completely broken down. The constitution had always been incredibly
ill-defined. There is no doubt that sovereignty legally belonged
to the people, and that senatorial government was a usurpation, as
the Gracchi called it. By calling the citizen body of Rome a mob or
a rabble you do not alter the rights of the case. It was largely
the fault of the Government that they had been allowed to become so
selfish, so disorderly, and so corrupt. The extraordinary machinery
of the tribunate--ten magistrates, each with an absolute veto upon all
government--had made it impossible to find any constitutional method
of reform. The policy of Gaius Gracchus was the only possible one if
Rome was to be saved, and as a matter of plain fact it was the policy
which after a century of unceasing bloodshed Rome eventually adopted.
It was to be a disguised monarchy, like that of Pericles at Athens,
working on the basis of the tribunician powers. The old ascendancy
of the Senate could not stand a challenge; not only did it rest upon
no legal title, but it had lost whatever claim to respect it ever
possessed on the score of patriotism or statesmanship. For the agrarian
problem it had no policy but to hold fast to its ill-gotten lands; to
the demands of the Italian allies it had nothing but a miserly “no.” It
watched with indifference the ruin of Italy, the degeneracy of Rome,
and the oppression of the provincial world. The policy of the Gracchi
may have included dreams and nightmares, but it did look forward and
hold out hopes. The Gracchi had now definitely started a party system.
They had laid the foundation of a democratic movement, and it is Rome’s
misfortune that this foundation was built of such rotten materials. The
democracy had been bought by bribes, but it had failed to exhibit a
spark of disinterested statesmanship. If ever a state needed a master
that state was Rome. Henceforth until a master came the condition of
Rome and Italy and the provinces was simply deplorable. Nothing could
be done in politics without a hired gang of bravos.
MARIUS
The next conspicuous attempt at reform comes from a genuine son of
the people, one of the very few peasants who emerge into the light
of history at Rome. In the wretchedly mismanaged Jugurthan war
Gaius Marius had shouldered his way to the front by sheer courage
and capacity for war through a crowd of cowardly and incompetent
aristocrats, who almost openly trafficked with the foreign enemy of
Rome. The course of this business requires a brief sketch if we are to
understand the condition of Roman government at this period.
The king of the client state of Numidia dying divided his realm between
two legitimate sons and one illegitimate, the latter being Jugurtha.
This amiable bastard straightway murdered one of his brothers and
attacked the other, who fled to the Roman province and appealed to
the senate for protection. Jugurtha, already knowing the ropes of
senatorial policy, sent envoys with well-filled purses, and easily
convinced the senate of his innocence and good intentions. The senate
decided to send out a commission to divide the kingdom equitably
between Jugurtha and his half-brother. The result of its labours was
that Adherbal got the desert and the capital, while Jugurtha got all
the fertile part of the country, and the commission returned home rich
and happy. Jugurtha had now only to obtain the capital, but as Adherbal
refused to fight and kept appealing to Rome, there was nothing for it
but to besiege Cirta. Numerous envoys came to Jugurtha from the senate
in the course of the siege, but he easily assured them of his pacific
intentions. As soon as he had taken the city he put his rival to death
with torture, and massacred the entire male population, including a
great number of Italian and Roman citizens.
The senate did not feel that this course of action was entirely
meritorious, but it required the stimulus of a democratic agitation
and another troublesome tribune to induce them to declare war. The
senate sent out two of its best men in Bestia and Scaurus; the latter
especially was generally reputed to be a veritable Aristides, for
he had ventured to protest against the former iniquities. When the
Roman army arrived, Jugurtha knew better ways than fighting. He
submitted at discretion, surrendered the Roman deserters, whom of
course he did not want to keep, and a few elephants, which he soon
afterwards repurchased privately. In return he was permitted to retain
his kingdom. Once more there were outcries at Rome, voiced by the
same democratic tribune Memmius, who insisted that Jugurtha should
be summoned to Rome to answer for his sins. Meekly but with bulging
moneybags Jugurtha arrived. As soon as Memmius began to cross-examine
him another tribune interposed his veto. During his visit Jugurtha was
able to purchase a strong party in the senate; he also had time to
procure the assassination of an obnoxious fellow-countryman in the city
itself. This outrage, combined with the ambition of the new consul,
Spurius Albinus, led to another declaration of war, Jugurtha himself
being allowed to go home and prepare for it. As he departed he uttered
the famous words, “Ah, Rome! Venal city! She would sell herself if she
could find a purchaser.”
When Albinus led out the second army, he found it utterly incapable of
fighting. It was a band of cowardly brigands, who spent their time in
plundering their own province; and when the consul’s brother conceived
the spirited project of seizing the king’s treasury for himself,
instead of waiting for the more tedious and uncertain profits of
bribery, he led the Roman army into an ambush. It surrendered readily.
It was forced to go under the yoke, and agree to evacuate all Numidia.
This was a little too much. Another tribune--in all this period we
observe the tribunes acting as the heads of popular opposition quite
in the Gracchan manner--proposed a special inquiry to investigate the
matter, and bring the offenders to justice. Three of the worst--Spurius
Albinus, Bestia, and L. Opimius, the destroyer of G. Gracchus--were
banished, but the incorruptible Scaurus escaped condemnation by
sitting on the bench. The treaty of peace was cancelled, and its
author--following the usual Roman custom when armies in awkward places
surrendered--was given up to the enemy.
In the third campaign the senate really tried to do its best. Q.
Metellus, the new general, belonged to the party of liberal nobles
who were in favour of moderate reform. He began well by choosing his
officers for military skill--somewhat of an innovation. Among others
he chose a brave young farmer, G. Marius. Arrived in Africa, Metellus
had first to reduce the Roman army to order, and then, having failed
to get his enemy assassinated, marched out to fight him. Jugurtha was
beaten in battle (for the Roman army could still fight under decent
leadership), and henceforth was driven to guerilla warfare, in which he
displayed such remarkable skill that the war soon came to a standstill.
At this point G. Marius, who had achieved popularity and renown
through his valour, conceived the ambitious plan of standing for the
consulship. It is hard to guess how such an audacious idea can have
entered his head, for such an application from a man of no family was
entirely without precedent. Somebody at Rome must have whispered the
idea. When he asked his consul for permission to go to Rome for the
purpose, Metellus was vastly diverted, and suggested that Marius had
better wait until his general’s little boy was grown up, in order that
he might have a Metellus for a colleague. Probably Marius had little
sense of humour, for he did go to Rome, just in time, and was elected
consul. Moreover, a special decree entrusted him with command of the
army in Africa.
Among his officers was the young legate, L. Cornelius Sulla, and
though Marius undoubtedly displayed vigour and competence, it was very
largely the luck and diplomacy of Sulla which procured the seizure and
surrender of the Numidian king. Marius, however, reaped the glory.
Jugurtha graced his triumph (104 B.C.), and soon afterwards perished in
a Roman dungeon.
Simultaneously with the Jugurthan war the Romans were called upon to
face a far more serious affair, one of those great folk-wanderings
from the north which occur periodically in the course of Mediterranean
history. The Cimbri and Teutons, who may have numbered ancestors of our
own among them, came down from the shores of the Baltic, travelling
with their households in a train of waggons which took six days in
defiling past the onlooker. These barbarians were terrible to the
Romans, with their strange aspect, their long iron swords and savage
war-cries, their fair hair and giant stature. But of course they were
savages compared to the Romans, and they should never have inflicted
more than one defeat on intelligent generals of disciplined armies.
As it was, they had to face mutinous legions and incompetent consuls.
First they defeated Carbo and overran Gaul; then coming south into
the province they beat Silanus and Scaurus; and then, united with the
Helvetians, they inflicted a frightful disaster on Longinus, when a
Roman legate had to surrender, and another Roman army was sent under
the yoke. In 105 a worse thing happened: the great defeat of Arausio
(Orange) seemed more fatal even than Cannæ in the extent of its losses.
There was a panic in Italy, which seemed helplessly exposed to the fury
of the northmen, but fortunately the aimless barbarians wandered off
into the west and spent their strength on the warlike Spanish tribes.
As before, popular indignation at Rome, diverted from the real cause
of the mischief, the rotten system of cliques which governed them,
wasted its fury on individuals. Senators were mobbed and stoned.
A proconsul was actually deposed from office. There was only one
man deemed capable of dealing with the peril--Marius, the man of
the people, the triumphant conqueror of Jugurtha. So, despite laws
forbidding re-election, Marius became consul for a second time and a
third--five times consul. This was symptomatic of a changed Rome. It
was, however, necessary. Amateur generals had had a long trial. From
104 to 100 Marius was continuously chief magistrate of the state, as
well as generalissimo of its armies. He did his work. First he had to
get his army in hand, and accustom them to the sight of the terrible
barbarians. Then he dealt two smashing blows at the Teutons and Cimbri
near Aquæ Sextiæ and on the Raudine Plain. It was the misfortune of
the Roman system of imperium that no general could attain to eminence
in war without at the same time acquiring political importance.
Hence Marius in 100 B.C. found himself absolutely first in the Roman
state without education or even common sense in politics. He presents
a pathetic figure in the turbulent world of Roman statecraft, a
war-scarred veteran, the indubitable saviour of Rome, called upon to
play the part of a statesman, and yet a mere puppet in the hands of
unscrupulous intriguers. First he fell into the hands of two shameless
demagogues--Saturninus and Glaucia--who used him to revive the Gracchan
revolution. Marius became consul for the sixth time, and a new reform
programme was drawn up, including an agrarian law to divide the land
conquered from the Cimbri, and incidentally all the land they had
conquered, into small holdings for the Marian veterans, Latins and
Italians alike. Marius was to have personal charge of the distribution,
and this task would make him master of Rome for many years to come.
Secondly, there was to be a still further cheapening of corn; and,
thirdly, new colonies were to be founded and the Italian allies to
have a share in them. Of course there was violent opposition. The
senate tried all its old stratagems, tribunician veto, portents, and
lastly bludgeons. To meet the latter, Marius whistled his veteran
soldiers to his side, and the “Appuleian Laws” were carried, with the
addition of a very obnoxious clause that each senator was to take an
oath of allegiance to the new legislation within five days on pain of
forfeiting his seat. Q. Metellus alone had the courage to prefer exile.
Then, it seems, the senate found it necessary to beguile the great
general over to the side of aristocracy. Marius was a child in their
hands. He actually boggled at taking the oath to his own laws, and
added the remarkable proviso, “So far as they are valid.” Saturninus
and Glaucia in their turn tried violence, and Marius led the forces
of the senate against them. There was a battle in the forum, the
demagogues were slain, and four magistrates of the Roman people put to
death without trial. Once more reaction had triumphed. For the time
being Marius was politically defunct.
But one side of his work was lasting and fraught with momentous
consequences for the Roman state. It was Marius, the first professional
general, who formed the first professional army. We noticed that
Greece, even before the end of the fifth century, had already begun
to use paid and trained soldiers, partly owing to the unwillingness
of her comfortable or busy citizens to engage in annual campaigns,
but still more because it was found that the more highly trained
and better disciplined mercenaries were far more efficient at their
business. So for many centuries Rome had now been the only power in
the Mediterranean world to rely upon a citizen militia. That citizen
militia had indeed conquered the world; but certainly in dealing with
the trained troops of Pyrrhus and Hannibal, the Roman forces had always
begun with disaster and slowly been schooled to their trade by defeat.
So it was now in the Jugurthan and Cimbric wars: the generals had to
train their armies in the face of the enemy, and while that is no doubt
the best training ground it is terribly dangerous and expensive. It
implies, too, an almost inexhaustible stock of recruits to fall back
upon. With the decline of Italian agriculture and the growth of city
life the stock of recruits was no longer inexhaustible. Moreover the
art of war was becoming more intricate. Rome found it necessary to
appoint a genuine soldier for her general against Jugurtha in view
of the disastrous failures of aristocratic amateurs. In the same way
Marius found it necessary to overhaul the Roman fighting machine, and
by the end of his five years of successive consulship he had organised
a professional army on much the same system as our own. Rome like
England required a highly trained expeditionary force and behind it
a large reserve. The principal change instituted by Marius seemed at
first a small one and required no legislative sanction. Hitherto the
army had consisted only of the propertied classes, the infantry of
those who could afford a suit of arms, and the cavalry of the richest
citizens who could maintain one of the state horses. The minimum
property for a Roman soldier is said to have been £115. The poorest
had originally formed a light-armed support, the three middle classes
were the line, and the richest the cavalry. But the three classes of
the line had by now come to be drawn up not according to property
but according to length of service. This was the traditional battle
formation of the Roman infantry maniples:
[Illustration: (traditional battle formation of the Roman infantry
maniples) Triara Principes Hastats]
with the cavalry upon the wings. But social changes were changing the
army. As wealth increased and the gulf between rich and poor grew wider
the comfortable burgesses were no longer obedient or willing soldiers.
Bad discipline--a monstrous violation of the old Roman spirit--had
begun to appear in the ranks as early as the Macedonian wars. In the
Jugurthan wars it was deplorably rife. The equestrian class as the
richest was also the most mutinous: as early as the third century
the knights had refused to work in the trenches alongside of the
legionaries. By 140 B.C. they had ceased to act as a military force and
become merely a grade of honour, or rather of income, in the state,
though the younger knights continued to form a corps of noble guards to
the general. As for the army as a whole, the theory down to the time of
Marius was still that of the annual spring campaign; each consul levied
his own army for a specific purpose. This levy had become more and
more difficult. The simple innovation which Marius introduced was that
in the process of holding his levy he began by asking for volunteers
and enrolling those first. There was generally a distinct promise of
rewards on discharge. Thus instead of the moneyed classes Marius filled
his ranks with the poorest and hardiest inhabitants of Rome and Italy.
Of course the obligation to serve still remained part of the condition
of certain subject peoples. The auxiliary ranks were now supplied by
foreign experts--cavalry from the Numidian deserts or the Ligurian
hills, slingers from the Balearic Islands, and presently archers from
Crete. Having thus professionalised his army Marius proceeded to
abolish all distinctions in the ranks. All the men of the line now had
a uniform equipment supplied by the state, and instead of a bewildering
variety of insignia all the legionaries now fought under that emblem
destined to be carried in victory to the four corners of Europe--the
silver eagle. The eagle was the standard of the legion and it was
regarded as sacred. In camp it rested in a special shrine and terrible
was the disgrace attaching to its loss in battle. Hitherto legions
had been gathered for each campaign and disbanded at its close. Now a
legion had a permanent existence, a fixed number, a tradition and an
_esprit de corps_ of its own. It was now a larger unit of 6000 men; for
while the maniple or company of 120 men still remained, the maniples
were grouped into cohorts or battalions, which now became the regular
tactical unit, and ten cohorts formed the legion.
Beside the body-armour consisting of helmet, cuirass, and cylindrical
shield,[14] the uniform equipment of the legionary included the pilum,
a short heavy javelin for throwing (it is interesting to notice that
whereas Marius had the point loosely attached to the shaft so as to
break off in the shield or body of the enemy, Julius Cæsar actually
invented what may fairly be called a “Dum-Dum pilum” with a soft nose
for stopping the rush of barbarians), and the short broad-bladed
sword[15] which had been copied from the Spanish swordsmen in the
Second Punic War. The latter was a very handy little weapon only about
thirty inches long including the hilt, with two edges as well as a
point, though the thrust was always advocated in preference to the cut.
Marius now introduced a new drill which included lessons in fencing
given in the first instance by masters from the gladiatorial schools.
Though bloodshed be abhorrent to the learned, many a scholar would
like to have witnessed the combat between the Roman _gladius_ and the
Cimbrian claymore. It must be repeated that the Roman maniple, unlike
the close Greek phalanx, stood in open order with a six-foot square of
space for each man so that there was room for individual prowess in
swordsmanship. Lastly, Marius still further professionalised his army
by introducing a system of bounties on discharge which made the army
a really attractive career for poor citizens. He promised them each
a farm at the end of the war and his example was followed by other
generals. In fact a veteran soldier came to expect a handsome pension
on retirement.
It is surely unnecessary to emphasise the meaning of all this. An
army was now a trained corps against which no levy of recruits could
stand for an instant. Hitherto it had been the chief guarantee against
usurpation by a general that new armies could be summoned from the
soil at any time. Now there was a weapon in the hands of a successful
general against which the feeble safeguards of the republican
constitution were powerless. As with the first trained army in English
history, the general of such a force became master of the destinies
of the state so long as the allegiance of the soldiers was personal
rather than patriotic. The Roman soldier’s allegiance had always been
personal and now it became more so. Moreover the Roman constitution
had never sought to distinguish military from civil power. Hence that
day in 100 B.C., when the Appuleian code was carried under threat of
the legions of Marius, was of evil omen for the constitution. Less
than twenty years were to elapse before a Roman army entered Rome
in triumph to support the political enactments of Sulla. It is in
reality henceforward one long state of civil war, open or concealed,
between rival generals, until at last a permanent military monarchy
was established. It only required a bold free spirit like that of
Julius Cæsar to discern the real facts of the case. Marius, as we have
already seen, had not sufficient intellect to play a political part
with success; Sulla attained what was really a monarchical position
but retired when he had won it. Pompeius never had the courage to face
the situation. Cæsar had, but he was sacrificed to the republican
tradition. Finally the diplomatic Augustus realised the long inevitable
fact.
Henceforth, then, it is merely a question of who shall be Emperor
of Rome. The causes of the end of Rome’s incoherent constitutional
system, called by us a Republic, are already clear. There are the
constitutional causes--above all the inelasticity of the Roman system,
which made legitimate reform impossible, provided no machinery to
express the will of the people, and rendered it inevitable that rioting
should accompany every change. It was a constitution essentially
municipal and the tribunate was the centre of mischief. Then there are
the economic causes, now working more banefully than ever, and causing
the decay of the agricultural population, the rise of a dangerous
uneducated city proletariat, and the corruption of the governing
aristocracy. There was the political fact that the government of a
vast ill-organised empire destroyed the Republican spirit and further
increased corruption, while it denationalised the Roman temper.
Lastly, there is the military cause, namely, the professionalisation
of the army, putting excessive power into the hands of the general and
replacing patriotism by _esprit de corps_.
It strikes the onlooker that no one of these evils, nor even the
accumulation of them, need have been fatal to the republican system
if there had been a genuine spirit of patriotic enthusiasm determined
to overcome them. For instance, if the great men of Rome had been
loyal and patriotic there is no reason why the excessive power of
the generals should have led to high treason. And again, though the
provincial system was misbegotten it might have been corrected and
reformed. But it was the spirit that failed. Was not that just because
Roman power had outstripped Roman civilisation? For the upper-class
Roman, faith was dead or dying, and there were no high interests of
the mind to replace it. Fighting was their sole inherited interest and
their tastes were correspondingly brutal and bloody. The last agony of
the Republic in the period we are now considering is painful enough,
but the wise will surely regard it as the period in which a new and
much more hopeful order of things was gradually evolved.
SULLA
On the extinction of Marius there arose Sulla. Sulla was the aristocrat
of talent, almost of genius, who tried to save the state by reaction.
He tried, vainly and foolishly enough, to bolster up the rickety
structure of senatorial ascendancy, but had not the patience or the
wisdom to attempt even that with any thoroughness. L. Cornelius Sulla
was of the class of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belong, but
an inferior specimen of the class. Though of noble birth he had risen
from poverty and obscurity by his own talents. He was clever--and he
did the most foolish acts in history. He was handsome--and his face
in later life is described as “a mulberry speckled with meal.” He was
brave and successful in war; half lion and half fox, they said, and the
fox was the more dangerous of the two. He secured the affections of his
soldiers by giving them free licence to plunder or to murder unpopular
officers. He was a rake and a gambler, reckless of bloodshed as he was
careless of praise or blame, and he had that fatal belief in a star
which has led better men than him to follow will-o’-the-wisps. He might
have stood where Cæsar stands. He would have made a very typical bad
emperor, and whatever it was that made him decline to be one, it was
not patriotism. He was as cultured as Nero, and showed it by sacking
Athens, plundering Delphi, and looting a famous library. Like Nero, but
unlike the majority of his fellow-countrymen, he had a sense of humour.