sole master of the Roman world.
The figure of Julius Cæsar is one that has stirred the human
imagination out of all proportion to its merit or true importance. He
has become a legend and a symbol. For us he is chiefly important as
marking the transition from the phase of military adventurers to the
beginning of the fourth stage in Roman expansion, the Early Empire.
For in spite of the profoundest economic and political convulsions, in
spite of civil war and social degeneration, throughout all this time
the boundaries of the Roman state crept outward and continued to creep
outward to their maximum about 100 A.D. There had been something like
an ebb during the doubtful phases of the Second Punic War, and again a
manifest loss of vigour before the reconstruction of the army by
Marius. The revolt of Spartacus marked a third phase. Julius Cæsar
made his reputation as a military leader in Gaul, which is now France
and Belgium. (The chief tribes inhabiting this country belonged to the
same Celtic people as the Gauls who had occupied north Italy for a
time, and who had afterwards raided into Asia Minor and settled down as
the Galatians.) Cæsar drove back a German invasion of Gaul and added
all that country to the empire, and he twice crossed the Straits of
Dover into Britain (55 and 54 B.C.), where however he made no permanent
conquest. Meanwhile Pompey the Great was consolidating Roman conquests
that reached in the east to the Caspian Sea.
THE COLUMN OF TRAJAN AT ROME
THE COLUMN OF TRAJAN AT ROME
Representing his conquests at Dacia and elsewhere
At this time, the middle of the first century B.C., the Roman Senate
was still the nominal centre of the Roman government, appointing
consuls and other officials, granting powers and the like; and a number
of politicians, among whom Cicero was an outstanding figure, were
struggling to preserve the great traditions of republican Rome and to
maintain respect for its laws. But the spirit of citizenship had gone
from Italy with the wasting away of the free farmers; it was a land now
of slaves and impoverished men with neither the understanding nor the
desire for freedom. There was nothing whatever behind these republican
leaders in the Senate, while behind the great adventurers they feared
and desired to control were the legions. Over the heads of the Senate
Crassus and Pompey and Cæsar divided the rule of the Empire between
them (The First Triumvirate). When presently Crassus was killed at
distant Carrhæ by the Parthians, Pompey and Cæsar fell out. Pompey took
up the republican side, and laws were passed to bring Cæsar to trial
for his breaches of law and his disobedience to the decrees of the
Senate.
It was illegal for a general to bring his troops out of the boundary of
his command, and the boundary between Cæsar’s command and Italy was the
Rubicon. In 49 B.C. he crossed the Rubicon, saying “The die is cast”
and marched upon Pompey and Rome.
It had been the custom in Rome in the past, in periods of military
extremity, to elect a “dictator” with practically unlimited powers to
rule through the crisis. After his overthrow of Pompey, Cæsar was made
dictator first for ten years and then (in 45 B.C.) for life. In effect
he was made monarch of the empire for life. There was talk of a king,
a word abhorrent to Rome since the expulsion of the Etruscans five
centuries before. Cæsar refused to be king, but adopted throne and
sceptre. After his defeat of Pompey, Cæsar had gone on into Egypt and
had made love to Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, the goddess
queen of Egypt. She seems to have turned his head very completely. He
had brought back to Rome the Egyptian idea of a god-king. His statue
was set up in a temple with an inscription “To the Unconquerable God.”
The expiring republicanism of Rome flared up in a last protest, and
Cæsar was stabbed to death in the Senate at the foot of the statue of
his murdered rival, Pompey the Great.
Thirteen years more of this conflict of ambitious personalities
followed. There was a second Triumvirate of Lepidus, Mark Antony and
Octavian Cæsar, the latter the nephew of Julius Cæsar. Octavian like
his uncle took the poorer, hardier western provinces where the best
legions were recruited. In 31 B.C., he defeated Mark Antony, his only
serious rival, at the naval battle of Actium, and made himself sole
master of the Roman world. But Octavian was a man of different quality
altogether from Julius Cæsar. He had no foolish craving to be God or
King. He had no queen-lover that he wished to dazzle. He restored
freedom to the Senate and people of Rome. He declined to be dictator.
The grateful Senate in return gave him the reality instead of the forms
of power. He was to be called not King indeed, but “Princeps” and
“Augustus.” He became Augustus Cæsar, the first of the Roman emperors
(27 B.C. to 14 A.D.).
He was followed by Tiberius Cæsar (14 to 37 A.D.) and he by others,
Caligula, Claudius, Nero and so on up to Trajan (98 A.D.), Hadrian (117
A.D.), Antonius Pius (138 A.D.) and Marcus Aurelius (161- 180 A.D.).
All these emperors were emperors of the legions. The soldiers made
them, and some the soldiers destroyed. Gradually the Senate fades out
of Roman-history, and the emperor and his administrative officials
replace it. The boundaries of the empire crept forward now to their
utmost limits. Most of Britain was added to the empire, Transylvania
was brought in as a new province, Dacia; Trajan crossed the Euphrates.
Hadrian had an idea that reminds us at once of what had happened at the
other end of the old world. Like Shi-Hwang-ti he built walls against
the northern barbarians; one across Britain and a palisade between the
Rhine and the Danube. He abandoned some of the acquisitions of Trajan.
The expansion of the Roman Empire was at an end.
XXXIV
BETWEEN ROME AND CHINA
The second and first centuries B.C. mark a new phase in the history of
mankind. Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean are no longer the
centre of interest. Both Mesopotamia and Egypt were still fertile,
populous and fairly prosperous, but they were no longer the dominant
regions of the world. Power had drifted to the west and to the east.
Two great empires now dominated the world, this new Roman Empire and
the renascent Empire of China. Rome extended its power to the
Euphrates, but it was never able to get beyond that boundary. It was
too remote. Beyond the Euphrates the former Persian and Indian
dominions of the Seleucids fell under a number of new masters. China,
now under the Han dynasty, which had replaced the Ts’in dynasty at the
death of Shi-Hwang-ti, had extended its power across Tibet and over the
high mountain passes of the Pamirs into western Turkestan. But there,
too, it reached its extremes. Beyond was too far.
China at this time was the greatest, best organized and most civilized
political system in the world. It was superior in area and population
to the Roman Empire at its zenith. It was possible then for these two
vast systems to flourish in the same world at the same time in almost
complete ignorance of each other. The means of communication both by
sea and land was not yet sufficiently developed and organized for them
to come to a direct clash.
Yet they reacted upon each other in a very remarkable way, and their
influence upon the fate of the regions that lay between them, upon
central Asia and India, was profound. A certain amount of trade
trickled through, by camel caravans across Persia, for example, and by
coasting ships by way of India and the Red Sea. In 66 B.C. Roman
troops under Pompey followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great,
and marched up the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. In 102 A.D. a
Chinese expeditionary force under Pan Chau reached the Caspian, and
sent emissaries to report upon the power of Rome. But many centuries
were still to pass before definite knowledge and direct intercourse
were to link the great parallel worlds of Europe and Eastern Asia.
To the north of both these great empires were barbaric wildernesses.
What is now Germany was largely forest lands; the forests extended far
into Russia and made a home for the gigantic aurochs, a bull of almost
elephantine size. Then to the north of the great mountain masses of
Asia stretched a band of deserts, steppes and then forests and frozen
lands. In the eastward lap of the elevated part of Asia was the great
triangle of Manchuria. Large parts of these regions, stretching
between South Russia and Turkestan into Manchuria, were and are regions
of exceptional climatic insecurity. Their rainfall has varied greatly
in the course of a few centuries They are lands treacherous to man.
For years they will carry pasture and sustain cultivation, and then
will come an age of decline in humidity and a cycle of killing
droughts.
A CHINESE COVERED JAR OF GREEN-GLAZED EARTHENWARE
A CHINESE COVERED JAR OF GREEN-GLAZED EARTHENWARE
Han Dynasty (contemporary with the late Roman republic and early
Empire)
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
The western part of this barbaric north from the German forests to
South Russia and Turkestan and from Gothland to the Alps was the region
of origin of the Nordic peoples and of the Aryan speech. The eastern
steppes and deserts of Mongolia was the region of origin of the Hunnish
or Mongolian or Tartar or Turkish peoples—for all these several peoples
were akin in language, race, and way of life. And as the Nordic
peoples seem to have been continually overflowing their own borders and
pressing south upon the developing civilizations of Mesopotamia and the
Mediterranean coast, so the Hunnish tribes sent their surplus as
wanderers, raiders and conquerors into the settled regions of China.
Periods of plenty in the north would mean an increase in population
there; a shortage of grass, a spell of cattle disease, would drive the
hungry warlike tribesmen south.
For a time there were simultaneously two fairly effective Empires in
the world capable of holding back the barbarians and even forcing
forward the frontiers of the imperial peace. The thrust of the Han
empire from north China into Mongolia was strong and continuous. The
Chinese population welled up over the barrier of the Great Wall.
Behind the imperial frontier guards came the Chinese farmer with horse
and plough, ploughing up the grass lands and enclosing the winter
pasture. The Hunnish peoples raided and murdered the settlers, but the
Chinese punitive expeditions were too much for them. The nomads were
faced with the choice of settling down to the plough and becoming
Chinese tax-payers or shifting in search of fresh summer pastures.
Some took the former course and were absorbed. Some drifted
north-eastward and eastward over the mountain passes down into western
Turkestan.
VASE OF BRONZE FORM, UNGLAZED STONEWARE
VASE OF BRONZE FORM, UNGLAZED STONEWARE
Han Dynasty (B.C. 206 - A.D. 220)
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
This westward drive of the Mongolian horsemen was going on from 200
B.C. onward. It was producing a westward pressure upon the Aryan
tribes, and these again were pressing upon the Roman frontiers ready to
break through directly there was any weakness apparent. The Parthians,
who were apparently a Scythian people with some Mongolian admixture,
came down to the Euphrates by the first century B.C. They fought
against Pompey the Great in his eastern raid. They defeated and killed
Crassus. They replaced the Seleucid monarchy in Persia by a dynasty of
Parthian kings, the Arsacid dynasty.
CHINESE VESSEL IN BRONZE, IN FORM OF A GOOSE
CHINESE VESSEL IN BRONZE, IN FORM OF A GOOSE
Dating from before the time of Shi-Hwang-ti. Such a piece of work
indicates a high level of comfort and humour
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
But for a time the line of least resistance for hungry nomads lay
neither to the west nor the east but through central Asia and then
south-eastward through the Khyber Pass into India. It was India which
received the Mongolian drive in these centuries of Roman and Chinese
strength. A series of raiding conquerors poured down through the
Punjab into the great plains to loot and destroy. The empire of Asoka
was broken up, and for a time the history of India passes into
darkness. A certain Kushan dynasty founded by the “Indo- Scythians”—one
of the raiding peoples—ruled for a time over North India and maintained
a certain order. These invasions went on for several centuries. For a
large part of the fifth century A.D. India was afflicted by the
Ephthalites or White Huns, who levied tribute on the small Indian
princes and held India in terror. Every summer these Ephthalites
pastured in western Turkestan, every autumn they came down through the
passes to terrorize India.
In the second century A.D. a great misfortune came upon the Roman and
Chinese empires that probably weakened the resistance of both to
barbarian pressure. This was a pestilence of unexampled virulence. It
raged for eleven years in China and disorganized the social framework
profoundly. The Han dynasty fell, and a new age of division and
confusion began from which China did not fairly recover until the
seventh century A.D. with the coming of the great Tang dynasty.
The infection spread through Asia to Europe. It raged throughout the
Roman Empire from 164 to 180 A.D. It evidently weakened the Roman
imperial fabric very seriously. We begin to hear of depopulation in
the Roman provinces after this, and there was a marked deterioration in
the vigour and efficiency of government. At any rate we presently find
the frontier no longer invulnerable, but giving way first in this place
and then in that. A new Nordic people, the Goths, coming originally
from Gothland in Sweden, had migrated across Russia to the Volga region
and the shores of the Black Sea and taken to the sea and piracy. By
the end of the second century they may have begun to feel the westward
thrust of the Huns. In 247 they crossed the Danube in a great land
raid, and defeated and killed the Emperor Decius in a battle in what is
now Serbia. In 236 another Germanic people, the Franks, had broken
bounds upon the lower Rhine, and the Alemanni had poured into Alsace.
The legions in Gaul beat back their invaders, but the Goths in the
Balkan peninsula raided again and again. The province of Dacia vanished
from Roman history.
A chill had come to the pride and confidence of Rome. In 270-275 Rome,
which had been an open and secure city for three centuries, was
fortified by the Emperor Aurelian.
XXXV
THE COMMON MAN’S LIFE UNDER THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE
Before we tell of how this Roman empire which was built up in the two
centuries B.C., and which flourished in peace and security from the
days of Augustus Cæsar onward for two centuries, fell into disorder and
was broken up, it may be as well to devote some attention to the life
of the ordinary people throughout this great realm. Our history has
come down now to within 2000 years of our own time; and the life of the
civilized people, both under the Peace of Rome and the Peace of the Han
dynasty, was beginning to resemble more and more clearly the life of
their civilized successors to-day.
In the western world coined money was now in common use; outside the
priestly world there were many people of independent means who were
neither officials of the government nor priests; people travelled about
more freely than they had ever done before, and there were high roads
and inns for them. Compared with the past, with the time before 500
B.C., life had become much more loose. Before that date civilized men
had been bound to a district or country, had been bound to a tradition
and lived within a very limited horizon; only the nomads traded and
travelled.
But neither the Roman Peace nor the Peace of the Han dynasty meant a
uniform civilization over the large areas they controlled. There were
very great local differences and great contrasts and inequalities of
culture between one district and another, just as there are to-day
under the British Peace in India. The Roman garrisons and colonies
were dotted here and there over this great space, worshipping Roman
gods and speaking the Latin language; but where there had been towns
and cities before the coming of the Romans, they went on, subordinated
indeed but managing their own affairs, and, for a time at least,
worshipping their own gods in their own fashion. Over Greece, Asia
Minor, Egypt and the Hellenized East generally, the Latin language
never prevailed. Greek ruled there invincibly. Saul of Tarsus, who
became the apostle Paul, was a Jew and a Roman citizen; but he spoke
and wrote Greek and not Hebrew. Even at the court of the Parthian
dynasty, which had overthrown the Greek Seleucids in Persia, and was
quite outside the Roman imperial boundaries, Greek was the fashionable
language. In some parts of Spain and in North Africa, the Carthaginian
language also held on for a long time in spite of the destruction of
Carthage. Such a town as Seville, which had been a prosperous city
long before the Roman name had been heard of, kept its Semitic goddess
and preserved its Semitic speech for generations, in spite of a colony
of Roman veterans at Italica a few miles away. Septimius Severus, who
was emperor from 193 to 211 A.D., spoke Carthaginian as his mother
speech. He learnt Latin later as a foreign tongue; and it is recorded
that his sister never learnt Latin and conducted her Roman household in
the Punic language.
A Gladiator (contemporary representation)