associates the governing clique pursued its old course of headlong
folly. For one thing the aristocrats soon fell out with the
capitalists, which is always an unwise thing for aristocrats to do.
The equestrian jury-courts established by Gracchus acted with brutal
simplicity on behalf of their tax-gathering and tax-farming brothers
against whatever honest governors proceeded from the senate. Men were
condemned for honest administration in those days. For another thing
the bitter cry of the Italian “allies,” who bore all the hard knocks
of the Roman service, and in return got nothing but servitude, was
persistently and contemptuously ignored. In 95 a consular law flatly
prohibited them from ever claiming the franchise. But presently there
came forward a new reformer in M. Livius Drusus. This remarkable
man might be described as a third Gracchus, only that he saw the
futility of the so-called democracy of Rome, and adopted other means
to attain his ends. On the one hand he was a champion of the senate
against the knights, and on the other hand he was resolved to give the
Italians their rights. He seems to have promoted a widespread secret
organisation among the Italians. He then proposed four measures: the
inevitable vote-catching corn law and agrarian law, the jury-courts to
be restored to the senate, the senate for that purpose to be enlarged
by the inclusion of three hundred knights, and, lastly, citizenship for
the allies. The first three were carried, not without violence, but the
fourth was his stumbling-block. The Italians were by now so clamorous
that civil war was inevitable if it were refused, and no man denied
the justice of their claim. But neither justice nor expediency had
any power to move the dead weight of senatorial conservatism. Drusus
was murdered and his laws repealed. That was the signal for the long
and terrible Social War which completed the ruin of Italy and caused
grave alarm for the very existence of Rome herself. In the course of
this struggle and in fear for her existence Rome yielded in fact, if
not openly, to the demand of the Italians. Some states received the
franchise as a reward for fidelity and others as a bait for submission.
By a law of 89 all Italians who applied to the prætor within sixty
days received the citizenship, and this belated concession had its
effect. The face of Italy had been covered with mourning to secure it.
Even so the governing clique succeeded in nullifying the political
value of the concession by confining the Italians along with the Roman
freedmen to a few of the tribes so that their votes were almost useless.
The pressure of this war and of the great Mithradatic war which
began simultaneously in Asia led to a serious economic crisis at
Rome. Debt and usury were the symptoms, and when a prætor tried to
meet it by reviving the old laws against usury he was murdered in
his priestly robes at sacrifice. Now we begin to hear the ominous
cry of “Novæ tabulæ”--the clean slate for debtors. A popular orator
named Sulpicius Rufus, whose programme included the exclusion of
all bankrupts from the senate, protected his valuable person with a
bodyguard of 3000 hired roughs, and organised a mock senate of 300
high-spirited young bloods. Then, since Sulla with his army threatened
opposition, he passed a decree giving the command of the great army
destined to fight Mithradates to the old Marius. During the Social War
both these generals had held command with some success, but on the
whole the reputation of Marius had declined while that of Sulla had
increased. Without hesitation Sulla now marched his army into Rome,
and won a battle in the streets of the city. Sulpicius was of course
executed, his head was nailed to the rostra, and Marius escaped under
circumstances of romantic adventure. Sulla was thus in the year 88
completely master of Rome.
At this moment his real ambition was for more fighting. Mithradates,
King of Pontus,[16] was then in full career of rebellion against the
Roman dominion in Asia, where 80,000 Roman traders and money-lenders
were murdered in a sudden mutiny. Sulla saw in Mithradates a worthy
foeman, and much preferred glory on the fields of Asia to Roman
politics; and besides, his army was clamouring for plunder. So he
hastily flung out a series of constitutional reforms designed to
restore the senate to more than its ancient predominance, and then set
out for the East, heedless or ignorant of the fact that he had not
really changed anything. On the contrary he had left at Rome in sole
charge the new consul, Cinna, the worst and most dangerous of all the
demagogues. Sulla--most innocent of reprobates--seems to have fancied
that an oath to obey his constitution would restrain such a man at such
a time.
Consequently as soon as his back was turned a fresh revolution broke
out. Cinna also brought an army to Rome and invited Marius to return.
Then the old general, furious with all his disappointments, began
a fearful debauch of bloodshed. Every distinguished senator left
in Rome, including statesmen like L. Cæsar, soldiers like Catulus,
orators like Antonius and Crassus, were butchered by his slaves and
their heads displayed in the forum. In 86 Marius gained the goal of
his ambition, that seventh consulship which had been promised him long
ago by a prophet. In the same year he died. Now for four years Cinna
ruled as monarch at Rome. Year after year he assumed the consulship
and nominated the other magistrates at his own choice without the
formality of election. He repealed the laws of Sulla, equalised all the
citizens in the tribes, and reduced all debts by 75 per cent. It is
the last measure which is truly typical of Roman democracy. Meanwhile,
of course, the reckoning was in preparation across the seas. Sulla
was winning glorious victories in Greece and Asia, and at length in
84, drove Mithradates to surrender temporarily,[shld be.] Cinna, who
does not seem to have understood that a Roman army belonged not to the
republic but to its general, audaciously set out to supersede Sulla,
and was murdered by the troops.
Sulla, having offered terms which the government very foolishly
declined, came home in 83 after five years’ absence bearing not peace
but a sword. He had five veteran legions of his own, the exiled
aristocrats joined him, and among them a young man called Pompeius
with three more legions. The lead of the democratic party had now
fallen into the hands of a young Marius, and he having no troops to
oppose the returning veterans decided to join the Samnite rebels who
remained unconquered from the Social War. Before leaving the city
they ordered a final and still more bloody massacre of the surviving
aristocrats; practically all the men of distinction left in the city
suffered death. Sulla had to fight 40,000 Samnites at the Colline Gate
of Rome, and after a desperate struggle was victorious. The young
Marius committed suicide. Thus Sulla was once more master of Rome. His
8000 Samnite prisoners were slaughtered in the Circus. Of the Roman
democrats, 80 senators, 3600 equites, and over 2000 private citizens
were proscribed, and their heads nailed up in the forum. In Spain,
Sertorius, an honest and valorous democrat, maintained a gallant
struggle by the aid of a miraculous deer, and a native Spanish army
trained on the Roman model, until at last he fell by treachery.
For two years Sulla was monarch at Rome. For the purpose he invented a
sort of revival of the obsolete dictatorship, without limit of time and
without a colleague. If we care for the term, Sulla was at that time
as much “Emperor” as Augustus. He enacted a whole constitution of his
own--which it is scarcely necessary to recount since scarcely anything
of it survived--all destined to put the senate on its throne again, and
then simply abdicated and retired into private life. I think he was
bored with Rome and politics. It is generally admitted that he had a
sense of humour. It was a very foolish thing to do. But Sulla’s star
was with him and he died in his bed. His dying moments were comforted
by the apparition of his deceased wife (he had had five) and son, who
invited him to join them in the land of peace and bliss beyond the
grave.
Sulla was hardly dead before another consul had marched against Rome
with his army and suffered defeat in the city. But these were mere
episodes. The streets of the sacred city were in a perpetual state
of war: every serious politician had to organise his gang of roughs,
and when the very senate-house was burnt down in one such encounter it
only seemed an excessive display of political zeal. Of constitutional
government there was little pretence. The seas were swarming with
pirates, no longer isolated rovers who preyed upon commerce, but an
organised pirate-state with head-quarters in Cilicia, and a great
fleet consisting of all the broken men and desperate outlaws of the
unhappy Mediterranean world. They sailed the high seas in fleets under
admirals who voyaged in state like princes. For their homes they had
impregnable citadels among the creeks of the Cilician and Dalmatian
coasts where they stored their families and their plunder. They were
not afraid to march inland to sack a city or loot a rich temple.
Commerce at sea was ruined, even the food-supply of the capital was
occasionally cut off. On land and even in Italy things were not much
better. All through Republican history (but seldom afterwards) we hear
of risings among the slaves of Italy. Now, under the plantation system,
the inaccessible Apennine highlands were swarming with desperate
runaways who constantly committed minor acts of brigandage. In 73 they
found a leader in Spartacus, the gladiator who was said to be of royal
descent in Thrace. Starting as a mere handful the band swelled in the
course of a few months to 40,000. Roman armies one after another and
ten in all marched against them in vain. Two consuls were defeated,
many eagles were captured, Italy was at their mercy. Respectable towns
like Thurii and Nola were seized, their prisoners were crucified like
slaves or forced with grim irony to fight one another to the death like
gladiators. Thus the most frightful form of civil war was devastating
Italy. It was necessary to raise an army of eight legions to crush
the slaves, and the command was entrusted to Marcus Crassus, who even
then had to decimate a legion before he could get his cowardly troops
to stand and fight. After several stubborn battles, and aided by the
want of discipline which was even more conspicuous among the slaves
than among the Romans, Crassus accomplished his task. Six thousand
crucified slaves who lined the road from Capua to Rome testified to the
restoration of order.
Abroad matters were little better. The war against Mithradates, which
had provided so many Roman triumphs and had so often been proclaimed
at an end, actually lasted for twenty-five years, and its duration was
due rather to the ineptitude of the government than to the prowess
of the unmilitary Asiatics. In Spain it took ten years to defeat
Sertorius with his native troops, and even then the result was only
accomplished by assassination. If a Hannibal had entered Italy in these
latter days the state could not have survived. But there was only one
military power of any consequence left in the world in those days, the
Parthians. Here there were half-hellenised despots ruling over tribes
of warriors only lately descended from the Caucasian and Armenian
highlands, and still nursing a fierce mountain spirit though they
occupied the rich plains of Mesopotamia. Crassus, the victor over the
slaves, was sent to fight them with a great army, but the millionaire
displayed wretched ignorance of strategy and especially of the perils
of Eastern warfare. He blundered on into the wilderness and tried to
meet the terrible horse-bowmen and mail-clad lancers of the East with
his legions in a hollow square. The result was the great disaster of
Carrhæ in 53, a defeat which amid all the shameful ignominies of this
period rankled continually owing to the loss of the eagles and the
tragic fate of the leader. Marcus Crassus himself was an almost wholly
repulsive character, who had amassed a fortune, colossal even in those
days of millionaires, by the most discreditable method. The foundations
of his millions had been laid by speculating in the property of the
victims of Sulla’s proscriptions. He had been a slave-trainer on a
large scale and at one time he had organised a private fire-brigade
which he used for acquiring house-property cheaply by blackmail. By
lending money to the young spendthrifts of the aristocracy he obtained
great influence at Rome, and indeed figures in the wretched politics of
his day as a statesman on equality with really great men like Cæsar and
Pompeius. But he had no policy and was only of importance through his
wealth and influence.
POMPEIUS AND CÆSAR
So we come to the final phase of the Republic--the great struggle
between the giants Cæsar and Pompeius, with figures like Cicero, Cato,
and Clodius in the background. I do not propose to linger over this
period, because on the one hand it is so thoroughly well known as the
period of fullest evidence in all Roman history, and therefore would
require a volume for adequate treatment, and on the other hand because
it has been such a battle-ground for partisan historians of all times
that it is difficult in such a summary as this to do justice without
detailed argument.
Gneius Pompeius the Great[17] had first come into prominence as a
supporter of Sulla. He was of high official family and was a born
soldier. That is really the secret of his career. Like Marius he was a
general and no statesman, but he was a very great general, and one of
the few honest men, one might almost say one of the few gentlemen, of
his period. The tragedy of his life was to be born in such a period. He
had disdained the minor offices of state, and relying on his military
renown but in defiance of the law, he stood for the consulship in
70 B.C. As the official aristocracy objected he went over to the
democrats, and allied himself with Crassus. These two, elected under
threat of Pompeius’s army, straightway repealed most of the Sullan
constitution, and restored the balance of power to the knights and the
assembly. At the end of the year Pompeius retired into private life.
This was characteristic of him; he was capable of grandiose schemes
but he lived in fear of public opinion, and he was really moved when
orators spoke of illegality. Meanwhile there was a loud demand for some
comprehensive scheme of attack upon the pirates. No ordinary consular
command would do. Even the Roman senate was by this time convinced
that it was useless to send legions and cavalry against pirate ships.
Accordingly a Gabinian Law of 67 gave to Pompeius a command of
unprecedented magnitude. Millions of money were voted to him, he was to
be supreme over all the seas and all the coasts for fifty miles inland
for three years, with a staff of twenty-five legates, and all governors
were to obey his orders. The price of corn fell at once: Pompeius
discovered abundance of it in the granaries of the Sicilian corn trust.
Then he began a systematic drive of the seas, and in about three months
had cleared them. Thousands of pirates were caught and crucified. All
this made Pompeius the most powerful and the most dangerous man in Rome.
Next the tribune Manilius, in whose favour that rising _novus homo_
the friend of our youth, Marcus Tullius Cicero, pronounced an oration,
gave to Pompeius another huge commission against Mithradates, the
irrepressible rebel of Asia. Pompeius succeeded where all his
predecessors, from Sulla to Lucullus, had failed, and the wicked old
king was driven to suicide. Then Pompeius proceeded to organise the
East like an Alexander, but always in perfect loyalty to Rome.
While Pompeius was absent the so-called democracy, which mostly
consisted of hired ruffians in the pay of discontented nobles, ruled
the streets of the city. Among the young nobles who took this side
was one more dissolute and more foppish than the rest, a notorious
adulterer and spendthrift, Gaius Julius Cæsar. Though of the highest
birth--the goddess Venus by her marriage with the father of Æneas
was among his ancestors--he was also by lineage associated with the
democracy. His aunt was the wife of Marius, and his wife was a daughter
of Cinna. He began his public career quaintly enough as _pontifex
maximus_. When Julia the widow of Marius died, young Cæsar had the
audacity to display images and utter an oration in praise of Marius.
This, as was intended, set all the gossips talking, and his amazing
extravagance kept him well in the public eye. On one occasion he
exhibited three hundred gladiators in silver armour, although he was
known to be penniless. Probably Crassus was his financier all along.
At this time there was another of the frequently recurring financial
crises at Rome. Everybody was deeply in debt, and loud rose the cry
for the clean slate, as part of the democratic programme--the only
intelligible part. This was the cause of the famous conspiracy of
Catiline, who, if Cicero may be trusted, proposed to seize and burn
Rome by the aid of the discontented Sullan colonists in Etruria.
Both Cæsar and Crassus are said to have favoured the plot, but it is
exceedingly difficult to see what a large owner of Roman house property
had to gain by it. Cicero was the consul for the year 63, and though it
is the fashion just now to sneer at Cicero, he seems to have displayed
courage and promptitude in dealing with the conspirators. Unfortunately
his arrest and execution of Catiline was technically illegal. Cicero
himself, as a parvenu, was naturally an aristocrat, and his policy,
though futile, was intelligible. Briefly, it was to unite the senate
with the capitalist class in what he called the “union of the orders”
against the democratic elements of disorder. Pompeius came home from
the East to find the conspiracy crushed. He and his legions were not
wanted. With incredible folly and ingratitude the senate, led by
Cicero, refused even to grant the lands he had promised to his veterans.
Cæsar had gone as prætor to Spain, and there began to win military
renown--much to the surprise of his friends--and money. He wanted the
consulship for the next year, and therefore required the support of
Pompeius, who had now been driven away from the aristocratic party to
which he belonged by sympathy. Crassus came in as Cæsar’s creditor and
as the necessary millionaire. Thus was formed the Triumvirate of the
year 60, and in 59 Cæsar became consul. By this time he had conceived
high, possibly the highest, ambitions. Marius and Sulla, not to mention
Alexander and Æneas, had always been much in his mind. For the present
his object was to acquire a lasting office and secure the allegiance
of a trained army. Cæsar’s colleague in the consulship was a certain
Bibulus, who tried to stop the dangerous proceedings of the democrat by
seeing omens in the heavens every day, but no one, least of all Cæsar,
took any notice of him. The only serious opposition came from Cato
the Younger, who represented the genuine and respectable aristocracy.
This Cato was a queer anachronism at Rome, an honest man. He was also,
if biography may be trusted, a bigot and a priggish eccentric. He was
the sort of man to go about Africa without a hat, or to sit on the
judicial bench without shoes, because such was the _mos maiorum_. He
tried to revive the ways which had been styled old-fashioned in his
grandfather. Nevertheless he was upright and brave, a good soldier,
and a man with a clear though impossible policy. Once again it is
the fault of rhetorical history that all the good men of Rome appear
as prigs and eccentrics. This man most courageously opposed his veto
to the proceedings of Cæsar, though he was hustled and beaten by
the democratic hirelings, then organised under that most notorious
scoundrel Clodius. But the result was that though Cæsar’s laws might
pass, they could afterwards be declared illegal, and Cæsar would be
liable to prosecution as soon as he became a private citizen. However,
he had no immediate intention of becoming a private citizen. He secured
the province of Gaul for five years with four legions.
Now Gaul was not reckoned an important province. It was only
the peaceful plain of Upper Italy to which the senate had added
Narbonensian Gaul, a southern strip of France, chiefly considered as
a step on the road to Spain. Four legions was a small consular army
for those days; no one supposed that he would have much fighting. But
either Cæsar had received secret intelligence or else he had very good
luck. At the outset he was called to deal with a great immigration of
the barbarian Helvetii, who were migrating out of Switzerland into Gaul
and threatening the province.
The conservatives at Rome maintained that Cæsar’s conquests in Gaul
were the result of wanton aggression--cheap victories over inoffensive
savages, wholly unjustifiable and unauthorised. At this point it is
scarcely possible to avoid entering upon the much-debated question of
Cæsar’s real character. For orthodox Romans Cæsar was the founder of
the empire, a person not only of divine descent, but himself divine.
All emperors took his name, until that surname of Cæsar, once a mere
nickname, came, in half the languages of Europe, to be synonymous
with “Emperor.” For the Middle Ages he stood with Constantine, who
christianised the Empire, and Charlemagne, who revived it, as the
founder of that divinely instituted polity which shared with the Church
God’s viceregency on earth. In the eyes of Dante, Cæsar stood very near
to Christ, for the poet peoples the frozen heart of his Inferno with
three tormented figures who writhe in the very jaws of Cocytus. Along
with Judas Iscariot are the two murderers of Julius Cæsar. Though the
Renaissance stripped him of much of his legendary greatness, Cæsar
remained for the men of Shakespeare’s day the embodiment of imperial
pride. Shakespeare himself was too great an artist to make any of
his characters more or less than human, but it is evidently Brutus
who has the sympathies of the dramatist. In the French Revolution,
again, Brutus and Cassius were heroes and glorious tyrannicides. The
reaction against early nineteenth-century liberalism brought Cæsar
once more into honour, and Mommsen, the prophet of Cæsarism, makes him
the hero of his great history. To Mommsen Cæsar was almost divine, the
clear-sighted and magnanimous “saviour” who alone saw the true path out
of the disorders of his city. From this view again we are apparently
now in reaction once more. To the latest critics the greatness of Cæsar
and of Mommsen are alike abhorrent, and Signor Ferrero depicts his
greatest fellow-countryman as an unscrupulous demagogue who blundered
into renown through treachery and bloodshed.
The historical principle by which this result is attained is rather
typical of certain modern critical methods. Since the account of
the Gallic Wars was written chiefly by Cæsar himself, and Cæsar is
by hypothesis a scoundrel, the history of these wars must be found
by reading between the lines of Cæsar’s account, putting the most
unfavourable construction upon everything and preferring any evidence
to his, even if it be that of two centuries later. If any gaps or
inconsistencies are noticed they must be treated as concealing defeats
or acts of treachery. Written in this spirit, the story of the Gallic
Wars is a very black one for Cæsar and Rome. Yet unbiassed readers
must generally admit that Cæsar was a very careful and on the whole
an honest historian. The accusation that he was capable of relentless
cruelty springs from his own admissions. It was in the Roman character
to despise life, and when Cæsar thought that a rebellious tribe needed
a lesson he did not hesitate to massacre defenceless women and children
or to lay waste miles of territory with fire and sword. But, on the
other hand, his preference was for clemency and justice.