The Roman Constitution had grown out of the character of the Roman
nation. It was popular in form beyond all constitutions of which there
is any record in history. The citizens assembled in the Comitia were
the sovereign authority in the State, and they exercised their power
immediately and not by representatives. The executive magistrates were
chosen annually. The assembly was the supreme Court of Appeal; and
without its sanction no freeman could be lawfully put to death. In the
assembly also was the supreme power of legislation. Any consul, any
praetor, any tribune, might propose a law from the Rostra to the
people. The people if it pleased them might accept such law, and
senators and public officers might be sworn to obey it under pains of
treason. As a check on precipitate resolutions, a single consul or a
single tribune might interpose his veto. But the veto was binding only
so long as the year of office continued. If the people were in earnest,
submission to their wishes could be made a condition at the next
election, and thus no constitutional means existed of resisting them
when these wishes showed themselves.
In normal times the Senate was allowed the privilege of preconsidering
intended acts of legislation, and refusing to recommend them if
inexpedient, but the privilege was only converted into a right after
violent convulsions, and was never able to maintain itself. That under
such a system the functions of government could have been carried on at
all was due entirely to the habits of self-restraint which the Romans
had engraved into their nature. They were called a nation of kings,
kings over their own appetites, passions, and inclinations. They were
not imaginative, they were not intellectual; they had little national
poetry, little art, little philosophy. They were moral and practical.
In these two directions the force that was in them entirely ran. They
were free politically, because freedom meant to them not freedom to do
as they pleased, but freedom to do what was right; and every citizen,
before he arrived at his civil privileges, had been schooled in the
discipline of obedience. Each head of a household was absolute master
of it, master over his children and servants, even to the extent of
life and death. What the father was to the family, the gods were to the
whole people, the awful lords and rulers at whose pleasure they lived
and breathed. Unlike the Greeks, the reverential Romans invented no
idle legends about the supernatural world. The gods to them were the
guardians of the State, whose will in all things they were bound to
seek and to obey. The forms in which they endeavored to learn what that
will might be were childish or childlike. They looked to signs in the
sky, to thunder-storms and comets and shooting stars. Birds, winged
messengers, as they thought them, between earth and heaven, were
celestial indicators of the gods' commands. But omens and auguries were
but the outward symbols, and the Romans, like all serious peoples, went
to their own hearts for their real guidance. They had a unique
religious peculiarity, to which no race of men has produced anything
like. They did not embody the elemental forces in personal forms; they
did not fashion a theology out of the movements of the sun and stars or
the changes of the seasons. Traces may be found among them of cosmic
traditions and superstitions, which were common to all the world; but
they added of their own this especial feature: that they built temples
and offered sacrifices to the highest human excellences, to "Valor," to
"Truth," to "Good Faith," to "Modesty," to "Charity," to "Concord." In
these qualities lay all that raised man above the animals with which he
had so much in common. In them, therefore, were to be found the link
which connected him with the divine nature, and moral qualities were
regarded as divine influences which gave his life its meaning and its
worth. The "Virtues" were elevated into beings to whom disobedience
could be punished as a crime, and the superstitious fears which run so
often into mischievous idolatries were enlisted with conscience in the
direct service of right action.
On the same principle the Romans chose the heroes and heroines of their
national history. The Manlii and Valerii were patterns of courage, the
Lucretias and Virginias of purity, the Decii and Curtii of patriotic
devotion, the Reguli and Fabricii of stainless truthfulness. On the
same principle, too, they had a public officer whose functions
resembled those of the Church courts in mediaeval Europe, a Censor
Morum, an inquisitor who might examine into the habits of private
families, rebuke extravagance, check luxury, punish vice and
self-indulgence, nay, who could remove from the Senate, the great
council of elders, persons whose moral conduct was a reproach to a body
on whose reputation no shadow could be allowed to rest.
Such the Romans were in the day when their dominion had not extended
beyond the limits of Italy; and because they were such they were able
to prosper under a constitution which to modern experience would
promise only the most hopeless confusion.
Morality thus engrained in the national character and grooved into
habits of action creates strength, as nothing else creates it. The
difficulty of conduct does not lie in knowing what it is right to do,
but in doing it when known. Intellectual culture does not touch the
conscience. It provides no motives to overcome the weakness of the
will, and with wider knowledge it brings also new temptations. The
sense of duty is present in each detail of life; the obligatory "must"
which binds the will to the course which right principle has marked out
for it produces a fibre like the fibre of the oak. The educated Greeks
knew little of it. They had courage and genius and enthusiasm, but they
had no horror of immorality as such. The Stoics saw what was wanting,
and tried to supply it; but though they could provide a theory of
action, they could not make the theory into a reality, and it is
noticeable that Stoicism as a rule of life became important only when
adopted by the Romans. The Catholic Church effected something in its
better days when it had its courts which treated sins as crimes.
Calvinism, while it was believed, produced characters nobler and
grander than any which Republican Rome produced. But the Catholic
Church turned its penances into money payments. Calvinism made demands
on faith beyond what truth would bear; and when doubt had once entered,
the spell of Calvinism was broken. The veracity of the Romans, and
perhaps the happy accident that they had no inherited religious
traditions, saved them for centuries from similar trials. They had hold
of real truth unalloyed with baser metal; and truth had made them free
and kept them so. When all else has passed away, when theologies have
yielded up their real meaning, and creeds and symbols have become
transparent, and man is again in contact with the hard facts of nature,
it will be found that the "Virtues" which the Romans made into gods
contain in them the essence of true religion, that in them lies the
special characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the rest
of animated things. Every other creature exists for itself, and cares
for its own preservation. Nothing larger or better is expected from it
or possible to it. To man it is said, you do not live for yourself. If
you live for yourself you shall come to nothing. Be brave, be just, be
pure, be true in word and deed; care not for your enjoyment, care not
for your life; care only for what is right. So, and not otherwise, it
shall be well with you. So the Maker of you has ordered, whom you will
disobey at your peril.
Thus and thus only are nations formed which are destined to endure; and
as habits based on such convictions are slow in growing, so when grown
to maturity they survive extraordinary trials. But nations are made up
of many persons in circumstances of endless variety. In country
districts, where the routine of life continues simple, the type of
character remains unaffected; generation follows on generation exposed
to the same influences and treading in the same steps. But the morality
of habit, though the most important element in human conduct, is still
but a part of it. Moral habits grow under given conditions. They
correspond to a given degree of temptation. When men are removed into
situations where the use and wont of their fathers no longer meets
their necessities; where new opportunities are offered to them; where
their opinions are broken in upon by new ideas; where pleasures tempt
them on every side, and they have but to stretch out their hand to take
them--moral habits yield under the strain, and they have no other
resource to fall back upon. Intellectual cultivation brings with it
rational interests. Knowledge, which looks before and after, acts as a
restraining power, to help conscience when it flags. The sober and
wholesome manners of life among the early Romans had given them
vigorous minds in vigorous bodies. The animal nature had grown as
strongly as the moral nature, and along with it the animal appetites;
and when appetites burst their traditionary restraints, and man in
himself has no other notion of enjoyment beyond bodily pleasure, he may
pass by an easy transition into a mere powerful brute. And thus it
happened with the higher classes at Rome after the destruction of
Carthage. Italy had fallen to them by natural and wholesome expansion;
but from being sovereigns of Italy, they became a race of imperial
conquerors. Suddenly, and in comparatively a few years after the one
power was gone which could resist them, they became the actual or
virtual rulers of the entire circuit of the Mediterranean. The
south-east of Spain, the coast of France from the Pyrenees to Nice, the
north of Italy, Illyria and Greece, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Greek
Islands, the southern and western shores of Asia Minor, were Roman
provinces, governed directly under Roman magistrates. On the African
side Mauritania (Morocco) was still free. Numidia (the modern Algeria)
retained its native dynasty, but was a Roman dependency. The
Carthaginian dominions, Tunis and Tripoli, had been annexed to the
Empire. The interior of Asia Minor up to the Euphrates, with Syria and
Egypt, were under sovereigns called Allies, but, like the native
princes in India, subject to a Roman protectorate. Over this enormous
territory, rich with the accumulated treasures of centuries, and
inhabited by thriving, industrious races, the energetic Roman men of
business had spread and settled themselves, gathering into their hands
the trade, the financial administration, the entire commercial control
of the Mediterranean basin. They had been trained in thrift and
economy, in abhorrence of debt, in strictest habits of close and
careful management. Their frugal education, their early lessons in the
value of money, good and excellent as those lessons were, led them, as
a matter of course, to turn to account their extraordinary
opportunities. Governors with their staffs, permanent officials,
contractors for the revenue, negotiators, bill-brokers, bankers,
merchants, were scattered everywhere in thousands. Money poured in upon
them in rolling streams of gold. The largest share of the spoils fell
to the Senate and the senatorial families. The Senate was the permanent
Council of State, and was the real administrator of the Empire. The
Senate had the control of the treasury, conducted the public policy,
appointed from its own ranks the governors of the provinces. It was
patrician in sentiment, but not necessarily patrician in composition.
The members of it had virtually been elected for life by the people,
and were almost entirely those who had been quaestors, aediles,
praetors, or consuls; and these offices had been long open to the
plebeians. It was an aristocracy, in theory a real one, but tending to
become, as civilization went forward, an aristocracy of the rich. How
the senatorial privileges affected the management of the provinces will
be seen more particularly as we go on. It is enough at present to say
that the nobles and great commoners of Rome rapidly found themselves in
possession of revenues which their fathers could not have imagined in
their dreams, and money in the stage of progress at which Rome had
arrived was convertible into power.
The opportunities opened for men to advance their fortunes in other
parts of the world drained Italy of many of its most enterprising
citizens. The grandsons of the yeomen who had held at bay Pyrrhus and
Hannibal sold their farms and went away. The small holdings merged
rapidly into large estates bought up by the Roman capitalists. At the
final settlement of Italy, some millions of acres had been reserved to
the State as public property. The "public land," as the reserved
portion was called, had been leased on easy terms to families with
political influence, and by lapse of time, by connivance and right of
occupation, these families were beginning to regard their tenures as
their private property, and to treat them as lords of manors in England
have treated the "commons." Thus everywhere the small farmers were
disappearing, and the soil of Italy was fast passing into the hands of
a few territorial magnates, who, unfortunately (for it tended to
aggravate the mischief), were enabled by another cause to turn their
vast possessions to advantage. The conquest of the world had turned the
flower of the defeated nations into slaves. The prisoners taken either
after a battle or when cities surrendered unconditionally were bought
up steadily by contractors who followed in the rear of the Roman
armies. They were not ignorant like the negroes, but trained, useful,
and often educated men, Asiatics, Greeks, Thracians, Gauls, and
Spaniards, able at once to turn their hands to some form of skilled
labor, either as clerks, mechanics, or farm-servants. The great
landowners might have paused in their purchases had the alternative
lain before them of letting their lands lie idle or of having freemen
to cultivate them. It was otherwise when a resource so convenient and
so abundant was opened at their feet. The wealthy Romans bought slaves
by thousands. Some they employed in their workshops in the capital.
Some they spread over their plantations, covering the country, it might
be, with olive gardens and vineyards, swelling further the plethoric
figures of their owners' incomes. It was convenient for the few, but
less convenient for the Commonwealth. The strength of Rome was in her
free citizens. Where a family of slaves was settled down, a village of
freemen had disappeared; the material for the legions diminished; the
dregs of the free population which remained behind crowded into Rome,
without occupation except in politics, and with no property save in
their votes, of course to become the clients of the millionaires, and
to sell themselves to the highest bidders. With all his wealth there
were but two things which the Roman noble could buy, political power
and luxury; and in these directions his whole resources were expended.
The elections, once pure, became matters of annual bargain between
himself and his supporters. The once hardy, abstemious mode of living
degenerated into grossness and sensuality.
And his character was assailed simultaneously on another side with
equally mischievous effect. The conquest of Greece brought to Rome a
taste for knowledge and culture; but the culture seldom passed below
the surface, and knowledge bore but the old fruit which it had borne in
Eden. The elder Cato used to say that the Romans were like their
slaves--the less Greek they knew the better they were. They had
believed in the gods with pious simplicity. The Greeks introduced them
to an Olympus of divinities whom the practical Roman found that he must
either abhor or deny to exist. The "Virtues" which he had been taught
to reverence had no place among the graces of the new theology.
Reverence Jupiter he could not, and it was easy to persuade him that
Jupiter was an illusion; that all religions were but the creations of
fancy, his own among them. Gods there might be, airy beings in the
deeps of space, engaged like men with their own enjoyments; but to
suppose that these high spirits fretted themselves with the affairs of
the puny beings that crawled upon the earth was a delusion of vanity.
Thus, while morality was assailed on one side by extraordinary
temptations, the religious sanction of it was undermined on the other.
The Romans ceased to believe, and in losing their faith they became as
steel becomes when it is demagnetized; the spiritual quality was gone
out of them, and the high society of Rome itself became a society of
powerful animals with an enormous appetite for pleasure. Wealth poured
in more and more, and luxury grew more unbounded. Palaces sprang up in
the city, castles in the country, villas at pleasant places by the sea,
and parks, and fish-ponds, and game-preserves, and gardens, and vast
retinues of servants. When natural pleasures had been indulged in to
satiety, pleasures which were against nature were imported from the
East to stimulate the exhausted appetite. To make money--money by any
means, lawful or unlawful--became the universal passion. Even the most
cultivated patricians were coarse alike in their habits and their
amusements. They cared for art as dilettanti, but no schools either of
sculpture or painting were formed among themselves. They decorated
their porticos and their saloons with the plunder of the East. The
stage was never more than an artificial taste with them; their delight
was the delight of barbarians, in spectacles, in athletic exercises, in
horse-races and chariot-races, in the combats of wild animals in the
circus, combats of men with beasts on choice occasions, and, as a rare
excitement, in fights between men and men, when select slaves trained
as gladiators were matched in pairs to kill each other. Moral habits
are all-sufficient while they last; but with rude strong natures they
are but chains which hold the passions prisoners. Let the chain break,
and the released brute is but the more powerful for evil from the force
which his constitution has inherited. Money! the cry was still
money!--money was the one thought from the highest senator to the
poorest wretch who sold his vote in the Comitia. For money judges gave
unjust decrees and juries gave corrupt verdicts. Governors held their
provinces for one, two, or three years; they went out bankrupt from
extravagance, they returned with millions for fresh riot. To obtain a
province was the first ambition of a Roman noble. The road to it lay
through the praetorship and the consulship; these offices, therefore,
became the prizes of the State; and being in the gift of the people,
they were sought after by means which demoralized alike the givers and
the receivers. The elections were managed by clubs and coteries; and,
except on occasions of national danger or political excitement, those
who spent most freely were most certain of success.
Under these conditions the chief powers in the Commonwealth necessarily
centred in the rich. There was no longer an aristocracy of birth, still
less of virtue. The patrician families had the start in the race. Great
names and great possessions came to them by inheritance. But the door
of promotion was open to all who had the golden key. The great
commoners bought their way into the magistracies. From the magistracies
they passed into the Senate; and the Roman senator, though in Rome
itself and in free debate among his colleagues he was handled as an
ordinary man, when he travelled had the honors of a sovereign. The
three hundred senators of Rome were three hundred princes. They moved
about in other countries with the rights of legates, at the expense of
the province, with their trains of slaves and horses. The proud
privilege of Roman citizenship was still jealously reserved to Rome
itself and to a few favored towns and colonies; and a mere subject
could maintain no rights against a member of the haughty oligarchy
which controlled the civilized world. Such generally the Roman Republic
had become, or was tending to become, in the years which followed the
fall of Carthage, B.C. 146. Public spirit in the masses was dead or
sleeping; the Commonwealth was a plutocracy. The free forms of the
constitution were themselves the instruments of corruption. The rich
were happy in the possession of all that they could desire. The
multitude was kept quiet by the morsels of meat which were flung to it
when it threatened to be troublesome. The seven thousand in Israel, the
few who in all states and in all times remained pure in the midst of
evil, looked on with disgust, fearing that any remedy which they might
try might be worse than the disease. All orders in a society may be
wise and virtuous, but all cannot be rich. Wealth which is used only
for idle luxury is always envied, and envy soon curdles into hate. It
is easy to persuade the masses that the good things of this world are
unjustly divided, especially when it happens to be the exact truth. It
is not easy to set limits to an agitation once set on foot, however
justly it may have been provoked, when the cry for change is at once
stimulated by interest and can disguise its real character under the
passionate language of patriotism. But it was not to be expected that
men of noble natures, young men especially whose enthusiasm had not
been cooled by experience, would sit calmly by while their country was
going thus headlong to perdition. Redemption, if redemption was to be
hoped for, could come only from free citizens in the country districts
whose manners and whoso minds were still uncontaminated, in whom the
ancient habits of life still survived, who still believed in the gods,
who were contented to follow the wholesome round of honest labor. The
numbers of such citizens were fast dwindling away before the omnivorous
appetite of the rich for territorial aggrandizement. To rescue the land
from the monopolists, to renovate the old independent yeomanry, to
prevent the free population of Italy, out of which the legions had been
formed which had built up the Empire, from being pushed out of their
places and supplanted by foreign slaves, this, if it could be done,
would restore the purity of the constituency, snatch the elections from
the control of corruption, and rear up fresh generations of peasant
soldiers to preserve the liberties and the glories which their fathers
had won.