Umbria, had been reduced by poverty to the position almost of a slave;
Cæcilius was a prisoner of war from the neighbourhood of Milan, who
had been brought to Rome as a slave and then set free; Terence was a
Carthaginian by birth, belonging as a slave to the Senator Terentius
Lucanus, and subsequently being liberated became a friend of the
younger Scipio. Ennius, the “father” of epic verse and tragedy, was a
client of the elder Scipio and a Greek-speaking Calabrian by birth.
Pacuvius, the best of the early tragedians, was a native of Brundisium,
and therefore more Greek than Roman; he too belonged to the Scipionic
circle. The activity of these writers belongs mainly to the first half
of the second century. Not one of them was a Roman by origin, still
less was there anything distinctively Roman in their work. Except from
the linguistic point of view there is little to be said about any of
them. The comic dramatists were engaged in translating the work of the
Greek comedians of the third phase, especially Menander and Philemon.
To meet the demand for more plot, more action, with less dialogue and
less poetry, they would generally make a patchwork of two or three
Greek plays. From the artistic point of view the work was clumsily
done. There was little pretence of Romanising the characters or the
scenes, generally they were frankly Greek with strange intrusions from
Roman life. The source from which they drew was by now a stereotyped
comedy of manners with stock characters--the heavy father, either an
indulgent debauchee or a stingy curmudgeon; the old woman, generally
a procuress; the gay and profligate young hero; the fair heroine,
generally a _meretrix_, and a background of parasites, bullies,
pandars, slave-dealers, and scoundrelly slaves, who came in for
recurrent beatings to the great entertainment of the audience. The
situations are also “taken from stock,” facial resemblances, disguised
strangers, mistaken identities, veiled women and so forth. The “love
interest,” such as it is, almost invariably centres round the desire of
a young profligate for a courtesan. The atmosphere is generally brutal
and immoral. There is often a ludicrous want of dramatic imagination
in the stage management. Yet the comedies of Plautus and Terence have
played a larger part in monasteries and schoolrooms than any other
literature in the world, and through Shakespeare and Molière have had
a decisive influence in the history of the drama. We do not possess
enough of the original Greek sources to say very definitely how much
was contributed by the Roman dramatists of their own. Where we do
get passages for comparison the Latin version has generally lost a
great deal in wit and neatness of expression. The prologues, so far
as they are genuine, are at any rate in the case of Plautus extremely
bald and crude. “Now I will tell you why I have come forward here
and what I intend in order that you may know the name of this play.
For so far as the story goes it is a short one. Now I will tell you
what I was anxious to inform you of: the name of this play in Greek
is _Onagos_--Demophilus (or Diphilus?) composed it, Maccius turned it
into Latin. He wishes it called _Asinaria_, if you please.” And so
he proceeds to unwind his plot and relate how the young spendthrift
Argyrripus won the favours of the courtesan Philenium by duping her
mother, the procuress, and cheating _his_ mother, a shrew, out of
twenty minæ by the co-operation of his immoral old father who hoped to
secure the young woman for himself.
It would be wrong, however, to underrate the literary merits of Plautus
and Terence. These authors reveal to us something of the natural speech
of the Roman--Plautus in particular, for Terence is already far more
“classical” in his language. It is not always easy to say how far
the amusement which we get from them is legitimate, or how far it is
laughter at the expense of their antique artlessness and clumsiness.
But Plautus has a rich vein of simple humour and an irresistible sly
appeal to his audience which often makes one unconscious of the garbage
in which he is dealing. Terence has a polish, a graceful way of putting
the obvious, and a purity of diction which sometimes makes his young
men seem almost gentlemen and his young women almost virtuous. There
is a great deal of sound worldly morality in Terence and some pure
sentiment. But it is necessary here to lay stress upon the fact that
the literary arts of Rome never possessed the fresh innocence or even
the simple coarseness of youth. It was little harm, perhaps, that the
gladiators, the rope-dancers, the bear-baiters, and the charioteers won
the day in the affections of Roman audiences.
Father Ennius, too, in his tragedies was little more than a translator.
He was employed consciously by the great Scipio to educate and broaden
the Roman taste. He had learnt of the Greek philosophers to disbelieve
in the gods, or rather he had learnt the deadly Euhemerist doctrine
that the gods of Olympus are but the memories of long dead human
heroes, or that they sit, as Epicurus also taught,
“On the hills ... together careless of mankind.”
“ego deum genus esse dixi et dicam semper cælitum,
sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus,
nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.”
At the age of fifty Ennius set himself to relate the whole of Roman
history in eighteen books of epic verse. No one claims for him the
rank of a great poet, but he shaped for Vergil’s hand that magnificent
instrument the Latin hexameter, and many scholars believe that he
vitally affected the literary language of Rome by preserving the
terminal inflexions which were dropping out of current speech. All the
fragments of Ennius that have survived, though often rough and ugly,
yet possess a massive dignity of their own, and often a most solemn
majesty of cadence, as in the lines with which I have headed this
chapter. But here again we must notice that the rugged father of Latin
poetry had already taken over the scepticism of the declining religion
of Greece.
For many generations now Roman religion had been losing its native
character and becoming cosmopolitan and denationalised. As we have
seen, its genuinely native elements were mainly rural and now the Roman
was a townsman with a townsman’s light scepticism and craving for
novelty and sensation. Jupiter and Minerva and the other high gods had
from the first been largely foreigners; at any rate few discernibly
Latin ideas appear in the cults or personalities. As early as 204
B.C., that is, in the throes of the Great Punic War, the worship of
Cybele--the Great Mother of Phrygian ritual--had been introduced along
with its begging eunuch priests. Apollo with appropriate athletic
games had arrived a few years earlier. New gods multiplied, old gods
became hellenised, Roman priesthoods became more and more political,
being simply obtained by popular election like any other public office,
or crack dining-clubs for the aristocracy. As the gods multiplied
faith declined. In 186 B.C. the Senate discovered a whole system of
secret nocturnal orgies which under the name of Bacchic mysteries had
spread with extraordinary rapidity throughout Italy. Ten thousand men
were arrested and condemned, mostly to death, but the associations
flourished unchecked.
Morality, public and private, was equally unsound. Publicly we have
sufficient stories of bribery by candidates for office--not to mention
the systematic corruption of the electorate by corn-doles and shows--to
prove that political uncleanness was of very old standing in Rome. As
for private virtue it may be that the world of pimps and prostitutes
which flits across the Plautine stage is borrowed from Athens, but it
was certainly familiar at Rome and rapidly domesticated itself. Slavery
had always existed there, and immorality is inseparable from slavery.
Now with a mob of retired soldiers gathered promiscuously and without
employment in the capital immorality was multiplied in every class. As
early as 234 B.C. there was public complaint of the unwillingness of
the Roman men of good family to face the responsibilities of marriage.
Already, as in the case of C. Calpurnius Piso, there were horrible
domestic tragedies in great houses. Divorce was already common. As
usual the Pharisees of the day strove to combat immorality with
prudishness. Cato the Censor punished a Roman senator for kissing his
wife in the presence of their daughter.
* * * * *
Now, let it be remembered that this very age of which we are speaking,
the age of conquest in the Punic and Greek wars, is the heroic age of
Roman history, the age to which poets and historians of the empire
looked back as golden. We do not rely upon satirists or gossip-dealers
for this gloomy picture of Rome in her palmy days. The facts upon
which it is based are beyond dispute. What inference are we to draw?
Reviewing those facts and especially noticing the dates, we see that
all the vicious features of Roman society, the cruelty, the idleness,
the debauchery, the political corruption, the lack of artistic taste,
the immorality and crime in the noble houses, the injustice and
oppression of the poor and helpless, are no products of the Empire, but
deeply engrained in the Roman character and entwined about the roots
of her history. In our pursuit of old Roman virtue we may go to the
furthest bounds of historical record in vain. No doubt, before Rome
began to be a city and long before she began to have a history, there
were simple laborious rustics on the Latin plains, who possessed, for
want of opportunity, the virtuous abstinences of the poor. But it is
manifestly false to ascribe degeneration either to the fall of the
Republican system of government or to the introduction of civilisation.
If one cause more than another is to be assigned for the rapid growth
of evil tendencies it is the exhaustion consequent upon incessant
warfare and the brutality engendered by continual life in camp. The
only thing that could mitigate the latter was surely education and
culture. Instead, then, of Greek civilisation being the cause of
degeneracy at Rome we may more truthfully assert that it came to save
her from ruin at a time when she was threatened with internal decay.
Had it come earlier or been accepted more willingly it might have
done more to brighten the darker pages of Roman history. It was their
starved souls, empty of ideals, devoid even of reasonable occupation
for their leisure or harmless use for their wealth, which rendered the
aristocracy of Rome so utterly vulgar and debased.
III
THE LAST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC
urbem uenalem et mature perituram si emptorem inuenerit.
Jugurtha in SALLUST
There is no doubt that many of the disquieting
symptoms which we have just noted as afflicting Roman society in
the second century B.C. might have been allayed, and possibly even
the causes removed, by a wise and foreseeing government. In dealing
with the allies and subjects who formed her vast and growing empire
any modern politician could have told the senate that they had to
choose one of two courses--either centralisation or devolution of
power, either a just and firm system of control or a liberal grant
of autonomous rights. But the senate had no policy. It left things
to shape themselves. Again, the agrarian difficulty of a deserted
countryside and an idle, disorderly city proletariat could easily have
been solved if it had been taken early, before the habit of city-life
grew upon the discharged warriors. Again the senate did nothing till
it was too late. Then, having acquired an overseas empire all over the
Mediterranean, the senate, if it had not been blind, should have seen
that it was necessary to maintain a strong navy and police the seas in
the interests of commerce. But again the government neglected its duty.
For these and many other sins of negligence there was a heavy reckoning
to be paid. It required no oracle to foretell disaster.
While the mass of the senate sat by inert and helpless, allowing the
helm of state to sway from side to side in their nerveless fingers,
two small parties in the state had policies of their own. There was
Cato (it is difficult to find a party for him to lead), who believed
that by repeating the mystic words _mos maiorum_ he could put the clock
back to the days of Cincinnatus, if not of Numa, mistaking symptoms
for diseases and hoping, like many another revivalist, to make people
virtuous by making them uncomfortable, a task doomed to failure from
the start.
Over against these were set a party who may almost be termed liberals,
in that they were prepared to go forward hopefully in company with
the spirit of their age. Their foremost representatives were the
Scipios, who acted as patrons to many of the literary circle we have
just described, and were themselves eager to accept the new culture.
Unfortunately there was very little wisdom or foresight among them,
and, above all, there was an aristocratic pride which would have
rendered them impossible as leaders even if they had had any idea of
a destination. As a family the Scipios were by no means uniformly
competent, and most of them subsisted on the glamour of the name, which
itself had been very largely due to the good luck and opportunity of
Scipio Africanus, the Elder and the Younger.
The special feature which distinguishes the age which we have now to
consider--that is, roughly, the hundred years from 146 B.C. onwards--is
that the historian’s attention now begins to be focussed on a series
of personal biographies. One might almost say it is already clear that
some individual must dominate this ill-constructed imperial city,
and the only question left is who it shall be. In the true polity of
the city-state the influence of personality is reduced to a minimum,
and various devices, such as the lot at Athens or the double and
annual consulship at Rome, are employed to prevent that individual
predominance which so easily turns to despotism. It is not due so much
to envy as to an instinct of self-preservation that republics are
notoriously ungrateful to their great men. But personal eminence, if
it is dangerous to the liberty of a republic, is almost essential to
the government of a great empire and the control of huge armies. The
incompetence of the annual generals, now that warfare was on a large
scale and conducted far from the overseeing eye of the administration,
became more noticeable. Already in the Third Macedonian War it had been
disgracefully apparent. Now the long campaigns against Viriathus in
Spain and Jugurtha in Africa reveal pitiful ineptitude, coupled with
shameless dishonesty, in the republican generals of the aristocracy.
Roman armies are no longer invincible in the field, they are not even
disciplined.
THE GRACCHI
But first we have to recall a futile attempt at reform of the economic
distresses of the imperial city. It is not so much the actual
schemes of the brothers Gracchus which interest us--for the schemes
themselves were unworkable and contained as much folly as wisdom--as
the manner in which reform was proposed and defeated. The Gracchi
themselves, though of plebeian origin, belonged by numerous ties to
the liberal aristocracy. Their famous mother, Cornelia--one of the
many Roman women who by their influence help to make Roman history so
different from Greek--was the daughter of Scipio Africanus. Tiberius,
the elder brother, was married to a Claudia; among his friends were
Scævola and Crassus. Thus on all sides he belonged to the circle of
progressive nobles. His education had been such as one would expect
from such surroundings. As their father had died at an early age, it
was Cornelia’s task to make her two “jewels” worthy of her glorious
name. Accordingly she employed the most eminent Greeks for their
tutors. The boys were trained, no doubt, in Greek oratory to declaim
in praise of liberty and tyrannicides, in Greek history and political
science to divide constitutions up into monarchies, aristocracies, and
democracies, and to believe that in the latter all power belongs to the
people. At the same time their military training was not neglected; in
horsemanship and feats of arms they outshone all their comrades. Their
prospects were in every way brilliant and hopeful. While still a youth
of about sixteen, Tiberius was elected augur. The proud aristocrat,
Appius Claudius, as it is related by Plutarch, offered him the hand
of his daughter, and, having secured it, rushed home to announce her
betrothal. As soon as his wife heard of it she exclaimed: “Why in such
a hurry unless you have got Tiberius Gracchus for our daughter?” It
is the misfortune of rhetorical history that all its good characters
appear to be prigs and all its bad ones scoundrels; but it is certain
that if Tiberius had been content with the easy road to fame which
stretched before him in youth, he might without trouble have had the
world at his feet. He accompanied his brother-in-law, the younger
Africanus, in the last expedition against Carthage. In camp he was
the most distinguished of the young officers, and the first to scale
the walls of the city. He served his quæstorship in Spain, and there
showed all the diplomatic skill of the Cornelian family. He saved
an army of 20,000 men from destruction at Numantia. The Spaniards
loved him no less for his name than for his uprightness. Thus at the
age of thirty-one he had his future assured. A brilliant orator with
distinguished public service behind him, he was obviously destined for
the consulship in the near future, and then for a huge province, for
wealth, fame, and honour.
Call him a prig and a doctrinaire, if you will, for not being content
with that prospect. In passing through, on his way to Spain, he had
seen the pleasant lands of Tuscany lying forlorn and desolate, chained
gangs of foreign slaves working in the fields or tending the flocks of
absentee Roman landlords, while the sturdy peasants who should have
been in their place were loafing in the streets of Rome. The public
land, conquered in war, had sometimes been simply embezzled by Roman
politicians; sometimes granted to veteran soldiers only to fall into
the hands of speculators. The old Licinian land-law, which had limited
the amount of land which might be held in one hand, was openly flouted,
and leases were treated as freeholds.
Seeing these things, the young man was filled with a passion for
reform, and deliberately devoted his life to that task. The modern
historians who call him prig and demagogue do not deny the awful
mischief which he set himself to repair. It is hard to know what he
should have done to please them. The senate, by now an entrenched
stronghold of property dishonestly acquired and privilege dishonestly
maintained, could obviously never be converted. Filled with Greek
ideas, Tiberius determined to appeal to the _demos_. That of course
was a mistake. There was no such thing as a _demos_ at Rome, and there
never had been. The relation between Senate and Comitia was not in
the least the same as that between Council and Assembly in Greece. At
Rome the Senate deliberated and the Comitia ratified; at Athens the
Council prepared business for the Assembly to discuss and decide. It
is not that the letter of the constitution really matters--when people
are hungry it does not--but that there was lacking at Rome the very
elements of democracy, an articulate commons, an organised will of the
people. Failing that, any attempt to pose as champion of the people
must be a fraud, conscious or unconscious. But it is grossly unfair
to Gracchus to suppose that it was conscious. He thought that he was
living in a democracy, he thought that a tribune of the plebs might
fairly claim to be champion of the people, unaware that the plebs was
now an anachronism, and the tribunate merely a clumsy brake on the
wheels of the state. In 133 B.C. Tiberius had himself elected as one of
the ten tribunes, and immediately prepared to introduce the millennium
by legislative process.
He proposed to enforce the old Licinian laws by which no individual
citizen could claim a large holding of public land. Then presently,
in his childlike ignorance of the tenacity of property, annoyed at the
resistance he encountered, he further proposed to make his measure
retrospective, so as to evict thousands of noble land-grabbers. The
land thus escheated to the state he proposed to lease on nominal terms
as small holdings to the poorer citizens of Rome. The distribution was
to be carried out by a commission of three. Very unwisely, but probably
because there were no men of standing in the senate whom he could
trust, he made this commission a family party consisting of himself,
his father-in-law, and his young brother. Property was immediately up
in arms against him. The liberal senators discovered, as even liberals
are apt to do, that one’s own property has a sanctity far superior
to other people’s. Accordingly, they took the Roman constitutional
method of putting up another tribune to veto the proposals of Tiberius.
Thereupon Tiberius, with his fantastic notions of the people and the
people’s rights, declared that a tribune who opposed the people was
no tribune, and so had Octavius deposed. The senate’s answer was the
only constitutional answer left to them, a threat of prosecution when
the tribunate should be over. That, of course, made it necessary for
Tiberius to perpetuate his office. He gathered a band of followers
sworn to protect his life, proposed a string of attractive measures
to secure popular support, and stood for a second term of office. The
senate put up more tribunes to veto his election. Thus the state was at
a deadlock; there were no more resources for such a situation within
constitutional limits, so the senators simply girt up their togas and,
led by a Scipio, marched down into the forum to settle the question of
reform in a truly Roman manner. Tiberius Gracchus was murdered, and his
followers left for judicial assassination.
Ten years later Gaius Gracchus, with a similar programme and the added
motive of piety to his brother’s memory, took up the campaign afresh.
The senate, indeed, having slain the author of reform, had been forced
to allow the reforms themselves at any rate to start. Some lands
had been redistributed, and when another Scipio got a decree passed
to stop the work of the land commission, he too was assassinated. It
is clear that by this time the agrarian agitation had been largely
appeased; what follows is political merely. The reformers had got the
constitution altered to permit the re-election of tribunes, and in 123
Gaius was elected to that office; he was rather more practical, and
therefore far more dangerous, than his brother, but the passion for
vengeance against the stubborn and brutal nobility had no doubt blinded
his judgment. Coupled with the land-agitation there was now a loud
demand for political rights by the Italians, who were debarred even
from the elementary rights of market and marriage with each other.
The platform upon which Gaius Gracchus stood was a radical one.
Henceforth every poor citizen was to be supplied with cheap corn at
less than half price, about 4_d._ a bushel. The land commission was
to be restored. The Assembly was to be reorganised upon a new basis,
which would destroy the preponderant voting power of the nobility. New
colonies were to be founded, including one at Carthage--a most salutary
measure. Easier terms of military service were to be granted, including
free equipment and the right of appeal. By these measures, some of
them wise and just, some of them mere vote-catching devices, Gaius won
the support of the people. Then he turned to the second estate--the
capitalist Equites. To buy their favour he took up their demand that
the taxes of “Asia,” as the Romans called their new province bequeathed
to them by King Attalus III., should be put up for auction not locally
but in Rome. It seemed to the Romans that since the Asiatics were
bound to be plundered in any case, as indeed the inhabitants of Asia
Minor always had and always have been plundered, the proceeds might as
well flow straight into the pockets of Roman capitalists. To this he
added the proposition that the jury-lists should henceforth be drawn
from the Equestrian order and the senators excluded. It was probably
more iniquitous that money-lenders and governors should be tried by a
jury of money-lenders exclusively than that they should come before a
jury of governors past and future. Neither would seem to us or to the
provincials an ideal arrangement.
Much of this policy, we have to admit, was pure demagogy, but for
that the conservative nobles, who cared nothing for the welfare of
the state, and were impervious to anything but force, are directly
responsible. Gracchus got his measures through the comitia, and secured
his re-election for the next year. Feeling that his policy had secured
him a large and faithful party of supporters, he now prepared to
introduce a measure which he knew to be necessary for the salvation of
his country, but which he must equally well have known to be unpopular
at Rome, namely, the grant of citizen rights to the Italians. By this
we see that Gaius Gracchus, if he sometimes stooped to the arts of the
demagogue, was also capable of real statesmanship. The progressive
grant of burgess rights as soon as subject peoples were sufficiently
Romanised to be fit for them was the old Roman policy, which had made
the city great in the past, and kept her safe in the shock of invasion.
But the Romans had now become jealous and exclusive. The proposal was
detested in Rome. Each side organised its gangs of roughs; there were
daily riots in the streets, and at last the senatorial party once more
charged down into the forum and slaughtered the second reformer as they
had slaughtered the first. In the prosecutions that followed no fewer
than 3000 of his partisans were executed.