had been in a position to regulate it,(72) more judicious
than Tiberius Gracchus, did not seek to restore the farmer-system
at any price, even at that of a revolution--concealed under
juristic clauses--directed against property; by him on the contrary,
as by every other genuine statesman, the security of that
which is property or is at any rate regarded by the public
as property was esteemed as the first and most inviolable
of all political maxims, and it was only within the limits assigned
by this maxim that he sought to accomplish the elevation of the Italian
small holdings, which also appeared to him as a vital question
for the nation. Even as it was, there was much still left for him
in this respect to do. Every private right, whether it was called
property or entitled heritable possession, whether traceable to Gracchus
or to Sulla, was unconditionally respected by him. On the other hand,
Caesar, after he had in his strictly economical fashion--
which tolerated no waste and no negligence even on a small scale--
instituted a general revision of the Italian titles to possession
by the revived commission of Twenty,(73) destined the whole
actual domain land of Italy (including a considerable portion
of the real estates that were in the hands of spiritual guilds
but legally belonged to the state) for distribution in the Gracchan
fashion, so far, of course, as it was fitted for agriculture;
the Apulian summer and the Samnite winter pastures belonging
to the state continued to be domain; and it was at least the design
of the Imperator, if these domains should not suffice, to procure
the additional land requisite by the purchase of Italian estates
from the public funds. In the selection of the new farmers provision
was naturally made first of all for the veteran soldiers,
and as far as possible the burden, which the levy imposed
on the mother country, was converted into a benefit by the fact
that Caesar gave the proletarian, who was levied from it as a recruit,
back to it as a farmer; it is remarkable also that the desolate
Latin communities, such as Veii and Capena, seem to have been
preferentially provided with new colonists. The regulation
of Caesar that the new owners should not be entitled to alienate
the lands received by them till after twenty years, was a happy medium
between the full bestowal of the right of alienation, which would have
brought the larger portion of the distributed land speedily
back into the hands of the great capitalists, and the permanent
restrictions on freedom of dealing in land which Tiberius Gracchus(74)
and Sulla (75) had enacted, both equally in vain.
Elevation of the Municipal System
Lastly while the government thus energetically applied itself
to remove the diseased, and to strengthen the sound, elements
of the Italian national life, the newly-regulated municipal system--
which had but recently developed itself out of the crisis
of the Social war in and alongside of the state-economy(76)--was intended
to communicate to the new absolute monarchy the communal life
which was compatible with it, and to impart to the sluggish circulation
of the noblest elements of public life once more a quickened action.
The leading principles in the two municipal ordinances issued in 705
for Cisalpine Gaul and in 709 for Italy,(77) the latter of which remained
the fundamental law for all succeeding times, are apparently, first,
the strict purifying of the urban corporations from all immoral elements,
while yet no trace of political police occurs; secondly, the utmost
restriction of centralization and the utmost freedom of movement
in the communities, to which there was even now reserved the election
of magistrates and an--although limited--civil and criminal jurisdiction.
The general police enactments, such as the restrictions on the right
of association,(78) came, it is true, into operation also here.
Such were the ordinances, by which Caesar attempted to reform
the Italian national economy. It is easy both to show their
insufficiency, seeing that they allowed a multitude of evils
still to exist, and to prove that they operated in various respects
injuriously by imposing restrictions, some of which were
very severely felt, on freedom of dealing. It is still easier
to show that the evils of the Italian national economy generally
were incurable. But in spite of this the practical statesman
will admire the work as well as the master-workman. It was already
no small achievement that, where a man like Sulla, despairing
of remedy, had contented himself with a mere formal reorganization,
the evil was seized in its proper seat and grappled with there;
and we may well conclude that Caesar with his reforms came as near
to the measure of what was possible as it was given to a statesman
and a Roman to come. He could not and did not expect from them
the regeneration of Italy; but he sought on the contrary to attain
this in a very different way, for the right apprehension
of which it is necessary first of all to review the condition
of the provinces as Caesar found them.
Provinces
The provinces, which Caesar found in existence, were fourteen in number:
seven European--the Further and the Hither Spain, Transalpine Gaul,
Italian Gaul with Illyricum, Macedonia with Greece, Sicily,
Sardinia with Corsica; five Asiatic--Asia, Bithynia and Pontus,
Cilicia with Cyprus, Syria, Crete; and two African--Cyrene and Africa.
To these Caesar added three new ones by the erection of the two new
governorships of Lugdunese Gaul and Belgica(79) and by constituting
Illyricum a province by itself.(80)
Provincial Administration of the Oligarchy
In the administration of these provinces oligarchic misrule
had reached a point which, notwithstanding various noteworthy
performances in this line, no second government has ever attained
at least in the west, and which according to our ideas it seems
no longer possible to surpass. Certainly the responsibility for this
rests not on the Romans alone. Almost everywhere before their day
the Greek, Phoenician, or Asiatic rule had already driven out
of the nations the higher spirit and the sense of right and of liberty
belonging to better times. It was doubtless bad, that every
accused provincial was bound, when asked, to appear personally
in Rome to answer for himself; that the Roman governor interfered
at pleasure in the administration of justice and the management
of the dependent communities, pronounced capital sentences, and cancelled
transactions of the municipal council; and that in case of war
he treated the militia as he chose and often infamously, as e. g.
when Cotta at the siege of the Pontic Heraclea assigned to the militia
all the posts of danger, to spare his Italians, and on the siege
not going according to his wish, ordered the heads of his engineers
to be laid at his feet. It was doubtless bad, that no rule
of morality or of criminal law bound either the Roman administrators
or their retinue, and that violent outrages, rapes, and murders
with or without form of law were of daily occurrence in the provinces.
But these things were at least nothing new; almost everywhere
men had long been accustomed to be treated like slaves,
and it signified little in the long run whether a Carthaginian overseer,
a Syrian satrap, or a Roman proconsul acted as the local tyrant.
Their material well-being, almost the only thing for which
the provincials still cared, was far less disturbed by those occurrences,
which although numerous in proportion to the many tyrants yet affected
merely isolated individuals, than by the financial exactions pressing
heavily on all, which had never previously been prosecuted
with such energy.
The Romans now gave in this domain fearful proof of their old master
of money-matters. We have already endeavoured to describe
the Roman system of provincial oppression in its modest
and rational foundations as well as in its growth and corruption
as a matter of course, the latter went on increasing. The ordinary taxes
became far more oppressive from the inequality of their distribution
and from the preposterous system of levying them than from their
high amount. As to the burden of quartering troops, Roman statesmen
themselves expressed the opinion that a town suffered nearly
to the same extent when a Roman army took up winter quarters
in it as when an enemy took it by storm. While the taxation
in its original character had been an indemnification for the burden
of military defence undertaken by Rome, and the community
paying tribute had thus a right to remain exempt from ordinary service,
garrison-service was now--as is attested e. g. in the case
of Sardinia--for the most part imposed on the provincials,
and even in the ordinary armies, besides other duties, the whole
heavy burden of the cavalry-service was devolved on them.
The extraordinary contributions demanded--such as, the deliveries
of grain for little or no compensation to benefit the proletariate
of the capital; the frequent and costly naval armaments and coast-
defences in order to check piracy; the task of supplying works of art,
wild beasts, or other demands of the insane Roman luxury in the theatre
and the chase; the military requisitions in case of war--
were just as frequent as they were oppressive and incalculable.
A single instance may show how far things were carried.
During the three years' administration of Sicily by Gaius Verres
the number of farmers in Leontini fell from 84 to 32, in Motuca
from 187 to 86, in Herbita from 252 to 120, in Agyrium from 250 to 80;
so that in four of the most fertile districts of Sicily 59 per cent
of the landholders preferred to let their fields lie fallow
than to cultivate them under such government. And these landholders were,
as their small number itself shows and as is expressly stated, by no means
small farmers, but respectable planters and in great part Roman burgesses!
In the Client-States
In the client-states the forms of taxation were somewhat different,
but the burdens themselves were if possible still worse,
since in addition to the exactions of the Romans there came
those of the native courts. In Cappadocia and Egypt the farmer
as well as the king was bankrupt; the former was unable to satisfy
the tax-collector, the latter was unable to satisfy his Roman creditor.
Add to these the exactions, properly so called, not merely
of the governor himself, but also of his "friends," each of whom fancied
that he had as it were a draft on the governor and a title accordingly
to come back from the province a made man. The Roman oligarchy
in this respect completely resembled a gang of robbers,
and followed out the plundering of the provincials in a professional
and business-like manner; capable members of the gang set to work
not too nicely, for they had in fact to share the spoil
with the advocates and the jurymen, and the more they stole,
they did so the more securely. The notion of honour in theft too
was already developed; the big robber looked down on the little,
and the latter on the mere thief, with contempt; any one, who had been
once for a wonder condemned, boasted of the high figure of the sums
which he was proved to have exacted. Such was the behaviour
in the provinces of the successors of those men, who had been
accustomed to bring home nothing from their administration but the thanks
of the subjects and the approbation of their fellow-citizens.
The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces
But still worse, if possible, and still less subject to any control
was the havoc committed by the Italian men of business among
the unhappy provincials. The most lucrative portions of the landed
property and the whole commercial and monetary business
in the provinces were concentrated in their hands. The estates
in the transmarine regions, which belonged to Italian grandees,
were exposed to all the misery of management by stewards, and never
saw their owners; excepting possibly the hunting-parks, which occur
as early as this time in Transalpine Gaul with an area amounting
to nearly twenty square miles. Usury flourished as it had never
flourished before. The small landowners in Illyricum, Asia, and Egypt
managed their estates even in Varro's time in great part practically
as the debtor-slaves of their Roman or non-Roman creditors,
just as the plebeians in former days for their patrician lords.
Cases occurred of capital being lent even to urban communities
at four per cent per month. It was no unusual thing for an energetic
and influential man of business to get either the title
of envoy(81) given to him by the senate or that of officer
by the governor, and, if possible, to have men put at his service
for the better prosecution of his affairs; a case is narrated
on credible authority, where one of these honourable martial bankers
on account of a claim against the town of Salamis in Cyprus
kept its municipal council blockaded in the town-house,
until five of the members had died of hunger.
Robberies and Damage by War
To these two modes of oppression, each of which by itself
was intolerable and which were always becoming better arranged to work
into each other's hands, were added the general calamities, for which
the Roman government was also in great part, at least indirectly,
responsible. In the various wars a large amount of capital
was dragged away from the country and a larger amount destroyed
sometimes by the barbarians, sometimes by the Roman armies.
Owing to the worthlessness of the Roman land and maritime police,
brigands and pirates swarmed every where. In Sardinia and the interior
of Asia Minor brigandage was endemic; in Africa and Further Spain
it became necessary to fortify all buildings constructed
outside of the city-enclosures with walls and towers. The fearful evil
of piracy has been already described in another connection.(82)
The panaceas of the prohibitive system, with which the Roman governor
was wont to interpose when scarcity of money or dearth occurred,
as under such circumstances they could not fail to do--
the prohibition of the export of gold or grain from the province--
did not mend the matter. The communal affairs were almost everywhere
embarrassed, in addition to the general distress, by local disorders
and frauds of the public officials.
The Conditions of the Provinces Generally
Where such grievances afflicted communities and individuals
not temporarily but for generations with an inevitable, steady,
and yearly-increasing oppression, the best regulated public
or private economy could not but succumb to them, and the most
unspeakable misery could not but extend over all the nations
from the Tagus to the Euphrates. "All the communities," it is said
in a treatise published as early as 684, "are ruined"; the same truth
is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul,
the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still
in the most tolerable economic position. In Asia Minor even towns
like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery
seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which
the free provincial succumbed, and even the patient Asiatic had become,
according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves,
weary of life. Any one who desires to fathom the depths to which man
can sink in the criminal infliction, and in the no less criminal
endurance, of all conceivable injustice, may gather together
from the criminal records of this period the wrongs which Roman grandees
could perpetrate and Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians could suffer.
Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded
that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece
and Asia; and, when the burgesses of the Pontic Heraclea on one occasion
put to death the whole of the Roman tax-collectors, the only matter
for regret was that such things did not occur oftener.
Caesar and the Provinces
The Optimates scoffed at the new master who went in person
to inspect his "farms" one after the other; in reality the condition
of the several provinces demanded all the earnestness and all the wisdom
of one of those rare men, who redeem the name of king from being regarded
by the nations as merely a conspicuous example of human insufficiency.
The wounds inflicted had to be healed by time; Caesar took care
that they might be so healed, and that there should be
no fresh inflictions.
The Caesarian Magistrates
The system of administration was thoroughly remodelled.
The Sullan proconsuls and propraetors had been in their provinces
essentially sovereign and practically subject to no control;
those of Caesar were the well-disciplined servants of a stern master,
who from the very unity and life-tenure of his power sustained
a more natural and more tolerable relation to the subjects
than those numerous, annually changing, petty tyrants. The governorships
were no doubt still distributed among the annually-retiring two consuls
and sixteen praetors, but, as the Imperator directly nominated
eight of the latter and the distribution of the provinces
among the competitors depended solely on him,(83) they were
in reality bestowed by the Imperator. The functions also
of the governors were practically restricted. The superintendence
of the administration of justice and the administrative control
of the communities remained in their hands; but their command
was paralyzed by the new supreme command in Rome and its adjutants
associated with the governor,(84) and the raising of the taxes
was probably even now committed in the provinces substantially
to imperial officials,(85) so that the governor was thenceforward
surrounded with an auxiliary staff which was absolutely dependent
on the Imperator in virtue either of the laws of the military
hierarchy or of the still stricter laws of domestic discipline.
While hitherto the proconsul and his quaestor had appeared as if
they were members of a gang of robbers despatched to levy contributions,
the magistrates of Caesar were present to protect the weak
against the strong; and, instead of the previous worse than useless
control of the equestrian or senatorian tribunals, they had to answer
for themselves at the bar of a just and unyielding monarch.
The law as to exactions, the enactments of which Caesar
had already in his first consulate made more stringent,
was applied by him against the chief commandants in the provinces
with an inexorable severity going even beyond its letter;
and the tax-officers, if indeed they ventured to indulge
in an injustice, atoned for it to their master, as slaves
and freedmen according to the cruel domestic law of that time
were wont to atone.
Regulation of Burdens
The extraordinary public burdens were reduced to the right proportion
and the actual necessity; the ordinary burdens were materially lessened.
We have already mentioned the comprehensive regulation of taxation;(86)
the extension of the exemptions from tribute, the general lowering
of the direct taxes, the limitation of the system of -decumae- to Africa
and Sardinia, the complete setting aside of middlemen in the collection
of the direct taxes, were most beneficial reforms for the provincials.
That Caesar after the example of one of his greatest democratic
predecessors, Sertorius,(87) wished to free the subjects from the burden
of quartering troops and to insist on the soldiers erecting
for themselves permanent encampments resembling towns, cannot indeed
be proved; but he was, at least after he had exchanged the part
of pretender for that of king, not the man to abandon the subject
to the soldier; and it was in keeping with his spirit, when the heirs
of his policy created such military camps, and then converted them
into towns which formed rallying-points for Italian civilization
amidst the barbarian frontier districts.
Influence on the Capitalist System
It was a task far more difficult than the checking of official
irregularities, to deliver the provincials from the oppressive
ascendency of Roman capital. Its power could not be directly broken
without applying means which were still more dangerous than the evil;
the government could for the time being abolish only isolated abuses--
as when Caesar for instance prohibited the employment of the title
of state-envoy for financial purposes--and meet manifest acts of violence
and palpable usury by a sharp application of the general penal laws
and of the laws as to usury, which extended also to the provinces;(88)
but a more radical cure of the evil was only to be expected
from the reviving prosperity of the provincials under a better
administration. Temporary enactments, to relieve the insolvency
of particular provinces, had been issued on several occasions
in recent times. Caesar himself had in 694 when governor
of Further Spain assigned to the creditors two thirds
of the income of their debtors in order to pay themselves
from that source. Lucius Lucullus likewise when governor of Asia Minor
had directly cancelled a portion of the arrears of interest
which had swelled beyond measure, and had for the remaining portion
assigned to the creditors a fourth part of the produce of the lands
of their debtors, as well as a suitable proportion of the profits
accruing to them from house-rents or slave-labour. We are not expressly
informed that Caesar after the civil war instituted similar
general liquidations of debt in the provinces; yet from what
has just been remarked and from what was done in the case of Italy,(89)
it can hardly be doubted that Caesar likewise directed his efforts
towards this object, or at least that it formed part of his plan.
While thus the Imperator, as far as lay within human power,
relieved the provincials from the oppressions of the magistrates
and capitalists of Rome, it might at the same time be with certaint
expected from the government to which he imparted fresh vigour,
that it would scare off the wild border-peoples and disperse
the freebooters by land and sea, as the rising sun chases away
the mist. However the old wounds might still smart, with Caesar
there appeared for the sorely-tortured subjects the dawn
of a more tolerable epoch, the first intelligent and humane government
that had appeared for centuries, and a policy of peace which rested
not on cowardice but on strength. Well might the subjects above all
mourn along with the best Romans by the bier of the great liberator.
The Beginning of the Helleno-Italic State
But this abolition of existing abuses was not the main matter
in Caesar's provincial reform. In the Roman republic, according
to the view of the aristocracy and democracy alike, the provinces
had been nothing but--what they were frequently called--country-estates
of the Roman people, and they were employed and worked out as such.
This view had now passed away. The provinces as such were gradually
to disappear, in order to prepare for the renovated Helleno-Italic nation
a new and more spacious home, of whose several component parts no one
existed merely for the sake of another but all for each and each for all;
the new existence in the renovated home, the fresher, broader, grander
national life, was of itself to overbear the sorrows and wrongs
of the nation for which there was no help in the old Italy. These ideas,
as is well known, were not new. The emigration from Italy
to the provinces that had been regularly going on for centuries
had long since, though unconsciously on the part of the emigrants
themselves, paved the way for such an extension of Italy. The first
who in a systematic way guided the Italians to settle beyond the bounds
of Italy was Gaius Gracchus, the creator of the Roman democratic monarchy,
the author of the Transalpine conquests, the founder of the colonies
of Carthage and Narbo. Then the second statesman of genius
produced by the Roman democracy, Quintus Sertorius, began to introduce
the barbarous Occidentals to Latin civilization; he gave to the Spanish
youth of rank the Roman dress, and urged them to speak Latin
and to acquire the higher Italian culture at the training institute
founded by him in Osca. When Caesar entered on the government,
a large Italian population--though, in great part, lacking stability
and concentration--already existed in all the provinces and client-
states. To say nothing of the formally Italian towns in Spain
and southern Gaul, we need only recall the numerous troops of burgesses
raised by Sertorius and Pompeius in Spain, by Caesar in Gaul,
by Juba in Numidia, by the constitutional party in Africa, Macedonia,
Greece, Asia Minor, and Crete; the Latin lyre--ill-tuned doubtless--
on which the town-poets of Corduba as early as the Sertorian war
sang the praises of the Roman generals; and the translations
of Greek poetry valued on account of their very elegance of language,
which the earliest extra-Italian poet of note, the Transalpine
Publius Terentius Varro of the Aude, published
shortly after Caesar's death.
On the other hand the interpenetration of the Latin and Hellenic
character was, we might say, as old as Rome. On occasion
of the union of Italy the conquering Latin nation had assimilated
to itself all the other conquered nationalities, excepting only
the Greek, which was received just as it stood without any attempt
at external amalgamation. Wherever the Roman legionary went,
the Greek schoolmaster, no less a conqueror in his own way, followed;
at an early date we find famous teachers of the Greek language
settled on the Guadalquivir, and Greek was as well taught as Latin
in the institute of Osca. The higher Roman culture itself
was in fact nothing else than the proclamation of the great gospel
of Hellenic manners and art in the Italian idiom; against the modest
pretension of the civilizing conquerors to proclaim it first of all
in their own language to the barbarians of the west the Hellene
at least could not loudly protest. Already the Greek every where--
and, most decidedly, just where the national feeling was purest
and strongest, on the frontiers threatened by barbaric denationalization,
e. g. in Massilia, on the north coast of the Black Sea,
and on the Euphrates and Tigris--descried the protector and avenger
of Hellenism in Rome; and in fact the foundation of towns by Pompeius
in the far east resumed after an interruption of centuries
the beneficent work of Alexander.
The idea of an Italo-Hellenic empire with two languages
and a single nationality was not new--otherwise it would have been
nothing but a blunder; but the development of it from floating projects
to a firmly-grasped conception, from scattered initial efforts
to the laying of a concentrated foundation, was the work of the third
and greatest of the democratic statesmen of Rome.
The Ruling Nations
The Jews
The first and most essential condition for the political
and national levelling of the empire was the preservation and extension
of the two nations destined to joint dominion, along with the absorption
as rapidly as possible of the barbarian races, or those termed barbarian
existing by their side. In a certain sense we might no doubt name
along with Romans and Greeks a third nationality, which vied with them
in ubiquity in the world of that day, and was destined to play
no insignificant part in the new state of Caesar. We speak of the Jews.
This remarkable people, yielding and yet tenacious, was in the ancient
as in the modern world everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere
and nowhere powerful. The successors of David and Solomon were of hardly
more significance for the Jews of that age than Jerusalem for those
of the present day; the nation found doubtless for its religious
and intellectual unity a visible rallying-point in the petty kingdom
of Jerusalem, but the nation itself consisted not merely of the subjects
of the Hasmonaeans, but of the innumerable bodies of Jews
scattered through the whole Parthian and the whole Roman empire.
Within the cities of Alexandria especially and of Cyrene the Jews
formed special communities administratively and even locally distinct,
not unlike the "Jews' quarters" of our towns, but with a freer position
and superintended by a "master of the people" as superior judge
and administrator. How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population
was already before Caesar's time, and how closely at the same time
the Jews even then kept together as fellow-countrymen, is shown
by the remark of an author of this period, that it was dangerous
for a governor to offend the Jews, in his province, because he might
then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return by the populace
of the capital. Even at this time the predominant business of the Jews
was trade; the Jewish trader moved everywhere with the conquering Roman
merchant then, in the same way as he afterwards accompanied the Genoese
and the Venetian, and capital flowed in on all hands to the Jewish,
by the side of the Roman, merchants. At this period too we encounter
the peculiar antipathy of the Occidentals towards this so thoroughly
Oriental race and their foreign opinions and customs. This Judaism,
although not the most pleasing feature in the nowhere pleasing picture
of the mixture of nations which then prevailed, was nevertheless
a historical element developing itself in the natural course of things,
which the statesman could neither ignore nor combat, and which Caesar
on the contrary, just like his predecessor Alexander, with correct
discernment of the circumstances, fostered as far as possible.
While Alexander, by laying the foundation of Alexandrian Judaism,
did not much less for the nation than its own David by planning
the temple of Jerusalem, Caesar also advanced the interests of the Jews
in Alexandria and in Rome by special favours and privileges,
and protected in particular their peculiar worship against the Roman
as well as against the Greek local priests. The two great men
of course did not contemplate placing the Jewish nationality
on an equal footing with the Hellenic or Italo-Hellenic.
But the Jew who has not like the Occidental received the Pandora's gift
of political organization, and stands substantially in a relation
of indifference to the state; who moreover is as reluctant
to give up the essence of his national idiosyncrasy, as he is ready
to clothe it with any nationality at pleasure and to adapt himself
up to a certain degree to foreign habits--the Jew was for this
very reason as it were made for a state, which was to be built
on the ruins of a hundred living polities and to be endowed
with a somewhat abstract and, from the outset, toned-down nationality.
Even in the ancient world Judaism was an effective leaven
of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition, and to that extent
a specially privileged member in the Caesarian state, the polity
of which was strictly speaking nothing but a citizenship of the world,
and the nationality of which was at bottom nothing but humanity.
Hellenism
But the Latin and Hellenic nationalities continued to be
exclusively the positive elements of the new citizenship.
The distinctively Italian state of the republic was thus at an end;
but the rumour that Caesar was ruining Italy and Rome on purpose
to transfer the centre of the empire to the Greek east and to make
Ilion or Alexandria its capital, was nothing but a piece of talk--
very easy to be accounted for, but also very silly--of the angry
nobility. On the contrary in Caesar's organizations the Latin
nationality always retained the preponderance; as is indicated
in the very fact that he issued all his enactments in Latin,
although those destined for the Greek-speaking countries were
at the same time issued in Greek. In general he arranged the relations
of the two great nations in his monarchy just as his republican
predecessors had arranged them in the united Italy; the Hellenic
nationality was protected where it existed, the Italian was extended
as far as circumstances permitted, and the inheritance
of the races to be absorbed was destined for it. This was necessary,
because an entire equalizing of the Greek and Latin elements
in the state would in all probability have in a very short time
occasioned that catastrophe which Byzantinism brought about
several centuries later; for the Greek element was superior
to the Roman not merely in all intellectual aspects, but also
in the measure of its predominance, and it had within Italy itself
in the hosts of Hellenes and half-Hellenes who migrated compulsorily
or voluntarily to Italy an endless number of apostles apparently
insignificant, but whose influence could not be estimated
too highly. To mention only the most conspicuous phenomenon
in this respect, the rule of Greek lackeys over the Roman monarchs
is as old as the monarchy. The first in the equally long and repulsive
list of these personages is the confidential servant of Pompeius,
Theophanes of Mytilene, who by his power over his weak master
contributed probably more than any one else to the outbreak of the war
between Pompeius and Caesar. Not wholly without reason he was
after his death treated with divine honours by his countrymen;
he commenced, forsooth, the -valet de chambre- government
of the imperial period, which in a certain measure was just
a dominion of the Hellenes over the Romans. The government
had accordingly every reason not to encourage by its fostering action
the spread of Hellenism at least in the west. If Sicily was not simply
relieved of the pressure of the -decumae- but had its communities
invested with Latin rights, which was presumably meant to be followed
in due time by full equalization with Italy, it can only have been
Caesar's design that this glorious island, which was at that time
desolate and had as to management passed for the greater part
into Italian hands, but which nature has destined to be not so much
a neighbouring land to Italy as rather the finest of its provinces,
should become altogether merged in Italy. But otherwise
the Greek element, wherever it existed, was preserved and protected.
However political crises might suggest to the Imperator the demolition
of the strong pillars of Hellenism in the west and in Egypt, Massilia
and Alexandria were neither destroyed nor denationalized.
Latinizing
On the other hand the Roman element was promoted by the government
through colonization and Latinizing with all vigour and at the most
various points of the empire. The principle, which originated
no doubt from a bad combination of formal law and brute force,
but was inevitably necessary in order to freedom in dealing
with the nations destined to destruction--that all the soil
in the provinces not ceded by special act of the government
to communities or private persons was the property of the state,
and the holder of it for the time being had merely an heritable
possession on sufferance and revocable at any time--was retained
also by Caesar and raised by him from a democratic party-theory
to a fundamental principle of monarchical law.
Cisalpine Gaul
Gaul, of course, fell to be primarily dealt with in the extension
of Roman nationality. Cisalpine Gaul obtained throughout--
what a great part of the inhabitants had long enjoyed--
political equalization with the leading country by the admission
of the Transpadane communities into the Roman burgess-union,
which had for long been assumed by the democracy as accomplished,(90)
and was now (705) finally accomplished by Caesar. Practically
this province had already completely Latinized itself during
the forty years which had elapsed since the bestowal of Latin rights.
The exclusives might ridicule the broad and gurgling accent
of the Celtic Latin, and miss "an undefined something of the grace
of the capital" in the Insubrian or Venetian, who as Caesar's legionary
had conquered for himself with his sword a place in the Roman Forum
and even in the Roman senate-house. Nevertheless Cisalpine Gaul
with its dense chiefly agricultural population was even before
Caesar's time in reality an Italian country, and remained
for centuries the true asylum of Italian manners and Italian culture;
indeed the teachers of Latin literature found nowhere else
out of the capital so much encouragement and approbation.
The Province of Narbo
While Cisalpine Gaul was thus substantially merged in Italy,
the place which it had hitherto occupied was taken by the Transalpine
province, which had been converted by the conquests of Caesar
from a frontier into an inland province, and which by its vicinity
as well as by its climate was fitted beyond all other regions
to become in due course of time likewise an Italian land.
Thither principally, according to the old aim of the transmarine
settlements of the Roman democracy, was the stream of Italian
emigration directed. There the ancient colony of Narbo was reinforced
by new settlers, and four new burgess-colonies were instituted
at Baeterrae (Beziers) not far from Narbo, at Arelate (Aries)
and Arausio (Orange) on the Rhone, and at the new seaport Forum Julii
(Frejus); while the names assigned to them at the same time preserved
the memory of the brave legions which had annexed northern Gaul
to the empire.(91) The townships not furnished with colonists appear,
at least for the most part, to have been led on toward Romanization
in the same way as Transpadane Gaul in former times(92) by the bestowal
of Latin urban rights; in particular Nemausus (Nimes), as the chief place
of the territory taken from the Massiliots in consequence of their revolt
against Caesar,(93)was converted from a Massiliot village into a Latin
urban community, and endowed with a considerable territory and even
with the right of coinage.(94) While Cisalpine Gaul thus advanced
from the preparatory stage to full equality with Italy, the Narbonese
province advanced at the same time into that preparatory stage;
just as previously in Cisalpine Gaul, the most considerable
communities there had the full franchise, the rest Latin rights.
Northern Gaul
In the other non-Greek and non-Latin regions of the empire,
which were still more remote from the influence of Italy and the process
of assimilation, Caesar confined himself to the establishment
of several centres for Italian civilization such as Narbo had hitherto
been in Gaul, in order by their means to pave the way for a future
complete equalization. Such initial steps can be pointed out
in all the provinces of the empire, with the exception of the poorest
and least important of all, Sardinia. How Caesar proceeded
in Northern Gaul, we have already set forth;(95) the Latin language
there obtained throughout official recognition, though not yet
employed for all branches of public intercourse, and the colony
of Noviodunum (Nyon) arose on the Leman lake as the most northerly town
with an Italian constitution.
Spain
In Spain, which was presumably at that time the most densely peopled
country of the Roman empire, not merely were Caesarian colonists
settled in the important Helleno-Iberian seaport town of Emporiae
by the side of the old population; but, as recently-discovered
records have shown, a number of colonists probably taken
predominantly from the proletariate of the capital were provided for
in the town of Urso (Osuna), not far from Seville in the heart
of Andalusia, and perhaps also in several other townships
of this province. The ancient and wealthy mercantile city of Gades,
whose municipal system Caesar even when praetor had remodelled
suitably to the times, now obtained from the Imperator the full rights
of the Italian -municipia-(705) and became--what Tusculum had been
in Italy(96)--the first extra-Italian community not founded by Rome
which was admitted into the Roman burgess-union. Some years
afterwards (709) similar rights were conferred also on some other
Spanish communities, and Latin rights presumably on still more.
Carthage
In Africa the project, which Gaius Gracchus had not been allowed
to bring to an issue, was now carried out, and on the spot
where the city of the hereditary foes of Rome had stood, 3000 Italian
colonists and a great number of the tenants on lease and sufferance
resident in the Carthaginian territory were settled; and the new
"Venus-colony," the Roman Carthage, throve with amazing rapidity
under the incomparably favourable circumstances of the locality.
Utica, hitherto the capital and first commercial town in the province,
had already been in some measure compensated beforehand,
apparently by the bestowal of Latin rights, for the revival
of its superior rival. In the Numidian territory newly annexed
to the empire the important Cirta and the other communities assigned
to the Roman condottiere Publius Sittius for himself and his troops(97)
obtained the legal position of Roman military colonies.
The stately provincial towns indeed, which the insane fury of Juba
and of the desperate remnant of the constitutional party had converted
into ruins, did not revive so rapidly as they had been reduced to ashes,
and many a ruinous site recalled long afterwards this fatal period;
but the two new Julian colonies, Carthage and Cirta, became
and continued to be the centres of Africano-Roman civilization.
Corinth
The East
In the desolate land of Greece, Caesar, besides other plans
such as the institution of a Roman colony in Buthrotum (opposite Corfu),
busied himself above all with the restoration of Corinth. Not only
was a considerable burgess-colony conducted thither, but a plan
was projected for cutting through the isthmus, so as to avoid
the dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus and to make
the whole traffic between Italy and Asia pass through the Corintho-
Saronic gulf. Lastly even in the remote Hellenic east the monarch
called into existence Italian settlements; on the Black Sea,
for instance, at Heraclea and Sinope, which towns the Italian
colonists shared, as in the case of Emporiae, with the old inhabitants;
on the Syrian coast, in the important port of Berytus,
which like Sinope obtained an Italian constitution; and even in Egypt,
where a Roman station was established on the lighthouse-island
commanding the harbour of Alexandria.
Extension of the Italian Municipal Constitution to the Provinces
Through these ordinances the Italian municipal freedom was carried
into the provinces in a manner far more comprehensive than had been
previously the case. The communities of full burgesses--that is,
all the towns of the Cisalpine province and the burgess-colonies
and burgess-municipia--scattered in Transalpine Gaul and elsewhere--
were on an equal footing with the Italian, in so far as they administered
their own affairs, and even exercised a certainly limited jurisdiction;
while on the other hand the more important processes came before
the Roman authorities competent to deal with them--as a rule the governor
of the province.(98) The formally autonomous Latin and the other
emancipated communities-thus including all those of Sicily
and of Narbonese Gaul, so far as they were not burgess-communities,
and a considerable number also in the other provinces--had not merely
free administration, but probably unlimited jurisdiction; so that
the governor was only entitled to interfere there by virtue of his--
certainly very arbitrary--administrative control. No doubt even earlier
there had been communities of full burgesses within the provinces
of governors, such as Aquileia, and Narbo, and whole governors'
provinces, such as Cisalpine Gaul, had consisted of communities
with Italian constitution; but it was, if not in law, at least
in a political point of view a singularly important innovation,
that there was now a province which as well as Italy was peopled
solely by Roman burgesses,(99) and that others promised to become such.
Italy and the Provinces Reduced to One Level
With this disappeared the first great practical distinction
that separated Italy from the provinces; and the second--that ordinarily
no troops were stationed in Italy, while they were stationed
in the provinces--was likewise in the course of disappearing;
troops were now stationed only where there was a frontier to be defended,
and the commandants of the provinces in which this was not the case,
such as Narbo and Sicily, were officers only in name. The formal
contrast between Italy and the provinces, which had at all times
depended on other distinctions,(100) continued certainly
even now to subsist, for Italy was the sphere of civil jurisdiction
and of consuls and praetors, while the provinces were districts
under the jurisdiction of martial law and subject to proconsuls
and propraetors; but the procedure according to civil and according
to martial law had for long been practically coincident,
and the different titles of the magistrates signified little
after the one Imperator was over all.
In all these various municipal foundations and ordinances--
which are traceable at least in plan, if not perhaps all in execution,
to Caesar--a definite system is apparent. Italy was converted
from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother
of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation. The Cisalpine province
completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise
and a guarantee that, in the monarchy of Caesar just as
in the healthier times of the republic, every Latinized
district might expect to be placed on an equal footing
by the side of its elder sisters and of the mother herself.
On the threshold of full national and political equalization
with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily
and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized.
In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces
of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo
had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities--Emporiae, Gades,
Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus, Alexandria--
now became Italian or Helleno-Italian communities, the centres
of an Italian civilization even in the Greek east, the fundamental
pillars of the future national and political levelling of the empire.
The rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores
of the Mediterranean was at an end; in its stead came the new
Mediterranean state, and its first act was to atone for the two
greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated
on civilization. While the destruction of the two greatest marts
of commerce in the Roman dominions marked the turning-point at which
the protectorate of the Roman community degenerated into political
tyrannizing over, and financial exaction from, the subject lands,
the prompt and brilliant restoration of Carthage and Corinth marked
the foundation of the new great commonwealth which was to train up
all the regions on the Mediterranean to national and political
equality, to union in a genuine state. Well might Caesar bestow
on the city of Corinth in addition to its far-famed ancient name
the new one of "Honour to Julius" (-Lavs Jvli-).
Organization of the New Empire
While thus the new united empire was furnished with a national character,
which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather
an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature,
it further had need of unity in those institutions which express
the general life of nations--in constitution and administration,
in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights;
as to which, of course, local diversities of the most varied character
were quite compatible with essential union. In all these departments
we can only speak of the initial steps, for the thorough formation
of the monarchy of Caesar into an unity was the work of the future,
and all that he did was to lay the foundation for the building
of centuries. But of the lines, which the great man drew in these
departments, several can still be recognized; and it is more pleasing
to follow him here, than in the task of building from the ruins
of the nationalities.
Census of the Empire
As to constitution and administration, we have already noticed
elsewhere the most important elements of the new unity--
the transition of the sovereignty from the municipal council of Rome
to the sole master of the Mediterranean monarchy; the conversion
of that municipal council into a supreme imperial council representing
Italy and the provinces; above all, the transference--now commenced--
of the Roman, and generally of the Italian, municipal organization
to the provincial communities. This latter course--the bestowal
of Latin, and thereafter of Roman, rights on the communities
ripe for full admission to the united state--gradually of itself
brought about uniform communal arrangements. In one respect alone
this process could not be waited for. The new empire needed
immediately an institution which should place before the government
at a glance the principal bases of administration--the proportions
of population and property in the different communities--
in other words an improved census. First the census of Italy
was reformed. According to Caesar's ordinance(101)--which probably,
indeed, only carried out the arrangements which were, at least
as to principle, adopted in consequence of the Social war--
in future, when a census took place in the Roman community,
there were to be simultaneously registered by the highest authority
in each Italian community the name of every municipal burgess
and that of his father or manumitter, his district, his age,
and his property; and these lists were to be furnished to the Roman
censor early enough to enable him to complete in proper time
the general list of Roman burgesses and of Roman property.
That it was Caesar's intention to introduce similar institutions
also in the provinces is attested partly by the measurement
and survey of the whole empire ordered by him, partly by the nature
of the arrangement itself; for it in fact furnished the general
instrument appropriate for procuring, as well in the Italian
as in the non-Italian communities of the state, the information
requisite for the central administration. Evidently here too
it was Caesar's intention to revert to the traditions
of the earlier republican times, and to reintroduce the census
of the empire, which the earlier republic had effected--
essentially in the same way as Caesar effected the Italian--
by analogous extension of the institution of the urban censorship
with its set terms and other essential rules to all the subject
communities of Italy and Sicily.(102) This had been
one of the first institutions which the torpid aristocracy allowed
to drop, and in this way deprived the supreme administrative authority
of any view of the resources in men and taxation at its disposal
and consequently of all possibility of an effective control.(103)
The indications still extant, and the very connection of things,
show irrefragably that Caesar made preparations to renew
the general census that had been obsolete for centuries.
Religion of the Empire
We need scarcely say that in religion and in jurisprudence
no thorough levelling could be thought of; yet with all toleration
towards local faiths and municipal statutes the new state needed
a common worship corresponding to the Italo-Hellenic nationality
and a general code of law superior to the municipal statutes.
It needed them; for de facto both were already in existence.
In the field of religion men had for centuries been busied
in fusing together the Italian and Hellenic worships partly
by external adoption, partly by internal adjustment of their respective
conceptions of the gods; and owing to the pliant formless character
of the Italian gods, there had been no great difficulty in resolving
Jupiter into Zeus, Venus into Aphrodite, and so every essential idea
of the Latin faith into its Hellenic counterpart. The Italo-Hellenic
religion stood forth in its outlines ready-made; how much
in this very department men were conscious of having gone beyond
the specifically Roman point of view and advanced towards
an Italo-Hellenic quasi-nationality, is shown by the distinction made
in the already-mentioned theology of Varro between the "common" gods,
that is, those acknowledged by Romans and Greeks, and the special gods
of the Roman community.
Law of the Empire
So far as concerns the field of criminal and police law,
where the government more directly interferes and the necessities
of the case are substantially met by a judicious legislation,
there was no difficulty in attaining, in the way of legislative action,
that degree of material uniformity which certainly was in this department
needful for the unity of the empire. In the civil law again,
where the initiative belongs to commercial intercourse and merely
the formal shape to the legislator, the code for the united empire,
which the legislator certainly could not have created, had been already
long since developed in a natural way by commercial intercourse itself.
The Roman urban law was still indeed legally based on the embodiment
of the Latin national law contained in the Twelve Tables.
Later laws had doubtless introduced various improvements
of detail suited to the times, among which the most important
was probably the abolition of the old inconvenient mode
of commencing a process through standing forms of declaration
by the parties(104) and the substitution of an instruction drawn up
in writing by the presiding magistrate for the single juryman
(formula): but in the main the popular legislation had only piled upon
that venerable foundation an endless chaos of special laws
long since in great part antiquated and forgotten, which can
only be compared to the English statute-law. The attempts to impart
to them scientific shape and system had certainly rendered
the tortuous paths of the old civil law accessible, and thrown light
upon them;(105) but no Roman Blackstone could remedy the fundamental
defect, that an urban code composed four hundred years ago
with its equally diffuse and confused supplements was now to serve
as the law of a great state.
The New Urban Law or the Edict
Commercial intercourse provided for itself a more thorough remedy.
The lively intercourse between Romans and non-Romans had long ago
developed in Rome an international private law (-ius gentium-;(106)),
that is to say, a body of maxims especially relating to commercial
matters, according to which Roman judges pronounced judgment,
when a cause could not be decided either according to their own
or any other national code and they were compelled--setting aside
the peculiarities of Roman, Hellenic, Phoenician and other law--
to revert to the common views of right underlying all dealings.
The formation of the newer law attached itself to this basis.
In the first place as a standard for the legal dealings
of Roman burgesses with each other, it de facto substituted
for the old urban law, which had become practically useless,
a new code based in substance on a compromise between the national law
of the Twelve Tables and the international law or so-called
law of nations. The former was essentially adhered to,
though of course with modifications suited to the times,
in the law of marriage, family, and inheritance; whereas
in all regulations which concerned dealings with property,
and consequently in reference to ownership and contracts,
the international law was the standard; in these matters indeed
various important arrangements were borrowed even from local
provincial law, such as the legislation as to usury,(107)
and the institution of -hypotheca-. Through whom, when,
and how this comprehensive innovation came into existence,
whether at once or gradually, whether through one or several authors,
are questions to which we cannot furnish a satisfactory answer.
We know only that this reform, as was natural, proceeded
in the first instance from the urban court; that it first took
formal shape in the instructions annually issued by the -praetor
urbanus-, when entering on office, for the guidance of the parties
in reference to the most important maxims of law to be observed
in the judicial year then beginning (-edictum annuum- or -perpetuum
praetoris urbani de iuris dictione-); and that, although various
preparatory steps towards it may have been taken in earlier times,
it certainly only attained its completion in this epoch. The new code
was theoretic and abstract, inasmuch as the Roman view of law
had therein divested itself of such of its national peculiarities
as it had become aware of; but it was at the same time practical
and positive, inasmuch as it by no means faded away into the dim
twilight of general equity or even into the pure nothingness
of the so-called law of nature, but was applied by definite
functionaries for definite concrete cases according to fixed rules,
and was not merely capable of, but had already essentially received,
a legal embodiment in the urban edict. This code moreover corresponded
in matter to the wants of the time, in so far as it furnished
the more convenient forms required by the increase of intercourse
for legal procedure, for acquisition of property, and for conclusion
of contracts. Lastly, it had already in the main become subsidiary law
throughout the compass of the Roman empire, inasmuch as--
while the manifold local statutes were retained for those legal relations
which were not directly commercial, as well as for local transactions
between members of the same legal district--dealings relating
to property between subjects of the empire belonging to different
legal districts were regulated throughout after the model
of the urban edict, though not applicable de jure to these cases,
both in Italy and in the provinces. The law of the urban edict
had thus essentially the same position in that age which the Roman law
has occupied in our political development; this also is, so far as
such opposites can be combined, at once abstract and positive;
this also recommended itself by its (compared with the earlier
legal code) flexible forms of intercourse, and took its place by the side
of the local statutes as universal subsidiary law. But the Roman
legal development had an essential advantage over ours in this,
that the denationalized legislation appeared not, as with us,
prematurely and by artificial birth, but at the right time
and agreeably to nature.
Caesar's Project of Codification
Such was the state of the law as Caesar found it. If he projected
the plan for a new code, it is not difficult to say what were
his intentions. This code could only comprehend the law of Roman
burgesses, and could be a general code for the empire merely so far as
a code of the ruling nation suitable to the times could not
but of itself become general subsidiary law throughout the compass
of the empire. In criminal law, if the plan embraced this at all,
there was needed only a revision and adjustment of the Sullan
ordinances. In civil law, for a state whose nationality
was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape
was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown
out of lawful commerce, with the security and precision of statute-law.
The first step towards this had been taken by the Cornelian law
of 687, when it enjoined the judge to keep to the maxims set forth
at the beginning of his magistracy and not arbitrarily
to administer other law (108)--a regulation, which may well
be compared with the law of the Twelve Tables, and which became
almost as significant for the fixing of the later urban law
as that collection for the fixing of the earlier. But although
after the Cornelian decree of the people the edict was no longer
subordinate to the judge, but the judge was by law subject to the edict;
and though the new code had practically dispossessed the old urban law
in judicial usage as in legal instruction--every urban judge
was still free at his entrance on office absolutely and arbitrarily
to alter the edict, and the law of the Twelve Tables with its additions
still always outweighed formally the urban edict, so that
in each individual case of collision the antiquated rule had to be
set aside by arbitrary interference of the magistrates,
and therefore, strictly speaking, by violation of formal law.
The subsidiary application of the urban edict in the court
of the -praetor peregrinus- at Rome and in the different provincial
judicatures was entirely subject to the arbitrary pleasure
of the individual presiding magistrates. It was evidently necessary
to set aside definitely the old urban law, so far as it had not
been transferred to the newer, and in the case of the latter
to set suitable limits to its arbitrary alteration by each individual
urban judge, possibly also to regulate its subsidiary application
by the side of the local statutes. This was Caesars design,
when he projected the plan for his code; for it could not have been
otherwise. The plan was not executed; and thus that troublesome
state of transition in Roman jurisprudence was perpetuated
till this necessary reform was accomplished six centuries afterwards,
and then but imperfectly, by one of the successors of Caesar,
the Emperor Justinian.
Lastly, in money, measures, and weights the substantial equalization
of the Latin and Hellenic systems had long been in progress.
It was very ancient so far as concerned the definitions of weight
and the measures of capacity and of length indispensable for trade
and commerce,(109) and in the monetary system little more recent
than the introduction of the silver coinage.(110) But these older
equations were not sufficient, because in the Hellenic world itself
the most varied metrical and monetary systems subsisted side by side;
it was necessary, and formed part doubtless of Caesar's plan,
now to introduce everywhere in the new united empire, so far as
this had not been done already, Roman money, Roman measures,
and Roman weights in such a manner that they alone should be reckoned
by in official intercourse, and that the non-Roman systems
should be restricted to local currency or placed in a--once for all
regulated--ratio to the Roman.(111) The action of Caesar,
however, can only be pointed out in two of the most important
of these departments, the monetary system and the calendar.
Gold Coin as Imperial Currency
The Roman monetary system was based on the two precious metals
circulating side by side and in a fixed relation to each other,
gold being given and taken according to weight,(112) silver
in the form of coin; but practically in consequence of the extensive
transmarine intercourse the gold far preponderated over the silver.
Whether the acceptance of Roman silver money was not even
at an earlier period obligatory throughout the empire, is uncertain;
at any rate uncoined gold essentially supplied the place of imperial
money throughout the Roman territory, the more so as the Romans
had prohibited the coining of gold in all the provinces and client-
states, and the -denarius- had, in addition to Italy, de jure
or de facto naturalized itself in Cisalpine Gaul, in Sicily,
in Spain and various other places, especially in the west.(113)
but the imperial coinage begins with Caesar. Exactly like Alexander,
he marked the foundation of the new monarchy embracing the civilized
world by the fact that the only metal forming an universal medium
obtained the first place in the coinage. The greatness of the scale
on which the new Caesarian gold piece (20 shillings 7 pence
according to the present value of the metal) was immediately coined,
is shown by the fact that in a single treasure buried seven years
after Caesar's death 80,000 of these pieces were found together.
It is true that financial speculations may have exercised
a collateral influence in this respect.(114) as to the silver money,
the exclusive rule of the Roman -denarius- in all the west,
for which the foundation had previously been laid, was finally
established by Caesar, when he definitively closed the only
Occidental mint that still competed in silver currency with the Roman,
that of Massilia. The coining of silver or copper small money
was still permitted to a number of Occidental communities;
three-quarter -denarii- were struck by some Latin communities
of southern Gaul, half -denarii- by several cantons in northern Gaul,
copper small coins in various instances even after Caesar's time
by communes of the west; but this small money was throughout coined
after the Roman standard, and its acceptance moreover was probably
obligatory only in local dealings. Caesar does not seem any more
than the earlier government to have contemplated the regulation
with a view to unity of the monetary system of the east,
where great masses of coarse silver money--much of which too easily
admitted of being debased or worn away--and to some extent even,
as in Egypt, a copper coinage akin to our paper money
were in circulation, and the Syrian commercial cities would have felt
very severely the want of their previous national coinage corresponding
to the Mesopotamian currency. We find here subsequently
the arrangement that the -denarius- has everywhere legal currency
and is the only medium of official reckoning,(115) while the local coins
have legal currency within their limited range but according
to a tariff unfavourable for them as compared with the -denarius-.(116)
This was probably not introduced all at once, and in part perhaps
may have preceded Caesar; but it was at any rate the essential
complement of the Caesarian arrangement as to the imperial coinage,
whose new gold piece found its immediate model in the almost equally
heavy coin of Alexander and was doubtless calculated especially
for circulation in the east.
Reform of the Calendar
Of a kindred nature was the reform of the calendar.
The republican calendar, which strangely enough was still
the old decemviral calendar--an imperfect adoption of the -octaeteris-
that preceded Meton (117)--had by a combination of wretched mathematics
and wretched administration come to anticipate the true time
by 67 whole days, so that e. g. the festival of Flora was celebrated
on the 11th July instead of the 28th April. Caesar finally removed
this evil, and with the help of the Greek mathematician Sosigenes
introduced the Italian farmer's year regulated according to the Egyptian
calendar of Eudoxus, as well as a rational system of intercalation,
into religious and official use; while at the same time
the beginning of the year on the 1st March of the old calendar
was abolished, and the date of the 1st January--fixed at first
as the official term for changing the supreme magistrates and,
in consequence of this, long since prevailing in civil life--
was assumed also as the calendar-period for commencing the year.
Both changes came into effect on the 1st January 709, and along
with them the use of the Julian calendar so named after its author,
which long after the fall of the monarchy of Caesar remained
the regulative standard of the civilized world and in the main
is so still. By way of explanation there was added in a detailed edict
a star-calendar derived from the Egyptian astronomical observations
and transferred--not indeed very skilfully--to Italy, which fixed
the rising and setting of the stars named according to days
of the calendar.(118) In this domain also the Roman and Greek worlds
were thus placed on a par.
Caesar and His Works
Such were the foundations of the Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar.
For the second time in Rome the social question had reached
a crisis, at which the antagonisms not only appeared to be,
but actually were, in the form of their exhibition, insoluble and,
in the form of their expression, irreconcilable. On the former
occasion Rome had been saved by the fact that Italy was merged
in Rome and Rome in Italy, and in the new enlarged and altered home
those old antagonisms were not reconciled, but fell into abeyance.
Now Rome was once more saved by the fact that the countries
of the Mediterranean were merged in it or became prepared for merging;
the war between the Italian poor and rich, which in the old Italy
could only end with the destruction of the nation, had no longer
a battle-field or a meaning in the Italy of three continents.
The Latin colonies closed the gap which threatened to swallow up
the Roman community in the fifth century; the deeper chasm
of the seventh century was filled by the Transalpine and transmarine
colonizations of Gaius Gracchus and Caesar. For Rome alone history
not merely performed miracles, but also repeated its miracles,
and twice cured the internal crisis, which in the state itself
was incurable, by regenerating the state. There was doubtless
much corruption in this regeneration; as the union of Italy
was accomplished over the ruins of the Samnite and Etruscan nations,
so the Mediterranean monarchy built itself on the ruins of countless
states and tribes once living and vigorous; but it was a corruption
out of which sprang a fresh growth, part of which remains green
at the present day. What was pulled down for the sake of the new
building, was merely the secondary nationalities which had long since
been marked out for destruction by the levelling hand of civilization.
Caesar, wherever he came forward as a destroyer, only carried out
the pronounced verdict of historical development; but he protected
the germs of culture, where and as he found them, in his own land
as well as among the sister nation of the Hellenes. He saved
and renewed the Roman type; and not only did he spare the Greek type,
but with the same self-relying genius with which he accomplished
the renewed foundation of Rome he undertook also the regeneration
of the Hellenes, and resumed the interrupted work of the great Alexander,
whose image, we may well believe, never was absent from Caesar's soul.
He solved these two great tasks not merely side by side,
but the one by means of the other. The two great essentials
of humanity--general and individual development, or state and culture--
once in embryo united in those old Graeco-Italians feeding their flocks
in primeval simplicity far from the coasts and islands
of the Mediterranean, had become dissevered when these were parted
into Italians and Hellenes, and had thenceforth remained apart
for many centuries. Now the descendant of the Trojan prince
and the Latin king's daughter created out of a state without
distinctive culture and a cosmopolitan civilization a new whole,
in which state and culture again met together at the acme
of human existence in the rich fulness of blessed maturity
and worthily filled the sphere appropriate to such an union.
The outlines have thus been set forth, which Caesar drew for this work,
according to which he laboured himself, and according to which posterity--
for many centuries confined to the paths which this great man marked out--
endeavoured to prosecute the work, if not with the intellect
and energy, yet on the whole in accordance with the intentions,
of the illustrious master. Little was finished; much even
was merely begun. Whether the plan was complete, those who venture
to vie in thought with such a man may decide; we observe no material
defect in what lies before us--every single stone of the building
enough to make a man immortal, and yet all combining to form
one harmonious whole. Caesar ruled as king of Rome for five years
and a half, not half as long as Alexander; in the intervals
of seven great campaigns, which allowed him to stay not more
than fifteen months altogether(119) in the capital of his empire,
he regulated the destinies of the world for the present
and the future, from the establishment of the boundary-line
between civilization and barbarism down to the removal of the pools
of rain in the streets of the capital, and yet retained time
and composure enough attentively to follow the prize-pieces in the theatre
and to confer the chaplet on the victor with improvised verses.
The rapidity and self-precision with which the plan was executed
prove that it had been long meditated thoroughly and all its parts
settled in detail; but, even thus, they remain not much less wonderful than
the plan itself. The outlines were laid down and thereby the new state
was defined for all coming time; the boundless future alone could complete
the structure. So far Caesar might say, that his aim was attained;
and this was probably the meaning of the words which were sometimes
heard to fall from him--that he had "lived enough." But precisely because
the building was an endless one, the master as long as he lived restlessly
added stone to stone, with always the same dexterity and always the same
elasticity busy at his work, without ever overturning or postponing,
just as if there were for him merely a to-day and no to-morrow.
Thus he worked and created as never did any mortal before or after him;
and as a worker and creator he still, after wellnigh two thousand years,
lives in the memory of the nations--the first, and withal unique,
Imperator Caesar.
CHAPTER XII
Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art
State Religion
In the development of religion and philosophy no new element
appeared during this epoch. The Romano-Hellenic state-religion
and the Stoic state-philosophy inseparably combined with it
were for every government--oligarchy, democracy or monarchy--not merely
a convenient instrument, but quite indispensable for the very reason
that it was just as impossible to construct the state wholly without
religious elements as to discover any new state-religion fitted
to take the place of the old. So the besom of revolution swept doubtless
at times very roughly through the cobwebs of the augural bird-lore;(1)
nevertheless the rotten machine creaking at every joint
survived the earthquake which swallowed up the republic itself,
and preserved its insipidity and its arrogance without diminution
for transference to the new monarchy. As a matter of course,
it fell more and more into disfavour with all those who preserved
their freedom of judgment. Towards the state-religion indeed
public opinion maintained an attitude essentially indifferent;
it was on all sides recognized as an institution of political convenience,
and no one specially troubled himself about it with the exception
of political and antiquarian literati. But towards its philosophical
sister there gradually sprang up among the unprejudiced public
that hostility, which the empty and yet perfidious hypocrisy of set phrases
never fails in the long run to awaken. That a presentiment of its own
worthlessness began to dawn on the Stoa itself, is shown by its attempt
artificially to infuse into itself some fresh spirit in the way
of syncretism. Antiochus of Ascalon (flourishing about 675), who professed
to have patched together the Stoic and Platonic-Aristotelian systems
into one organic unity, in reality so far succeeded that his misshapen
doctrine became the fashionable philosophy of the conservatives
of his time and was conscientiously studied by the genteel dilettanti
and literati of Rome. Every one who displayed any intellectual vigour,
opposed the Stoa or ignored it. It was principally antipathy
towards the boastful and tiresome Roman Pharisees, coupled doubtless
with the increasing disposition to take refuge from practical life
in indolent apathy or empty irony, that occasioned during this epoch
the extension of the system of Epicurus to a larger circle
and the naturalization of the Cynic philosophy of Diogenes in Rome.
However stale and poor in thought the former might be, a philosophy,
which did not seek the way to wisdom through an alteration
of traditional terms but contented itself with those in existence,
and throughout recognized only the perceptions of sense as true,
was always better than the terminological jingle and the hollow
conceptions of the Stoic wisdom; and the Cynic philosophy
was of all the philosophical systems of the times in so far
by much the best, as its system was confined to the having
no system at all and sneering at all systems and all systematizers.
In both fields war was waged against the Stoa with zeal and success;
for serious men, the Epicurean Lucretius preached with the full accents
of heartfelt conviction and of holy zeal against the Stoical faith
in the gods and providence and the Stoical doctrine of the immortality
of the soul; for the great public ready to laugh, the Cynic Varro
hit the mark still more sharply with the flying darts of his extensively-
read satires. While thus the ablest men of the older generation
made war on the Stoa, the younger generation again, such as Catullus,
stood in no inward relation to it at all, and passed a far sharper
censure on it by completely ignoring it.
The Oriental Religions
But, if in the present instance a faith no longer believed in
was maintained out of political convenience, they amply made up
for this in other respects. Unbelief and superstition, different hues
of the same historical phenomenon, went in the Roman world
of that day hand in hand, and there was no lack of individuals
who in themselves combined both--who denied the gods with Epicurus,
and yet prayed and sacrificed before every shrine. Of course only
the gods that came from the east were still in vogue, and, as the men
continued to flock from the Greek lands to Italy, so the gods
of the east migrated in ever-increasing numbers to the west.
The importance of the Phrygian cultus at that time in Rome is shown
both by the polemical tone of the older men such as Varro and Lucretius,
and by the poetical glorification of it in the fashionable Catullus,
which concludes with the characteristic request that the goddess
may deign to turn the heads of others only, and not that
of the poet himself.
Worship of Mithra
A fresh addition was the Persian worship, which is said
to have first reached the Occidental through the medium of the pirates
who met on the Mediterranean from the east and from the west;
the oldest seat of this cultus in the west is stated to have been
Mount Olympus in Lycia. That in the adoption of Oriental worships
in the west such higher speculative and moral elements as they contained
were generally allowed to drop, is strikingly evinced by the fact
that Ahuramazda, the supreme god of the pure doctrine of Zarathustra,
remained virtually unknown in the west, and adoration there
was especially directed to that god who had occupied the first place
in the old Persian national religion and had been transferred
by Zarathustra to the second--the sun-god Mithra.
Worship of Isis
But the brighter and gentler celestial forms of the Persian religion
did not so rapidly gain a footing in Rome as the wearisome mystical host
of the grotesque divinities of Egypt--Isis the mother of nature
with her whole train, the constantly dying and constantly reviving
Osiris, the gloomy Sarapis, the taciturn and grave Harpocrates,
the dog-headed Anubis. In the year when Clodius emancipated
the clubs and conventicles (696), and doubtless in consequence
of this very emancipation of the populace, that host even prepared
to make its entry into the old stronghold of the Roman Jupiter
in the Capitol, and it was with difficulty that the invasion
was prevented and the inevitable temples were banished
at least to the suburbs of Rome. No worship was equally popular
among the lower orders of the population in the capital: when the senate
ordered the temples of Isis constructed within the ring-wall
to be pulled down, no labourer ventured to lay the first hand on them,
and the consul Lucius Paullus was himself obliged to apply
the first stroke of the axe(704); a wager might be laid,
that the more loose any woman was, the more piously she worshipped Isis.
That the casting of lots, the interpretation of dreams, and similar
liberal arts supported their professors, was a matter of course.
The casting of horoscopes was already a scientific pursuit;
Lucius Tarutius of Firmum, a respectable and in his own way learned man,
a friend of Varro and Cicero, with all gravity cast the nativity
of kings Romulus and Numa and of the city of Rome itself,
and for the edification of the credulous on either side confirmed
by means of his Chaldaean and Egyptian wisdom the accounts
of the Roman annals.
The New Pythagoreanism
Nigidius Figulus
But by far the most remarkable phenomenon in this domain
was the first attempt to mingle crude faith with speculative thought,
the first appearance of those tendencies, which we are accustomed
to describe as Neo-Platonic, in the Roman world. Their oldest apostle
there was Publius Nigidius Figulus, a Roman of rank belonging
to the strictest section of the aristocracy, who filled
the praetorship in 696 and died in 709 as a political exile
beyond the bounds of Italy. With astonishing copiousness of learning
and still more astonishing strength of faith he created
out of the most dissimilar elements a philosophico-religious structure,
the singular outline of which he probably developed still more
in his oral discourses than in his theological and physical writings.
In philosophy, seeking deliverance from the skeletons of the current
systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain
of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought
had still presented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches
of physical science--which, suitably treated, afford even now
so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand,
and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws
lent themselves still more easily to such objects--played in this case,
as may readily be conceived, a considerable part. His theology
was based essentially on that strange medley, in which Greeks
of a kindred spirit had intermingled Orphic and other very old
or very new indigenous wisdom with Persian, Chaldaean,
and Egyptian secret doctrines, and with which Figulus incorporated
the quasi-results of the Tuscan investigation into nothingness
and of the indigenous lore touching the flight of birds,
so as to produce further harmonious confusion. The whole system obtained
its consecration--political, religious, and national--from the name
of Pythagoras, the ultra-conservative statesman whose supreme principle
was "to promote order and to check disorder," the miracle-worker
and necromancer, the primeval sage who was a native of Italy,
who was interwoven even with the legendary history of Rome,
and whose statue was to be seen in the Roman Forum. As birth
and death are kindred with each other, so--it seemed--Pythagoras
was to stand not merely by the cradle of the republic as friend
of the wise Numa and colleague of the sagacious mother Egeria,
but also by its grave as the last protector of the sacred bird-lore.
But the new system was not merely marvellous, it also worked marvels;
Nigidius announced to the father of the subsequent emperor Augustus,
on the very day when the latter was born, the future greatness
of his son; nay the prophets conjured up spirits for the credulous,
and, what was of more moment, they pointed out to them the places
where their lost money lay. The new-and-old wisdom, such as it was,
made a profound impression on its contemporaries; men of the highest rank,
of the greatest learning, of the most solid ability, belonging
to very different parties--the consul of 705, Appius Claudius,
the learned Marcus Varro, the brave officer Publius Vatinius--
took part in the citation of spirits, and it even appears
that a police interference was necessary against the proceedings
of these societies. These last attempts to save the Roman theology,
like the kindred efforts of Cato in the field of politics, produce at once
a comical and a melancholy impression; we may smile at the creed
and its propagators, but still it is a grave matter when even able men
begin to addict themselves to absurdity.
Training of Youth
Sciences of General Culture at This Period
The training of youth followed, as may naturally be supposed,
the course of bilingual humane culture chalked out in the previous epoch,
and the general culture also of the Roman world conformed
more and more to the forms established for that purpose by the Greeks.
Even the bodily exercises advanced from ball-playing, running,
and fencing to the more artistically-developed Greek gymnastic contests;
though there were not yet any public institutions for gymnastics,
in the principal country-houses the palaestra was already to be found
by the side of the bath-rooms. The manner in which the cycle
of general culture had changed in the Roman world during the course
of a century, is shown by a comparison of the encyclopaedia of Cato(2)
with the similar treatise of Varro "concerning the school-sciences."
As constituent elements of non-professional culture, there appear in Cato
the art of oratory, the sciences of agriculture, of law, of war,
and of medicine; in Varro--according to probable conjecture--grammar,
logic or dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
music, medicine, and architecture. Consequently in the course
of the seventh century the sciences of war, jurisprudence,
and agriculture had been converted from general into professional
studies. On the other hand in Varro the Hellenic training of youth
appears already in all its completeness: by the side of the course
of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, which had been introduced
at an earlier period into Italy, we now find the course which had
longer remained distinctively Hellenic, of geometry, arithmetic,
astronomy, and music.(3) That astronomy more especially,
which ministered, in the nomenclature of the stars, to the thoughtless
erudite dilettantism of the age and, in its relations to astrology,
to the prevailing religious delusions, was regularly and zealously
studied by the youth in Italy, can be proved also otherwise;
the astronomical didactic poems of Aratus, among all the works
of Alexandrian literature, found earliest admittance into the instruction
of Roman youth. To this Hellenic course there was added the study
of medicine, which was retained from the older Roman instruction,
and lastly that of architecture--indispensable to the genteel Roman
of this period, who instead of cultivatingthe ground built
houses and villas.
Greek Instruction
Alexandrinism
In comparison with the previous epoch the Greek as well as
the Latin training improved in extent and in scholastic strictness
quite as much as it declined in purity and in refinement.
The increasing eagerness after Greek lore gave to instruction
of itself an erudite character. To explain Homer or Euripides
was after all no art; teachers and scholars found their account better
in handling the Alexandrian poems, which, besides, were in their spirit
far more congenial to the Roman world of that day than the genuine Greek
national poetry, and which, if they were not quite so venerable
as the Iliad, possessed at any rate an age sufficiently respectable
to pass as classics with schoolmasters. The love-poems of Euphorion,
the "Causes" of Callimachus and his "Ibis," the comically obscure
"Alexandra" of Lycophron contained in rich abundance rare vocables
(-glossae-) suitable for being extracted and interpreted,
sentences laboriously involved and difficult of analysis,
prolix digressions full of mystic combinations of antiquated myths,
and generally a store of cumbersome erudition of all sorts.
Instruction needed exercises more and more difficult; these productions,
in great part model efforts of schoolmasters, were excellently
adapted to be lessons for model scholars. Thus the Alexandrian poems
took a permanent place in Italian scholastic instruction,
especially as trial-themes, and certainly promoted knowledge,
although at the expense of taste and of discretion. The same unhealthy
appetite for culture moreover impelled the Roman youths to derive
their Hellenism as much as possible from the fountain-head. The courses
of the Greek masters in Rome sufficed only for a first start;
every one who wished to be able to converse heard lectures
on Greek philosophy at Athens, and on Greek rhetoric at Rhodes,
and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor,
where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still
to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts
had been continued, although after a mechanical fashion;
whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat
of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men
desirous of culture directed their travels.
Latin Instruction
The advance in Latin instruction was similar to that of Greek.
This in part resulted from the mere reflex influence of the Greek,
from which it in fact essentially borrowed its methods
and its stimulants. Moreover, the relations of politics, the impulse
to mount the orators' platform in the Forum which was imparted
by the democratic doings to an ever-widening circle, contributed
not a little to the diffusion and enhancement of oratorical exercises;
"wherever one casts his eyes," says Cicero, "every place is full
of rhetoricians." Besides, the writings of the sixth century,
the farther they receded into the past, began to be more decidedly
regarded as classical texts of the golden age of Latin literature,
and thereby gave a greater preponderance to the instruction
which was essentially concentrated upon them. Lastly the immigration
and spreading of barbarian elements from many quarters
and the incipient Latinizing of extensive Celtic and Spanish districts,
naturally gave to Latin grammar and Latin instruction a higher importance
than they could have had, so long as Latium only spoke Latin;
the teacher of Latin literature had from the outset a different
position in Comum and Narbo than he had in Praeneste and Ardea.
Taken as a whole, culture was more on the wane than on the advance.
The ruin of the Italian country towns, the extensive intrusion of foreign
elements, the political, economic, and moral deterioration of the nation,
above all, the distracting civil wars inflicted more injury
on the language than all the schoolmasters of the world could repair.
The closer contact with the Hellenic culture of the present,
the more decided influence of the talkative Athenian wisdom
and of the rhetoric of Rhodes and Asia Minor, supplied
to the Roman youth just the very elements that were most pernicious
in Hellenism. The propagandist mission which Latium undertook
among the Celts, Iberians, and Libyans--proud as the task was--
could not but have the like consequences for the Latin language
as the Hellenizing of the east had had for the Hellenic.
The fact that the Roman public of this period applauded
the well arranged and rhythmically balanced periods of the orator,
and any offence in language or metre cost the actor dear, doubtless
shows that the insight into the mother tongue which was the reflection
of scholastic training was becoming the common possession of an ever-
widening circle. But at the same time contemporaries capable
of judging complain that the Hellenic culture in Italy about 690
was at a far lower level than it had been a generation before;
that opportunities of hearing pure and good Latin were but rare,
and these chiefly from the mouth of elderly cultivated ladies;
that the tradition of genuine culture, the good old Latin mother wit,
the Lucilian polish, the cultivated circle of readers
of the Scipionic age were gradually disappearing. The circumstance
that the term -urbanitas-, and the idea of a polished national culture
which it expressed, arose during this period, proves, not that
it was prevalent, but that it was on the wane, and that people
were keenly alive to the absence of this -urbanitas- in the language
and the habits of the Latinized barbarians or barbarized Latins.
Where we still meet with the urbane tone of conversation, as in Varro's
Satires and Cicero's Letters, it is an echo of the old fashion
which was not yet so obsolete in Reate and Arpinum as in Rome.
Germs of State Training-Schools
Thus the previous culture of youth remained substantially unchanged,
except that--not so much from its own deterioration as
from the general decline of the nation--it was productive of less good
and more evil than in the preceding epoch. Caesar initiated
a revolution also in this department. While the Roman senate
had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture,
the government of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence
in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it
after the Hellenic fashion. If Caesar conferred the Roman franchise
on all teachers of the liberal sciences and all the physicians
of the capital, we may discover in this step a paving of the way
in some degree for those institutions in which subsequently
the higher bilingual culture of the youth of the empire
was provided for on the part of the state, and which form
the most significant expression of the new state of -humanitas-;
and if Caesar had further resolved on the establishment
of a public Greek and Latin library in the capital and had already
nominated the most learned Roman of the age, Marcus Varro,
as principal librarian, this implied unmistakeably the design
of connecting the cosmopolitan monarchy with cosmopolitan literature.
Language
The Vulgarism of Asia Minor
The development of the language during this period turned
on the distinction between the classical Latin of cultivated society
and the vulgar language of common life. The former itself
was a product of the distinctively Italian culture; even in the Scipionic
circle "pure Latin" had become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken,
no longer in entire naivete, but in conscious contradistinction
to the language of the great multitude. This epoch opens
with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which had hitherto
exclusively prevailed in the higher language of conversation
and accordingly also in literature--a reaction which had
inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction
of a similar nature in the language of Greece. Just about this time
the rhetor and romance-writer Hegesias of Magnesia and the numerous
rhetors and literati of Asia Minor who attached themselves to him
began to rebel against the orthodox Atticism. They demanded
full recognition for the language of life, without distinction,
whether the word or the phrase originated in Attica or in Caria
and Phrygia; they themselves spoke and wrote not for the taste
of learned cliques, but for that of the great public. There could not
be much objection to the principle; only, it is true, the result
could not be better than was the public of Asia Minor of that day,
which had totally lost the taste for chasteness and purity
of production, and longed only after the showy and brilliant.
To say nothing of the spurious forms of art that sprang
out of this tendency--especially the romance and the history assuming
the form of romance--the very style of these Asiatics was,
as may readily be conceived, abrupt and without modulation and finish,
minced and effeminate, full of tinsel and bombast, thoroughly vulgar
and affected; "any one who knows Hegesias," says Cicero,
"knows what silliness is."
Roman Vulgarism
Hortensius
Reaction
The Rhodian School
Yet this new style found its way also into the Latin world.
When the Hellenic fashionable rhetoric, after having at the close
of the previous epoch obtruded into the Latin instruction of youth,(4)
took at the beginning of the present period the final step and mounted
the Roman orators' platform in the person of Quintus Hortensius
(640-704), the most celebrated pleader of the Sullan age,
it adhered closely even in the Latin idiom to the bad Greek taste
of the time; and the Roman public, no longer having the pure
and chaste culture of the Scipionic age, naturally applauded
with zeal the innovator who knew how to give to vulgarism
the semblance of an artistic performance. This was of great importance.
As in Greece the battles of language were always waged at first
in the schools of the rhetoricians, so in Rome the forensic oration
to a certain extent even more than literature set the standard of style,
and accordingly there was combined, as it were of right,
with the leadership of the bar the prerogative of giving the tone
to the fashionable mode of speaking and writing. The Asiatic vulgarism
of Hortensius thus dislodged classicism from the Roman platform
and partly also from literature. But the fashion soon changed
once more in Greece and in Rome. In the former it was the Rhodian school
of rhetoricians, which, without reverting to all the chaste severity
of the Attic style, attempted to strike out a middle course between it
and the modern fashion: if the Rhodian masters were not too particular
as to the internal correctness of their thinking and speaking,
they at least insisted on purity of language and style, on the careful
selection of words and phrases, and the giving thorough effect
to the modulation of sentences.
Ciceronianism
In Italy it was Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who, after having
in his early youth gone along with the Hortensian manner,
was brought by hearing the Rhodian masters and by his own
more matured taste to better paths, and thenceforth addicted himself
to strict purity of language and the thorough periodic arrangement
and modulation of his discourse. The models of language, which,
in this respect he followed, he found especially in those circles
of the higher Roman society which had suffered but little or not at all
from vulgarism; and, as was already said, there were still such,
although they were beginning to disappear. The earlier Latin
and the good Greek literature, however considerable was the influence
of the latter more especially on the rhythm of his oratory,
were in this matter only of secondary moment: this purifying
of the language was by no means a reaction of the language of books
against that of conversation, but a reaction of the language
of the really cultivated against the jargon of spurious
and partial culture. Caesar, in the department of language
also the greatest master of his time, expressed the fundamental idea
of Roman classicism, when he enjoined that in speech and writing
every foreign word should be avoided, as rocks are avoided
by the mariner; the poetical and the obsolete word of the older
literature was rejected as well as the rustic phrase or that borrowed
from the language of common life, and more especially the Greek words
and phrases which, as the letters of this period show,
had to a very great extent found their way into conversational language.
Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism
of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance
to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon
to the model French of Moliere and Boileau; while the former classicism
had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were
caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing
beyond recovery. Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself.
With the leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste
passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious
authorship of the latter gave to this classicism--what it had
hitherto lacked--extensive prose texts. Thus Cicero became
the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism
attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist;
it was to the stylist Cicero, not to the author, still less
to the statesman, that the panegyrics--extravagant yet not made up
wholly of verbiage--applied, with which the most gifted representatives
of classicism, such as Caesar and Catullus, loaded him.
The New Roman Poetry
They soon went farther. What Cicero did in prose, was carried out
in poetry towards the end of the epoch by the new Roman school
of poets, which modelled itself on the Greek fashionable poetry,
and in which the man of most considerable talent was Catullus.
Here too the higher language of conversation dislodged the archaic
reminiscences which hitherto to a large extent prevailed
in this domain, and as Latin prose submitted to the Attic rhythm,
so Latin poetry submitted gradually to the strict or rather painful
metrical laws of the Alexandrines; e. g. from the time of Catullus,
it is no longer allowable at once to begin a verse and to close
a sentence begun in the verse preceding with a monosyllabic word
or a dissyllabic one not specially weighty.
Grammatical Science
At length science stepped in, fixed the law of language,
and developed its rule, which was no longer determined on the basis
of experience, but made the claim to determine experience.
The endings of declension, which hitherto had in part been variable,
were now to be once for all fixed; e. g. of the genitive and dative
forms hitherto current side by side in the so-called fourth declension
(-senatuis- and -senatus-, -senatui-, and -senatu-) Caesar recognized
exclusively as valid the contracted forms (-us and -u).
In orthography various changes were made, to bring the written
more fully into correspondence with the spoken language;
thus the -u in the middle of words like -maxumus- was replaced
after Caesar's precedent by -i; and of the two letters
which had become superfluous, -k and -q, the removal of the first
was effected, and that of the second was at least proposed.
The language was, if not yet stereotyped, in the course of becoming so;
it was not yet indeed unthinkingly dominated by rule, but it had already
become conscious of it. That this action in the department
of Latin grammar derived generally its spirit and method
from the Greek, and not only so, but that the Latin language was also
directly rectified in accordance with Greek precedent, is shown,
for example, by the treatment of the final -s, which till
towards the close of this epoch had at pleasure passed sometimes
as a consonant, sometimes not as one, but was treated by the new-
fashioned poets throughout, as in Greek, as a consonantal
termination. This regulation of language is the proper domain
of Roman classicism; in the most various ways, and for that very reason
all the more significantly, the rule is inculcated and the offence
against it rebuked by the coryphaei of classicism, by Cicero,
by Caesar, even in the poems of Catullus; whereas the older generation
expresses itself with natural keenness of feeling respecting
the revolution which had affected the field of language
as remorselessly as the field of politics.(5) But while the new
classicism--that is to say, the standard Latin governed by rule
and as far as possible placed on a parity with the standard Greek--
which arose out of a conscious reaction against the vulgarism
intruding into higher society and even into literature,
acquired literary fixity and systematic shape, the latter by no means
evacuated the field. Not only do we find it naively employed
in the works of secondary personages who have drifted into the ranks
of authors merely by accident, as in the account of Caesar's second
Spanish war, but we shall meet it also with an impress more or less
distinct in literature proper, in the mime, in the semi-romance,
in the aesthetic writings of Varro; and it is a significant
circumstance, that it maintains itself precisely in the most national
departments of literature, and that truly conservative men,
like Varro, take it into protection. Classicism was based
on the death of the Italian language as monarchy on the decline
of the Italian nation; it was completely consistent that the men,
in whom the republic was still living, should continue to give
to the living language its rights, and for the sake of its comparative
vitality and nationality should tolerate its aesthetic defects.
Thus then the linguistic opinions and tendencies of this epoch
are everywhere divergent; by the side of the old-fashioned poetry
of Lucretius appears the thoroughly modern poetry of Catullus,
by the side of Cicero's well-modulated period stands the sentence
of Varro intentionally disdaining all subdivision. In this field
likewise is mirrored the distraction of the age.
Literary Effort
Greek Literati in Rome
In the literature of this period we are first of all struck
by the outward increase, as compared with the former epoch,
of literary effort in Rome. It was long since the literary activity
of the Greeks flourished no more in the free atmosphere
of civic independence, but only in the scientific institutions
of the larger cities and especially of the courts. Left to depend
on the favour and protection of the great, and dislodged
from the former seats of the Muses(6) by the extinction
of the dynasties of Pergamus (621), Cyrene (658), Bithynia (679),
and Syria (690) and by the waning splendour of the court
of the Lagids--moreover, since the death of Alexander the Great,
necessarily cosmopolitan and at least quite as much strangers
among the Egyptians and Syrians as among the Latins--
the Hellenic literati began more and more to turn their eyes
towards Rome. Among the host of Greek attendants with which
the Roman of quality at this time surrounded himself, the philosopher,
the poet, and the memoir-writer played conspicuous parts
by the side of the cook, the boy-favourite, and the jester.
We meet already literati of note in such positions; the Epicurean
Philodemus, for instance, was installed as domestic philosopher
with Lucius Piso consul in 696, and occasionally edified the initiated
with his clever epigrams on the coarse-grained Epicureanism
of his patron. From all sides the most notable representatives
of Greek art and science migrated in daily-increasing numbers to Rome
where literary gains were now more abundant than anywhere else.
Among those thus mentioned as settled in Rome we find the physician
Asclepiades whom king Mithradates vainly endeavoured to draw away from it
into his service; the universalist in learning, Alexander of Miletus,
termed Polyhistor; the poet Parthenius from Nicaea in Bithynia;
Posidonius of Apamea in Syria equally celebrated as a traveller,
teacher, and author, who at a great age migrated in 703 from Rhodes
to Rome; and various others. A house like that of Lucius Lucullus
was a seat of Hellenic culture and a rendezvous for Hellenic literati
almost like the Alexandrian Museum; Roman resources and Hellenic
connoisseurship had gathered in these halls of wealth and science
an incomparable collection of statues and paintings of earlier
and contemporary masters, as well as a library as carefully selected
as it was magnificently fitted up, and every person of culture
and especially every Greek was welcome there--the master of the house
himself was often seen walking up and down the beautiful colonnade
in philological or philosophical conversation with one of his
learned guests. No doubt these Greeks brought along with their
rich treasures of culture their preposterousness and servility
to Italy; one of these learned wanderers for instance, the author
of the "Art of Flattery," Aristodemus of Nysa (about 700)
recommended himself to his masters by demonstrating that Homer
was a native of Rome!
Extent of the Literary Pursuits of the Romans
In the same measure as the pursuits of the Greek literati prospered
in Rome, literary activity and literary interest increased among
the Romans themselves. Even Greek composition, which the stricter
taste of the Scipionic age had totally set aside, now revived.
The Greek language was now universally current, and a Greek treatise
found a quite different public from a Latin one; therefore Romans
of rank, such as Lucius Lucullus, Marcus Cicero, Titus Atticus,
Quintus Scaevola (tribune of the people in 700), like the kings
of Armenia and Mauretania, published occasionally Greek prose
and even Greek verses. Such Greek authorship however by native Romans
remained a secondary matter and almost an amusement; the literary
as well as the political parties of Italy all coincided in adhering
to their Italian nationality, only more or less pervaded
by Hellenism. Nor could there be any complaint at least as to want
of activity in the field of Latin authorship. There was a flood
of books and pamphlets of all sorts, and above all of poems, in Rome.
Poets swarmed there, as they did only in Tarsus or Alexandria;
poetical publications had become the standing juvenile sin
of livelier natures, and even then the writer was reckoned fortunate
whose youthful poems compassionate oblivion withdrew from criticism.
Any one who understood the art, wrote without difficulty
at a sitting his five hundred hexameters in which no schoolmaster
found anything to censure, but no reader discovered anything to praise.
The female world also took a lively part in these literary pursuits;
the ladies did not confine themselves to dancing and music,
but by their spirit and wit ruled conversation and talked excellently
on Greek and Latin literature; and, when poetry laid siege
to a maiden's heart, the beleaguered fortress not seldom surrendered
likewise in graceful verses. Rhythms became more and more
the fashionable plaything of the big children of both sexes;
poetical epistles, joint poetical exercises and competitions
among good friends, were of common occurrence, and towards the end
of this epoch institutions were already opened in the capital,
at which unfledged Latin poets might learn verse-making for money.
In consequence of the large consumption of books the machinery
for the manufacture of copies was substantially perfected,
and publication was effected with comparative rapidity and cheapness;
bookselling became a respectable and lucrative trade, and the bookseller's
shop a usual meeting-place of men of culture. Reading had become
a fashion, nay a mania; at table, where coarser pastimes had not
already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one
who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library.
The superior officer was seen in the camp-tent with the obscene
Greek romance, the statesman in the senate with the philosophical
treatise, in his hands. Matters accordingly stood in the Roman state
as they have stood and will stand in every state where the citizens
read "from the threshold to the closet." The Parthian vizier
was not far wrong, when he pointed out to the citizens of Seleucia
the romances found in the camp of Crassus and asked them whether
they still regarded the readers of such books as formidable opponents.
The Classicists and the Moderns
The literary tendency of this age was varied and could not be otherwise,
for the age itself was divided between the old and the new modes.
The same tendencies which came into conflict on the field of politics,
the national-Italian tendency of the conservatives, the Helleno-Italian
or, if the term be preferred, cosmopolitan tendency of the new monarchy,
fought their battles also on the field of literature. The former
attached itself to the older Latin literature, which in the theatre,
in the school, and in erudite research assumed more and more
the character of classical. With less taste and stronger party
tendencies than the Scipionic epoch showed, Ennius, Pacuvius,
and especially Plautus were now exalted to the skies. The leaves
of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively
greater nationality and relatively greater productiveness of the poets
of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch
of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly
as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors
as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall.
No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion
of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic
of the conservatism of this age in general; and here too
there was no want of trimmers. Cicero for instance, although in prose
one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency,
revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same
antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution
and the augural discipline; "patriotism requires," we find him saying,
"that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation
of Sophocles than the original." While thus the modern literary tendency
cognate to the democratic monarchy numbered secret adherents enough even
among the orthodox admirers of Ennius, there were not wanting already
bolder judges, who treated the native literature as disrespectfully
as the senatorial politics. Not only did they resume the strict
criticism of the Scipionic epoch and set store by Terence only in order
to condemn Ennius and still more the Ennianists, but the younger
and bolder men went much farther and ventured already--though only as yet
in heretical revolt against literary orthodoxy--to call Plautus
a rude jester and Lucilius a bad verse-smith. This modern tendency
attached itself not to the native authorship, but rather
to the more recent Greek literature or the so-called Alexandrinism.
The Greek Alexandrinism
We cannot avoid saying at least so much respecting
this remarkable winter-garden of Hellenic language and art,
as is requisite for the understanding of the Roman literature
of this and the later epochs. The Alexandrian literature was based
on the decline of the pure Hellenic idiom, which from the time
of Alexander the Great was superseded in daily life by an inferior
jargon deriving its origin from the contact of the Macedonian dialect
with various Greek and barbarian tribes; or, to speak more accurately,
the Alexandrian literature sprang out of the ruin of the Hellenic nation
generally, which had to perish, and did perish, in its national
individuality in order to establish the universal monarchy of Alexander
and the empire of Hellenism. Had Alexander's universal empire continued
to subsist, the former national and popular literature would have been
succeeded by a cosmopolitan literature Hellenic merely in name,
essentially denationalized and called into life in a certain measure
by royal patronage, but at all events ruling the world;
but, as the state of Alexander was unhinged by his death,
the germs of the literature corresponding to it rapidly perished.
Nevertheless the Greek nation with all that it had possessed--
with its nationality, its language, its art--belonged to the past.
It was only in a comparatively narrow circle not of men of culture--
for such, strictly speaking, no longer existed--but of men of erudition
that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead;
that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried
with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that,
possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition
was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous
productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism.
It is essentially similar to that literature of scholars, which,
keeping aloof from the living Romanic nationalities and their vulgar
idioms, grew up during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
among a cosmopolitan circle of erudite philologues--as an artificial
aftergrowth of the departed antiquity; the contrast between
the classical and the vulgar Greek of the period of the Diadochi
is doubtless less strongly marked, but is not, properly speaking,
different from that between the Latin of Manutius
and the Italian of Macchiavelli.
The Roman Alexandrinism