old, spent with war and labour, and, as I have said, quite alone.
He was a man without beliefs or illusions or scruples. Not a bad
man: for he preferred justice and mercy to tyranny and cruelty, and
he had a passion for logic and order. He was not the sort of man to
make compromises. His sudden successes had taught him to despise his
enemies. He was not, of course, ignorant that the Romans (if there
were any true Romans left) had it in their blood to hate the title of
Rex. Every Roman schoolboy was brought up to declaim in praise of
regicides. But possibly in time they could be accustomed to the hideous
idea. For the present, old-fashioned titles like Dictator, Consul, and
Tribune would suffice. But the office must be made hereditary, and the
boy Octavius was already marked for adoption and succession. The title
of Rex could wait. Cæsar would feel his way gently.
But patience was not one of his virtues. Actually fortune only left
him less than two years, and those broken by tedious campaigns in the
Spanish provinces, for the regeneration of Roman society. In that time
he restored the finances, rearranged the provincial system, abolished
the political clubs which had been centres of disorder at Rome,
reformed the Calendar, dedicated a new forum and new temples, restored
and revised the senate, founded a system of municipal government for
Italy, settled his veterans on the land, and was preparing a great
expedition to chastise the Parthians.
Most of these acts were wisely done, but in one thing Cæsar
miscalculated. His brilliant successes and the adulation with which
he was surrounded led him to despise his enemies. He would not stoop
to flatter antiquarian prejudices or to cast a decent veil over his
monarchical position. You may treat people as slaves and they will
admire you for it, but when you _call_ them slaves they will begin
to resent it. Cæsar failed to rise from his chair to receive the
senators. In his reformed senate he included representatives of the
equestrian class, provincials and even distinguished soldiers of quite
humble birth. He allowed his statue to be set up beside the Seven
Kings of Rome. He accepted a gilt chair, he permanently retained the
triumphant general’s laurel-crown, partly because he was bald and
keenly sensitive about it; and then either through his orders or
by their own officiousness his friends began to throw up _ballons
d’essai_ in the direction of kingship. At the Lupercalia Antony offered
him a crown of gold. It was spread abroad that an ancient Sibylline
prophecy had foretold that the Parthians could only be conquered by
a king and that Cæsar was to adopt the title for the purpose of his
Eastern expedition. It was trifles like these, and trivial jealousies,
trivial requests declined in the name of justice, that led to the
great conspiracy. No doubt the influence of rhetorical patriotism had
its effect upon many of the conspirators. An unknown hand wrote “O
that thou wert living!” upon the statue of old Brutus the Liberator.
But neither Brutus nor Cassius deserves our admiration. It was pique
not patriotism that sharpened their daggers. Sixty senators conspired
together, and on the eve of setting out for Parthia--the Ides of March,
44 B.C.--Julius Cæsar was slain.
And then, having slain the tyrant and liberated the republic, the
patriots were helpless. A doctrinaire like Cicero might still dream
of restoring the commonwealth; but the only real question was who
should succeed. The people only cried for peace. It was not so much the
speech of Mark Antony as the funeral of Cæsar, cleverly stage-managed
by Calpurnia, and the genuine sorrow of his veterans, which gradually
turned the popular feeling against the conspirators. The senate did not
venture to declare Cæsar a tyrant, they confirmed his acts, but there
was no proposal to punish the murderers. The whole conclusion was a
feeble compromise.
The man who should have grasped the helm was Mark Antony. He was left
sole consul, there was a legion and the prætorian cohort under arms
only waiting the word. The conspirators had only a few gladiators in
their pay. Antony had every right to arrest them. But Antony was not
the man for the part. With all his talents his character was feeble. He
was always dependent on his surroundings and generally under feminine
influence. Once it had been the dancer Cytheris, at present it was
the aggressive Fulvia; for a time Octavia almost reformed him, but
Cleopatra easily ensnared him. He was a rake and a spendthrift, always
in debt. He was timid of public opinion: just now the aristocratic
society in which he moved was prating of tyrannicide. Antony wanted to
be in the fashion. There were dramatic embracements between Antony and
Brutus.
Now the testament of Cæsar, which had just been confirmed by the
senate, named young Gneius Octavius as heir to three-quarters of his
estate. At the end of the will was a codicil adopting him. Henceforth
until he gets the title of Augustus this young Cæsar must be called
Octavianus, though he never accepted that name for himself. The “second
heirs” named in case the first should fail or decline to succeed
included D. Brutus, one of the murderers, and Mark Antony himself.
Whosoever should accept the heirship would be bound by all Roman ideas
of honour to undertake the chastisement of the murderers. Antony seems
to have assumed that the obscure young man would not be likely to
accept the inheritance. He therefore got together all Cæsar’s papers,
and began to spend Cæsar’s immense fortune as only Antony could. He
began also to manipulate Cæsar’s papers, inserting anything he liked
among Cæsar’s “acts,” selling honours, raising taxes, recalling exiles
to please Fulvia. For some time no one ventured to complain. Leading
senators like Cicero retired to the country remarking that the tyrant
was dead but the tyranny still alive. Then, of course, Antony had to
provide himself with a province to ensure his future safety. Moreover,
the cry of the veterans for revenge began to move him to play the
Cæsarian. Thus Antony was virtually master of the Roman world and the
sky was dark with menace.
Into this dangerous arena steps the nineteen-year-old Octavian.
His guardian advised him to have nothing to do with his perilous
inheritance. Historians have often dubbed him a coward. But alone and
unfriended this youth left his tutors at Apollonia and came to Rome
to take up his trust. It meant, first, revenge upon the conspirators;
and secondly, a quarrel with Antony. It meant, in fact, two more civil
wars, and Octavian had seen nothing of warfare. He set to work coolly
and warily. There was still a magic in the name of Cæsar, and the
veterans rallied to him and besought him to march against Brutus and
Cassius. Part of his duties as executor was to pay a million sterling
in donations to the Roman people. He sold his property and began to
distribute the largess, man by man, tribe by tribe, until the sum was
paid. He gave magnificent games in his “father’s” honour, with the
lucky star of Julius publicly exhibited. He bought an army of 10,000
men with borrowed money. Two of Antony’s legions deserted to him
bodily, and the very veterans of Antony’s bodyguard offered to murder
their general if young Cæsar would give the signal.
But there was no haste in his method. Antony was to be used first and
then destroyed. Octavian tried for a time to work with the senate, and
even marched against Antony under their orders, but the incredible
folly of the senate, who were persuaded by Cicero that “the boy” was
negligible, drove him into the famous triple alliance of Antony,
Octavian, and Lepidus. These three were appointed under threat of their
armies to a kind of dictatorship in commission, “a triumvirate to
reorganise the state.” Revenge was the explicit motive of this league.
They began with the usual horrid proscription of all the senatorial
aristocrats to be found in Rome. This was mainly Antony’s work. His
creditors, his enemies and his wife’s enemies were slain wholesale,
and, among them, Cicero. Eighteen towns of Italy were destroyed to
provide lands for the veterans.
Meanwhile the tyrannicides had gathered in the East, and now Antony
and the young Cæsar set out in pursuit of them. In the two battles
of Philippi the luck of Octavian and the skill of Antony triumphed
over their dispirited adversaries. Brutus and Cassius fell. A few of
the “patriots” survived and joined Sextus Pompeius who was still at
large in the Mediterranean. In the warfare at Philippi Octavian’s
inexperience and real want of talent for generalship had been very
apparent in contrast to Antony. Lepidus was already a nonentity.
Antony went off to the East; and while he was holding his court of
justice in Cilicia there sailed into harbour the splendid royal yacht
of Cleopatra. The people left the judgment seat to see the famous
Queen, and Antony too was soon at her feet. Signor Ferrero would have
us believe, relying partly on the mature age of Cleopatra, that it
was policy, not love, which made Antony dally at Alexandria. Policy
no doubt was there, but everything that we know of Antony leads us
to believe that he was just the man to be captured by a celebrated
courtesan, particularly if she were also a queen. Certainly his sojourn
in the East lowered his character both as a politician and as a soldier.
Octavian had to face Rome and the West. His task was full of perils
but also full of possibilities. The soldiers were mutinous, he himself
was grievously sick, and the redoubtable Fulvia, who was her husband’s
real agent at Rome, very soon perceived that he was an enemy to be
fought. Octavian had to fight another small civil war at Perugia
before he could call himself master even of Italy, and then fight
Sextus Pompeius in the Sicilian waters. Luckily he had at his side a
splendid soldier--general and admiral by turns as were all good Roman
fighting-men--Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.[19] He had also as his agent
at Rome Mæcenas, an astute diplomatist and man of business. So though
he himself often displayed feebleness and was often in danger he
accomplished his task and became master of the West. Thus the lordship
of the world was reduced to a plain duel.
Antony had actually married Cleopatra after Fulvia’s death and
Octavia’s divorce, and as consort of the Egyptian queen reigned in
Oriental majesty. He had marched against the Parthians and failed
ignominiously. He was assigning provinces and princedoms to Cleopatra
and her dubious offspring. It was easy for Octavian to represent Antony
as a renegade Roman threatening to introduce Oriental monarchy into
Rome. When at last it came to the final civil war Octavian appeared as
fighting in the public cause of Rome against Egypt, with Antony as a
mere deserter on the Egyptian side. The great naval battle of Actium
(31 B.C.), which decided the mastery of the world for Octavian, was
thus a triumph for the Roman arms over the barbarians. Actually it was
a degenerate Antony who sailed away at the crisis of the battle in the
wake of the queen’s yacht. The glory of the day was Agrippa’s. The luck
as usual was the young Cæsar’s. He was able to inaugurate his reign at
Rome by presenting her with Egypt, the richest country in the world. In
29 B.C. he came home to celebrate a glorious triple triumph and to open
a new era as the first Roman Emperor.
LATE REPUBLICAN CIVILISATION
Such is a brief sketch of the hundred and four years from the day when
Tiberius Gracchus first arose to challenge the senatorial oligarchy
to the day when the Empire was established upon the ruins of the
Republic. It is perhaps the most terrible century in the history of
the world. Rome had become the centre of the world, the only hope for
civilisation, and Rome was filled with bloodshed and corruption. For
the provinces there was no decent government, only a succession of
licensed plunderers. In the city itself there was a long series of
personal struggles for the mastery; politics meant organised rioting by
gangs of roughs, questions were solved by the dagger or by the swords
of senators. At intervals there came from each side alternately the
murderous proscriptions, in which every man of spirit or eminence on
the opposing side was marked down for destruction. Often their sons
and grandsons perished with them, and in any case their fortunes were
destroyed. Besides the proscriptions there had been of late a series of
civil wars on a great scale in which thousands of the bravest Romans
perished by each other’s swords. A successful foreign war may have
some compensating effect in stiffening the moral fibre of a nation and
exalting its spirit. But civil war is disastrous in every way. It is
only the meanest who survive and the evil passions which it arouses
have no compensation.
In such a period it is wonderful that civilisation should have been
able to make any advances at all. But in spite of the public turmoil
private citizens were amassing enormous fortunes out of the plunder of
the world, and living, though always on the edge of a volcano, in state
and luxury like kings. It is now our task to see something of private
life and culture in the Rome of the expiring Republic.
Money was easily made in those days and lavishly spent. Even an honest
man like Cicero, governing a comparatively poor province like Cilicia,
made at least £20,000 by his year of office while he remitted to the
provincials a million, which, as he says, any governor of average
morality would have retained. Legacies were a very frequent source
of revenue especially to pleaders, and it was customary for a rich
testator at Rome to make large bequests to his friends. Cicero gained
£200,000 by such legacies. Foreign kings and states paid handsomely
for legal advice or support. Although a barrister was supposed to give
his services for nothing yet gifts and legacies were not refused. For
the financier or business man there were many channels to affluence.
There were mines all over the empire to be financed and exploited.
Although there was little genuine industry at Rome, yet the training
and use of slaves for various undertakings was a lucrative business.
Crassus trained a salvage brigade for Rome and went about to fires with
them in order to make bids for the purchase of the burning property.
Atticus trained a company of copying clerks and made money by the sale
of books. He also kept gladiators and hired them out to magistrates for
the games. Fortunes were made, as in the case of Crassus, by buying
up the confiscated property of the proscribed. Land speculation was
rendered extremely profitable by the frequent assignation of farm-lands
to veteran soldiers who were generally glad to sell them at once.
The extravagance of the Roman nobles led to a very brisk traffic in
loans at high interest. There was a great deal of genuine commercial
speculation in ships and cargoes, generally by companies, and Cato
advises the investor to put his money in fifty different enterprises
rather than in one at a time. Commerce overseas was, however,
forbidden to the senators by the Claudian law, and these speculated
chiefly in land, on which they made a profit by slave-labour. But
the most profitable business of all was tax-farming, in which the
equestrian classes joined together in capitalist rings. In these and
other ways prodigious fortunes were accumulated. The stored-up capital
of the Roman world is astounding in its magnitude compared even to
that of modern times. The real property of Pompeius sold for £700,000.
Æsopus, the popular actor, left £200,000. After the most lavish
donations to the public Crassus left nearly two millions sterling by
will. On the death of Cæsar the treasury contained eight millions in
bullion of which a million was the dictator’s own property.
But all the wealth of the Roman empire was shared by a very narrow
circle. The gulf between rich and poor was far deeper than it is
to-day. We hear of poor nobles and rich upstarts, but of a respectable
middle class with traditions of its own there is little trace. There is
an aristocracy of a few thousand families, and nothing else but a vast
proletariat, silent and hungry, dependent on their bounty, bribed with
money, bribed with free corn, and bribed with bloody spectacles. They
lived miserably in huge tenement blocks or in hovels on the outskirts
of the city. The only career open to them was in the army, and that
was chiefly filled by the stronger rustics. They had nothing to do but
lounge in the streets, gape at gladiators and actors and shout for
the most generous politicians of the day. No doubt there were honest
citizen cobblers, but Roman history is silent about them.
That section of the city which is to be styled Society was as proud and
reckless as the French aristocracy before the Revolution. The senate
had now become almost literally a hereditary rank. A child born into
one of these princely houses was tended by a multitude of slaves. By
this time there was some attempt at a liberal education. Attended by a
slave pedagogue the boy would go daily to the school of some starved
Greek, who would teach him his letters and his figures. The staple of
education was the delivery of artificial declamation on the model of
Isocrates or Demosthenes. After this stage a young man would commonly
be sent abroad to Athens or Rhodes to finish his education with a
little philosophy or mathematics, but chiefly with oratory. Returned
to Rome, his destiny placed him in a circle of foppish youths, who
devoted their principal attention to dress and manicure. Bejewelled
and scented, they practised every vice, natural and unnatural. In
due course, with no effort but a few bribes from the parental purse,
they became priests and augurs, thus entering what were in reality
aristocratic dining-clubs. Dining was now the principal art of Rome.
Macrobius has preserved the menu of one of these priestly dinners of
the Republic, at which the priests and vestals were present. The party
began with a prolusion like the Russian or Swedish system of _hors
d’œuvres_, in which seventeen dishes of fish and game were presented.
The dinner itself contained ten more courses, “sow’s udder, boar’s
head, fish-pasties, boar-pasties, ducks, boiled teals, hares, roasted
fowls, starch-pastry, Pontic-pastry.” Such was the State religion
of Rome in the first century before Christ. At intervals the young
noble’s father’s friends would invite him to join their staff on
foreign service. If he had the good fortune to serve with Pompeius
or Lucullus in the East or with Cæsar in Gaul, he might get a taste
of real manliness, and serve his country as tribune of the soldiers.
But more often in a peaceful province like Sicily or Africa he was
merely initiated into the arts of extortion, and enjoyed all the
vicious opportunities of the younger sons of princes. Thus fortified
by experience he would return to Rome to seek the suffrages of his
fellow-citizens for the quæstorship, the first rung on the ladder
of office. Votes were to be won by bribery, direct or indirect. One
candidate would spread a banquet for a whole tribe; another would seek
to outshine his rivals by providing strange beasts from Africa--among
Cicero’s correspondence there is an urgent appeal for Cilician panthers
to be slain in the arena--or by dressing his gladiators in silver
armour. Similar requirements accompanied his progress through all
the stages of office on a progressively lavish scale. As quæstor he
would be a judge or a comptroller of the treasury for a single year.
Then as ædile he would conduct the public festivals, preside in the
ædile’s court, control the markets and streets of Rome. So he rose to
be consul, commander of legions and president of the state, and then
in due course governor of an enormous province. From his quæstorship
onwards his seat in the senate was assured.
In his home the noble Roman lived like a king, waited upon by an
enormous retinue. There was much luxury and little comfort. The houses
of the Romans were on a far more luxurious scale than those of the
Greeks. The only genuine Roman taste that can be called liberal was the
hobby of collecting beautiful town houses and country seats. Cicero,
who was a man of modest income and tastes, seems to have possessed
about eighteen different estates, and gave nearly £30,000 for his town
house. The qualities prized in the choice of a mansion were space and
coolness, and the Romans of this age were by no means insensible to
the charms of scenery. The coast round Naples and Baiæ was dotted with
sumptuous villas, and the gay world spent its summer there in much the
same way as the cosmopolitan crowds at Biarritz. Besides his great town
house and his family mansion at Arpinum, and his country houses at
Tusculum and elsewhere, Cicero had marine villas all along the coast at
Antium, Formiæ, Cumæ, Puteoli, and Pompeii, and all along the Campanian
road were his private “inns,” where he lodged on his journeys. His
favourite villa was the one at Tusculum, the scene of many of his
literary labours, and among others of the famous Tusculan Disputations.
It had previously belonged to Sulla, and was adorned with paintings in
commemoration of Sulla’s victories. It was situated on the top of a
hill along with many other villas of the aristocracy, and commanded a
delightful view of the city about twelve miles away. The park attached
to it was extensive, and through it there ran a broad canal. He had
books everywhere, but his principal library was deposited at Antium. At
Puteoli he constructed a cloister and a grove on the model of Plato’s
Academy.
The principal feature of the Roman house was its large colonnaded hall,
with a roof open in the middle to admit light and air. This roof sloped
inwards, and allowed the rain to fall into a central tank, delightful
for coolness, no doubt, but probably very unwholesome. In old days the
atrium had been the common room of the Roman family. It still retained
a symbolical marriage-bed, a symbolical spinning-wheel, the portraits
of the ancestors, and the ceremonial altar to the family gods, who were
now stored away in a cupboard close at hand. Most of the rooms opened
directly out of the atrium. As they are seen in the ruins of Roman
villas, they appear to have been comparatively small and ill-lighted.
The larger houses themselves were generally built of local limestone
with facings of stucco, though the greater part of Rome was still
in this first century b.c. constructed of sun-baked bricks. It was
considered unheard-of luxury when Mamurra faced his walls with marble
slabs. The floors were generally tessellated. It was an innovation of
the Roman architect to build houses of three or more stories, but it
was probably only a starveling poet who would live on the fourth floor.
A noble’s house would spread over the ground regardless of space, but
the bedrooms and sometimes the dining-room were upstairs. Externally
the Roman house was a little finer than the Greek, being fronted with
a pillared forecourt and a dwelling for the concierge. At the back the
atrium opened into a colonnaded garden with a fountain, flower-beds,
and shrubbery.
As the Roman’s house was built mainly with a view to coolness, so
his daily life was that of a southerner. Rome was never a healthy
city in the summer, and all who could afford it fled to the country
or the sea-side. Almost every Roman known to us in literature was
either an invalid or a valetudinarian. Malarial fever in its periodic
form was very widely spread, and most of our distinguished friends
pursued a medical regimen. Cæsar was subject to fits of epilepsy,
Cicero was of weak constitution, Horace was a martyr to ophthalmia
as well as malaria, Augustus was always ailing and often at death’s
door. The Roman’s most amiable idiosyncrasy was his devotion to the
bath. Every considerable house had an elaborate bathing department
with at least a hot room built over a furnace, and a cold room with a
swimming-tank. But there were also public baths, on an ever-increasing
scale of magnificence. Agrippa alone built 170 of them at Rome. Rich
and poor alike made it their daily practice to bathe after exercise,
just before their principal meal in the early afternoon. The custom of
the noon-tide siesta was universal, except with prodigies of industry
like Cicero. A great deal of time was spent in lounging abroad through
the streets or under shady colonnades. The streets of Rome, as of all
ancient cities, were extremely narrow, but in the busy parts of the
city all wheeled traffic was forbidden.