The following scene which occurred in the senate shows

significantlyhow matters stood. Immediately after the arrest

of Lentulus and his comrades, a messenger despatched by the conspirators

in the capital to Catilina was seized by the agents of the government,

and, after having been assured of impunity, was induced

to make a comprehensive confession in a full meeting of the senate.

But when he came to the critical portions of his confession

and in particular named Crassus as having commissioned him,

he was interrupted by the senators, and on the suggestion

of Cicero it was resolved to cancel the whole statement without

farther inquiry, but to imprison its author notwithstanding

the amnesty assured to him, until such time as he should have

not merely retracted the statement, but should have also confessed

who had instigated him to give such false testimony! Here it is

abundantly clear, not merely that that man had a very accurate

knowledge of the state of matters who, when summoned to make

an attack upon Crassus, replied that he had no desire to provoke

the bull of the herd, but also that the majority of the senate

with Cicero at their head were agreed in not permitting the revelations

to go beyond a certain limit. The public was not so nice; the young men,

who had taken up arms to ward off the incendiaries, were exasperated

against no one so much as against Caesar, on the 5th of December,

when he left the senate, they pointed their swords at his breast

and even now he narrowly escaped with his life on the same spot

where the fatal blow fell on him seventeen years afterwards;

he did not again for a considerable time enter the senate-house.

Any one who impartially considers the course of the conspiracy

will not be able to resist the suspicion that during all this time

Catilina was backed by more powerful men, who--relying on the want

of a legally complete chain of evidence and on the lukewarmness

and cowardice of the majority of the senate, which was but half-

initiated and greedily caught at any pretext for inaction--knew how

to hinder any serious interference with the conspiracy on the part

of the authorities, to procure free departure for the chief

of the insurgents, and even so to manage the declaration of war

and the sending of troops against the insurrection that it was almost

equivalent to the sending of an auxiliary army. While the course

of the events themselves thus testifies that the threads

of the Catilinarian plot reached far higher than Lentulus and Catilina,

it deserves also to be noticed, that at a much later period,

when Caesar had got to the head of the state, he was in the closest

alliance with the only Catilinarian still surviving, Publius Sittius

the leader of the Mauretanian free bands, and that he modified

the law of debt quite in the sense that the proclamations

of Manlius demanded.

All these pieces of evidence speak clearly enough; but, even were

it not so, the desperate position of the democracy in presence

of the military power--which since the Gabinio-Manilian laws assumed

by its side an attitude more threatening than ever--renders it

almost a certainty that, as usually happens in such cases,

it sought a last resource in secret plots and in alliance

with anarchy. The circumstances were very similar to those

of the Cinnan times. While in the east Pompeius occupied a position

nearly such as Sulla then did, Crassus and Caesar sought to raise

over against him a power in Italy like that which Marius and Cinna

had possessed, with the view of employing it if possible better

than they had done. The way to this result lay once more through

terrorism and anarchy, and to pave that way Catilina was certainly

the fitting man. Naturally the more reputable leaders

of the democracy kept themselves as far as possible in the background,

and left to their unclean associates the execution of the unclean

work, the political results of which they hoped afterwards

to appropriate. Still more naturally, when the enterprise had failed,

the partners of higher position applied every effort to conceal

their participation in it. And at a later period, when the former

conspirator had himself become the target of political plots,

the veil was for that very reason drawn only the more closely

over those darker years in the life of the great man, and even

special apologies for him were written with that very object.(21)

Total Destruction of the Democratic Party

For five years Pompeius stood at the head of his armies and fleets

in the east; for five years the democracy at home conspired

to overthrow him. The result was discouraging. With unspeakable

exertions they had not merely attained nothing, but had suffered

morally as well as materially enormous loss. Even the coalition

of 683 could not but be for democrats of pure water a scandal,

although the democracy at that time only coalesced with two

distinguished men of the opposite party and bound these

to its programme.

But now the democratic party had made common cause with a band

of murderers and bankrupts, who were almost all likewise deserters

from the camp of the aristocracy; and had at least for the time

being accepted their programme, that is to say, the terrorism

of Cinna. The party of material interests, one of the chief elements

of the coalition of 683, was thereby estranged from the democracy,

and driven into the arms of the Optimates in the first instance,

or of any power at all which would and could give protection against

anarchy. Even the multitude of the capital, who, although having

no objection to a street-riot, found it inconvenient to have

their houses set on fire over their heads, became in some measure

alarmed. It is remarkable that in this very year (691) the full

re-establishment of the Sempronian corn-largesses took place,

and was effected by the senate on the proposal of Cato. The league

of the democratic leaders with anarchy had obviously created a breach

between the former and the burgesses of the city; and the oligarchy

sought, not without at least momentary success, to enlarge

this chasm and to draw over the masses to their side. Lastly,

Gnaeus Pompeius had been partly warned, partly exasperated,

by all these cabals; after all that had occurred, and after the democracy

had itself virtually torn asunder the ties which connected it

with Pompeius, it could no longer with propriety make the request--

which in 684 had had a certain amount of reason on its side--

that he should not himself destroy with the sword the democratic power

which he had raised, and which had raised him.

Thus the democracy was disgraced and weakened; but above all it had

become ridiculous through the merciless exposure of its perplexity

and weakness. Where the humiliation of the overthrown government

and similar matters of little moment were concerned, it was great

and potent; but every one of its attempts to attain a real

political success had proved a downright failure. Its relation

to Pompeius was as false as pitiful. While it was loading him

with panegyrics and demonstrations of homage, it was concocting

against him one intrigue after another; and one after another,

like soap-bubbles, they burst of themselves. The general of the east

and of the seas, far from standing on his defence against them,

appeared not even to observe all the busy agitation, and to obtain

his victories over the democracy as Herakles gained his over

the Pygmies, without being himself aware of it. The attempt to kindle

civil war had miserably failed; if the anarchist section

had at least displayed some energy, the pure democracy, while knowing

doubtless how to hire conspirators, had not known how to lead

them or to save them or to die with them. Even the old languid

oligarchy, strengthened by the masses passing over to it

from the ranks of the democracy and above all by the--in this affair

unmistakeable--identity of its interests and those of Pompeius,

had been enabled to suppress this attempt at revolution and thereby

to achieve yet a last victory over the democracy. Meanwhile king

Mithradates was dead, Asia Minor and Syria were regulated,

and the return of Pompeius to Italy might be every moment expected.

The decision was not far off; but was there in fact still room

to speak of a decision between the general who returned more famous

and mightier than ever, and the democracy humbled beyond parallel

and utterly powerless? Crassus prepared to embark his family

and his gold and to seek an asylum somewhere in the east;

and even so elastic and so energetic a nature as that of Caesar seemed

on the point of giving up the game as lost. In this year (691)

occurred his candidature for the place of -pontifex maximus-;(22)

when he left his dwelling on the morning of the election,

he declared that, if he should fail in this also, he would

never again cross the threshold of his house.

CHAPTER VI

Retirement of Pompeius and Coalition of the Pretenders

Pompeius in the East

When Pompeius, after having transacted the affairs committed

to his charge, again turned his eyes homeward, he found for the second

time the diadem at his feet. For long the development of the Roman

commonwealth had been tending towards such a catastrophe;

it was evident to every unbiassed observer, and had been remarked

a thousand times, that, if the rule of the aristocracy

should be brought to an end, monarchy was inevitable. The senate

had now been overthrown at once by the civic liberal opposition

and by the power of the soldiery; the only question remaining

was to settle the persons, names, and forms for the new order of things;

and these were already clearly enough indicated in the partly democratic,

partly military elements of the revolution. The events of the last

five years had set, as it were, the final seal on this impending

transformation of the commonwealth. In the newly-erected

Asiatic provinces, which gave regal honours to their organizer

as the successor of Alexander the Great, and already received

his favoured freedmen like princes, Pompeius had laid the foundations

of his dominion, and found at once the treasures, the army, and the halo

of glory which the future prince of the Roman state required.

The anarchist conspiracy, moreover, in the capital, and the civil

war connected with it, had made it palpably clear to every one

who studied political or even merely material interests,

that a government without authority and without military power,

such as that of the senate, exposed the state to the equally ludicrous

and formidable tyranny of political sharpers, and that a change

of constitution, which should connect the military power more closely

with the government, was an indispensable necessity if social order

was to be maintained. So the ruler had arisen in the east,

the throne had been erected in Italy; to all appearance the year 692

was the last of the republic, the first of monarchy.

The Opponents of the Future Monarchy

This goal, it is true, was not to be reached without a struggle.

The constitution, which had endured for five hundred years,

and under which the insignificant town on the Tiber had risen

to unprecedented greatness and glory, had sunk its roots into the soil

to a depth beyond human ken, and no one could at all calculate

to what extent the attempt to overthrow it would penetrate

and convulse civil society. Several rivals had been outrun by Pompeius

in the race towards the great goal, but had not been wholly set

aside. It was not at all beyond reach of calculation that all

these elements might combine to overthrow the new holder of power,

and that Pompeius might find Quintus Catulus and Marcus Cato united

in opposition to him with Marcus Crassus, Gaius Caesar, and Titus

Labienus. But the inevitable and undoubtedly serious struggle

could not well be undertaken under circumstances more favourable.

It was in a high degree probable that, under the fresh impression

of the Catilinarian revolt, a rule which promised order

and security, although at the price of freedom, would receive

the submission of the whole middle party--embracing especially

the merchants who concerned themselves only about their material

interests, but including also a great part of the aristocracy,

which, disorganized in itself and politically hopeless, had to rest

content with securing for itself riches, rank, and influence

by a timely compromise with the prince; perhaps even a portion

of the democracy, so sorely smitten by the recent blows, might submit

to hope for the realization of a portion of its demands

from a military chief raised to power by itself. But, whatever might be

the position of party-relations, of what importance, in the first

instance at least, were the parties in Italy at all in presence

of Pompeius and his victorious army? Twenty years previously Sulla,

after having concluded a temporary peace with Mithradates,

had with his five legions been able to carry a restoration

runningcounter to the natural development of things in the face

of the whole liberal party, which had been arming en masse for years,

from the moderate aristocrats and the liberal mercantile class down

to the anarchists. The task of Pompeius was far less difficult.

He returned, after having fully and conscientiously performed

his different functions by sea and land. He might expect to encounter

no other serious opposition save that of the various extreme

parties, each of which by itself could do nothing, and which even

when leagued together were no more than a coalition of factions

still vehemently hostile to each other and inwardly at thorough

variance. Completely unarmed, they were without a military force

and without a head, without organization in Italy, without support

in the provinces, above all, without a general; there was in their

ranks hardly a soldier of note--to say nothing of an officer--who

could have ventured to call forth the burgesses to a conflict

with Pompeius. The circumstance might further be taken into account,

that the volcano of revolution, which had been now incessantly

blazing for seventy years and feeding on its own flame, was visibly

burning out and verging of itself to extinction. It was very doubtful

whether the attempt to arm the Italians for party interests

would now succeed, as it had succeeded with Cinna and Carbo.

If Pompeius exerted himself, how could he fail to effect

a revolution of the state, which was chalked out by a certain

necessity of nature in the organic development

of the Roman commonwealth?

Mission of Nepos to Rome

Pompeius had seized the right moment, when he undertook his mission

to the east; he seemed desirous to go forward. In the autumn

of 691, Quintus Metellus Nepos arrived from the camp of Pompeius

in the capital, and came forward as a candidate for the tribuneship,

with the express design of employing that position to procure

for Pompeius the consulship for the year 693 and more immediately,

by special decree of the people, the conduct of the war against

Catilina. The excitement in Rome was great. It was not

to be doubted that Nepos was acting under the direct or indirect

commission of Pompeius; the desire of Pompeius to appear in Italy

as general at the head of his Asiatic legions, and to administer

simultaneously the supreme military and the supreme civil power

there, was conceived to be a farther step on the way to the throne,

and the mission of Nepos a semi-official proclamation of the monarchy.

Pompeius in Relation to the Parties

Everything turned on the attitude which the two great political parties

should assume towards these overtures; their future position

and the future of the nation depended on this. But the reception

which Nepos met with was itself in its turn determined

by the then existing relation of the parties to Pompeius, which was

of a very peculiar kind. Pompeius had gone to the east as general

of the democracy. He had reason enough to be discontented

with Caesar and his adherents, but no open rupture had taken place.

It is probable that Pompeius, who was at a great distance and occupied

with other things, and who besides was wholly destitute of the gift

of calculating his political bearings, by no means saw through,

at least at that time, the extent and mutual connection

of the democratic intrigues contrived against him; perhaps even

in his haughty and shortsighted manner he had a certain pride

in ignoring these underground proceedings. Then there came the fact,

which with a character of the type of Pompeius had much weight,

that the democracy never lost sight of outward respect for the great man,

and even now (691) unsolicited (as he preferred it so) had granted

to him by a special decree of the people unprecedented honours

and decorations.(1) But, even if all this had not been the case,

it lay in Pompeius' own well-understood interest to continue

his adherence, at least outwardly, to the popular party; democracy

and monarchy stand so closely related that Pompeius, in aspiring

to the crown, could scarcely do otherwise than call himself, as hitherto,

the champion of popular rights. While personal and political

reasons, therefore, co-operated to keep Pompeius and the leaders

of the democracy, despite of all that had taken place, in their

previous connection, nothing was done on the opposite side to fill

up the chasm which separated him since his desertion to the camp

of the democracy from his Sullan partisans. His personal quarrel

with Metellus and Lucullus transferred itself to their extensive

and influential coteries. A paltry opposition of the senate--

but, to a character of so paltry a mould, all the more exasperating

by reason of its very paltriness--had attended him through his whole

career as a general. He felt it keenly, that the senate had not taken

the smallest step to honour the extraordinary man according to

his desert, that is, by extraordinary means. Lastly, it is not

to be forgotten, that the aristocracy was just then intoxicated

by its recent victory and the democracy deeply humbled,

and that the aristocracy was led by the pedantically stiff

and half-witless Cato, and the democracy by the supple master

of intrigue, Caesar.

Rupture between Pompeius and the Aristocracy

Such was the state of parties amidst which the emissary sent

by Pompeius appeared. The aristocracy not only regarded the proposals

which he announced in favour of Pompeius as a declaration of war

against the existing constitution, but treated them openly as such,

and took not the slightest pains to conceal their alarm and their

indignation. With the express design of combating these proposals,

Marcus Cato had himself elected as tribune of the people

along with Nepos, and abruptly repelled the repeated attempts of Pompeius

to approach him personally. Nepos naturally after this found himself

under no inducement to spare the aristocracy, but attached himself

the more readily to the democrats, when these, pliant as ever,

submitted to what was inevitable and chose freely to concede

the office of general in Italy as well as the consulate

rather than let the concession be wrung from them by force of arms.

The cordial understanding soon showed itself. Nepos publicly accepted

(Dec. 691) the democratic view of the executions recently decreed

by the majority of the senate, as unconstitutional judicial murders;

and that his lord and master looked on them in no other light,

was shown by his significant silence respecting the voluminous

vindication of them which Cicero had sent to him. On the other

hand, the first act with which Caesar began his praetorship

was to call Quintus Catulus to account for the moneys alleged

to have been embezzled by him at the rebuilding of the Capitoline temple,

and to transfer the completion of the temple to Pompeius. This was

a masterstroke. Catulus had already been building at the temple

for fifteen years, and seemed very much disposed to die as he had lived

superintendent of the Capitoline buildings; an attack on this abuse

of a public commission--an abuse covered only by the reputation

of the noble commissioner--was in reality entirely justified

and in a high degree popular. But when the prospect was simultaneously

opened up to Pompeius of being allowed to delete the name of Catulus

and engrave his own on this proudest spot of the first city

of the globe, there was offered to him the very thing which most

of all delighted him and did no harm to the democracy--abundant

but empty honour; while at the same time the aristocracy, which could

not possibly allow its best man to fall, was brought into the most

disagreeable collision with Pompeius.

Meanwhile Nepos had brought his proposals concerning Pompeius

before the burgesses. On the day of voting Cato and his friend

and colleague, Quintus Minucius, interposed their veto. When Nepos

did not regard this and continued the reading out, a formal conflict

took place; Cato and Minucius threw themselves on their colleague

and forced him to stop; an armed band liberated him, and drove

the aristocratic section from the Forum; but Cato and Minucius

returned, now supported likewise by armed bands, and ultimately

maintained the field of battle for the government. Encouraged

by this victory of their bands over those of their antagonist,

the senate suspended the tribune Nepos as well as the praetor Caesar,

who had vigorously supported him in the bringing in of the law,

from their offices; their deposition, which was proposed in the senate,

was prevented by Cato, more, doubtless, because it was

unconstitutional than because it was injudicious. Caesar did

not regard the decree, and continued his official functions till

the senate used violence against him. As soon as this was known,

the multitude appeared before his house and placed itself at his

disposal; it was to depend solely on him whether the struggle

in the streets should begin, or whether at least the proposals made

by Metellus should now be resumed and the military command in Italy

desired by Pompeius should be procured for him; but this was not

in Caesar's interest, and so he induced the crowds to disperse,

whereupon the senate recalled the penalty decreed against him.

Nepos himself had, immediately after his suspension, left

the city and embarked for Asia, in order to report to Pompeius

the result of his mission.

Retirement of Pompeius

Pompeius had every reason to be content with the turn which things

had taken. The way to the throne now lay necessarily through civil

war; and he owed it to Cato's incorrigible perversity that he could

begin this war with good reason. After the illegal condemnation

of the adherents of Catilina, after the unparalleled acts of violence

against the tribune of the people Metellus, Pompeius might wage war

at once as defender of the two palladia of Roman public freedom--

the right of appeal and the inviolability of the tribunate

of the people--against the aristocracy, and as champion of the party

of order against the Catilinarian band. It seemed almost impossible

that Pompeius should neglect this opportunity and with his eyes

open put himself a second time into the painful position, in which

the dismissal of his army in 684 had placed him, and from which

only the Gabinian law had released him. But near as seemed

the opportunity of placing the white chaplet around his brow,

and much as his own soul longed after it, when the question of action

presented itself, his heart and his hand once more failed him.

This man, altogether ordinary in every respect excepting only

his pretensions, would doubtless gladly have placed himself beyond

the law, if only he could have done so without forsaking legal ground.

His very lingering in Asia betrayed a misgiving of this sort.

He might, had he wished, have very well arrived in January 692

with his fleet and army at the port of Brundisium, and have received

Nepos there. His tarrying the whole winter of 691-692 in Asia had

proximately the injurious consequence, that the aristocracy,

which of course accelerated the campaign against Catilina as it best

could, had meanwhile got rid of his bands, and had thus set aside

the most feasible pretext for keeping together the Asiatic legions

in Italy. For a man of the type of Pompeius, who for want of faith

in himself and in his star timidly clung in public life to formal

right, and with whom the pretext was nearly of as much importance

as the motive, this circumstance was of serious weight. He probably

said to himself, moreover, that, even if he dismissed his army,

he did not let it wholly out of his hand, and could in case

of need still raise a force ready for battle sooner at any rate

than any other party-chief; that the democracy was waiting

in submissive attitude for his signal, and that he could deal

with the refractory senate even without soldiers; and such further

considerations as suggested themselves, in which there was exactly

enough of truth to make them appear plausible to one who wished

to deceive himself. Once more the very peculiar temperament

of Pompeius naturally turned the scale. He was one of those men

who are capable it may be of a crime, but not of insubordination;

in a good as in a bad sense, he was thoroughly a soldier. Men of mark

respect the law as a moral necessity, ordinary men as a traditional

everyday rule; for this very reason military discipline, in which

more than anywhere else law takes the form of habit, fetters every

man not entirely self-reliant as with a magic spell. It has often

been observed that the soldier, even where he has determined

to refuse obedience to those set over him, involuntarily

when that obedience is demanded resumes his place in the ranks.

It was this feeling that made Lafayette and Dumouriez hesitate

at the last moment before the breach of faith and break down;

and to this too Pompeius succumbed.

In the autumn of 692 Pompeius embarked for Italy. While in the capital

all was being prepared for receiving the new monarch, news came

that Pompeius, when barely landed at Brundisium, had broken up

his legions and with a small escort had entered on his journey

to the capital. If it is a piece of good fortune to gain a crown

without trouble, fortune never did more for mortal than it did

for Pompeius; but on those who lack courage the gods lavish every

favour and every gift in vain.

Pompeius without Influence

The parties breathed freely. For the second time Pompeius had

abdicated; his already-vanquished competitors might once more begin

the race--in which doubtless the strangest thing was, that Pompeius

was again a rival runner. In January 693 he came to Rome.

His position was an awkward one and vacillated with so much uncertainty

between the parties, that people gave him the nickname of Gnaeus

Cicero. He had in fact lost favour with all. The anarchists saw

in him an adversary, the democrats an inconvenient friend, Marcus

Crassus a rival, the wealthy class an untrustworthy protector,

the aristocracy a declared foe.(2) He was still indeed the most

powerful man in the state; his military adherents scattered through

all Italy, his influence in the provinces, particularly those

of the east, his military fame, his enormous riches gave him a weight

such as no other possessed; but instead of the enthusiastic

reception on which he had counted, the reception which he met

with was more than cool, and still cooler was the treatment given

to the demands which he presented. He requested for himself,

as he had already caused to be announced by Nepos, a second consulship;

demanding also, of course, a confirmation of the arrangements made

by him in the east and a fulfilment of the promise which he had

given to his soldiers to furnish them with lands. Against these

demands a systematic opposition arose in the senate, the chief

elements of which were furnished by the personal exasperation

of Lucullus and Metellus Creticus, the old resentment of Crassus,

and the conscientious folly of Cato. The desired second consulship

was at once and bluntly refused. The very first request

which the returning general addressed to the senate, that the election

of the consuls for 693 might be put off till after his entry

into the capital, had been rejected; much less was there any likelihood

of obtaining from the senate the necessary dispensation from the law

of Sulla as to re-election.(3) As to the arrangements which

he had made in the eastern provinces, Pompeius naturally asked

their confirmation as a whole; Lucullus carried a proposal

thatevery ordinance should be separately discussed and voted upon,

which opened the door for endless annoyances and a multitude of defeats

in detail. The promise of a grant of land to the soldiers

of the Asiatic army was ratified indeed in general by the senate,

but was at the same time extended to the Cretan legions of Metellus;

and--what was worse--it was not executed, because the public chest

was empty and the senate was not disposed to meddle with the domains

for this purpose. Pompeius, in despair of mastering the persistent

and spiteful opposition of the senate, turned to the burgesses.

But he understood still less how to conduct his movements

on this field. The democratic leaders, although they did not

openly oppose him, had no cause at all to make his interests their own,

and so kept aloof. Pompeius' own instruments--such as the consuls

elected by his influence and partly by his money, Marcus Pupius Piso

for 693 and Lucius Afranius for 694--showed themselves unskilful

and useless. When at length the assignation of land for the veterans

of Pompeius was submitted to the burgesses by the tribune

of the people Lucius Flavius in the form of a general agrarian law,

the proposal, not supported by the democrats, openly combated

by the aristocrats, was left in a minority (beg. of 694). The exalted

general now sued almost humbly for the favour of the masses,

for it was on his instigation that the Italian tolls were abolished

by a law introduced by the praetor Metellus Nepos (694). But he played

the demagogue without skill and without success; his reputation

suffered from it, and he did not obtain what he desired. He had

completely run himself into a noose. One of his opponents summed

up his political position at that time by saying that he had

endeavoured "to conserve by silence his embroidered triumphal

mantle." In fact nothing was left for him but to fret.

Rise of Caesar

Then a new combination offered itself. The leader

of the democratic party had actively employed in his own interest

the political calm which had immediately followed on the retirement

of the previous holder of power. When Pompeius returned from Asia,

Caesar had been little more than what Catilina was--the chief

of a political party which had dwindled almost into a club

of conspirators, and a bankrupt. But since that event he had,

after administering the praetorship (692), been invested

with the governorship of Further Spain, and thereby had found means

partly to rid himself of his debts, partly to lay the foundation

for his military repute. His old friend and ally Crassus had been

induced by the hope of finding the support against Pompeius,

which he had lost in Piso,(4) once more in Caesar, to relieve him

even before his departure to the province from the most oppressive

portion of his load of debt. He himself had energetically employed

his brief sojourn there. Returning from Spain in the year 694

with filled chests and as Imperator with well-founded claims

to a triumph, he came forward for the following year as a candidate

for the consulship; for the sake of which, as the senate refused

him permission to announce himself as a candidate for the consular

election in absence, he without hesitation abandoned the honour

of the triumph. For years the democracy had striven to raise

one of its partisans to the possession of the supreme magistracy,

that by way of this bridge it might attain a military power of its own.

It had long been clear to discerning men of all shades that the strife

of parties could not be settled by civil conflict, but only

by military power; but the course of the coalition between

the democracy and the powerful military chiefs, through which the rule

of the senate had been terminated, showed with inexorable clearness

that every such alliance ultimately issued in a subordination

of the civil under the military elements, and that the popular party,

if it would really rule, must not ally itself with generals

properly foreign and even hostile to it, but must make generals

of its own leaders themselves. The attempts made with this view

to carry the election of Catilina as consul, and to gain a military

support in Spain or Egypt, had failed; now a possibility presented

itself of procuring for their most important man the consulship

and the consular province in the usual constitutional way,

and of rendering themselves independent of their dubious and dangerous

ally Pompeius by the establishment, if we may so speak, of a home

power in their own democratic household.

Second Coalition of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar

But the more the democracy could not but desire to open up

for itself this path, which offered not so much the most favourable

as the only prospect of real successes, the more certainly it

might reckon on the resolute resistance of its political opponents.

Everything depended on whom it found opposed to it in this matter.

The aristocracy isolated was not formidable; but it had just been

rendered evident in the Catilinarian affair that it could certainly

still exert some influence, where it was more or less openly

supported by the men of material interests and by the adherents

of Pompeius. It had several times frustrated Catilina's candidature

for the consulship, and that it would attempt the like against

Caesar was sufficiently certain. But, even though Caesar should

perhaps be chosen in spite of it, his election alone did not suffice.

He needed at least some years of undisturbed working out of Italy,

in order to gain a firm military position; and the nobility

assuredly would leave no means untried to thwart his plans

during this time of preparation. The idea naturally occurred,

whether the aristocracy might not be again successfully isolated

as in 683-684, and an alliance firmly based on mutual advantage might

not be established between the democrats with their ally Crassus

on the one side and Pompeius and the great capitalists on the other.

For Pompeius such a coalition was certainly a political suicide.

His weight hitherto in the state rested on the fact, that he was

the only party-leader who at the same time disposed of legions--

which, though now dissolved, were still in a certain sense

at his disposal. The plan of the democracy was directed

to the very object of depriving him of this preponderance,

and of placing by his side in their own chief a military rival.

Never could he consent to this, and least of all personally help

to a post of supreme command a man like Caesar, who already

as a mere political agitator had given him trouble enough

and had just furnished the most brilliant proofs also of military

capacity in Spain. But on the other hand, in consequence

of the cavilling opposition of the senate and the indifference

of the multitude to Pompeius and Pompeius' wishes, his position,

particularly with reference to his old soldiers, had become so painful

and so humiliating, that people might well expect from his character

to gain him for such a coalition at the price of releasing him

from that disagreeable situation. And as to the so-called

equestrian party, it was to be found on whatever side the power lay;

and as a matter of course it would not let itself be long waited for,

if it saw Pompeius and the democracy combining anew in earnest.

It happened moreover, that on account of Cato's severity--

otherwise very laudable--towards the lessees of the taxes,

the great capitalists were just at this time once more

at vehement variance with the senate.

Change in the Position of Caesar

So the second coalition was concluded in the summer of 694.

Caesar was assured of the consulship for the following year

and a governorship in due course; to Pompeius was promised

the ratification of his arrangements made in the east,

and an assignation of lands for the soldiers of the Asiatic army;

to the equites Caesar likewise promised to procure for them

by means of the burgesses what the senate had refused; Crassus

in fine--the inevitable--was allowed at least to join the league,

although without obtaining definite promises for an accession

which he could not refuse. It was exactly the same elements,

and indeed the same persons, who concluded the league with one another

in the autumn of 683 and in the summer of 694; but how entirely different

was the position of the parties then and now! Then the democracy

was nothing but a political party, while its allies were victorious

generals at the head of their armies; now the leader of the democracy

was himself an Imperator crowned with victory and full

of magnificent military schemes, while his allies were retired

generals without any army. Then the democracy conquered

in questions of principle, and in return for that victory conceded

the highest offices of state to its two confederates; now it had

become more practical and grasped the supreme civil and military

power for itself, while concessions were made to its allies only

in subordinate points and, significantly enough, not even the old

demand of Pompeius for a second consulship was attended to. Then

the democracy sacrificed itself to its allies; now these had

to entrust themselves to it. All the circumstances were completely

changed, most of all, however, the character of the democracy

itself. No doubt it had, ever since it existed at all,

contained at its very core a monarchic element; but the ideal

of a constitution, which floated in more or less clear outline before

its best intellects, was always that of a civil commonwealth,

a Periclean organization of the state, in which the power

of the prince rested on the fact that he represented the burgesses

in the noblest and most accomplished manner, and the most accomplished

and noblest part of the burgesses recognized him as the man in whom

they thoroughly confided. Caesar too set out with such views;

but they were simply ideals, which might have some influence

on realities, but could not be directly realized. Neither the simple

civil power, as Gaius Gracchus possessed it, nor the arming

of the democratic party, such as Cinna though in a very inadequate

fashion had attempted, was able to maintain a permanent superiority

in the Roman commonwealth; the military machine fighting not for a party

but for a general, the rude force of the condottieri--after having

first appeared on the stage in the service of the restoration--soon

showed itself absolutely superior to all political parties. Caesar

could not but acquire a conviction of this amidst the practical

workings of party, and accordingly he matured the momentous

resolution of making this military machine itself serviceable

to his ideals, and of erecting such a commonwealth, as he had

in his view, by the power of condottieri. With this design

he concluded in 683 the league with the generals of the opposite party,

which, notwithstanding that they had accepted the democratic programme,

yet brought the democracy and Caesar himself to the brink

of destruction. With the same design he himself came forward eleven

years afterwards as a condottiere. It was done in both cases

with a certain naivete--with good faith in the possibility

of his being able to found a free commonwealth, if not by the swords

of others, at any rate by his own. We perceive without difficulty

that this faith was fallacious, and that no one takes an evil spirit

into his service without becoming himself enslaved to it;

but the greatest men are not those who err the least.

If we still after so many centuries bow in reverence before what

Caesar willed and did, it is not because he desired and gained

a crown (to do which is, abstractly, as little of a great thing

as the crown itself) but because his mighty ideal--of a free commonwealth

under one ruler--never forsook him, and preserved him even when monarch

from sinking into vulgar royalty.

Caesar Consul

The election of Caesar as consul for 695 was carried without

difficulty by the united parties. The aristocracy had to rest

content with giving to him--by means of a bribery, for which

the whole order of lords contributed the funds, and which excited

surprise even in that period of deepest corruption--a colleague

in the person of Marcus Bibulus, whose narrow-minded obstinacy

was regarded in their circles as conservative energy,

and whose good intentions at least were not at fault if the genteel

lords did not get a fit return for their patriotic expenditure.

Caesar's Agrarian Law

As consul Caesar first submitted to discussion the requests of his

confederates, among which the assignation of land to the veterans

of the Asiatic army was by far the most important. The agrarian

law projected for this purpose by Caesar adhered in general

to the principles set forth in the project of law, which was introduced

in the previous year at the suggestion of Pompeius but not carried.(5)

There was destined for distribution only the Italian domain-land,

that is to say, substantially, the territory of Capua, and, if this

should not suffice, other Italian estates were to be purchased

out of the revenue of the new eastern provinces at the taxable value

recorded in the censorial rolls; all existing rights of property

and heritable possession thus remained unaffected. The individual

allotments were small. The receivers of land were to be poor

burgesses, fathers of at least three children; the dangerous

principle, that the rendering of military service gave a claim

to landed estate, was not laid down, but, as was reasonable and had

been done at all times, the old soldiers as well as the temporary

lessees to be ejected were simply recommended to the special

consideration of the land-distributors. The execution of the measure

was entrusted to a commission of twenty men, into which Caesar

distinctly declared that he did not wish to be himself elected.

Opposition of the Aristocracy

The opposition had a difficult task in resisting this proposal.

It could not rationally be denied, that the state-finances ought

after the erection of the provinces of Pontus and Syria to be

in a position to dispense with the moneys from the Campanian leases;

that it was unwarrantable to withhold one of the finest districts

of Italy, and one peculiarly fitted for small holdings,

from private enterprise; and, lastly, that it was as unjust as it

was ridiculous, after the extension of the franchise to all Italy,

still to withhold municipal rights from the township of Capua.

The whole proposal bore the stamp of moderation, honesty, and solidity,

with which a democratic party-character was very dexterously

combined; for in substance it amounted to the re-establishment

of the Capuan colony founded in the time of Marius and again

done away by Sulla.(6) In form too Caesar observed all possible

consideration. He laid the project of the agrarian law, as well

as the proposal to ratify collectively the ordinances issued

by Pompeius in the east, and the petition of the farmers of the taxes

for remission of a third of the sums payable by them, in the first

instance before the senate for approval, and declared himself

ready to entertain and discuss proposals for alterations.

The corporation had now opportunity of convincing itself how foolishly

it had acted in driving Pompeius and the equites into the arms

of the adversary by refusing these requests. Perhaps it was

the secret sense of this, that drove the high-born lords to the most

vehement opposition, which contrasted ill with the calm demeanour

of Caesar. The agrarian law was rejected by them nakedly and even

without discussion. The decree as to the arrangements of Pompeius

in Asia found quite as little favour in their eyes. Cato attempted,

in accordance with the disreputable custom of Roman parliamentary

debate, to kill the proposal regarding the farmers of the taxes

by speaking, that is, to prolong his speech up to the legal hour

for closing the sitting; when Caesar threatened to have the stubborn

man arrested, this proposal too was at length rejected.

Proposals before the Burgesses

Of course all the proposals were now brought before the burgesses.

Without deviating far from the truth, Caesar could tell

the multitude that the senate had scornfully rejected most rational

and most necessary proposals submitted to it in the most respectful

form, simply because they came from the democratic consul.

When he added that the aristocrats had contrived a plot to procure

the rejection of the proposals, and summoned the burgesses,

and more especially Pompeius himself and his old soldiers, to stand

by him against fraud and force, this too was by no means a mere invention.

The aristocracy, with the obstinate weak creature Bibulus

and the unbending dogmatical fool Cato at their head, in reality

intended to push the matter to open violence. Pompeius, instigated

by Caesar to proclaim his position with reference to the pending

question, declared bluntly, as was not his wont on other occasions,

that if any one should venture to draw the sword, he too would

grasp his, and in that case would not leave the shield at home;

Crassus expressed himself to the same effect The old soldiers

of Pompeius were directed to appear on the day of the vote--

which in fact primarily concerned them--in great numbers,

and with arms under their dress, at the place of voting.

The nobility however left no means untried to frustrate the proposals

of Caesar. On each day when Caesar appeared before the people,

his colleague Bibulus instituted the well-known political observations

of the weather which interrupted all public business;(7) Caesar

did not trouble himself about the skies, but continued to prosecute

his terrestrial occupation. The tribunician veto was interposed;

Caesar contented himself with disregarding it. Bibulus and Cato

sprang to the rostra, harangued the multitude, and instigated

the usual riot; Caesar ordered that they should be led away

by lictors from the Forum, and took care that otherwise no harm

should befall them--it was for his interest that the political

comedy should remain such as it was.

The Agrarian Law Carried

Passive Resistance of the Aristocracy

Notwithstanding all the chicanery and all the blustering

of the nobility, the agrarian law, the confirmation of the Asiatic

arrangements, and the remission to the lessees of taxes

were adopted by the burgesses; and the commission of twenty was elected

with Pompeius and Crassus at its head, and installed in office.

With all their exertions the aristocracy had gained nothing,

save that their blind and spiteful antagonism had drawn the bonds

of the coalition still tighter, and their energy, which they were soon

to need for matters more important, had exhausted itself

on these affairs that were at bottom indifferent. They congratulated

each other on the heroic courage which they had displayed;

the declaration of Bibulus that he would rather die than yield,

the peroration which Cato still continued to deliver when in the hands

of the lictors, were great patriotic feats; otherwise they resigned

themselves to their fate. The consul Bibulus shut himself up

for the remainder of the year in his house, while he at the same time

intimated by public placard that he had the pious intention

of watching the signs of the sky on all the days appropriate

for public assemblies during that year. His colleagues once more

admired the great man who, as Ennius had said of the old Fabius,

"saved the state by wise delay," and they followed his example;

most of them, Cato included, no longer appeared in the senate,

but within their four walls helped their consul to fret over

the fact that the history of the world went on in spite of political

astronomy. To the public this passive attitude of the consul

as well as of the aristocracy in general appeared, as it fairly might,

a political abdication; and the coalition were naturally very well

content that they were left to take their farther steps almost

undisturbed.

Caesar Governor of the Two Gauls

The most important of these steps was the regulating of the future

position of Caesar. Constitutionally it devolved on the senate

to fix the functions of the second consular year of office before

the election of the consuls took place; accordingly it had, in prospect

of the election of Caesar, selected with that view for 696 two

provinces in which the governor should find no other employment

than the construction of roads and other such works of utility.

Of course the matter could not so remain; it was determined among

the confederates, that Caesar should obtain by decree of the people

an extraordinary command formed on the model of the Gabinio-Manilian

laws. Caesar however had publicly declared that he would introduce

no proposal in his own favour; the tribune of the people Publius

Vatinius therefore undertook to submit the proposal to the burgesses,

who naturally gave their unconditional assent. By this means

Caesar obtained the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and the supreme

command of the three legions which were stationed there

and were already experienced in border warfare under Lucius Afranius,

along with the same rank of propraetor for his adjutants

which those of Pompeius had enjoyed; this office was secured to him

for five years--a longer period than had ever before been assigned

to any general whose appointment was limited to a definite time

at all. The Transpadanes, who for years had in hope of the franchise

been the clients of the democratic party in Rome and of Caesar

in particular,(8) formed the main portion of his province.

His jurisdiction extended south as far as the Arnus and the Rubico,

and included Luca and Ravenna. Subsequently there was added to Caesar's

official district the province of Narbo with the one legion

stationed there--a resolution adopted by the senate on the proposal

of Pompeius, that it might at least not see this command

also pass to Caesar by extraordinary decree of the burgesses.

What was wished was thus attained. As no troops could constitutionally

be stationed in Italy proper,(9) the commander of the legions

of northern Italy and Gaul dominated at the same time Italy and Rome

for the next five years; and he who was master for five years

was master for life. The consulship of Caesar had attained its object.

As a matter of course, the new holders of power did not neglect

withal to keep the multitude in good humour by games and amusements

of all sorts, and they embraced every opportunity of filling their

exchequer; in the case of the king of Egypt, for instance,

the decree of the people, which recognized him as legitimate ruler,(10)

was sold to him by the coalition at a high price, and in like manner

other dynasts and communities acquired charters and privileges

on this occasion.

Measures Adopted by the Allies for Their Security

The permanence of the arrangements made seemed also sufficiently

secured. The consulship was, at least for the next year, entrusted

to safe hands. The public believed at first, that it was destined

for Pompeius and Crassus themselves; the holders of power however

preferred to procure the election of two subordinate but trustworth

men of their party--Aulus Gabinius, the best among Pompeius' adjutants,

and Lucius Piso, who was less important but was Caesar's father-in-law--

as consuls for 696. Pompeius personally undertook to watch over Italy,

where at the head of the commission of twenty he prosecuted the execution

of the agrarian law and furnished nearly 20,000 burgesses,

in great part old soldiers from his army, with land in the territory

of Capua. Caesar's north-Italian legions served to back him

against the opposition in the capital. There existed no prospect,

immediately at least, of a rupture among the holders of power themselves.

The laws issued by Caesar as consul, in the maintenance of which

Pompeius was at least as much interested as Caesar, formed

a guarantee for the continuance of the breach between Pompeius

and the aristocracy--whose heads, and Cato in particular,

continued to treat these laws as null--and thereby a guarantee

for the subsistence of the coalition. Moreover, the personal bonds

of connection between its chiefs were drawn closer. Caesar had

honestly and faithfully kept his word to his confederates

without curtailing or cheating them of what he had promised,

and in particular had fought to secure the agrarian law proposed

in the interest of Pompeius, just as if the case had been his own,

with dexterity and energy; Pompeius was not insensible to upright

dealing and good faith, and was kindly disposed towards the man

who had helped him to get quit at a blow of the sorry part

of a suppliant which he had been playing for three years. Frequent

and familiar intercourse with a man of the irresistible amiableness

of Caesar did what was farther requisite to convert the alliance

of interests into an alliance of friendship. The result

and the pledge of this friendship--at the same time, doubtless,

a public announcement which could hardly be misunderstood

of the newly established conjoint rule--was the marriage of Pompeius

with Caesar's only daughter, three-and-twenty years of age.

Julia, who had inherited the charm of her father, lived

in the happiest domestic relations with her husband, who was

nearly twice as old; and the burgesses longing for rest

and order after so many troubles and crises, saw in this nuptial

alliance the guarantee of a peaceful and prosperous future.

Situation of the Aristocracy

The more firmly and closely the alliance was thus cemented

between Pompeius and Caesar, the more hopeless grew the cause

of the aristocracy. They felt the sword suspended over their head

and knew Caesar sufficiently to have no doubt that he would,

if necessary, use it without hesitation. "On all sides," wrote

one of them, "we are checkmated; we have already through fear of death

or of banishment despaired of 'freedom'; every one sighs,

no one ventures to speak." More the confederates could not desire.

But though the majority of the aristocracy was in this desirable

frame of mind, there was, of course, no lack of Hotspurs among

this party. Hardly had Caesar laid down the consulship, when some

of the most violent aristocrats, Lucius Domitius and Gaius Memmius,

proposed in a full senate the annulling of the Julian laws.

This indeed was simply a piece of folly, which redounded only

to the benefit of the coalition; for, when Caesar now himself

insisted that the senate should investigate the validity of the laws

assailed, the latter could not but formally recognize their

legality. But, as may readily be conceived, the holders of power

found in this a new call to make an example of some of the most

notable and noisiest of their opponents, and thereby to assure

themselves that the remainder would adhere to that fitting policy

of sighing and silence. At first there had been a hope

that the clause of the agrarian law, which as usual required

all the senators to take an oath to the new law on pain of forfeiting

their political rights, would induce its most vehement opponents

to banish themselves, after the example of Metellus Numidicus,(11)

by refusing the oath. But these did not show themselves

so complaisant; even the rigid Cato submitted to the oath,

and his Sanchos followed him. A second, far from honourable,

attempt to threaten the heads of the aristocracy with criminal

impeachments on account of an alleged plot for the murder of Pompeius,

and so to drive them into exile, was frustrated by the incapacity

of the instruments; the informer, one Vettius, exaggerated

and contradicted himself so grossly, and the tribune Vatinius,

who directed the foul scheme, showed his complicity with that Vettius

so clearly, that it was found advisable to strangle the latter

in prison and to let the whole matter drop. On this occasion however

they had obtained sufficient evidence of the total disorganization

of the aristocracy and the boundless alarm of the genteel lords:

even a man like Lucius Lucullus had thrown himself in person

at Caesar's feet and publicly declared that he found himself compelled

by reason of his great age to withdraw from public life.

Cato and Cicero Removed

Ultimately therefore they were content with a few isolated victims.

It was of primary importance to remove Cato, who made no secret

of his conviction as to the nullity of all the Julian laws,

and who was a man to act as he thought. Such a man Marcus Cicero

was certainly not, and they did not give themselves the trouble

to fear him. But the democratic party, which played the leading part

in the coalition, could not possibly after its victory leave

unpunished the judicial murder of the 5th December 691, which it

had so loudly and so justly censured. Had they wished to bring

to account the real authors of the fatal decree, they ought

to have seized not on the pusillanimous consul, but on the section

of the strict aristocracy which had urged the timorous man

to that execution. But in formal law it was certainly not the advisers

of the consul, but the consul himself, that was responsible for it,

and it was above all the gentler course to call the consul alone

to account and to leave the senatorial college wholly out of the case;

for which reason in the grounds of the proposal directed against

Cicero the decree of the senate, in virtue of which he ordered

the execution, was directly described as supposititious. Even against

Cicero the holders of power would gladly have avoided steps

that attracted attention; but he could not prevail on himself either

to give to those in power the guarantees which they required,

or to banish himself from Rome under one of the feasible pretexts

on several occasions offered to him, or even to keep silence.

With the utmost desire to avoid any offence and the most sincere alarm,

he yet had not self-control enough to be prudent; the word had

to come out, when a petulant witticism stung him, or when his self-

conceit almost rendered crazy by the praise of so many noble lords

gave vent to the well-cadenced periods of the plebeian advocate.

Clodius

The execution of the measures resolved on against Cato and Cicero

was committed to the loose and dissolute, but clever and pre-

eminently audacious Publius Clodius, who had lived for years

in the bitterest enmity with Cicero, and, with the view of satisfying

that enmity and playing a part as demagogue, had got himself converted

under the consulship of Caesar by a hasty adoption from a patrician

into a plebeian, and then chosen as tribune of the people

for the year 696. To support Clodius, the proconsul Caesar remained

in the immediate vicinity of the capital till the blow was struck

against the two victims. Agreeably to the instructions

which he had received, Clodius proposed to the burgesses to entrust

Cato with the regulation of the complicated municipal affairs

of the Byzantines and with the annexation of the kingdom of Cyprus,

which as well as Egypt had fallen to the Romans by the testament

of Alexander II, but had not like Egypt bought off the Roman

annexation, and the king of which, moreover, had formerly given

personal offence to Clodius. As to Cicero, Clodius brought in

a project of law which characterized the execution of a burgess

without trial and sentence as a crime to be punished with banishment.

Cato was thus removed by an honourable mission, while Cicero

was visited at least with the gentlest possible punishment and,

besides, was not designated by name in the proposal. But they did not

refuse themselves the pleasure, on the one hand, of punishing

a man notoriously timid and belonging to the class of political

weathercocks for the conservative energy which he displayed,

and, on the other hand, of investing the bitter opponent

of all interferences of the burgesses in administration

and of all extraordinary commands with such a command conferred

by decree of the burgesses themselves; and with similar humour

the proposal respecting Cato was based on the ground of the abnormal

virtue of the man, which made him appear pre-eminently qualified

to execute so delicate a commission, as was the confiscation

of the considerable crown treasure of Cyprus, without embezzlement.

Both proposals bear generally the same character of respectful

deference and cool irony, which marks throughout the bearing of Caesar

in reference to the senate. They met with no resistance.

It was naturally of no avail, that the majority of the senate,

with the view of protesting in some way against the mockery

and censure of their decree in the matter of Catilina, publicly

put on mourning, and that Cicero himself, now when it was too late,

fell on his knees and besought mercy from Pompeius; he had to banish

himself even before the passing of the law which debarred him

from his native land (April 696). Cato likewise did not venture

to provoke sharper measures by declining the commission

which he had received, but accepted itand embarked for the east.(12)

What was most immediately necessary was done; Caesar too

might leave Italy to devote himself to more serious tasks.

CHAPTER VII

The Subjugation of the West

The Romanizing of the West

When the course of history turns from the miserable monotony

of the political selfishness, which fought its battles

in the senate-house and in the streets of the capital, to matters

of greater importance than the question whether the first monarch

of Rome should be called Gnaeus, Gaius, or Marcus, we may well

be allowed--on the threshold of an event, the effects of which still

at the present day influence the destinies of the world--to look round us

for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest

of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact

with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be

apprehended in their bearing on the general history of the world.

By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state

absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized

people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage--

by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much

a law of nature as the law of gravity--the Italian nation (the only

one in antiquity which was able to combine a superior political

development and a superior civilization, though it presented

the latter only in an imperfect and external manner) was entitled

to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the east which were ripe

for destruction, and to dispossess the peoples of lower grades

of culture in the west--Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Germans--by means

of its settlers; just as England with equal right has in Asia reduced

to subjection a civilization of rival standing but politically

impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled,

and still continues to mark and ennoble, extensive barbarian

countries with the impress of its nationality. The Roman aristocracy

had accomplished the preliminary condition required for this task--

the union of Italy; the task itself it never solved, but always

regarded the extra-Italian conquests either as simply a necessary

evil, or as a fiscal possession virtually beyond the pale

of the state. It is the imperishable glory of the Roman democracy

or monarchy--for the two coincide--to have correctly apprehended

and vigorously realized this its highest destination. What

the irresistible force of circumstances had paved the way for,

through the senate establishing against its will the foundations

of the future Roman dominion in the west as in the east; what thereafter

the Roman emigration to the provinces--which came as a public

calamity, no doubt, but also in the western regions at any rate

as a pioneer of a higher culture--pursued as matter of instinct;

the creator of the Roman democracy, Gaius Gracchus, grasped

and began to carry out with statesmanlike clearness and decision.

The two fundamental ideas of the new policy--to reunite

the territories under the power of Rome, so far as they were Hellenic,

and to colonize them, so far as they were not Hellenic--had already

in the Gracchan age been practically recognized by the annexation

of the kingdom of Attalus and by the Transalpine conquests of Flaccus:

but the prevailing reaction once more arrested their application.

The Roman state remained a chaotic mass of countries without thorough

occupation and without proper limits. Spain and the Graeco-Asiatic

possessions were separated from the mother country by wide

territories, of which barely the borders along the coast

were subject to the Romans; on the north coast of Africa the domains

of Carthage and Cyrene alone were occupied like oases; large tracts

even of the subject territory, especially in Spain, were but nominally

subject to the Romans. Absolutely nothing was done on the part

of the government towards concentrating and rounding off

their dominion, and the decay of the fleet seemed at length

to dissolve the last bond of connection between the distant

possessions. The democracy no doubt attempted, so soon as it

again raised its head, to shape its external policy in the spirit

of Gracchus--Marius in particular cherished such ideas--but as it

did not for any length of time attain the helm, its projects

were left unfulfilled. It was not till the democracy practically took

in hand the government on the overthrow of the Sullan constitution

in 684, that a revolution in this respect occurred. First of all

their sovereignty on the Mediterranean was restored--the most

vital question for a state like that of Rome. Towards the east,

moreover, the boundary of the Euphrates was secured by the annexation

of the provinces of Pontus and Syria. But there still remained beyond

the Alps the task of at once rounding off the Roman territory towards

the north and west, and of gaining a fresh virgin soil there

for Hellenic civilization and for the yet unbroken vigour

of the Italic race.

Historical Significance of the Conquests of Caesar

This task Gaius Caesar undertook. It is more than an error,

it is an outrage upon the sacred spirit dominant in history,

to regard Gaul solely as the parade ground on which Caesar

exercised himself and his legions for the impending civil war.

Though the subjugation of the west was for Caesar so far a means

to an end that he laid the foundations of his later height of power

in the Transalpine wars, it is the especial privilege of a statesman

of genius that his means themselves are ends in their turn. Caesar

needed no doubt for his party aims a military power, but he did not

conquer Gaul as a partisan. There was a direct political necessity

for Rome to meet the perpetually threatened invasion of the Germans

thus early beyond the Alps, and to construct a rampart there

which should secure the peace of the Roman world. But even this

important object was not the highest and ultimate reason for which Gaul

was conquered by Caesar. When the old home had become too

narrow for the Roman burgesses and they were in danger of decay,

the senate's policy of Italian conquest saved them from ruin.

Now the Italian home had become in its turn too narrow; once more

the state languished under the same social evils repeating themselves

in similar fashion only on a greater scale. It was a brilliant

idea, a grand hope, which led Caesar over the Alps--the idea

and the confident expectation that he should gain there for his

fellow-burgesses a new boundless home, and regenerate the state

a second time by placing it on a broader basis.

Caesar in Spain

The campaign which Caesar undertook in 693 in Further Spain, may

be in some sense included among the enterprises which aimed at

the subjugation of the west. Long as Spain had obeyed the Romans,

its western shore had remained substantially independent of them

even after the expedition of Decimus Brutus against the Callaeci(1),

and they had not even set foot on the northern coast; while

the predatory raids, to which the subject provinces found

themselves continually exposed from those quarters, did no small

injury to the civilization and Romanizing of Spain. Against these

the expedition of Caesar along the west coast was directed.

He crossed the chain of the Herminian mountains (Sierra de Estrella)

bounding the Tagus on the north; after having conquered their

inhabitants and transplanted them in part to the plain, he reduced

the country on both sides of the Douro and arrived at the northwest

point of the peninsula, where with the aid of a flotilla brought

up from Gades he occupied Brigantium (Corunna). By this means

the peoples adjoining the Atlantic Ocean, Lusitanians and Callaecians,

were forced to acknowledge the Roman supremacy, while the conqueror

was at the same time careful to render the position of the subjects

generally more tolerable by reducing the tribute to be paid to Rome

and regulating the financial affairs of the communities.

But, although in this military and administrative debut of the great

general and statesman the same talents and the same leading ideas are

discernible which he afterwards evinced on a greater stage, his agency

in the Iberian peninsula was much too transient to have any deep effect;

the more especially as, owing to its physical and national peculiarities,

nothing but action steadily continued for a considerable time could

exert any durable influence there.

Gaul

A more important part in the Romanic development of the west

was reserved by destiny for the country which stretches between

the Pyrenees and the Rhine, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean,

and which since the Augustan age has been especially designated

by the name of the land of the Celts--Gallia--although strictly

speaking the land of the Celts was partly narrower, partly much

more extensive, and the country so called never formed a national

unity, and did not form a political unity before Augustus.

For this very reason it is not easy to present a clear picture

of the very heterogeneous state of things which Caesar encountered

on his arrival there in 696.

The Roman Province

Wars and Revolts There

In the region on the Mediterranean, which, embracing approximately

Languedoc on the west of the Rhone, on the east Dauphine and Provence,

had been for sixty years a Roman province, the Roman arms had seldom

been at rest since the Cimbrian invasion which had swept over it.

In 664 Gaius Caelius had fought with the Salyes about Aquae Sextiae,

and in 674 Gaius Flaccus,(2) on his march to Spain, with other

Celtic nations. When in the Sertorian war the governor Lucius Manlius,

compelled to hasten to the aid of his colleagues beyond the Pyrenees,

returned defeated from Ilerda (Lerida) and on his way home

was vanquished a second time by the western neighbours

of the Roman province, the Aquitani (about 676;(3)), this seems

to have provoked a general rising of the provincials between

the Pyrenees and the Rhone, perhaps even of those between the Rhone

and Alps. Pompeius had to make his way with the sword through

the insurgent Gaul to Spain,(4) and by way of penalty for their

rebellion gave the territories of the Volcae-Arecomici

and the Helvii (dep. Gard and Ardeche) over to the Massiliots;

the governor Manius Fonteius (678-680) carried out these arrangements

and restored tranquillity in the province by subduing the Vocontii

(dep. Drome), protecting Massilia from the insurgents,

and liberating the Roman capital Narbo which they invested.

Despair, however, and the financial embarrassment which the participation

in the sufferings of the Spanish war(5) and generally the official

and non-official exactions of the Romans brought upon the Gallic

provinces, did not allow them to be tranquil; and in particular

the canton of the Allobroges, the most remote from Narbo,

was in a perpetual ferment, which was attested by the "pacification"

that Gaius Piso undertook there in 688 as well as by the behaviour

of the Allobrogian embassy in Rome on occasion of the anarchist plot

in 691,(6) and which soon afterwards (693) broke into open revolt

Catugnatus the leader of the Allobroges in this war of despair,

who had at first fought not unsuccessfully, was conquered at Solonium

after a glorious resistance by the governor Gaius Pomptinus.

Bounds

Relations to Rome

Notwithstanding all these conflicts the bounds of the Roman

territory were not materially advanced; Lugudunum Convenarum,

where Pompeius had settled the remnant of the Sertorian army,(7)

Tolosa, Vienna and Genava were still the most remote Roman townships

towards the west and north. But at the same time the importance

of these Gallic possessions for the mother country was continually

on the increase. The glorious climate, akin to that of Italy,

the favourable nature of the soil, the large and rich region lying

behind so advantageous for commerce with its mercantile routes

reaching as far as Britain, the easy intercourse by land and sea

with the mother country, rapidly gave to southern Gaul an economic

importance for Italy, which much older possessions, such as those

in Spain, had not acquired in the course of centuries; and as

the Romans who had suffered political shipwreck at this period sought

an asylum especially in Massilia, and there found once more Italian

culture and Italian luxury, voluntary emigrants from Italy also

were attracted more and more to the Rhone and the Garonne.

"The province of Gaul," it was said in a sketch drawn ten years

before Caesar's arrival, "is full of merchants; it swarms with Roman

burgesses. No native of Gaul transacts a piece of business without

the intervention of a Roman; every penny, that passes from one hand

to another in Gaul, goes through the account books of the Roman

burgesses." From the same description it appears that in addition

to the colonists of Narbo there were Romans cultivating land

and rearing cattle, resident in great numbers in Gaul; as to which,

however, it must not be overlooked that most of the provincial land

possessed by Romans, just like the greater part of the English

possessions in the earliest times in America, was in the hands

of the high nobility living in Italy, and those farmers and graziers

consisted for the most part of their stewards--slaves or freedmen.

Incipient Romanizing

It is easy to understand how under such circumstances civilization

and Romanizing rapidly spread among the natives. These Celts

were not fond of agriculture; but their new masters compelled them

to exchange the sword for the plough, and it is very credible

that the embittered resistance of the Allobroges was provoked in part

by some such injunctions. In earlier times Hellenism had also

to a certain degree dominated those regions; the elements

of a higher culture, the stimulus to the cultivation of the vine

and the olive,(8) to the use of writing(9) and to the coining of money,

came to them from Massilia. The Hellenic culture was in this case

far from being set aside by the Romans; Massilia gained through

them more influence than it lost; and even in the Roman period

Greek physicians and rhetoricians were publicly employed

in the Gallic cantons. But, as may readily be conceived, Hellenism

in southern Gaul acquired through the agency of the Romans the same

character as in Italy; the distinctively Hellenic civilization

gave place to the Latino-Greek mixed culture, which soon made

proselytes here in great numbers. The "Gauls in the breeches,"

as the inhabitants of southern Gaul were called by way of contrast

to the "Gauls in the toga" of northern Italy, were not indeed

like the latter already completely Romanized, but they were even now

very perceptibly distinguished from the "longhaired Gauls"

of the northern regions still unsubdued. The semiculture becoming

naturalized among them furnished, doubtless, materials enough

for ridicule of their barbarous Latin, and people did not fail

to suggest to any one suspected of Celtic descent his "relationship

with the breeches"; but this bad Latin was yet sufficient

to enable even the remote Allobroges to transact business

with the Roman authorities, and even to give testimony in the Roman

courts without an interpreter.

While the Celtic and Ligurian population of these regions

was thus in the course of losing its nationality, and was languishing

and pining withal under a political and economic oppression,

the intolerable nature of which is sufficiently attested by their

hopeless insurrections, the decline of the native population here

went hand in hand with the naturalizing of the same higher culture

which we find at this period in Italy. Aquae Sextiae and still

more Narbo were considerable townships, which might probably be

named by the side of Beneventum and Capua; and Massilia, the best

organized, most free, most capable of self-defence, and most

powerful of all the Greek cities dependent on Rome, under its

rigorous aristocratic government to which the Roman conservatives

probably pointed as the model of a good urban constitution,

in possession of an important territory which had been considerably

enlarged by the Romans and of an extensive trade, stood by the side

of those Latin towns as Rhegium and Neapolis stood in Italy

by the side of Beneventum and Capua.

Free Gaul

Matters wore a different aspect, when one crossed the Roman frontier.

The great Celtic nation, which in the southern districts already

began to be crushed by the Italian immigration, still moved

to the north of the Cevennes in its time-hallowed freedom.

It is not the first time that we meet it: the Italians had already

fought with the offsets and advanced posts of this vast stock

on the Tiber and on the Po, in the mountains of Castile and Carinthia,

and even in the heart of Asia Minor; but it was here that the main stock

was first assailed at its very core by their attacks. The Celtic race

had on its settlement in central Europe diffused itself chiefly

over the rich river-valleys and the pleasant hill-country

of the present France, including the western districts of Germany

and Switzerland, and from thence had occupied at least the southern

part of England, perhaps even at this time all Great Britain

and Ireland;(10) it formed here more than anywhere else a broad,

geographically compact, mass of peoples. In spite of

the differences in language and manners which naturally

were to be found within this wide territory, a close mutual intercourse,

an innate sense of fellowship, seems to have knit together

the tribes from the Rhone and Garonne to the Rhine and the Thames;

whereas, although these doubtless were in a certain measure locally

connected with the Celts in Spain and in the modern Austria,

the mighty mountain barriers of the Pyrenees and the Alps

on the one hand, and the encroachments of the Romans and the Germans

which also operated here on the other, interrupted the intercourse

and the intrinsic connection of the cognate peoples far otherwise

than the narrow arm of the sea interrupted the relations

of the continental and the British Celts. Unhappily we are not

permitted to trace stage by stage the history of the internal development

of this remarkable people in these its chief seats; we must be content

with presenting at least some outline of its historical culture

and political condition, as it here meets us in the time of Caesar.

Population

Agriculture and the Rearing of Cattle

Gaul was, according to the reports of the ancients, comparatively

well peopled. Certain statements lead us to infer that in the Belgic

districts there were some 200 persons to the square mile--

a proportion such as nearly holds at present for Wales

and for Livonia--in the Helvetic canton about 245;(11) it is probable

that in the districts which were more cultivated than the Belgic

and less mountainous than the Helvetian, as among the Bituriges,

Arverni, Haedui, the number rose still higher. Agriculture

was no doubt practised in Gaul--for even the contemporaries of Caesar

were surprised in the region of the Rhine by the custom of manuring

with marl,(12) and the primitive Celtic custom of preparing beer

(-cervesia-) from barley is likewise an evidence of the early

and wide diffusion of the culture of grain--but it was not held

in estimation. Even in the more civilized south it was reckoned not

becoming for the free Celts to handle the plough. In far higher

estimation among the Celts stood pastoral husbandry, for which

the Roman landholders of this epoch very gladly availed themselves

both of the Celtic breed of cattle, and of the brave Celtic slaves

skilled in riding and familiar with the rearing of animals.(13)

Particularly in the northern Celtic districts pastoral husbandry

was thoroughly predominant. Brittany was in Caesar's time

a country poor in corn. In the north-east dense forests, attaching

themselves to the heart of the Ardennes, stretched almost without

interruption from the German Ocean to the Rhine; and on the plains

of Flanders and Lorraine, now so fertile, the Menapian and Treverian

herdsman then fed his half-wild swine in the impenetrable oak-forest.

Just as in the valley of the Po the Romans made the production

of wool and the culture of corn supersede the Celtic feeding

of pigs on acorns, so the rearing of sheep and the agriculture

in the plains of the Scheldt and the Maas are traceable

to their influence. In Britain even the threshing of corn

was not yet usual; and in its more northern districts agriculture

was not practised, and the rearing of cattle was the only known mode

of turning the soil to account. The culture of the olive and vine,

which yielded rich produce to the Massiliots, was not yet prosecuted

beyond the Cevennes in the time of Caesar.

Urban Life

The Gauls were from the first disposed to settle in groups;

there were open villages everywhere, and the Helvetic canton

alone numbered in 696 four hundred of these, besides a multitude

of single homesteads. But there were not wanting also walled towns,

whose walls of alternate layers surprised the Romans both by their

suitableness and by the elegant interweaving of timber and stones

in their construction; while, it is true, even in the towns

of the Allobroges the buildings were erected solely of wood.

Of such towns the Helvetii had twelve and the Suessiones an equal number;

whereas at all events in the more northern districts, such as among

the Nervii, while there were doubtless also towns, the population

during war sought protection in the morasses and forests rather

than behind their walls, and beyond the Thames the primitive

defence of the wooden barricade altogether took the place

of towns and was in war the only place of refuge for men and herds.

Intercourse

In close association with the comparatively considerable

development of urban life stands the activity of intercourse

by land and by water. Everywhere there were roads and bridges.

The river-navigation, which streams like the Rhone, Garonne, Loire,

and Seine, of themselves invited, was considerable and lucrative.

But far more remarkable was the maritime navigation of the Celts.

Not only were the Celts, to all appearance, the nation that first

regularly navigated the Atlantic ocean, but we find that the art

of building and of managing vessels had attained among them

a remarkable development. The navigation of the peoples

of the Mediterranean had, as may readily be conceived from the nature

of the waters traversed by them, for a comparatively long period

adhered to the oar; the war-vessels of the Phoenicians, Hellenes,

and Romans were at all times oared galleys, in which the sail

was applied only as an occasional aid to the oar; the trading vessels

alone were in the epoch of developed ancient civilization "sailers"

properly so called.(14) On the other hand the Gauls doubtless

employed in the Channel in Caesar's time, as for long afterwards,

a species of portable leathern skiffs, which seem to have been

in the main common oared boats, but on the west coast of Gaul

the Santones, the Pictones, and above all the Veneti sailed in large

though clumsily built ships, which were not impelled by oars

but were provided with leathern sails and iron anchor-chains;

and they employed these not only for their traffic with Britain,

but also in naval combat. Here therefore we not only meet

for the first time with navigation in the open ocean, but we find

that here the sailing vessel first fully took the place

of the oared boat--an improvement, it is true, which the declining

activity of the old world did not know how to turn to account,

and the immeasurable results of which our own epoch of renewed culture

is employed in gradually reaping.

Commerce

Manufactures

With this regular maritime intercourse between the British

and Gallic coasts, the very close political connection between

the inhabitants on both sides of the Channel is as easily explained

as the flourishing of transmarine commerce and of fisheries.

It was the Celts of Brittany in particular, that brought the tin

of the mines of Cornwall from England and carried it by the river

and land routes of Gaul to Narbo and Massilia. The statement,

that in Caesar's time certain tribes at the mouth of the Rhine subsisted

on fish and birds' eggs, may probably refer to the circumstance

that marine fishing and the collection of the eggs of sea-birds

were prosecuted there on an extensive scale. When we put together

and endeavour to fill up the isolated and scanty statements which have

reached us regarding the Celtic commerce and intercourse, we come

to see why the tolls of the river and maritime ports play a great

part in the budgets of certain cantons, such as those of the Haedui

and the Veneti, and why the chief god of the nation was regarded

by them as the protector of the roads and of commerce, and at

the same time as the inventor of manufactures. Accordingly the Celtic

industry cannot have been wholly undeveloped; indeed the singular

dexterity of the Celts, and their peculiar skill in imitating

any model and executing any instructions, are noticed by Caesar.

In most branches, however, their handicraft does not appear

to have risen above the ordinary level; the manufacture of linen

and woollen stuffs, that subsequently flourished in central

and northern Gaul, was demonstrably called into existence only

by the Romans. The elaboration of metals forms an exception,

and so far as we know the only one. The copper implements

not unfrequently of excellent workmanship and even now malleable,

which are brought to light in the tombs of Gaul, and the carefully

adjusted Arvernian gold coins, are still at the present day

striking witnesses of the skill of the Celtic workers in copper

and gold; and with this the reports of the ancients well accord,

that the Romans learned the art of tinning from the Bituriges

and that of silvering from the Alesini--inventions, the first of which

was naturally suggested by the traffic' in tin, and both of which

were probably made in the period of Celtic freedom.

Mining

Hand in hand with dexterity in the elaboration of the metals went

the art of procuring them, which had attained, more especially in

the iron mines on the Loire, such a degree of professional skill

that the miners played an important part in the sieges. The opinion

prevalent among the Romans of this period, that Gaul was one

of the richest gold countries in the world, is no doubt refuted

by the well-known nature of the soil and by the character

of the articles found in the Celtic tombs, in which gold appears

but sparingly and with far less frequency than in the similar

repositories of the true native regions of gold; this conception

no doubt had its origin merely from the descriptions which Greek

travellers and Roman soldiers, doubtless not without strong

exaggeration, gave to their countrymen of the magnificence

of the Arvernian kings,(15) and of the treasures of the Tolosan

temples.(16) But their stories were not pure fictions. It may

well be believed that in and near the rivers which flow

from the Alps and the Pyrenees gold-washing and searches for gold,

which are unprofitable at the present value of labour, were worked

with profit and on a considerable scale in ruder times and with a system

of slavery; besides, the commercial relations of Gaul may,

as is not unfrequently the case with half-civilized peoples,

have favoured the accumulation of a dead stock of the precious metals.

Art and Science

The low state of the arts of design is remarkable,

and is the more striking by the side of this mechanical skill

in handling the metals. The fondness for parti-coloured and brilliant

ornaments shows the want of a proper taste, which is sadly confirmed

by the Gallic coins with their representations sometimes exceedingly

simple, sometimes odd, but always childish in design, and almost

without exception rude beyond parallel in their execution.

It is perhaps unexampled that a coinage practised for centuries

with a certain technical skill should have essentially limited itself

to always imitating two or three Greek dies, and always

with increasing deformity. On the other hand the art of poetry

was highly valued by the Celts, and intimately blended

with the religious and even with the political institutions

of the nation; we find religious poetry, as well as that of the court

and of the mendicant, flourishing.(17) Natural science and philosophy

also found, although subject to the forms and fetters of the theology

of the country, a certain amount of attention among the Celts;

and Hellenic humanism met with a ready reception wherever

and in whatever shape it approached them. The knowledge of writing

was general at least among the priests. For the most part in free Gaul

the Greek writing was made use of in Caesar's time, as was done

among others by the Helvetii; but in its most southern districts

even then, in consequence of intercourse with the Romanized Celts,

the Latin attained predominance--we meet with it, for instance,

on the Arvernian coins of this period.

Political Organization

Cantonal Constitution

The political development of the Celtic nation also presents

very remarkable phenomena. The constitution of the state was based

in this case, as everywhere, on the clan-canton, with its prince,

its council of the elders, and its community of freemen capable

of bearing arms; but the peculiarity in this case was that it never

got beyond this cantonal constitution. Among the Greeks and Romans

the canton was very early superseded by the ring-wall as the basis

of political unity; where two cantons found themselves together

within the same walls, they amalgamated into one commonwealth;

where a body of burgesses assigned to a portion of their fellow-

burgesses a new ring-wall, there regularly arose in this way a new

state connected with the mother community only by ties of piety

and, at most, of clientship. Among the Celts on the other hand

the "burgess-body" continued at all times to be the clan; prince

and council presided over the canton and not over any town,

and the general diet of the canton formed the authority of last resort

in the state. The town had, as in the east, merely mercantile

and strategic, not political importance; for which reason the Gallic

townships, even when walled and very considerable such as Vienna

and Genava, were in the view of the Greeks and Romans nothing

but villages. In the time of Caesar the original clan-constitution

still subsisted substantially unaltered among the insular Celts

and in the northern cantons of the mainland; the general assembly held

the supreme authority; the prince was in essential questions bound

by its decrees; the common council was numerous--it numbered

in certain clans six hundred members--but does not appear

to have had more importance than the senate under the Roman kings.

In the more stirring southern portion of the land, again,

one or two generations before Caesar--the children of the last kings

were still living in his time--there had occurred, at least

among the larger clans, the Arverni, Haedui, Sequani, Helvetii,

a revolution which set aside the royal dominion and gave the power

into the hands of the nobility.

Development of Knighthood

Breaking Up of the Old Cantonal Constitution

It is simply the reverse side of the total want of urban

commonwealths among the Celts just noticed, that the opposite pole

of political development, knighthood, so thoroughly preponderates

in the Celtic clan-constitution. The Celtic aristocracy was to all

appearance a high nobility, for the most part perhaps the members

of the royal or formerly royal families; as indeed it is remarkable

that the heads of the opposite parties in the same clan

very frequently belong to the same house. These great families

combined in their hands financial, warlike, and political ascendency.

They monopolized the leases of the profitable rights of the state.

They compelled the free commons, who were oppressed by the burden

of taxation, to borrow from them, and to surrender their freedom

first de facto as debtors, then de jure as bondmen. They developed

the system of retainers, that is, the privilege of the nobility

to surround themselves with a number of hired mounted servants--

the -ambacti- as they were called (18)--and thereby to form a state

within the state; and, resting on the support of these troops

of their own, they defied the legal authorities and the common levy

and practically broke up the commonwealth. If in a clan,

which numbered about 80,000 men capable of arms, a single noble

could appear at the diet with 10,000 retainers, not reckoning

the bondmen and the debtors, it is clear that such an one

was more an independent dynast than a burgess of his clan. Moreover,

the leading families of the different clans were closely connected

and through intermarriages and special treaties formed virtually

a compact league, in presence of which the single clan was powerless.

Therefore the communities were no longer able to maintain

the public peace, and the law of the strong arm reigned throughout.

The dependent found protection only from his master, whom duty

and interest compelled to redress the injury inflicted on his client;

the state had no longer the power to protect those who were free,

and consequently these gave themselves over in numbers to some

powerful man as clients.

Abolition of the Monarchy

The common assembly lost its political importance; and even

the power of the prince, which should have checked the encroachments

of the nobility, succumbed to it among the Celts as well as in Latium.

In place of the king came the "judgment-worker" or -Vergobretus-,(19)

who was like the Roman consul nominated only for a year.

So far as the canton still held together at all, it was led

by the common council, in which naturally the heads of the aristocracy

usurped the government. Of course under such circumstances

there was agitation in the several clans much in the same way

as there had been agitation in Latium for centuries after the expulsion

of the kings: while the nobility of the different communities combined

to form a separate alliance hostile to the power of the community,

the multitude ceased not to desire the restoration of the monarchy;

and not unfrequently a prominent nobleman attempted, as Spurius

Cassius had done in Rome, with the support of the mass of those

belonging to the canton to break down the power of his peers,

and to reinstate the crown in its rights for his own special benefit.

Efforts towards National Unity

While the individual cantons were thus irremediably declining,

the sense of unity was at the same time powerfully stirring

in the nation and seeking in various ways to take shape and hold.

That combination of the whole Celtic nobility in contradistinction

to the individual canton-unions, while disturbing the existing order

of things, awakened and fostered the conception of the collective

unity of the nation. The attacks directed against the nation

from without, and the continued diminution of its territory in war

with its neighbours, operated in the same direction. Like the Hellenes

in their wars with the Persians, and the Italians in their wars

with the Celts, the Transalpine Gauls seem to have become conscious

of the existence and the power of their national unity in the wars

against Rome. Amidst the dissensions of rival clans and all their

feudal quarrelling there might still be heard the voices of those

who were ready to purchase the independence of the nation

at the cost of the independence of the several cantons, and even

at that of the seignorial rights of the knights. The thorough

popularity of the opposition to a foreign yoke was shown by the wars

of Caesar, with reference to whom the Celtic patriot party occupied

a position entirely similar to that of the German patriots

towards Napoleon; its extent and organization are attested,

among other things, by the telegraphic rapidity with which news

was communicated from one point to another.

Religious Union of the Nation

Druids

The universality and the strength of the Celtic national feeling

would be inexplicable but for the circumstance that, amidst

the greatest political disruption, the Celtic nation had for long

been centralized in respect of religion and even of theology.

The Celtic priesthood or, to use the native name, the corporation

of the Druids, certainly embraced the British islands and all Gaul,

and perhaps also other Celtic countries, in a common religious-

national bond. It possessed a special head elected by the priests

themselves; special schools, in which its very comprehensive

tradition was transmitted; special privileges, particularly

exemption from taxation and military service, which every clan

respected; annual councils, which were held near Chartres

at the "centre of the Celtic earth"; and above all, a believing people,

who in painful piety and blind obedience to their priests seem

to have been nowise inferior to the Irish of modern times. It may

readily be conceived that such a priesthood attempted to usurp,

as it partially did usurp, the secular government; where the annual

monarchy subsisted, it conducted the elections in the event

of an interregnum; it successfully laid claim to the right of excluding

individuals and whole communities from religious, and consequently

also from civil, society; it was careful to draw to itself the most

important civil causes, especially processes as to boundaries

and inheritance; on the ground, apparently, of its right to exclude

from the community, and perhaps also of the national custom

that criminals should be by preference taken for the usual

human sacrifices, it developed an extensive priestly criminal

jurisdiction, which was co-ordinate with that of the kings

and vergobrets; it even claimed the right of deciding on war and peace.

The Gauls were not far removed from an ecclesiastical state

with its pope and councils, its immunities, interdicts,

and spiritual courts; only this ecclesiastical state did not,

like that of recent times, stand aloof from the nations,

but was on the contrary pre-eminently national.

Want of Political Centralization

The Canton-Leagues

But while the sense of mutual relationship was thus vividly

awakened among the Celtic tribes, the nation was still precluded

from attaining a basis of political centralization such as Italy

found in the Roman burgesses, and the Hellenes and Germans

in the Macedonian and Frank kings. The Celtic priesthood and likewise

the nobility--although both in a certain sense represented and combined

the nation--were yet, on the one hand, incapable of uniting it

in consequence of their particular class-interests, and, on the other

hand, sufficiently powerful to allow no king and no canton to accomplish

the work of union. Attempts at this work were not wanting;

they followed, as the cantonal constitution suggested,

the system of hegemony. A powerful canton induced a weaker

to become subordinate, on such a footing that the leading canton

acted for the other as well as for itself in its external relations

and stipulated for it in state-treaties, while the dependent canton

bound itself to render military service and sometimes also to pay

a tribute. In this way a series of separate leagues arose;

but there was no leading canton for all Gaul--no tie, however

loose, combining the nation as a whole.

The Belgic League

The Maritime Cantons

The Leagues of Central Gaul

It has been already mentioned(20) that the Romans

at the commencement of their Transalpine conquests found in the north

a Britanno-Belgic league under the leadership of the Suessiones,

and in central and southern Gaul the confederation of the Arverni,

with which latter the Haedui, although having a weaker body

of clients, carried on a rivalry. In Caesar's time we find the Belgae

in north-eastern Gaul between the Seine and the Rhine still forming

such an association, which, however, apparently no longer extends

to Britain; by their side there appears, in the modern Normandy

and Brittany, the league of the Aremorican or the maritime cantons:

in central or proper Gaul two parties as formerly contended

for the hegemony, the one headed by the Haedui, the other by the Sequani

after the Arvernians weakened by the wars with Rome had retired.

These different confederacies subsisted independently side by side;

the leading states of central Gaul appear never to have extended

their clientship to the north-east nor, seriously, perhaps even

to the north-west of Gaul.

Character of Those Leagues

The impulse of the nation towards freedom found doubtless a certain

gratification in these cantonal unions; but they were in every

respect unsatisfactory. The union was of the loosest kind, constantly

fluctuating between alliance and hegemony; the representation

of the whole body in peace by the federal diets, in war

by the general,(21) was in the highest degree feeble. The Belgian

confederacy alone seems to have been bound together somewhat

more firmly; the national enthusiasm, from which the successful

repulse of the Cimbri proceeded,(22) may have proved beneficial

to it. The rivalries for the hegemony made a breach in every

league, which time did not close but widened, because the victory

of one competitor still left his opponent in possession

of political existence, and it always remained open to him,

even though he had submitted to clientship, subsequently to renew

the struggle. The rivalry among the more powerful cantons not only

set these at variance, but spread into every dependent clan,

into every village, often indeed into every house, for each individual

chose his side according to his personal relations. As Hellas

exhausted its strength not so much in the struggle of Athens against

Sparta as in the internal strife of the Athenian and Lacedaemonian

factions in every dependent community, and even in Athens itself,

so the rivalry of the Arverni and Haedui with its repetitions

on a smaller and smaller scale destroyed the Celtic people.

The Celtic Military System

Cavalry

The military capability of the nation felt the reflex influence

of these political and social relations. The cavalry was throughout

the predominant arm; alongside of which among the Belgae, and still

more in the British islands, the old national war-chariots appear

in remarkable perfection. These equally numerous and efficient

bands of combatants on horseback and in chariots were formed

from the nobility and its vassals; for the nobles had a genuine knightly

delight in dogs and horses, and were at much expense to procure

noble horses of foreign breed. It is characteristic of the spirit

and the mode of fighting of these nobles that, when the levy

was called out, whoever could keep his seat on horseback,

even the gray-haired old man, took the field, and that, when on the point

of beginning a combat with an enemy of whom they made little account,

they swore man by man that they would keep aloof from house

and homestead, unless their band should charge at least twice through

the enemy's line. Among the hired warriors the free-lance spirit

prevailed with all its demoralized and stolid indifference towards

their own life and that of others. This is apparent from the stories--

however anecdotic their colouring--of the Celtic custom of tilting

by way of sport and now and then fighting for life or death

at a banquet, and of the usage (which prevailed among the Celts,

and outdid even the Roman gladiatorial games) of selling themselves

to be killed for a set sum of money or a number of casks of wine,

and voluntarily accepting the fatal blow stretched on their shield

before the eyes of the whole multitude.

Infantry

By the side of these mounted warriors the infantry fell

into the background. In the main it essentially resembled the bands

of Celts, with whom the Romans had fought in Italy and Spain.

The large shield was, as then, the principal weapon of defence;

among the offensive arms, on the other hand, the long thrusting

lance now played the chief part in room of the sword. Where several

cantons waged war in league, they naturally encamped and fought clan

against clan; there is no trace of their giving to the levy of each

canton military organization and forming smaller and more regular

tactical subdivisions. A long train of waggons still dragged

the baggage of the Celtic army; instead of an entrenched camp, such as

the Romans pitched every night, the poor substitute of a barricade

of waggons still sufficed. In the case of certain cantons,

such as the Nervii, the efficiency of their infantry is noticed

as exceptional; it is remarkable that these had no cavalry,

and perhaps were not even a Celtic but an immigrant German tribe.

But in general the Celtic infantry of this period appears

as an unwarlike and unwieldy levy en masse; most of all

in the more southern provinces, where along with barbarism valour

had also disappeared. The Celt, says Caesar, ventures not to face

the German in battle. The Roman general passed a censure

still more severe than this judgment on the Celtic infantry,

seeing that, after having become acquainted with them

in his first campaign, he never again employed them

in connection with Roman infantry.

Stage of Development of the Celtic Civilization

If we survey the whole condition of the Celts as Caesar found it

in the Transalpine regions, there is an unmistakeable advance

in civilization, as compared with the stage of culture at which

the Celts came before us a century and a half previously in the valley

of the Po. Then the militia, excellent of its kind, thoroughly

preponderated in their armies;(23) now the cavalry occupies

the first place. Then the Celts dwelt in open villages; now well-

constructed walls surrounded their townships. The objects too

found in the tombs of Lombardy are, especially as respects articles

of copper and glass, far inferior to those of northern Gaul.

Perhaps the most trustworthy measure of the increase of culture

is the sense of a common relationship in the nation; so little

of it comes to light in the Celtic battles fought on the soil of what

is now Lombardy, while it strikingly appears in the struggles

against Caesar. To all appearance the Celtic nation, when Caesar

encountered it, had already reached the maximum of the culture

allotted to it, and was even now on the decline. The civilization

of the Transalpine Celts in Caesar's time presents, even for us

who are but very imperfectly informed regarding it, several aspects

that are estimable, and yet more that are interesting; in some

respects it is more akin to the modern than to the Hellenic-Roman

culture, with its sailing vessels, its knighthood, its ecclesiastical

constitution, above all with its attempts, however imperfect,

to build the state not on the city, but on the tribe and in a higher

degree on the nation. But just because we here meet the Celtic nation

at the culminating point of its development, its lesser degree

of moral endowment or, which is the same thing, its lesser

capacity of culture, comes more distinctly into view.

It was unable to produce from its own resources either a national

art or a national state; it attained at the utmost a national theology

and a peculiar type of nobility. The original simple valour

was no more; the military courage based on higher morality and judicious

organization, which comes in the train of increased civilization,

had only made its appearance in a very stunted form among

the knights. Barbarism in the strict sense was doubtless outlived;

the times had gone by, when in Gaul the fat haunch was assigned

to the bravest of the guests, but each of his fellow-guests who thought

himself offended thereby was at liberty to challenge the receiver

on that score to combat, and when the most faithful retainers

of a deceased chief were burnt along with him. But human sacrifices

still continued, and the maxim of law, that torture was inadmissible

in the case of the free man but allowable in that of the free

woman as well as of slaves, throws a far from pleasing light

on the position which the female sex held among the Celts

even in their period of culture. The Celts had lost the advantages

which specially belong to the primitive epoch of nations, but had not

acquired those which civilization brings with it when it intimately

and thoroughly pervades a people.

External Relations

Celts and Iberians

Such was the internal condition of the Celtic nation. It remains

that we set forth their external relations with their neighbours,

and describe the part which they sustained at this moment in the mighty

rival race and rival struggle of the nations, in which it is

everywhere still more difficult to maintain than to acquire.

Along the Pyrenees the relations of the peoples had for long been

peaceably settled, and the times had long gone by when the Celts

there pressed hard on, and to some extent supplanted, the Iberian,

that is, the Basque, original population. The valleys of the Pyrenees

as well as the mountains of Bearn and Gascony, and also the coast-

steppes to the south of the Garonne, were at the time of Caesar

in the undisputed possession of the Aquitani, a great number

of small tribes of Iberian descent, coming little into contact

with each other and still less with the outer world; in this quarter

only the mouth of the Garonne with the important port of Burdigala

(Bordeaux) was in the hands of a Celtic tribe, the Bituriges-Vivisci.

Celts and Romans

Advance of Roman Trade and Commerce into Free Gaul

Of far greater importance was the contact of the Celtic nation

with the Roman people, and with the Germans. We need not here repeat--

what has been related already--how the Romans in their slow advance

had gradually pressed back the Celts, had at last occupied the belt

of coast between the Alps and the Pyrenees, and had thereby totally

cut them off from Italy, Spain and the Mediterranean Sea--a catastrophe,

for which the way had already been prepared centuries before

by the laying out of the Hellenic stronghold at the mouth

of the Rhone. But we must here recall the fact that it was not merely

the superiority of the Roman arms which pressed hard on the Celts,

but quite as much that of Roman culture, which likewise reaped

the ultimate benefit of the respectable beginnings of Hellenic

civilization in Gaul. Here too, as so often happens, trade

and commerce paved the way for conquest. The Celt after northern

fashion was fond of fiery drinks; the fact that like the Scythian

he drank the generous wine unmingled and to intoxication,

excited the surprise and the disgust of the temperate southern;

but the trader has no objection to deal with such customers.

Soon the trade with Gaul became a mine of gold for the Italian merchant;

it was nothing unusual there for a jar of wine to be exchanged

for a slave. Other articles of luxury, such as Italian horses,

found advantageous sale in Gaul. There were instances even already

of Roman burgesses acquiring landed property beyond the Roman

frontier, and turning it to profit after the Italian fashion;

there is mention, for example, of Roman estates in the canton

of the Segusiavi (near Lyons) as early as about 673. Beyond doubt it

was a consequence of this that, as already mentioned(24) in free Gaul

itself, e. g. among the Arverni, the Roman language was not unknown

even before the conquest; although this knowledge was presumably

still restricted to few, and even the men of rank in the allied

canton of the Haedui had to be conversed with through interpreters.

Just as the traffickers in fire-water and the squatters led the way

in the occupation of North America, so these Roman wine-traders

and landlords paved the way for, and beckoned onward, the future

conqueror of Gaul. How vividly this was felt even on the opposite

side, is shown by the prohibition which one of the most energetic

tribes of Gaul, the canton of the Nervii, like some German peoples,

issued against trafficking with the Romans.

Celts and Germans

Still more violent even than the pressure of the Romans

from the Mediterranean was that of the Germans downward from the Baltic

and the North Sea--a fresh stock from the great cradle of peoples

in the east, which made room for itself by the side of its elder

brethren with youthful vigour, although also with youthful

rudeness. Though the tribes of this stock dwelling nearest

to the Rhine--the Usipetes, Tencteri, Sugambri, Ubii--had begun to be

in some degree civilized, and had at least ceased voluntarily

to change their abodes, all accounts yet agree that farther inland

agriculture was of little importance, and the several tribes

had hardly yet attained fixed abodes. It is significant

in this respect that their western neighbours at this time hardly knew

how to name any one of the peoples of the interior of Germany

by its cantonal name; these were only known to them under the general

appellations of the Suebi, that is, the roving people or nomads,

and the Marcomani, that is, the land-guard(25)--names which were

hardly cantonal names in Caesar's time, although they appeared

as such to the Romans and subsequently became in various cases

names of cantons.

The Right Bank of the Rhine Lost to the Celts

The most violent onset of this great nation fell upon the Celts.

The struggles, in which the Germans probably engaged with the Celts

for the possession of the regions to the east of the Rhine, are

wholly withdrawn from our view. We are only able to perceive,

that about the end of the seventh century of Rome all the land

as far as the Rhine was already lost to the Celts; that the Boii,

who were probably once settled in Bavaria and Bohemia,(26) were homeless

wanderers; and that even the Black Forest formerly possessed

by the Helvetii,(27) if not yet taken possession of by the German tribes

dwelling in the vicinity, was at least waste debateable border-

land, and was presumably even then, what it was afterwards called,

the Helvetian desert The barbarous strategy of the Germans--which

secured them from hostile attacks by laying waste the neighbourhood

for miles--seems to have been applied here on the greatest scale.

German Tribes on the Left Bank of the Rhine