The consulship and praetorship also, although viewed by the

aristocratic regenerator of Rome with a more favourable eye than

the tribunate liable in itself to be regarded with suspicion, by

no means escaped that distrust towards its own instruments which is

throughout characteristic of oligarchy. They were restricted with

more tenderness in point of form, but in a way very sensibly felt.

Sulla here began with the partition of functions. At the beginning

of this period the arrangement in that respect stood as follows.

As formerly there had devolved on the two consuls the collective

functions of the supreme magistracy, so there still devolved on them

all those official duties for which distinct functionaries had not

been by law established. This latter course had been adopted with

the administration of justice in the capital, in which the consuls,

according to a rule inviolably adhered to, might not interfere, and

with the transmarine provinces then existing--Sicily, Sardinia, and

the two Spains--in which, while the consul might no doubt exercise

his -imperium-, he did so only exceptionally. In the ordinary course

of things, accordingly, the six fields of special jurisdiction--

the two judicial appointments in the capital and the four transmarine

provinces--were apportioned among the six praetors, while there devolved

on the two consuls, by virtue of their general powers, the management

of the non-judicial business of the capital and the military command

in the continental possessions. Now as this field of general powers

was thus doubly occupied, the one consul in reality remained at the

disposal of the government; and in ordinary times accordingly those

eight supreme annual magistrates fully, and in fact amply, sufficed.

For extraordinary cases moreover power was reserved on the one

hand to conjoin the non-military functions, and on the other hand

to prolong the military powers beyond the term of their expiry

(-prorogare-). It was not unusual to commit the two judicial offices

to the same praetor, and to have the business of the capital, which

in ordinary circumstances had to be transacted by the consuls,

managed by the -praetor urbanus-; whereas, as far as possible, the

combination of several commands in the same hand was judiciously

avoided. For this case in reality a remedy was provided by the

rule that there was no interregnum in the military -imperium-, so

that, although it had its legal term, it yet continued after the

arrival of that term de jure, until the successor appeared and

relieved his predecessor of the command; or--which is the same thing--

the commanding consul or praetor after the expiry of his term of

office, if a successor did not appear, might continue to act, and was

bound to do so, in the consul's or praetor's stead. The influence

of the senate on this apportionment of functions consisted in its

having by use and wont the power of either giving effect to the

ordinary rule--so that the six praetors allotted among themselves

the six special departments and the consuls managed the continental

non-judicial business--or prescribing some deviation from it; it

might assign to the consul a transmarine command of especial importance

at the moment, or include an extraordinary military or judicial

commission--such as the command of the fleet or an important criminal

inquiry--among the departments to be distributed, and might arrange

the further cumulations and extensions of term thereby rendered

necessary. In this case, however, it was simply the demarcation of

the respective consular and praetorian functions on each occasion

which belonged to the senate, not the designation of the persons to

assume the particular office; the latter uniformly took place by

agreement among the magistrates concerned or by lot. The burgesses

in the earlier period were doubtless resorted to for the purpose

of legitimising by special decree of the community the practical

prolongation of command that was involved in the non-arrival of

relief;(25) but this was required rather by the spirit than by the

letter of the constitution, and soon the burgesses ceased from

intervention in the matter. In the course of the seventh century

there were gradually added to the six special departments already

existing six others, viz. the five new governorships of Macedonia,

Africa, Asia, Narbo, and Cilicia, and the presidency of the standing

commission respecting exactions.(26) With the daily extending sphere

of action of the Roman government, moreover, it was a case of more

and more frequent occurrence, that the supreme magistrates were

called to undertake extraordinary military or judicial commissions.

Nevertheless the number of the ordinary supreme annual magistrates

was not enlarged; and there thus devolved on eight magistrates to

be annually nominated--apart from all else--at least twelve special

departments to be annually occupied. Of course it was no mere

accident, that this deficiency was not covered once for all by

the creation of new praetorships. According to the letter of

the constitution all the supreme magistrates were to be nominated

annually by the burgesses; according to the new order or rather

disorder--under which the vacancies that arose were filled up mainly

by prolonging the term of office, and a second year was as a rule

added by the senate to the magistrates legally serving for one year,

but might also at discretion be refused--the most important and

most lucrative places in the state were filled up no longer by the

burgesses, but by the senate out of a list of competitors formed by

the burgess-elections. Since among these positions the transmarine

commands were especially sought after as being the most lucrative,

it was usual to entrust a transmarine command on the expiry of

their official year to those magistrates whom their office confined

either in law or at any rate in fact to the capital, that is, to the

two praetors administering justice in the city and frequently also

to the consuls; a course which was compatible with the nature of

prorogation, since the official authority of supreme magistrates

acting in Rome and in the provinces respectively, although differently

entered on, was not in strict state-law different in kind.

Regulation of Their Functions by Sulla

Separation of the Political and Military Authority

Cisalpine Gaul Erected into a Province

Such was the state of things which Sulla found existing, and which

formed the basis of his new arrangement. Its main principles were,

a complete separation between the political authority which governed

in the burgess-districts and the military authority which governed in

the non-burgess-districts, and an uniform extension of the duration of

the supreme magistracy from one year to two, the first of which was

devoted to civil, and the second to military affairs. Locally the

civil and the military authority had certainly been long separated

by the constitution, and the former ended at the -pomerium-, where

the latter began; but still the same man held the supreme political

and the supreme military power united in his hand. In future the

consul and praetor were to deal with the senate and burgesses, the

proconsul and propraetor were to command the army; but all military

power was cut off by law from the former, and all political action

from the latter. This primarily led to the political separation of

the region of Northern Italy from Italy proper. Hitherto they had

stood doubtless in a national antagonism, inasmuch as Northern Italy

was inhabited chiefly by Ligurians and Celts, Central and Southern

Italy by Italians; but, in a political and administrative point of

view, the whole continental territory of the Roman state from the

Straits to the Alps including the Illyrian possessions--burgess,

Latin, and non-Italian communities without exception--was in the

ordinary course of things under the administration of the supreme

magistrates who were acting in Rome, as in fact her colonial

foundations extended through all this territory. According to Sulla's

arrangement Italy proper, the northern boundary of which was at the

same time changed from the Aesis to the Rubico, was--as a region now

inhabited without exception by Roman citizens--made subject to the

ordinary Roman authorities; and it became one of the fundamental

principles of Roman state-law, that no troops and no commandant

should ordinarily be stationed in this district. The Celtic

country south of the Alps on the other hand, in which a military

command could not be dispensed with on account of the continued

incursions of the Alpine tribes, was constituted a distinct

governorship after the model of the older transmarine commands.(27)

Lastly, as the number of praetors to be nominated yearly was raised

from six to eight, the new arrangement of the duties was such, that

the ten chief magistrates to be nominated yearly devoted themselves,

during their first year of office, as consuls or praetors to

the business of the capital--the two consuls to government and

administration, two of the praetors to the administration of civil

law, the remaining six to the reorganized administration of criminal

justice--and, during their second year of office, were as proconsuls

or propraetors invested with the command in one of the ten

governorships: Sicily, Sardinia, the two Spains, Macedonia, Asia,

Africa, Narbo, Cilicia, and Italian Gaul. The already-mentioned

augmentation of the number of quaestors by Sulla to twenty was

likewise connected with this arrangement.(28)

Better Arrangement of Business

Increase of the Power of the Senate

By this plan, in the first instance, a clear and fixed rule was

substituted for the irregular mode of distributing offices hitherto

adopted, a mode which invited all manner of vile manoeuvres and

intrigues; and, secondly, the excesses of magisterial authority were

as far as possible obviated and the influence of the supreme governing

board was materially increased. According to the previous

arrangement the only legal distinction in the empire was that drawn

between the city which was surrounded by the ring-wall, and the

country beyond the -pomerium-; the new arrangement substituted for

the city the new Italy henceforth, as in perpetual peace, withdrawn

from the regular -imperium-,(29) and placed in contrast to it the

continental and transmarine territories, which were, on the other hand,

necessarily placed under military commandants--the provinces as they

were henceforth called. According to the former arrangement the

same man had very frequently remained two, and often more years in

the same office. The new arrangement restricted the magistracies

of the capital as well as the governorships throughout to one year;

and the special enactment that every governor should without fail

leave his province within thirty days after his successor's arrival

there, shows very clearly--particularly if we take along with it the

formerly-mentioned prohibition of the immediate re-election of the

late magistrate to the same or another public office--what the

tendency of these arrangements was. It was the time-honoured maxim

by which the senate had at one time made the monarchy subject to

it, that the limitation of the magistracy in point of function

was favourable to democracy, and its limitation in point of time

favourable to oligarchy. According to the previous arrangement

Gaius Marius had acted at once as head of the senate and as

commander-in-chief of the state; if he had his own unskilfulness

alone to blame for his failure to overthrow the oligarchy by means

of this double official power, care seemed now taken to prevent

some possibly wiser successor from making a better use of the

same lever. According to the previous arrangement the magistrate

immediately nominated by the people might have had a military

position; the Sullan arrangement, on the other hand, reserved

such a position exclusively for those magistrates whom the senate

confirmed in their official authority by prolonging their term

of office. No doubt this prolongation of office had now become

a standing usage; but it still--so far as respects the auspices

and the name, and constitutional form in general--continued to be

treated as an extraordinary extension of their term. This was no

matter of indifference. The burgesses alone could depose the consul

or praetor from his office; the proconsul and propraetor were

nominated and dismissed by the senate, so that by this enactment

the whole military power, on which withal everything ultimately

depended, became formally at least dependent on the senate.

Shelving of the Censorship

Lastly we have already observed that the highest of all magistracies,

the censorship, though not formally abolished, was shelved in the

same way as the dictatorship had previously been. Practically it

might certainly be dispensed with. Provision was otherwise made

for filling up the senate. From the time that Italy was practically

tax-free and the army was substantially formed by enlistment, the

register of those liable to taxation and service lost in the main

its significance; and, if disorder prevailed in the equestrian roll

or the list of those entitled to the suffrage, that disorder was

probably not altogether unwelcome. There thus remained only the current

financial functions which the consuls had hitherto discharged when,

as frequently happened, no election of censors had taken place, and

which they now took as a part of their ordinary official duties.

Compared with the substantial gain that by the shelving of the

censorship the magistracy lost its crowning dignity, it was a matter

of little moment and was not at all prejudicial to the sole dominion

of the supreme governing corporation, that--with a view to satisfy

the ambition of the senators now so much more numerous--the number

of the pontifices and that of the augurs was increased from

nine,(30) that of the custodiers of oracles from ten,(31) to fifteen

each, and that of the banquet-masters from three(32) to seven.

Regulation of the Finances

In financial matters even under the former constitution the decisive

voice lay with the senate; the only point to be dealt with, accordingly,

was the re-establishment of an orderly administration. Sulla had found

himself at first in no small difficulty as to money; the sums brought

with him from Asia Minor were soon expended for the pay of his numerous

and constantly swelling army. Even after thevictory at the Colline gate

the senate, seeing that the state-chest had been carried off to Praeneste,

had been obliged to resort to urgent measures. Various building-sites

in the capital and several portions of the Campanian domains were exposed

to sale, the client kings, the freed and allied communities, were laid

under extraordinary contribution, their landed property and their

customs-revenues were in some cases confiscated, and in others new

privileges were granted to them for money. But the residue of nearly

600,000 pounds found in the public chest on the surrender of Praeneste,

the public auctions which soon began, and other extraordinary resources,

relieved the embarrassment of the moment. Provision was made for

the future not so much by the reform in the Asiatic revenues, under

which the tax-payers were the principal gainers, and the state chest

was perhaps at most no loser, as by the resumption of the Campanian

domains, to which Aenaria was now added,(33) and above all by the

abolition of the largesses of grain, which since the time of Gaius

Gracchus had eaten like a canker into the Roman finances.

Reorganization of the Judicial System.

Previous Arrangements

Ordinary Procedure

Permanent and Special -Quaestiones-

Centumviral Court

The judicial system on the other hand was essentially revolutionized,

partly from political considerations, partly with a view to

introduce greater unity and usefulness into the previous very

insufficient and unconnected legislation on the subject. According

to the arrangements hitherto subsisting, processes fell to be decided

partly by the burgesses, partly by jurymen. The judicial cases in

which the whole burgesses decided on appeal from the judgment of

the magistrate were, down to the time of Sulla, placed in the

hands primarily of the tribunes of the people, secondarily of the

aediles, inasmuch as all the processes, through which a person

entrusted with an office or commission by the community was brought

to answer for his conduct of its affairs, whether they involved

life and limb or money-fines, had to be in the first instance dealt

with by the tribunes of the people, and all the other processes in

which ultimately the people decided, were in the first instance

adjudicated on, in the second presided over, by the curule or plebeian

aediles. Sulla, if he did not directly abolish the tribunician

process of calling to account, yet made it dependent, just like

the initiative of the tribunes in legislation, on the previous

consent of the senate, and presumably also limited in like manner

the aedilician penal procedure. On the other hand he enlarged the

jurisdiction of the jury courts. There existed at that time two

sorts of procedure before jurymen. The ordinary procedure, which

was applicable in all cases adapted according to our view for a

criminal or civil process with the exception of crimes immediately

directed against the state, consisted in this, that one of the two

praetors of the capital technically adjusted the cause and a juryman

(-iudex-) nominated by him decided it on the basis of this adjustment.

The extraordinary jury-procedure again was applicable in particular

civil or criminal cases of importance, for which, instead of

the single juryman, a special jury-court had been appointed by

special laws. Of this sort were the special tribunals constituted

for individual cases;(34) the standing commissional tribunals, such

as had been appointed for exactions,(35) for poisoning and murder,(36)

perhaps also for bribery at elections and other crimes, in the course

of the seventh century; and lastly, the two courts of the "Ten-men"

for processes affecting freedom, and the "Hundred and five," or more

briefly, the "Hundred-men," for processes affecting inheritance,

also called, from the shaft of a spear employed in all disputes

as to property, the "spear-court" (-hasta-). The court of Ten-men

(-decemviri litibus iudicandis-) was a very ancient institution for

the protection of the plebeians against their masters.(37) The period

and circumstances in which the spear-court originated are involved in

obscurity; but they must, it may be presumed, have been nearly the

same as in the case of the essentially similar criminal commissions

mentioned above. As to the presidency of these different tribunals

there were different regulations in the respective ordinances

appointing them: thus there presided over the tribunal as to

exactions a praetor, over the court for murder a president specially

nominated from those who had been aediles, over the spear-court several

directors taken from the former quaestors. The jurymen at least for

the ordinary as for the extraordinary procedure were, in accordance

with the Gracchan arrangement, taken from the non-senatorial men

of equestrian census; the selection belonged in general to the

magistrates who had the conducting of the courts, yet on such a

footing that they, in entering upon their office, had to set

forth once for all the list of jurymen, and then the jury for an

individual case was formed from these, not by free choice of the

magistrate, but by drawing lots, and by rejection on behalf of the

parties. From the choice of the people there came only the "Ten-men"

for procedure affecting freedom.

Sullan -Quaestiones-

Sulla's leading reforms were of a threefold character. First, he

very considerably increased the number of the jury-courts. There

were henceforth separate judicial commissions for exactions; for

murder, including arson and perjury; for bribery at elections; for

high treason and any dishonour done to the Roman name; for the most

heinous cases of fraud--the forging of wills and of money; for

adultery; for the most heinous violations of honour, particularly

for injuries to the person and disturbance of the domestic peace;

perhaps also for embezzlement of public moneys, for usury and other

crimes; and at least the greater number of these courts were either

found in existence or called into life by Sulla, and were provided

by him with special ordinances setting forth the crime and form of

criminal procedure. The government, moreover, was not deprived of

the right to appoint in case of emergency special courts for

particular groups of crimes. As a result of these arrangements,

the popular tribunals were in substance done away with, processes

of high treason in particular were consigned to the new high treason

commission, and the ordinary jury procedure was considerably

restricted, for the more serious falsifications and injuries were

withdrawn from it. Secondly, as respects the presidency of the courts,

six praetors, as we have already mentioned, were now available for

the superintendence of the different jury-courts, and to these were

added a number of other directors in the care of the commission

which was most frequently called into action--that for dealing with

murder. Thirdly, the senators were once more installed in the

office of jurymen in room of the Gracchan equites.

The political aim of these enactments--to put an end to the share

which the equites had hitherto had in the government--is clear as

day; but it as little admits of doubt, that these were not mere

measures of a political tendency, but that they formed the first

attempt to amend the Roman criminal procedure and criminal law, which

had since the struggle between the orders fallen more and more into

confusion. From this Sullan legislation dates the distinction--

substantially unknown to the earlier law--between civil and criminal

causes, in the sense which we now attach to these expressions;

henceforth a criminal cause appears as that which comes before the

bench of jurymen under the presidency of the praetor, a civil cause

as the procedure, in which the juryman or jurymen do not discharge

their duties under praetorian presidency. The whole body of the

Sullan ordinances as to the -quaestiones- may be characterized

at once as the first Roman code after the Twelve Tables, and as

the first criminal code ever specially issued at all. But in

the details also there appears a laudable and liberal spirit.

Singular as it may sound regarding the author of the proscriptions,

it remains nevertheless true that he abolished the punishment

of death for political offences; for, as according to the Roman

custom which even Sulla retained unchanged the people only, and

not the jury-commission, could sentence to forfeiture of life or

to imprisonment,(38) the transference of processes of high treason

from the burgesses to a standing commission amounted to the abolition

of capital punishment for such offences. On the other hand, the

restriction of the pernicious special commissions for particular cases

of high treason, of which the Varian commission(39) in the Social war

had been a specimen, likewise involved an improvement. The whole

reform was of singular and lasting benefit, and a permanent monument

of the practical, moderate, statesmanly spirit, which made its author

well worthy, like the old decemvirs, to step forward between the

parties as sovereign mediator with his code of law.

Police Laws

We may regard as an appendix to these criminal laws the police

ordinances, by which Sulla, putting the law in place of the censor,

again enforced good discipline and strict manners, and, by

establishing new maximum rates instead of the old ones which

had long been antiquated, attempted to restrain luxury at banquets,

funerals, and otherwise.

The Roman Municipal System

Lastly, the development of an independent Roman municipal system

was the work, if not of Sulla, at any rate of the Sullan epoch.

The idea of organically incorporating the community as a subordinate

political unit in the higher unity of the state was originally

foreign to antiquity; the despotism of the east knew nothing of urban

commonwealths in the strict sense of the word, and city and state

were throughout the Helleno-Italic world necessarily coincident.

In so far there was no proper municipal system from the outset either

in Greece or in Italy. The Roman polity especially adhered to this

view with its peculiar tenacious consistency; even in the sixth

century the dependent communities of Italy were either, in order to

their keeping their municipal constitution, constituted as formally

sovereign states of non-burgesses, or, if they obtained the Roman

franchise, were--although not prevented from organizing themselves

as collective bodies--deprived of properly municipal rights, so that

in all burgess-colonies and burgess--municipia- even the administration

of justice and the charge of buildings devolved on the Roman praetors

and censors. The utmost to which Rome consented was to allow at

least the most urgent lawsuits to be settled on the spot by a

deputy (-praefectus-) of the praetor nominated from Rome.(40)

The provinces were similarly dealt with, except that the governor

there came in place of the authorities of the capital. In the free,

that is, formally sovereign towns the civil and criminal jurisdiction

was administered by the municipal magistrates according to the local

statutes; only, unless altogether special privileges stood in the

way, every Roman might either as defendant or as plaintiff request

to have his cause decided before Italian judges according to Italian

law For the ordinary provincial communities the Roman governor was

the only regular judicial authority, on whom devolved the direction

of all processes. It was a great matter when, as in Sicily, in the

event of the defendant being a Sicilian, the governor was bound by the

provincial statute to give a native juryman and to allow him to decide

according to local usage; in most of the provinces this seems to

have depended on the pleasure of the directing magistrate.

In the seventh century this absolute centralization of the public

life of the Roman community in the one focus of Rome was given up,

so far as Italy at least was concerned. Now that Italy was a

single civic community and the civic territory reached from the Arnus

and Rubico down to the Sicilian Straits,(41) it was necessary to

consent to the formation of smaller civic communities within that

larger unit. So Italy was organized into communities of full

burgesses; on which occasion also the larger cantons that were

dangerous from their size were probably broken up, so far as this

had not been done already, into several smaller town-districts.(42)

The position of these new communities of full burgesses was a compromise

between that which had belonged to them hitherto as allied states,

and that which by the earlier law would have belonged to them as

integral parts of the Roman community. Their basis was in general

the constitution of the former formally sovereign Latin community, or,

so far as their constitution in its principles resembled the Roman,

that of the Roman old-patrician-consular community; only care was

taken to apply to the same institutions in the -municipium- names

different from, and inferior to, those used in the capital, or,

in other words, in the state. A burgess-assembly was placed at

the head, with the prerogative of issuing municipal statutes and

nominating the municipal magistrates. A municipal council of a

hundred members acted the part of the Roman senate. The administration

of justice was conducted by four magistrates, two regular judges

corresponding to the two consuls, and two market-judges corresponding

to the curule aediles. The functions of the censorship, which

recurred, as in Rome, every five years and, to all appearance,

consisted chiefly in the superintendence of public buildings, were also

undertaken by the supreme magistrates of the community, namely the

ordinary -duumviri-, who in this case assumed the distinctive title

of -duumviri- "with censorial or quinquennial power." The municipal

funds were managed by two quaestors. Religious functions primarily

devolved on the two colleges of men of priestly lore alone known to

the earliest Latin constitution, the municipal pontifices and augurs.

Relation of the -Municipium- to the State

With reference to the relation of this secondary political organism

to the primary organism of the state, political prerogatives in

general belonged completely to the former as well as to the latter,

and consequently the municipal decree and the -imperium- of the

municipal magistrates bound the municipal burgess just as the

decree of the people and the consular -imperium- bound the Roman.

This led, on the whole, to a co-ordinate exercise of power by the

authorities of the state and of the town; both had, for instance,

the right of valuation and taxation, so that in the case of any

municipal valuations and taxes those prescribed by Rome were not

taken into account, and vice versa; public buildings might be

instituted both by the Roman magistrates throughout Italy and by

the municipal authorities in their own district, and so in other

cases. In the event of collision, of course the community yielded

to the state and the decree of the people invalidated the municipal

decree. A formal division of functions probably took place only in

the administration of justice, where the system of pure co-ordination

would have led to the greatest confusion. In criminal procedure

presumably all capital causes, and in civil procedure those more

difficult cases which presumed an independent action on the part

of the directing magistrate, were reserved for the authorities and

jurymen of the capital, and the Italian municipal courts were

restricted to the minor and less complicated lawsuits, or to those

which were very urgent.

Rise of the -Municipium-

The origin of this Italian municipal system has not been recorded

by tradition. It is probable that its germs may be traced to

exceptional regulations for the great burgess-colonies, which were

founded at the end of the sixth century;(43) at least several, in

themselves indifferent, formal differences between burgess-colonies

and burgess--municipia- tend to show that the new burgess-colony,

which at that time practically took the place of the Latin, had

originally a better position in state-law than the far older burgess-

-municipium-, and the advantage doubtless can only have consisted in a

municipal constitution approximating to the Latin, such as afterwards

belonged to all burgess-colonies and burgess--municipia-. The new

organization is first distinctly demonstrable for the revolutionary

colony of Capua;(44) and it admits of no doubt that it was first

fully applied, when all the hitherto sovereign towns of Italy had

to be organized, in consequence of the Social war, as burgess-

communities. Whether it was the Julian law, or the censors of 668,

or Sulla, that first arranged the details, cannot be determined:

the entrusting of the censorial functions to the -duumviri- seems

indeed to have been introduced after the analogy of the Sullan

ordinance superseding the censorship, but may be equally well

referred to the oldest Latin constitution to which also the

censorship was unknown. In any case this municipal constitution--

inserted in, and subordinate to, the state proper--is one of the

most remarkable and momentous products of the Sullan period, and

of the life of the Roman state generally. Antiquity was certainly

as little able to dovetail the city into the state as to develop

of itself representative government and other great principles of

our modern state-life; but it carried its political development

up to those limits at which it outgrows and bursts its assigned

dimensions, and this was the case especially with Rome, which in

every respect stands on the line of separation and connection between

the old and the new intellectual worlds. In the Sullan constitution

the primary assembly and the urban character of the commonwealth

of Rome, on the one hand, vanished almost into a meaningless form;

the community subsisting within the state on the other hand was

already completely developed in the Italian -municipium-. Down

to the name, which in such cases no doubt is the half of the matter,

this last constitution of the free republic carried out the

representative system and the idea of the state built upon the

basis of the municipalities.

The municipal system in the provinces was not altered by this

movement; the municipal authorities of the non-free towns continued--

special exceptions apart--to be confined to administration and

police, and to such jurisdiction as the Roman authorities did

not prefer to take into their own hands.

Impression Produced by the Sullan Reorganization

Opposition of the Officers

Such was the constitution which Lucius Cornelius Sulla gave to

the commonwealth of Rome. The senate and equestrian order, the

burgesses and proletariate, Italians and provincials, accepted it

as it was dictated to them by the regent, if not without grumbling,

at any rate without rebelling: not so the Sullan officers. The Roman

army had totally changed its character. It had certainly been

rendered by the Marian reform more ready for action and more

militarily useful than when it did not fight before the walls of

Numantia; but it had at the same time been converted from a burgess-

force into a set of mercenaries who showed no fidelity to the state

at all, and proved faithful to the officer only if he had the skill

personally to gain their attachment. The civil war had given fearful

evidence of this total revolution in the spirit of the army: six

generals in command, Albinus,(45) Cato,(46) Rufus,(47) Flaccus,(48)

Cinna,(49) and Gaius Carbo,(50) had fallen during its course by the

hands of their soldiers: Sulla alone had hitherto been able to

retain the mastery of the dangerous crew, and that only, in fact,

by giving the rein to all their wild desires as no Roman general

before him had ever done. If the blame of destroying the old

military discipline is on this account attached to him, the

censure is not exactly without ground, but yet without justice;

he was indeed the first Roman magistrate who was only enabled to

discharge his military and political task by coming forward as a

-condottiere-. He had not however taken the military dictatorship

for the purpose of making the state subject to the soldiery, but

rather for the purpose of compelling everything in the state, and

especially the army and the officers, to submit once more to the

authority of civil order. When this became evident, an opposition

arose against him among his own staff. The oligarchy might play

the tyrant as respected other citizens; but that the generals also,

who with their good swords had replaced the overthrown senators in

their seats, should now be summoned to yield implicit obedience to

this very senate, seemed intolerable. The very two officers in

whom Sulla had placed most confidence resisted the new order of

things. When Gnaeus Pompeius, whom Sulla had entrusted with the

conquest of Sicily and Africa and had selected for his son-in-law,

after accomplishing his task received orders from the senate to

dismiss his army, he omitted to comply and fell little short

of open insurrection.

Quintus Ofella, to whose firm perseverance in front of Praeneste

the success of the last and most severe campaign was essentially

due in equally open violation of the newly issued ordinances became

a candidate for the consulship without having held the inferior

magistracies. With Pompeius there was effected, if not a cordial

reconciliation, at any rate a compromise. Sulla, who knew his man

sufficiently not to fear him, did not resent the impertinent remark

which Pompeius uttered to his face, that more people concerned

themselves with the rising than with the setting sun; and accorded

to the vain youth the empty marks of honour to which his heart

clung.(51) If in this instance he appeared lenient, he showed on

the other hand in the case of Ofella that he was not disposed to

allow his marshals to take advantage of him; as soon as the latter

had appeared unconstitutionally as candidate, Sulla had him cut down

in the public market-place, and then explained to the assembled citizens

that the deed was done by his orders and the reason for doing it.

So this significant opposition of the staff to the new order of things

was no doubt silenced for the present; but it continued to subsist

and furnished the practical commentary on Sulla's saying, that what

he did on this occasion could not be done a second time.

Re-establishment of Constitutional Order

One thing still remained--perhaps the most difficult of all:

to bring the exceptional state of things into accordance with

the paths prescribed by the new or old laws. It was facilitated

by the circumstance, that Sulla never lost sight of this as his

ultimate aim. Although the Valerian law gave him absolute power

and gave to each of his ordinances the force of law, he had nevertheless

availed himself of this extraordinary prerogative only in the case of

measures, which were of transient importance, and to take part in

which would simply have uselessly compromised the senate and burgesses,

especially in the case of the proscriptions.

Sulla Resigns the Regency

Ordinarily he had himself observed those regulations, which he

prescribed for the future. That the people were consulted, we read

in the law as to the quaestors which is still in part extant; and the

same is attested of other laws, e. g. the sumptuary law and those

regarding the confiscation of domains. In like manner the senate

was previously consulted in the more important administrative acts,

such as in the sending forth and recall of the African army and in

the conferring of the charters of towns. In the same spirit Sulla

caused consuls to be elected even for 673, through which at least

the odious custom of dating officially by the regency was avoided;

nevertheless the power still lay exclusively with the regent, and

the election was directed so as to fall on secondary personages.

But in the following year (674) Sulla revived the ordinary constitution

in full efficiency, and administered the state as consul in concert

with his comrade in arms Quintus Metellus, retaining the regency, but

allowing it for the time to lie dormant. He saw well how dangerous

it was for his own very institutions to perpetuate the military

dictatorship. When the new state of things seemed likely to hold

its ground and the largest and most important portion of the

new arrangements had been completed, although various matters,

particularly in colonization, still remained to be done, he allowed

the elections for 675 to have free course, declined re-election to

the consulship as incompatible with his own ordinances, and at the

beginning of 675 resigned the regency, soon after the new consuls

Publius Servilius and Appius Claudius had entered on office. Even

callous hearts were impressed, when the man who had hitherto dealt

at his pleasure with the life and property of millions, at whose nod

so many heads had fallen, who had mortal enemies dwelling in every

street of Rome and in every town of Italy, and who without an ally

of equal standing and even, strictly speaking, without the support

of a fixed party had brought to an end his work of reorganizing

the state, a work offending a thousand interests and opinions--when

this man appeared in the market-place of the capital, voluntarily

renounced his plenitude of power, discharged his armed attendants,

dismissed his lictors, and summoned the dense throng of burgesses to

speak, if any one desired from him a reckoning. All were silent: Sulla

descended from the rostra, and on foot, attended only by his friends,

returned to his dwelling through the midst of that very populace which

eight years before had razed his house to the ground.

Character of Sulla

Posterity has not justly appreciated either Sulla himself or his work

of reorganization, as indeed it is wont to judge unfairly of persons

who oppose themselves to the current of the times. In fact Sulla

is one of the most marvellous characters--we may even say a unique

phenomenon--in history. Physically and mentally of sanguine

temperament, blue-eyed, fair, of a complexion singularly white but

blushing with every passionate emotion--though otherwise a handsome

man with piercing eyes--he seemed hardly destined to be of more

moment to the state than his ancestors, who since the days of his

great-great-grandfather Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul in 464, 477),

one of the most distinguished generals and at the same time the

most ostentatious man of the times of Pyrrhus, had remained in second-

rate positions. He desired from life nothing but serene enjoyment.

Reared in the refinement of such cultivated luxury as was at that

time naturalized even in the less wealthy senatorial families of

Rome, he speedily and adroitly possessed himself of all the fulness of

sensuous and intellectual enjoyments which the combination of Hellenic

polish and Roman wealth could secure. He was equally welcome as a

pleasant companion in the aristocratic saloon and as a good comrade

in the tented field; his acquaintances, high and low, found in him a

sympathizing friend and a ready helper in time of need, who gave his

gold with far more pleasure to his embarrassed comrade than to his

wealthy creditor. Passionate was his homage to the wine-cup, still

more passionate to women; even in his later years he was no longer

the regent, when after the business of the day was finished he

took his place at table. A vein of irony--we might perhaps say

of buffoonery--pervaded his whole nature. Even when regent he gave

orders, while conducting the public sale of the property of the

proscribed, that a donation from the spoil should be given to the

author of a wretched panegyric which was handed to him, on condition

that the writer should promise never to sing his praises again.

When he justified before the burgesses the execution of Ofella,

he did so by relating to the people the fable of the countryman and

the lice. He delighted to choose his companions among actors, and

was fond of sitting at wine not only with Quintus Roscius--the Roman

Talma--but also with far inferior players; indeed he was himself not

a bad singer, and even wrote farces for performance within his own

circle. Yet amidst these jovial Bacchanalia he lost neither bodily

nor mental vigour, in the rural leisure of his last years he was

still zealously devoted to the chase, and the circumstance that he

brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome

attests withal his interest in more serious reading. The specific

type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing

of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of

displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of

narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his

humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen,

in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic

companions to drive their chariots personally at the games.

He retained still less of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes,

which in countries of free constitution allure every youth of talent

into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably

at one time felt. In such a life as his was, oscillating between

passionate intoxication and more than sober awaking, illusions are

speedily dissipated. Wishing and striving probably appeared to him

folly in a world which withal was absolutely governed by chance, and

in which, if men were to strive after anything at all, this chance

could be the only aim of their efforts. He followed the general

tendency of the age in addicting himself at once to unbelief and

to superstition. His whimsical credulity was not the plebeian

superstition of Marius, who got a priest to prophesy to him for money

and determined his actions accordingly; still less was it the sullen

belief of the fanatic in destiny; it was that faith in the absurd,

which necessarily makes its appearance in every man who has out and

out ceased to believe in a connected order of things--the superstition

of the fortunate player, who deems himself privileged by fate to throw

on each and every occasion the right number. In practical questions

Sulla understood very well how to satisfy ironically the demands of

religion. When he emptied the treasuries of the Greek temples, he

declared that the man could never fail whose chest was replenished

by the gods themselves. When the Delphic priests reported to him

that they were afraid to send the treasures which he asked, because

the harp of the god emitted a clear sound when they touched it,

he returned the reply that they might now send them all the more

readily, as the god evidently approved his design. Nevertheless

he fondly flattered himself with the idea that he was the chosen

favourite of the gods, and in an altogether special manner of that

goddess, to whom down to his latest years he assigned the pre-

eminence, Aphrodite. In his conversations as well as in his

autobiography he often plumed himself on the intercourse which

the immortals held with him in dreams and omens. He had more right

than most men to be proud of his achievements he was not so, but he

was proud of his uniquely faithful fortune. He was wont to say that

every improvised enterprise turned out better with him than those

which were systematically planned; and one of his strangest whims--

that of regularly stating the number of those who had fallen on his

side in battle as nil--was nothing but the childishness of a child of

fortune. It was but the utterance of his natural disposition, when,

having reached the culminating point of his career and seeing all

his contemporaries at a dizzy depth beneath him, he assumed the

designation of the Fortunate--Sulla Felix--as a formal surname,

and bestowed corresponding appellations on his children,

Sulla's Political Career

Nothing lay farther from Sulla than systematic ambition. He had too

much sense to regard, like the average aristocrats of his time, the

inscription of his name in the roll of the consuls as the aim of his

life; he was too indifferent and too little of an ideologue to be

disposed voluntarily to engage in the reform of the rotten structure

of the state. He remained--where birth and culture placed him--in the

circle of genteel society, and passed through the usual routine of

offices; he had no occasion to exert himself, and left such exertion

to the political working bees, of whom there was in truth no lack.

Thus in 647, on the allotment of the quaestorial places, accident

brought him to Africa to the headquarters of Gaius Marius.

The untried man-of-fashion from the capital was not very well received

by the rough boorish general and his experienced staff. Provoked

by this reception Sulla, fearless and skilful as he was, rapidly

made himself master of the profession of arms, and in his daring

expedition to Mauretania first displayed that peculiar combination

of audacity and cunning with reference to which his contemporaries

said of him that he was half lion half fox, and that the fox in him

was more dangerous than the lion. To the young, highborn, brilliant

officer, who was confessedly the real means of ending the vexatious

Numidian war, the most splendid career now lay open; he took part

also in the Cimbrian war, and manifested his singular talent for

organization in the management of the difficult task of providing

supplies; yet even now the pleasures of life in the capital had far

more attraction for him than war or even politics. During his

praetorship, which office he held in 661 after having failed in a

previous candidature, it once more chanced that in his province,

the least important of all, the first victory over king Mithradates

and the first treaty with the mighty Arsacids, as well as their first

humiliation, occurred. The Civil war followed. It was Sulla

mainly, who decided the first act of it--the Italian insurrection--

in favour of Rome, and thus won for himself the consulship by his

sword; it was he, moreover, who when consul suppressed with

energetic rapidity the Sulpician revolt. Fortune seemed to make

it her business to eclipse the old hero Marius by means of this

younger officer. The capture of Jugurtha, the vanquishing of

Mithradates, both of which Marius had striven for in vain, were

accomplished in subordinate positions by Sulla: in the Social war,

in which Marius lost his renown as a general and was deposed,

Sulla established his military repute and rose to the consulship;

the revolution of 666, which was at the same time and above all a

personal conflict between the two generals, ended with the outlawry

and flight of Marius. Almost without desiring it, Sulla had

become the most famous general of his time and the shield of the

oligarchy. New and more formidable crises ensued--the Mithradatic war,

the Cinnan revolution; the star of Sulla continued always in the

ascendant. Like the captain who seeks not to quench the flames of

his burning ship but continues to fire on the enemy, Sulla, while

the revolution was raging in Italy, persevered unshaken in Asia

till the public foe was subdued. So soon as he had done with that

foe, he crushed anarchy and saved the capital from the firebrands of

the desperate Samnites and revolutionists. The moment of his return

home was for Sulla an overpowering one in joy and in pain: he himself

relates in his memoirs that during his first night in Rome he had

not been able to close an eye, and we may well believe it.

But still his task was not at an end; his star was destined to

rise still higher. Absolute autocrat as was ever any king, and

yet constantly abiding on the ground of formal right, he bridled

the ultra-reactionary party, annihilated the Gracchan constitution

which had for forty years limited the oligarchy, and compelled first

the powers of the capitalists and of the urban proletariate which

had entered into rivalry with the oligarchy, and ultimately the

arrogance of the sword which had grown up in the bosom of his own

staff, to yield once more to the law which he strengthened afresh.

He established the oligarchy on a more independent footing than ever,

placed the magisterial power as a ministering instrument in its

hands, committed to it the legislation, the courts, the supreme

military and financial power, and furnished it with a sort of

bodyguard in the liberated slaves and with a sort of army in the

settled military colonists. Lastly, when the work was finished,

the creator gave way to his own creation; the absolute autocrat

became of his own accord once more a simple senator. In all this

long military and political career Sulla never lost a battle, was

never compelled to retrace a single step, and, led astray neither

by friends nor by foes, brought his work to the goal which he had

himself proposed. He had reason, indeed, to thank his star.

The capricious goddess of fortune seemed in his case for once to

have exchanged caprice for steadfastness, and to have taken a

pleasure in loading her favourite with successes and honours--

whether he desired them or not. But history must be more just

towards him than he was towards himself, and must place him in a

higher rank than that of the mere favourites of fortune.

Sulla and His Work

We do not mean that the Sullan constitution was a work of political

genius, such as those of Gracchus and Caesar. There does not occur

in it--as is, indeed, implied in its very nature as a restoration--a

single new idea in statesmanship. All its most essential features--

admission to the senate by the holding of the quaestorship, the

abolition of the censorial right to eject a senator from the senate,

the initiative of the senate in legislation, the conversion of the

tribunician office into an instrument of the senate for fettering

the -imperium-, the prolonging of the duration of the supreme

office to two years, the transference of the command from the

popularly-elected magistrate to the senatorial proconsul or

propraetor, and even the new criminal and municipal arrangements--

were not created by Sulla, but were institutions which had

previously grown out of the oligarchic government, and which he

merely regulated and fixed. And even as to the horrors attaching

to his restoration, the proscriptions and confiscations--are they,

compared with the doings of Nasica, Popillius, Opimius, Caepio and

so on, anything else than the legal embodiment of the customary

oligarchic mode of getting rid of opponents? On the Roman

oligarchy of this period no judgment can be passed save one of

inexorable and remorseless condemnation; and, like everything, else

connected with it, the Sullan constitution is completely involved in

that condemnation. To accord praise which the genius of a bad man

bribes us into bestowing is to sin against the sacred character of

history; but we may be allowed to bear in mind that Sulla was far

less answerable for the Sullan restoration than the body of the

Roman aristocracy, which had ruled as a clique for centuries and had

every year become more enervated and embittered by age, and that all

that was hollow and all that was nefarious therein is ultimately

traceable to that aristocracy. Sulla reorganized the state--not,

however, as the master of the house who puts his shattered estate

and household in order according to his own discretion, but as

the temporary business-manager who faithfully complies with his

instructions; it is superficial and false in such a case to devolve

the final and essential responsibility from the master upon the

manager. We estimate the importance of Sulla much too highly, or

rather we dispose of those terrible proscriptions, ejections, and

restorations--for which there never could be and never was any

reparation--on far too easy terms, when we regard them as the work

of a bloodthirsty tyrant whom accident had placed at the head of

the state. These and the terrorism of the restoration were the

deeds of the aristocracy, and Sulla was nothing more in the matter

than, to use the poet's expression, the executioner's axe following

the conscious thought as its unconscious instrument. Sulla carried

out that part with rare, in fact superhuman, perfection; but within

the limits which it laid down for him, his working was not only

grand but even useful. Never has any aristocracy deeply decayed

and decaying still farther from day to day, such as was the Roman

aristocracy of that time, found a guardian so willing and able as

Sulla to wield for it the sword of the general and the pen of the

legislator without any regard to the gain of power for himself.

There is no doubt a difference between the case of an officer who

refuses the sceptre from public spirit and that of one who throws it

away from a cloyed appetite; but, so far as concerns the total absence

of political selfishness--although, it is true, in this one respect

only--Sulla deserves to be named side by side with Washington.

Value of the Sullan Constitution

But the whole country--and not the aristocracy merely--was more

indebted to him than posterity was willing to confess. Sulla

definitely terminated the Italian revolution, in so far as it was

based on the disabilities of individual less privileged districts

as compared with others of better rights, and, by compelling himself

and his party to recognize the equality of the rights of all

Italians in presence of the law, he became the real and final

author of the full political unity of Italy--a gain which was

not too dearly purchased by ever so many troubles and streams

of blood. Sulla however did more. For more than half a century

the power of Rome had been declining, and anarchy had been her

permanent condition: for the government of the senate with the

Gracchan constitution was anarchy, and the government of Cinna and

Carbo was a yet far worse illustration of the absence of a master-

hand (the sad image of which is most clearly reflected in that

equally confused and unnatural league with the Samnites), the most

uncertain, most intolerable, and most mischievous of all

conceivable political conditions--in fact the beginning of the

end. We do not go too far when we assert that the long-undermined

Roman commonwealth must have necessarily fallen to pieces, had not

Sulla by his intervention in Asia and Italy saved its existence.

It is true that the constitution of Sulla had as little endurance

as that of Cromwell, and it was not difficult to see that his

structure was no solid one; but it is arrant thoughtlessness to

overlook the fact that without Sulla most probably the very site of

the building would have been swept away by the waves; and even the

blame of its want of stability does not fall primarily on Sulla.

The statesman builds only so much as in the sphere assigned to him

he can build. What a man of conservative views could do to save the

old constitution, Sulla did; and he himself had a foreboding that,

while he might doubtless erect a fortress, he would be unable to

create a garrison, and that the utter worthlessness of the oligarchs

would render any attempt to save the oligarchy vain. His constitution

resembled a temporary dike thrown into the raging breakers; it was

no reproach to the builder, if some ten years afterwards the waves

swallowed up a structure at variance with nature and not defended

even by those whom it sheltered. The statesman has no need to be

referred to highly commendable isolated reforms, such as those of

the Asiatic revenue-system and of criminal justice, that he may not

summarily dismiss Sulla's ephemeral restoration: he will admire it

as a reorganization of the Roman commonwealth judiciously planned

and on the whole consistently carried out under infinite difficulties,

and he will place the deliverer of Rome and the accomplisher of Italian

unity below, but yet by the side of, Cromwell.

Immoral and Superficial Nature of the Sullan Restoration

It is not, however, the statesman alone who has a voice in

judging the dead; and with justice outraged human feeling will

never reconcile itself to what Sulla did or suffered others to do.

Sulla not only established his despotic power by unscrupulous violence,

but in doing so called things by their right name with a certain cynical

frankness, through which he has irreparably offended the great mass

of the weakhearted who are more revolted at the name than at the

thing, but through which, from the cool and dispassionate character

of his crimes, he certainly appears to the moral judgment more

revolting than the criminal acting from passion. Outlawries, rewards

to executioners, confiscations of goods, summary procedure with

insubordinate officers had occurred a hundred times, and the obtuse

political morality of ancient civilization had for such things

only lukewarm censure; but it was unexampled that the names of

the outlaws should be publicly posted up and their heads publicly

exposed, that a set sum should be fixed for the bandits who slew them

and that it should be duly entered in the public account-books, that

the confiscated property should be brought to the hammer like the spoil

of an enemy in the public market, that the general should order a

refractory officer to be at once cut down and acknowledge the deed

before all the people. This public mockery of humanity was also

a political error; it contributed not a little to envenom later

revolutionary crises beforehand, and on that account even now

a dark shadow deservedly rests on the memory of the author

of the proscriptions.

Sulla may moreover be justly blamed that, while in all important

matters he acted with remorseless vigour, in subordinate and more

especially in personal questions he very frequently yielded to

his sanguine temperament and dealt according to his likings or

dislikings. Wherever he really felt hatred, as for instance against

the Marians, he allowed it to take its course without restraint even

against the innocent, and boasted of himself that no one had better

requited friends and foes.(52) He did not disdain on occasion of

his plenitude of power to accumulate a colossal fortune. The first

absolute monarch of the Roman state, he verified the maxim of

absolutism--that the laws do not bind the prince--forthwith in

the case of those laws which he himself issued as to adultery and

extravagance. But his lenity towards his own party and his own

circle was more pernicious for the state than his indulgence towards

himself. The laxity of his military discipline, although it was

partly enjoined by his political exigencies, may be reckoned as

coming under this category; but far more pernicious was his indulgence

towards his political adherents. The extent of his occasional

forbearance is hardly credible: for instance Lacius Murena was not only

released from punishment for defeats which he sustained through arrant

perversity and insubordination,(53) but was even allowed a triumph;

Gnaeus Pompeius, who had behaved still worse, was still more

extravagantly honoured by Sulla.(54) The extensive range and

the worst enormities of the proscriptions and confiscations probably

arose not so much from Sulla's own wish as from this spirit of

indifference, which in his position indeed was hardly more pardonable.

That Sulla with his intrinsically energetic and yet withal indifferent

temperament should conduct himself very variously, sometimes with

incredible indulgence, sometimes with inexorable severity, may readily

be conceived. The saying repeated a thousand times, that he was before

his regency a good-natured, mild man, but when regent a bloodthirsty

tyrant, carries in it its own refutation; if he as regent displayed

the reverse of his earlier gentleness, it must rather be said that

he punished with the same careless nonchalance with which he

pardoned. This half-ironical frivolity pervades his whole

political action. It is always as if the victor, just as it

pleased him to call his merit in gaining victory good fortune,

esteemed the victory itself of no value; as if he had a partial

presentiment of the vanity and perishableness of his own work; as

if after the manner of a steward he preferred making repairs to

pulling down and rebuilding, and allowed himself in the end to

be content with a sorry plastering to conceal the flaws.

Sulla after His Retirement

But, such as he was, this Don Juan of politics was a man of one

mould. His whole life attests the internal equilibrium of his

nature; in the most diverse situations Sulla remained unchangeably

the same. It was the same temper, which after the brilliant

successes in Africa made him seek once more the idleness of the

capital, and after the full possession of absolute power made him

find rest and refreshment in his Cuman villa. In his mouth the

saying, that public affairs were a burden which he threw off so

soon as he might and could, was no mere phrase. After his resignation

he remained entirely like himself, without peevishness and without

affectation, glad to be rid of public affairs and yet interfering

now and then when opportunity offered. Hunting and fishing and

the composition of his memoirs occupied his leisure hours; by way

of interlude he arranged, at the request of the discordant citizens,

the internal affairs of the neighbouring colony of Puteoli as

confidently and speedily as he had formerly arranged those of

the capital. His last action on his sickbed had reference to the

collection of a contribution for the rebuilding of the Capitoline

temple, of which he was not allowed to witness the completion.

Death of Sulla

Little more than a year after his retirement, in the sixtieth year

of his life, while yet vigorous in body and mind, he was overtaken by

death; after a brief confinement to a sick-bed--he was writing at his

autobiography two days even before his death--the rupture of a blood-

vessel(55) carried him off (676). His faithful fortune did not

desert him even in death. He could have no wish to be drawn once

more into the disagreeable vortex of party struggles, and to be

obliged to lead his old warriors once more against a new revolution;

yet such was the state of matters at his death in Spain and in

Italy, that he could hardly have been spared this task had his life

been prolonged. Even now when it was suggested that he should have a

public funeral in the capital, numerous voices there, which had been

silent in his lifetime, were raised against the last honour which it

was proposed to show to the tyrant. But his memory was still too

fresh and the dread of his old soldiers too vivid: it was resolved

that the body should be conveyed to the capital and that the obsequies

should be celebrated there.

His Funeral

Italy never witnessed a grander funeral solemnity. In every place

through which the deceased was borne in regal attire, with his well-

known standards and fasces before him, the inhabitants and above all

his old soldiers joined the mourning train: it seemed as if the whole

army would once more meet round the hero in death, who had in life

led it so often and never except to victory. So the endless

funeral procession reached the capital, where the courts kept

holiday and all business was suspended, and two thousand golden

chaplets awaited the dead--the last honorary gifts of the faithful

legions, of the cities, and of his more intimate friends. Sulla,

faithful to the usage of the Cornelian house, had ordered that his

body should be buried without being burnt; but others were more

mindful than he was of what past days had done and future days

might do: by command of the senate the corpse of the man who had

disturbed the bones of Marius from their rest in the grave was

committed to the flames. Headed by all the magistrates and the

whole senate, by the priests and priestesses in their official robes

and the band of noble youths in equestrian armour, the procession

arrived at the great market-place; at this spot, filled by his

achievements and almost by the sound as yet of his dreaded words,

the funeral oration was delivered over the deceased; and thence the

bier was borne on the shoulders of senators to the Campus Martius,

where the funeral pile was erected. While the flames were blazing,

the equites and the soldiers held their race of honour round

the corpse; the ashes of the regent were deposited in the Campus

Martius beside the tombs of the old kings, and the Roman women

mourned him for a year.

CHAPTER XI

The Commonwealth and Its Economy

External and Internal Bankruptcy of the Roman State

We have traversed a period of ninety years--forty years of profound

peace, fifty of an almost constant revolution. It is the most

inglorious epoch known in Roman history. It is true that the Alps

were crossed both in an easterly and westerly direction,(1) and the

Roman arms reached in the Spanish peninsula as far as the Atlantic

Ocean(2) and in the Macedono-Grecian peninsula as far as the

Danube;(3) but the laurels thus gained were as cheap as they were

barren. The circle of the "extraneous peoples under the will,

sway, dominion, or friendship of the Roman burgesses,"(4) was not

materially extended; men were content to realize the gains of a

better age and to bring the communities, annexed to Rome in laxer

forms of dependence, more and more into full subjection. Behind

the brilliant screen of provincial reunions was concealed a very

sensible decline of Roman power. While the whole ancient civilization

was daily more and more distinctly embraced in the Roman state,

and embodied there in forms of more general validity, the nations

excluded from it began simultaneously beyond the Alps and beyond

the Euphrates to pass from defence to aggression. On the battle-

fields of Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, of Chaeronea and Orchomenus,

were heard the first peals of that thunderstorm, which the Germanic

tribes and the Asiatic hordes were destined to bring upon the Italo-

Grecian world, and the last dull rolling of which has reached

almost to our own times. But in internal development also this

epoch bears the same character. The old organization collapses

irretrievably. The Roman commonwealth was planned as an urban

community, which through its free burgess-body gave to itself

rulers and laws; which was governed by these well-advised rulers

within these legal limits with kingly freedom; and around which

the Italian confederacy, as an aggregate of free urban communities

essentially homogeneous and cognate with the Roman, and the body

of extra-Italian allies, as an aggregate of Greek free cities and

barbaric peoples and principalities--both more superintended, than

domineered over, by the community of Rome--formed a double circle.

It was the final result of the revolution--and both parties, the

nominally conservative as well as the democratic party, had co-

operated towards it and concurred in it--that of this venerable

structure, which at the beginning of the present epoch, though full

of chinks and tottering, still stood erect, not one stone was at

its close left upon another. The holder of sovereign power was

now either a single man, or a close oligarchy--now of rank, now

of riches. The burgesses had lost all legitimate share in the

government. The magistrates were instruments without independence

in the hands of the holder of power for the time being. The urban

community of Rome had broken down by its unnatural enlargement.

The Italian confederacy had been merged in the urban community.

The body of extra-Italian allies was in full course of being

converted into a body of subjects. The whole organic classification

of the Roman commonwealth had gone to wreck, and nothing was left

but a crude mass of more or less disparate elements.

The Prospect

The state of matters threatened to end in utter anarchy and in

the inward and outward dissolution of the state. The political

movement tended thoroughly towards the goal of despotism; the only

point still in dispute was whether the close circle of the families

of rank, or the senate of capitalists, or a monarch was to be the

despot. The political movement followed thoroughly the paths that

led to despotism; the fundamental principle of a free commonwealth--

that the contending powers should reciprocally confine themselves

to indirect coercion--had become effete in the eyes of all parties

alike, and on both sides the fight for power began to be carried on

first by the bludgeon, and soon by the sword. The revolution, at

an end in so far as the old constitution was recognized by both

sides as finally set aside and the aim and method of the new

political development were clearly settled, had yet up to this

time discovered nothing but provisional solutions for this problem

of the reorganization of the state; neither the Gracchan nor the

Sullan constitution of the community bore the stamp of finality.

But the bitterest feature of this bitter time was that even hope

and effort failed the clear-seeing patriot. The sun of freedom

with all its endless store of blessings was constantly drawing

nearer to its setting, and the twilight was settling over the

very world that was still so brilliant. It was no accidental

catastrophe which patriotism and genius might have warded off;

it was ancient social evils--at the bottom of all, the ruin of

the middle class by the slave proletariate--that brought destruction

on the Roman commonwealth. The most sagacious statesman was in the

plight of the physician to whom it is equally painful to prolong or

to abridge the agony of his patient. Beyond doubt it was the

better for the interests of Rome, the more quickly and thoroughly

a despot set aside all remnants of the ancient free constitution,

and invented new forms and expressions for the moderate measure

of human prosperity for which in absolutism there is room: the

intrinsic advantage, which belonged to monarchy under the given

circumstances as compared with any oligarchy, lay mainly in the

very circumstance that such a despotism, energetic in pulling

down and energetic in building up, could never be exercised by

a collegiate board. But such calm considerations do not mould

history; it is not reason it is passion alone, that builds for

the future. The Romans had just to wait and to see how long their

commonwealth would continue unable to live and unable to die, and

whether it would ultimately find its master and, so far as might

be possible, its regenerator, in a man of mighty gifts, or would

collapse in misery and weakness.

Finances of the State

It remains that we should notice the economic and social relations

of the period before us, so far as we have not already done so.

Italian Revenues

The finances of the state were from the commencement of this

epoch substantially dependent on the revenues from the provinces.

In Italy the land-tax, which had always occurred there merely as

an extraordinary impost by the side of the ordinary domanial and

other revenues, had not been levied since the battle of Pydna,

so that absolute freedom from land-tax began to be regarded as a

constitutional privilege of the Roman landowner. The royalties of

the state, such as the salt monopoly(5) and the right of coinage,

were not now at least, if ever at all, treated as sources of income.

The new tax on inheritance(6) was allowed to fall into abeyance or

was perhaps directly abolished. Accordingly the Roman exchequer

drew from Italy including Cisalpine Gaul nothing but the produce

of the domains, particularly of the Campanian territory and of

the gold mines in the land of the Celts, and the revenue from

manumissions and from goods imported by sea into the Roman civic

territory not for the personal consumption of the importer. Both

of these may be regarded essentially as taxes on luxury, and they

certainly must have been considerably augmented by the extension

of the field of Roman citizenship and at the same time of Roman

customs-dues to all Italy, probably including Cisalpine Gaul.

Provincial Revenues

In the provinces the Roman state claimed directly as its private

property, on the one hand, in the states annulled by martial law

the whole domain, on the other hand in those states, where the

Roman government came in room of the former rulers, the landed

property possessed by the latter. By virtue of this right the

territories of Leontini, Carthage, and Corinth, the domanial

property of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamus, and Cyrene, the mines

in Spain and Macedonia were regarded as Roman domains; and, in like

manner with the territory of Capua, were leased by the Roman

censors to private contractors in return for the delivery of a

proportion of the produce or a fixed sum of money. We have already

explained that Gaius Gracchus went still farther, claimed the whole

land of the provinces as domain, and in the case of the province of

Asia practically carried out this principle; inasmuch as he legally

justified the -decumae-, -scriptura-, and -vectigalia- levied there

on the ground of the Roman state's right of property in the land,

pasture, and coasts of the province, whether these had previously

belonged to the king or private persons.(7)

There do not appear to have been at this period any royalties

from which the state derived profit, as respected the provinces;

the prohibition of the culture of the vine and olive in Transalpine

Gaul did not benefit the state-chest as such. On the other hand

direct and indirect taxes were levied to a great extent. The client

states recognized as fully sovereign--such as the kingdoms of Numidia

and Cappadocia, the allied states (-civitates foederatae-) of Rhodes,

Messana, Tauromenium, Massilia, Gades--were legally exempt from taxation,

and merely bound by their treaties to support the Roman republic in times

of war by regularly furnishing a fixed number of ships or men at their

own expense, and, as a matter of course in case of need, by rendering

extraordinary aid of any kind.

Taxes

The rest of the provincial territory on the other hand, even

including the free cities, was throughout liable to taxation; the

only exceptions were the cities invested with the Roman franchise,

such as Narbo, and the communities on which immunity from taxation

was specially conferred (-civitates immunes-), such as Centuripa

in Sicily. The direct taxes consisted partly--as in Sicily and

Sardinia--of a title to the tenth(8) of the sheaves and other field

produce as of grapes and olives, or, if the land lay in pasture,

to a corresponding -scriptura-; partly--as in Macedonia, Achaia,

Cyrene, the greater part of Africa, the two Spains, and by Sulla's

arrangements also in Asia--of a fixed sum of money to be paid

annually by each community to Rome (-stipendium-, -tributum-).

This amounted, e. g. for all Macedonia, to 600,000 -denarii-

(24,000 pounds), for the small island of Gyaros near Andros to 150

-denarii- (6 pounds, 10 shillings), and was apparently on the whole

low and less than the tax paid before the Roman rule. Those

ground-tenths and pasture-moneys the state farmed out to private

contractors on condition of their paying fixed quantities of grain

or fixed sums of money; with respect to the latter money-payments

the state drew upon the respective communities, and left it to

these to assess the amount, according to the general principles

laid down by the Roman government, on the persons liable, and to

collect it from them.(9)

Customs

The indirect taxes consisted--apart from the subordinate moneys

levied from roads, bridges, and canals--mainly of customs-duties.

The customs-duties of antiquity were, if not exclusively, at any

rate principally port-dues, less frequently frontier-dues, on

imports and exports destined for sale, and were levied by each

community in its ports and its territory at discretion. The Romans

recognized this principle generally, in so far as their original

customs-domain did not extend farther than the range of the Roman

franchise and the limit of the customs was by no means coincident

with the limits of the empire, so that a general imperial tariff

was unknown: it was only by means of state-treaty that a total

exemption from customs-dues in the client communities was secured

for the Roman state, and in various cases at least favourable

term for the Roman burgess. But in those districts, which had

not been admitted to alliance with Rome but were in the condition

of subjects proper and had not acquired immunity, the customs fell

as a matter of course to the proper sovereign, that is, to the Roman

community; and in consequence of this several larger regions within

the empire were constituted as separate Roman customs-districts, in

which the several communities allied or privileged with immunity

were marked off as exempt from Roman customs. Thus Sicily even

from the Carthaginian period formed a closed customs-district, on

the frontier of which a tax of 5 per cent on the value was levied

from all imports or exports; thus on the frontiers of Asia there

was levied in consequence of the Sempronian law(10) a similar tax

of 21 per cent; in like manner the province of Narbo, exclusively

the domain of the Roman colony, was organized as a Roman customs-

district This arrangement, besides its fiscal objects, may have

been partly due to the commendable purpose of checking the

confusion inevitably arising out of a variety of communal tolls by

a uniform regulation of frontier-dues. The levying of the customs,

like that of the tenths, was without exception leased to middlemen.

Costs of Collection

The ordinary burdens of Roman taxpayers were limited to these

imposts; but we may not overlook the fact, that the expenses of

collection were very considerable, and the contributors paid an

amount disproportionately great as compared with what the Roman

government received. For, while the system of collecting taxes

by middlemen, and especially by general lessees, is in itself

the most expensive of all, in Rome effective competition was

rendered extremely difficult in consequence of the slight

extent to which the lettings were subdivided and the immense

association of capital.

Requisitions

To these ordinary burdens, however, fell to be added in the first

place the requisitions which were made. The costs of military

administration were in law defrayed by the Roman community.

It provided the commandants of every province with the means of

transport and all other requisites; it paid and provisioned the

Roman soldiers in the province. The provincial communities had to

furnish merely shelter, wood, hay, and similar articles free of

cost to the magistrates and soldiers; in fact the free towns were

even ordinarily exempted from the winter quartering of the troops--

permanent camps were not yet known. If the governor therefore

needed grain, ships, slaves to man them, linen, leather, money,

or aught else, he was no doubt absolutely at liberty in time

of war--nor was it far otherwise in time of peace--to demand such

supplies according to his discretion and exigencies from the subject-

communities or the sovereign protected states; but these supplies

were, like the Roman land-tax, treated legally as purchases or

advances, and the value was immediately or afterwards made good by

the Roman exchequer. Nevertheless these requisitions became, if

not in the theory of state-law, at any rate practically, one of the

most oppressive burdens of the provincials; and the more so, that

the amount of compensation was ordinarily settled by the government

or even by the governor after a one-sided fashion. We meet indeed

with several legislative restrictions on this dangerous right of

requisition of the Roman superior magistrates: for instance, the

rule already mentioned, that in Spain there should not be taken

from the country people by requisitions for grain more than the

twentieth sheaf, and that the price even of this should be equitably

ascertained;(11) the fixing of a maximum quantity of grain to be

demanded by the governor for the wants of himself and his retinue;

the previous adjustment of a definite and high rate of compensation

for the grain which was frequently demanded, at least from Sicily,

for the wants of the capital. But, while by fixing such rules

the pressure of those requisitions on the economy of the communities

and of individuals in the province was doubtless mitigated here

and there, it was by no means removed. In extraordinary crises

this pressure unavoidably increased and often went beyond all bounds,

for then in fact the requisitions not unfrequently assumed the form

of a punishment imposed or that of voluntary contributions enforced,

and compensation was thus wholly withheld. Thus Sulla in 670-671

compelled the provincials of Asia Minor, who certainly had very

gravely offended against Rome, to furnish to every common soldier

quartered among them forty-fold pay (per day 16 -denarii- = 11 shillings),

to every centurion seventy-five-fold pay, in addition to clothing

and meals along with the right to invite guests at pleasure; thus

the same Sulla soon afterwards imposed a general contribution on

the client and subject communities,(12) in which case nothing,

of course, was said of repayment.

Local Burdens

Further the local public burdens are not to be left out of view.

They must have been, comparatively, very considerable;(13) for the

costs of administration, the keeping of the public buildings in

repair, and generally all civil expenses were borne by the local

budget, and the Roman government simply undertook to defray the

military expenses from their coffers. But even of this military

budget considerable items were devolved on the communities--such as

the expense of making and maintaining the non-Italian military

roads, the costs of the fleets in the non-Italian seas, nay even

in great part the outlays for the army, inasmuch as the forces of

the client-states as well as those of the subjects were regularly

liable to serve at the expense of their communities within their

province, and began to be employed with increasing frequency even

beyond it--Thracians in Africa, Africans in Italy, arid so on--at

the discretion of the Romans.(14) If the provinces only and not

Italy paid direct taxes to the government, this was equitable in

a financial, if not in a political, aspect so long as Italy alone

bore the burdens and expense of the military system; but from the

time that this system was abandoned, the provincials were, in a

financial point of view, decidedly overburdened.

Extortions

Lastly we must not forget the great chapter of injustice by which

in manifold ways the Roman magistrates and farmers of the revenue

augmented the burden of taxation on the provinces. Although every

present which the governor took might be treated legally as an

exaction, and even his right of purchase might be restricted by

law, yet the exercise of his public functions offered to him, if he

was disposed to do wrong, pretexts more than enough for doing so.

The quartering of the troops; the free lodging of the magistrates

and of the host of adjutants of senatorial or equestrian rank, of

clerks, lictors, heralds, physicians, and priests; the right which

the messengers of the state had to be forwarded free of cost; the

approval of, and providing transport for, the contributions payable

in kind; above all the forced sales and the requisitions--gave all

magistrates opportunity to bring home princely fortunes from the

provinces. And the plundering became daily more general, the more

that the control of the government appeared to be worthless and

that of the capitalist-courts to be in reality dangerous to the

upright magistrate alone. The institution of a standing commission

regarding the exactions of magistrates in the provinces, occasioned

by the frequency of complaints as to such cases, in 605,(15) and

the laws as to extortion following each other so rapidly and

constantly augmenting its penalties, show the daily increasing

height of the evil, as the Nilometer shows the rise of the flood.

Under all these circumstances even a taxation moderate in theory

might become extremely oppressive in its actual operation; and that

it was so is beyond doubt, although the financial oppression, which

the Italian merchants and bankers exercised over the provinces, was

probably felt as a far heavier burden than the taxation with all

the abuses that attached to it.

Aggregate Financial Result

If we sum up, the income which Rome drew from the provinces was

not properly a taxation of the subjects in the sense which we now

attach to that expression, but rather in the main a revenue that

may be compared with the Attic tributes, by means of which the

leading state defrayed the expense of the military system which

it maintained. This explains the surprisingly small amount of the

gross as well as of the net proceeds. There exists a statement,

according to which the income of Rome, exclusive, it may be

presumed, of the Italian revenues and of the grain delivered in

kind to Italy by the -decumani- up to 691 amounted to not more

than 200 millions of sesterces (2,000,000 pounds); that is, but

two-thirds of the sum which the king of Egypt drew from his country

annually. The proportion can only seem strange at the first

glance. The Ptolemies turned to account the valley of the Nile as

great, plantation-owners, and drew immense sums from their monopoly

of the commercial intercourse with the east; the Roman treasury was

not much more than the joint military chest of the communities

united under Rome's protection. The net produce was probably still

less in proportion. The only provinces yielding a considerable

surplus were perhaps Sicily, where the Carthaginian system of

taxation prevailed, and more especially Asia from the time that

Gaius Gracchus, in order to provide for his largesses of corn, had

carried out the confiscation of the soil and a general domanial

taxation there. According to manifold testimonies the finances of

the Roman state were essentially dependent on the revenues of Asia.

The assertion sounds quite credible that the other provinces on an

average cost nearly as much as they brought in; in fact those which

required a considerable garrison, such as the two Spains,

Transalpine Gaul, and Macedonia, probably often cost more than they

yielded. On the whole certainly the Roman treasury in ordinary

times possessed a surplus, which enabled them amply to defray the

expense of the buildings of the state and city, and to accumulate a

reserve-fund; but even the figures appearing for these objects,

when compared with the wide domain of the Roman rule, attest the

small amount of the net proceeds of the Roman taxes. In a certain

sense therefore the old principle equally honourable and judicious--

that the political hegemony should not be treated as a privilege

yielding profit--still governed the financial administration of the

provinces as it had governed that of Rome in Italy. What the Roman

community levied from its transmarine subjects was, as a rule, re-

expended for the military security of the transmarine possessions;

and if these Roman imposts fell more heavily on those who paid them

than the earlier taxation, in so far as they were in great part

expended abroad, the substitution, on the other hand, of a single

ruler and a centralized military administration for the many petty

rulers and armies involved a very considerable financial saving.

It is true, however, that this principle of a previous better age

came from the very first to be infringed and mutilated by the

numerous exceptions which were allowed to prevail. The ground-

tenth levied by Hiero and Carthage in Sicily went far beyond the

amount of an annual war-contributioa With justice moreover Scipio

Aemilianus says in Cicero, that it was unbecoming for the Roman

burgess-body to be at the same time the ruler and the tax-gatherer

of the nations. The appropriation of the customs-dues was not

compatible with the principle of disinterested hegemony, and the

high rates of the customs as well as the vexatious mode of levying

them were not fitted to allay the sense of the injustice thereby

inflicted. Even as early probably as this period the name of

publican became synonymous among the eastern peoples with that of

rogue and robber: no burden contributed so much as this to make the

Roman name offensive and odious especially in the east. But when

Gaius Gracchus and those who called themselves the "popular party"

in Rome came to the helm, political sovereignty was declared in

plain terms to be a right which entitled every one who shared in

it to a number of bushels of corn, the hegemony was converted into

a direct ownership of the soil, and the most complete system of

making the most of that ownership was not only introduced but

with shameless candour legally justified and proclaimed. It was

certainly not a mere accident, that the hardest lot in this respect

fell precisely to the two least warlike provinces, Sicily and Asia.

The Finances and Public Buildings

An approximate measure of the condition of Roman finance at this

period is furnished, in the absence of definite statements, first

of all by the public buildings. In the first decades of this epoch

these were prosecuted on the greatest scale, and the construction

of roads in particular had at no time been so energetically

pursued. In Italy the great southern highway of presumably earlier

origin, which as a prolongation of the Appian road ran from Rome by

way of Capua, Beneventum, and Venusia to the ports of Tarentum and

Brundisium, had attached to it a branch-road from Capua to the

Sicilian straits, a work of Publius Popillius, consul in 622.

On the east coast, where hitherto only the section from Fanum to

Ariminum had been constructed as part of the Flaminian highway (ii.

229), the coast road was prolonged southward as far as Brundisium,

northward by way of Atria on the Po as far as Aquileia, and the

portion at least from Ariminum to Atria was formed by the Popillius

just mentioned in the same year. The two great Etruscan highways--

the coast or Aurelian road from Rome to Pisa and Luna, which was in

course of formation in 631, and the Cassian road leading by way of

Sutrium and Clusium to Arretium and Florentia, which seems not to

have been constructed before 583--may as Roman public highways

belong only to this age. About Rome itself new projects were

not required; but the Mulvian bridge (Ponte Molle), by which

the Flaminian road crossed the Tiber not far from Rome, was in 645

reconstructed of stone. Lastly in Northern Italy, which hitherto

had possessed no other artificial road than the Flaminio-Aemilian

terminating at Placentia, the great Postumian road was constructed

in 606, which led from Genua by way of Dertona, where probably

a colony was founded at the same time, and onward by way of

Placentia, where it joined the Flaminio-Aemilian road, and of

Cremona and Verona to Aquileia, and thus connected the Tyrrhenian

and Adriatic seas; to which was added the communication established

in 645 by Marcus Aemilius Scaurus between Luna and Genua, which

connected the Postumian road directly with Rome. Gaius Gracchus

exerted himself in another way for the improvement of the Italian

roads. He secured the due repair of the great rural roads by

assigning, on occasion of his distribution of lands, pieces of

ground alongside of the roads, to which was attached the obligation

of keeping them in repair as an heritable burden. To him,

moreover, or at any rate to the allotment-commission, the custom

of erecting milestones appears to be traceable, as well as that

of marking the limits of fields by regular boundary-stones. Lastly

he provided for good -viae vicinales-, with the view of thereby

promoting agriculture. But of still greater moment was the

construction of the imperial highways in the provinces, which

beyond doubt began in this epoch. The Domitian highway after long

preparations(16) furnished a secure land-route from Italy to Spain,

and was closely connected with the founding of Aquae Sextiae and

Narbo;(17) the Gabinian(18) and the Egnatian (19) led from the

principal places on the east coast of the Adriatic sea--the former

from Salona, the latter from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium--into

the interior; the network of roads laid out by Manius Aquillius

immediately after the erection of the Asiatic province in 625

led from the capital Ephesus in different directions towards the

frontier. Of the origin of these works no mention is to be found

in the fragmentary tradition of this epoch, but they were

nevertheless undoubtedly connected with the consolidation

of the Roman rule in Gaul, Dalmatia, Macedonia, and Asia Minor,

and came to be of the greatest importance for the centralization of

the state and the civilizing of the subjugated barbarian districts.

In Italy at least great works of drainage were prosecuted as well

as the formation of roads. In 594 the drying of the Pomptine

marshes--a vital matter for Central Italy--was set about with great

energy and at least temporary success; in 645 the draining of the

low-lying lands between Parma and Placentia was effected in

connection with the construction of the north Italian highway.

Moreover, the government did much for the Roman aqueducts, as

indispensable for the health and comfort of the capital as they

were costly. Not only were the two that had been in existence

since the years 442 and 492--the Appian and the Anio aqueducts--

thoroughly repaired in 610, but two new ones were formed; the

Marcian in 610, which remained afterwards unsurpassed for the

excellence and abundance of the water, and the Tepula as it was

called, nineteen years later. The power of the Roman exchequer to

execute great operations by means of payments in pure cash without

making use of the system of credit, is very clearly shown by the

way in which the Marcian aqueduct was created: the sum required for

it of 180,000,000 sesterces (in gold nearly 2,000,000 pounds) was

raised and applied within three years. This leads us to infer a

very considerable reserve in the treasury: in fact at the very

beginning of this period it amounted to almost 860,000 pounds,(20)

and was doubtless constantly on the increase.

All these facts taken together certainly lead to the inference that

the position of the Roman finances at this epoch was on the whole

favourable. Only we may not in a financial point of view overlook

the fact that, while the government during the two earlier thirds

of this period executed splendid and magnificent buildings, it

neglected to make other outlays at least as necessary. We have

already indicated how unsatisfactory were its military provisions;

the frontier countries and even the valley of the Po(21) were

pillaged by barbarians, and bands of robbers made havoc in the

interior even of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Italy. The fleet even was

totally neglected; there was hardly any longer a Roman vessel of

war; and the war-vessels, which the subject cities were required to

build and maintain, were not sufficient, so that Rome was not only

absolutely unable to carry on a naval war, but was not even in a

position to check the trade of piracy. In Rome itself a number of

the most necessary improvements were left untouched, and the river-

buildings in particular were singularly neglected. The capital

still possessed no other bridge over the Tiber than the primitive

wooden gangway, which led over the Tiber island to the Janiculum;

the Tiber was still allowed to lay the streets every year under

water, and to demolish houses and in fact not unfrequently whole

districts, without anything being done to strengthen the banks;

mighty as was the growth of transmarine commerce, the roadstead

of Ostia--already by nature bad--was allowed to become more and

more sanded up. A government, which under the most favourable

circumstances and in an epoch of forty years of peace abroad and

at home neglected such duties, might easily allow taxes to fall

into abeyance and yet obtain an annual surplus of income over

expenditure and a considerable reserve; but such a financial

administration by no means deserves commendation for its mere

semblance of brilliant results, but rather merits the same censure--

in respect of laxity, want of unity in management, mistaken

flattery of the people--as falls to be brought in every other

sphere of political life against the senatorial government

of this epoch.

The Finances in the Revolution

The financial condition of Rome of course assumed a far worse

aspect, when the storms of revolution set in. The new and, even in

a mere financial point of view, extremely oppressive burden imposed

upon the state by the obligation under which Gaius Gracchus placed

it to furnish corn at nominal rates to the burgesses of the

capital, was certainly counterbalanced at first by the newly-opened

sources of income in the province of Asia. Nevertheless the public

buildings seem from that time to have almost come to a standstill.

While the public works which can be shown to have been constructed

from the battle of Pydna down to the time of Gaius Gracchus were

numerous, from the period after 632 there is scarcely mention of

any other than the projects of bridges, roads, and drainage which

Marcus Aemilius Scaurus organized as censor in 645. It must remain

a moot point whether this was the effect of the largesses of grain

or, as is perhaps more probable, the consequence of the system of

increased savings, such as befitted a government which became daily

more and more a rigid oligarchy, and such as is indicated by the

statement that the Roman reserve reached its highest point in 663.

The terrible storm of insurrection and revolution, in combination

with the five years' deficit of the revenues of Asia Minor, was the

first serious trial to which the Roman finances were subjected

after the Hannibalic war: they failed to sustain it. Nothing

perhaps so clearly marks the difference of the times as the

circumstance that in the Hannibalic war it was not till the tenth

year of the struggle, when the burgesses were almost sinking under

taxation, that the reserve was touched;(22) whereas the Social war

was from the first supported by the balance in hand, and when this

was expended after two campaigns to the last penny, they preferred

to sell by auction the public sites in the capital(23) and to seize

the treasures of the temples(24) rather than levy a tax on the

burgesses. The storm however, severe as it was, passed over;

Sulla, at the expense doubtless of enormous economic sacrifices

imposed on the subjects and Italian revolutionists in particular,

restored order to the finances and, by abolishing the largesses of

corn and retaining although in a reduced form the Asiatic revenues,

secured for the commonwealth a satisfactory economic condition, at

least in the sense of the ordinary expenditure remaining far below

the ordinary income.

Private Economics

Agriculture

In the private economics of this period hardly any new feature

emerges; the advantages and disadvantages formerly set forth as

incident to the social circumstances of Italy(25) were not altered,

but merely farther and more distinctly developed. In agriculture

we have already seen that the growing power of Roman capital was

gradually absorbing the intermediate and small landed estates in

Italy as well as in the provinces, as the sun sucks up the drops of

rain. The government not only looked on without preventing, but

even promoted this injurious division of the soil by particular

measures, especially by prohibiting the production of wine and oil

beyond the Alps with a view to favour the great Italian landlords

and merchants.(26) It is true that both the opposition and the

section of the conservatives that entered into ideas of reform

worked energetically to counteract the evil; the two Gracchi, by

carrying out the distribution of almost the whole domain land, gave

to the state 80,000 new Italian farmers; Sulla, by settling 120,000

colonists in Italy, filled up at least in part the gaps which the

revolution and he himself had made in the ranks of the Italian

yeomen. But, when a vessel is emptying itself by constant efflux,

the evil is to be remedied not by pouring in even considerable

quantities, but only by the establishment of a constant influx--

a remedy which was on various occasions attempted, but not with

success. In the provinces, not even the smallest effort was made

to save the farmer class there from being bought out by the Roman

speculators; the provincials, forsooth, were merely men, and not a

party. The consequence was, that even the rents of the soil beyond

Italy flowed more and more to Rome. Moreover the plantation-

system, which about the middle of this epoch had already gained

the ascendant even in particular districts of Italy, such as Etruria,

had, through the co-operation of an energetic and methodical

management and abundant pecuniary resources, attained to a state

of high prosperity after its kind. The production of Italian wine

in particular, which was artificially promoted partly by the opening

of forced markets in a portion of the provinces, partly by the

prohibition of foreign wines in Italy as expressed for instance

in the sumptuary law of 593, attained very considerable results:

the Aminean and Falernian wine began to be named by the side of the

Thasian and Chian, and the "Opimian wine" of 633, the Roman vintage

"Eleven," was long remembered after the last jar was exhausted.

Trades

Of trades and manufactur es there is nothing to be said, except

that the Italian nation in this respect persevered in an inaction

bordering on barbarism. They destroyed the Corinthian factories,

the depositories of so many valuable industrial traditions--not

however that they might establish similar factories for themselves,

but that they might buy up at extravagant prices such Corinthian

vases of earthenware or copper and similar "antique works" as were

preserved in Greek houses. The trades that were still somewhat

prosperous, such as those connected with building, were productive

of hardly any benefit for the commonwealth, because here too the

system of employing slaves in every more considerable undertaking

intervened: in the construction of the Marcian aqueduct, for

instance, the government concluded contracts for building and

materials simultaneously with 3000 master-tradesmen, each of whom

then performed the work contracted for with his band of slaves.

Money-Dealing and Commerce

The most brilliant, or rather the only brilliant, side of Roman

private economics was money-dealing and commerce. First of all

stood the leasing of the domains and of the taxes, through which a

large, perhaps the larger, part of the income of the Roman state

flowed into the pockets of the Roman capitalists. The money-

dealings, moreover, throughout the range of the Roman state were

monopolized by the Romans; every penny circulated in Gaul, it is

said in a writing issued soon after the end of this period, passes

through the books of the Roman merchants, and so it was doubtless

everywhere. The co-operation of rude economic conditions and of

the unscrupulous employment of Rome's political ascendency for the

benefit of the private interests of every wealthy Roman rendered a

usurious system of interest universal, as is shown for example by

the treatment of the war-tax imposed by Sulla on the province of

Asia in 670, which the Roman capitalists advanced; it swelled with

paid and unpaid interest within fourteen years to sixfold its

original amount. The communities had to sell their public buildings,

their works of art and jewels, parents had to sell their grown-up

children, in order to meet the claims of the Roman creditor: it

was no rare occurrence for the debtor to be not merely subjected

to moral torture, but directly placed upon the rack. To these

sources of gain fell to be added the wholesale traffic. The exports

and imports of Italy were very considerable. The former consisted

chiefly of wine and oil, with which Italy and Greece almost

exclusively--for the production of wine in the Massiliot and

Turdetanian territories can at that time have been but small--

supplied the whole region of the Mediterranean; Italian wine was

sent in considerable quantities to the Balearic islands and

Celtiberia, to Africa, which was merely a corn and pasture country,

to Narbo and into the interior of Gaul. Still more considerable

was the import to Italy, where at that time all luxury was

concentrated, and whither most articles of luxury for food, drink,

or clothing, ornaments, books, household furniture, works of art

were imported by sea. The traffic in slaves, above all, received

through the ever-increasing demand of the Roman merchants an

impetus to which no parallel had been known in the region of the

Mediterranean, and which stood in the closest connection with the

flourishing of piracy. All lands and all nations were laid under

contribution for slaves, but the places where they were chiefly

captured were Syria and the interior of Asia Minor.(27)

Ostia

Puteoli

In Italy the transmarine imports were chiefly concentrated in

the two great emporia on the Tyrrhene sea, Ostia and Puteoli.

The grain destined for the capital was brought to Ostia, which

was far from having a good roadstead, but, as being the nearest

port to Rome, was the most appropriate mart for less valuable wares;

whereas the traffic in luxuries with the east was directed mainly

to Puteoli, which recommended itself by its good harbour for ships

with valuable cargoes, and presented to merchants a market in its

immediate neighbourhood little inferior to that of the capital--

the district of Baiae, which came to be more and more filled with

villas. For a long time this latter traffic was conducted through

Corinth and after its destruction through Delos, and in this sense

accordingly Puteoli is called by Lucilius the Italian "Little Delos";

but after the catastrophe which befel Delos in the Mithradatic war,(28)

and from which it never recovered, the Puteolans entered into direct

commercial connections with Syria and Alexandria, and their city became

more and more decidedly the first seat of transmarine commerce in Italy.

But it was not merely the gain which was made by the Italian exports

and imports, that fell mainly to the Italians; at Narbo they competed

in the Celtic trade with the Massiliots, and in general it admits of

no doubt that the Roman merchants to be met with everywhere, floating

or settled, took to themselves the best share of all speculations.

Capitalist Oligarchy

Putting together these phenomena, we recognize as the most prominent

feature in the private economy of this epoch the financial oligarchy

of Roman capitalists standing alongside of, and on a par with,

the political oligarchy. In their hands were united the rents

of the soil of almost all Italy and of the best portions of

the provincial territory, the proceeds at usury of the capital

monopolized by them, the commercial gain from the whole empire,

and lastly, a very considerable part of the Roman state-revenue

in the form of profits accruing from the lease of that revenue.

The daily-increasing accumulation of capital is evident in the rise

of the average rate of wealth: 3,000,000 sesterces (30,000 pounds)

was now a moderate senatorial, 2,000,000 (20,000 pounds) was a decent

equestrian fortune; the property of the wealthiest man of the

Gracchan age, Publius Crassus consul in 623 was estimated at

100,000,000 sesterces (1,000,000 pounds). It is no wonder,

that this capitalist order exercised a preponderant influence

on external policy; that it destroyed out of commercial rivalry

Carthage and Corinth(29) as the Etruscans had formerly destroyed

Alalia and the Syracusans Caere; that it in spite of the senate

upheld the colony of Narbo.(30) It is likewise no wonder, that

this capitalist oligarchy engaged in earnest and often victorious

competition with the oligarchy of the nobles in internal politics.

But it is also no wonder, that ruined men of wealth put themselves

at the head of bands of revolted slaves,(31) and rudely reminded

the public that the transition is easy from the haunts of

fashionable debauchery to the robber's cave. It is no wonder,

that that financial tower of Babel, with its foundation not purely

economic but borrowed from the political ascendency of Rome,

tottered at every serious political crisis nearly in the same

way as our very similar fabric of a paper currency. The great

financial crisis, which in consequence of the Italo-Asiatic

commotions of 664 f. set in upon the Roman capitalist-class,

the bankruptcy of the state and of private persons, the general

depreciation of landed property and of partnership-shares, can no

longer be traced out in detail; but their general nature and their

importance are placed beyond doubt by their results--the murder of

the praetor by a band of creditors,(32) the attempt to eject from

the senate all the senators not free of debt,(33) the renewal of

the maximum of interest by Sulla,(34) the cancelling of 75 per cent

of all debts by the revolutionary party.(35) The consequence of

this system was naturally general impoverishment and depopulation

in the provinces, whereas the parasitic population of migratory

or temporarily settled Italians was everywhere on the increase.

In Asia Minor 80,000 men of Italian origin are said to have perished

in one day.(36) How numerous they were in Delos, is evident from

the tombstones still extant on the island and from the statement

that 20,000 foreigners, mostly Italian merchants, were put to death

there by command of Mithradates.(37) In Africa the Italians were

so many, that even the Numidian town of Cirta could be defended

mainly by them against Jugurtha.(38) Gaul too, it is said, was

filled with Roman merchants; in the case of Spain alone--perhaps

not accidentally--no statements of this sort are found. In Italy

itself, on the other hand, the condition of the free population

at this epoch had on the whole beyond doubt retrograded. To this

result certainly the civil wars essentially contributed, which,

according to statements of a general kind and but littletrustworthy,

are alleged to have swept away from 100,000 to 150,000 of the Roman

burgesses and 300,000 of the Italian population generally; but still

worse was the effect of the economic ruin of the middle class, and of

the boundless extent of the mercantile emigration which induced a great

portion of the Italian youth to spend their most vigorous years abroad.

A compensation of very dubious value was afforded by the free

parasitic Helleno-Oriental population, which sojourned in the

capital as diplomatic agents for kings or communities, as physicians,

schoolmasters, priests, servants, parasites, and in the myriad

employments of sharpers and swindlers, or, as traders and

mariners, frequented especially Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium.

Still more hazardous was the disproportionate increase of the

multitude of slaves in the peninsula. The Italian burgesses by

the census of 684 numbered 910,000 men capable of bearing arms, to

which number, in order to obtain the amount of the free population

in the peninsula, those accidentally passed over in the census,

the Latins in the district between the Alps and the Po, and the

foreigners domiciled in Italy, have to be added, while the Roman

burgesses domiciled abroad are to be deducted. It will therefore

be scarcely possible to estimate the free population of the

peninsula at more than from 6 to 7 millions. If its whole

population at this time was equal to that of the present day, we

should have to assume accordingly a mass of slaves amounting to 13

or 14 millions. It needs however no such fallacious calculations

to render the dangerous tension of this state of things apparent;

this is loudly enough attested by the partial servile insurrections,

and by the appeal which from the beginning of the revolutions was

at the close of every outbreak addressed to the slaves to take

up arms against their masters and to fight out their liberty.

If we conceive of England with its lords, its squires, and

above all its City, but with its freeholders and lessees converted

into proletarians, and its labourers and sailors converted into slaves,

we shall gain an approximate image of the population of the Italian

peninsula in those days.

The economic relations of this epoch are clearly mirrored to

us even now in the Roman monetary system. Its treatment shows

throughout the sagacious merchant. For long gold and silver stood

side by side as general means of payment on such a footing that,

while for the purpose of general cash-balances a fixed ratio of

value was legally laid down between the two metals,(39) the giving

one metal for the other was not, as a rule, optional, but payment

was to be in gold or silver according to the tenor of the bond.

In this way the great evils were avoided, that are otherwise

inevitably associated with the setting up of two precious metals;

the severe gold crises--as about 600, for instance, when in

consequence of the discovery of the Tauriscan gold-seams(40) gold

as compared with silver fell at once in Italy about 33 1/3 per

cent--exercised at least no direct influence on the silver money

and retail transactions. The nature of the case implied that,

the more transmarine traffic extended, gold the more decidedly

rose from the second place to the first; and that it did so, is

confirmed by the statements as to the balances in the treasury and

as to its transactions; but the government was not thereby induced

to introduce gold into the coinage. The coining of gold attempted

in the exigency of the Hannibalic war(41) had been long allowed

to fall into abeyance; the few gold pieces which Sulla struck as

regent were scarcely more than pieces coined for the occasion

of his triumphal presents. Silver still as before circulated

exclusively as actual money; gold, whether it, as was usual,

circulated in bars or bore the stamp of a foreign or possibly even

of an inland mint, was taken solely by weight. Nevertheless gold

and silver were on a par as means of exchange, and the fraudulent

alloying of gold was treated in law, like the issuing of spurious

silver money, as a monetary offence. They thus obtained the

immense advantage of precluding, in the case of the most important

medium of payment, even the possibility of monetary fraud and

monetary adulteration. Otherwise the coinage was as copious as it

was of exemplary purity. After the silver piece had been reduced

in the Hannibalic war from 1/72 (42) to 1/84 of a pound,(43) it

retained for more than three centuries quite the same weight

and the same quality; no alloying took place. The copper money

became about the beginning of this period quite restricted to

small change, and ceased to be employed as formerly in large

transactions; for this reason the -as- was no longer coined after

perhaps the beginning of the seventh century, and the copper

coinage was confined to the smaller values of a -semis- (1/4 pence)

and under, which could not well be represented in silver.

The sorts of coins were arranged according to a simple principle,

and in the then smallest coin of the ordinary issue--the -quadrans-

(1/8 pence)--carried down to the limit of appreciable value.

It was a monetary system, which, for the judicious principles

on which it was based and for the iron rigour with which they

were applied, stands alone in antiquity and has been but rarely

paralleled even in modern times.

Yet it had also its weak point. According to a custom, common

in all antiquity, but which reached its highest development at

Carthage,(44) the Roman government issued along with the good

silver -denarii- also -denarii- of copper plated with silver, which

had to be accepted like the former and were just a token-money

analogous to our paper currency, with compulsory circulation and

recourse on the public chest, inasmuch as it also was not entitled

to reject the plated pieces. This was no more an official

adulteration of the coinage than our manufacture of paper-money,

for they practised the thing quite openly; Marcus Drusus proposed

in 663, with the view of gaining the means for his largesses of

grain, the sending forth of one plated -denarius- for every seven

silver ones issuing fresh from the mint; nevertheless this measure

not only offered a dangerous handle to private forgery, but

designedly left the public uncertain whether it was receiving

silver or token money, and to what total amount the latter was

in circulation. In the embarrassed period of the civil war and

of the great financial crisis they seem to have so unduly availed

themselves of plating, that a monetary crisis accompanied the

financial one, and the quantity of spurious and really worthless

pieces rendered dealings extremely insecure. Accordingly during

the Cinnan government an enactment was passed by the praetors and

tribunes, primarily by Marcus Marius Gratidianus,(45) for redeeming

all the token-money by silver, and for that purpose an assay-office

was established. How far the calling-in was accomplished,

tradition has not told us; the coining of token-money itself

continued to subsist.

As to the provinces, in accordance with the setting aside of gold

money on principle, the coining of gold was nowhere permitted, not

even in the client-states; so that a gold coinage at this period

occurs only where Rome had nothing at all to say, especially among

the Celts to the north of the Cevennes and among the states in

revolt against Rome; the Italians, for instance, as well as

Mithradates Eupator struck gold coins. The government seems to

have made efforts to bring the coinage of silver also more and more

into its hands, particularly in the west. In Africa and Sardinia

the Carthaginian gold and silver money may have remained in

circulation even after the fall of the Carthaginian state; but

no coinage of precious metals took place there after either the

Carthaginian or the Roman standard, and certainly very soon after

the Romans took possession, the -denarius- introduced from Italy

acquired the predominance in the transactions of the two countries.

In Spain and Sicily, which came earlier to the Romans and

experienced altogether a milder treatment, silver was no doubt

coined under the Roman rule, and indeed in the former country the

silver coinage was first called into existence by the Romans and

based on the Roman standard;(46) but there exist good grounds for

the supposition, that even in these two countries, at least from

the beginning of the seventh century, the provincial and urban

mints were obliged to restrict their issues to copper small money.

Only in Narbonese Gaul the right of coining silver could not be

withdrawn from the old-allied and considerable free city of

Massilia; and the same was presumably true of the Greek cities in

Illyria, Apollonia and Dyrrhachium. But the privilege of these

communities to coin money was restricted indirectly by the fact,

that the three-quarter -denarius-, which by ordinance of the Roman

government was coined both at Massilia and in Illyria, and which

had been under the name of -victoriatus- received into the Roman

monetary system,(47) was about the middle of the seventh century

set aside in the latter; the effect of which necessarily was, that

the Massiliot and Illyrian currency was driven out of Upper Italy

and only remained in circulation, over and above its native field,

perhaps in the regions of the Alps and the Danube. Such progress

had thus been made already in this epoch, that the standard of the

-denarius- exclusively prevailed in the whole western division of

the Roman state; for Italy, Sicily--of which it is as respects the

beginning of the next period expressly attested, that no other

silver money circulated there but the -denarius---Sardinia, Africa,

used exclusively Roman silver money, and the provincial silver

still current in Spain as well as the silver money of the Massiliots

and Illyrians were at least struck after the standard of the -denarius-.

It was otherwise in the east. Here, where the number of the states

coining money from olden times and the quantity of native coin in

circulation were very considerable, the -denarius- did not make its

way into wider acceptance, although it was perhaps declared a legal

tender. On the contrary either the previous monetary standard

continued in use, as in Macedonia for instance, which still as

a province--although partially adding the names of the Roman

magistrates to that of the country--struck its Attic -tetradrachmae-

and certainly employed in substance no other money; or a peculiar

money-standard corresponding to the circumstances was introduced

under Roman authority, as on the institution of the province of Asia,

when a new -stater-, the -cistophorus- as it was called, was prescribed

by the Roman government and was thenceforth struck by the district-

capitals there under Roman superintendence. This essential diversity

between the Occidental and Oriental systems of currency came to be

of the greatest historical importance: the Romanizing of the subject

lands found one of its mightiest levers in the adoption of Roman money,

and it was not through mere accident that what we have designated at

this epoch as the field of the -denarius- became afterwards the Latin,

while the field of the -drachma- became afterwards the Greek, half

of the empire. Still at the present day the former field substantially

represents the sum of Romanic culture, whereas the latter has

severed itself from European civilization.