THE ROMAN EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS.
[Sidenote: The Roman Empire in the second century.]
[Sidenote: Obliteration of national distinctions.]
[Sidenote: The Capital.]
That ostentation of humility which the subtle policy of Augustus had
conceived, and the jealous hypocrisy of Tiberius maintained, was
gradually dropped by their successors, till despotism became at last
recognised in principle as the government of the Roman Empire. With an
aristocracy decayed, a populace degraded, an army no longer recruited
from Italy, the semblance of liberty that yet survived might be swept
away with impunity. Republican forms had never been known in the
provinces at all, and the aspect which the imperial administration had
originally assumed there, soon reacted on its position in the capital.
Earlier rulers had disguised their supremacy by making a slavish
senate the instrument of their more cruel or arbitrary acts. As time
went on, even this veil was withdrawn; and in the age of Septimius
Severus, the Emperor stood forth to the whole Roman world as the
single centre and source of power and political action. The warlike
character of the Roman state was preserved in his title of General;
his provincial lieutenants were military governors; and a more
terrible enforcement of the theory was found in his dependence on the
army, at once the origin and support of all authority. But, as he
united in himself every function of government, his sovereignty was
civil as well as military. Laws emanated from him; all officials acted
under his commission; the sanctity of his person bordered on divinity.
This increased concentration of power was mainly required by the
necessities of frontier defence, for within there was more decay than
disaffection. Few troops were quartered through the country: few
fortresses checked the march of armies in the struggles which placed
Vespasian and Severus on the throne. The distant crash of war from the
Rhine or the Euphrates was scarcely heard or heeded in the profound
quiet of the Mediterranean coasts, where, with piracy, fleets had
disappeared. No quarrels of race or religion disturbed that calm, for
all national distinctions were becoming merged in the idea of a common
Empire. The gradual extension of Roman citizenship through the
_coloniæ_, the working of the equalized and equalizing Roman law, the
even pressure of the government on all subjects, the movement of
population caused by commerce and the slave traffic, were steadily
assimilating the various peoples. Emperors who were for the most part
natives of the provinces cared little to cherish Italy or conciliate
Rome: it was their policy to keep open for every subject a career by
whose freedom they had themselves risen to greatness, and to recruit
the senate from the most illustrious families in the cities of Gaul,
Spain, and Asia. The edict by which Caracalla extended to all natives
of the Roman world the rights of Roman citizenship, though prompted by
no motives of kindness, proved in the end a boon. Annihilating legal
distinctions, it completed the work which trade and literature and
toleration to all beliefs but one were already performing, and left,
so far as we can tell, only two nations still cherishing a national
feeling. The Jew was kept apart by his religion: the Greek boasted his
original intellectual superiority. Speculative philosophy lent her aid
to this general assimilation. Stoicism, with its doctrine of a
universal system of nature, made minor distinctions between man and
man seem insignificant: and by its teachers the idea of
cosmopolitanism was for the first time proclaimed. Alexandrian
Neo-Platonism, uniting the tenets of many schools, first bringing the
mysticism of the East into connection with the logical philosophies of
Greece, had opened up a new ground of agreement or controversy for the
minds of all the world. Yet Rome's commanding position was scarcely
shaken. Her actual power was indeed confined within narrow limits.
Rarely were her senate and people permitted to choose the sovereign:
more rarely still could they control his policy; neither law nor
custom raised them above other subjects, or accorded to them any
advantage in the career of civil or military ambition. As in time past
Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom that she might be the mistress of
others, so now to be universal, she, the conqueror, had descended to
the level of the conquered. But the sacrifice had not wanted its
reward. From her came the laws and the language that had overspread
the world: at her feet the nations laid the offerings of their labour:
she was the head of the Empire and of civilization, and in riches,
fame, and splendour far outshone as well the cities of that time as
the fabled glories of Babylon or Persepolis.
[Sidenote: Diocletian and Constantine.]
Scarcely had these slowly working influences brought about this unity,
when other influences began to threaten it. New foes assailed the
frontiers; while the loosening of the structure within was shewn by
the long struggles for power which followed the death or deposition of
each successive emperor. In the period of anarchy after the fall of
Valerian, generals were raised by their armies in every part of the
Empire, and ruled great provinces as monarchs apart, owning no
allegiance to the possessor of the capital.
The founding of the kingdoms of modern Europe might have been
anticipated by two hundred years, had the barbarians been bolder, or
had there not arisen in Diocletian a prince active and politic enough
to bind up the fragments before they had lost all cohesion, meeting
altered conditions by new remedies. By dividing and localizing
authority, he confessed that the weaker heart could no longer make its
pulsations felt to the body's extremities. He parcelled out the
supreme power among four persons, and then sought to give it a
factitious strength, by surrounding it with an oriental pomp which his
earlier predecessors would have scorned. The sovereign's person became
more sacred, and was removed further from the subject by the
interposition of a host of officials. The prerogative of Rome was
menaced by the rivalry of Nicomedia, and the nearer greatness of
Milan. Constantine trod in the same path, extending the system of
titles and functionaries, separating the civil from the military,
placing counts and dukes along the frontiers and in the cities, making
the household larger, its etiquette stricter, its offices more
important, though to a Roman eye degraded by their attachment to the
monarch's person. The crown became, for the first time, the fountain
of honour. These changes brought little good. Heavier taxation
depressed the aristocracy[4]: population decreased, agriculture
withered, serfdom spread: it was found more difficult to raise native
troops and to pay any troops whatever. The removal of the seat of
power to Byzantium, if it prolonged the life of a part of the Empire,
shook it as a whole, by making the separation of East and West
inevitable. By it Rome's self-abnegation that she might Romanize the
world, was completed; for though the new capital preserved her name,
and followed her customs and precedents, yet now the imperial sway
ceased to be connected with the city which had created it. Thus did
the idea of Roman monarchy become more universal; for, having lost its
local centre, it subsisted no longer historically, but, so to speak,
naturally, as a part of an order of things which a change in external
conditions seemed incapable of disturbing. Henceforth the Empire would
be unaffected by the disasters of the city. And though, after the
partition of the Empire had been confirmed by Valentinian, and finally
settled on the death of Theodosius, the seat of the Western government
was removed first to Milan and then to Ravenna, neither event
destroyed Rome's prestige, nor the notion of a single imperial
nationality common to all her subjects. The Syrian, the Pannonian, the
Briton, the Spaniard, still called himself a Roman[5].
[Sidenote: Christianity.]
[Sidenote: Its alliance with the State.]
For that nationality was now beginning to be supported by a new and
vigorous power. The Emperors had indeed opposed it as disloyal and
revolutionary: had more than once put forth their whole strength to
root it out. But the unity of the Empire, and the ease of
communication through its parts, had favoured the spread of
Christianity: persecution had scattered the seeds more widely, had
forced on it a firm organization, had given it martyr-heroes and a
history. When Constantine, partly perhaps from a genuine moral
sympathy, yet doubtless far more in the well-grounded belief that he
had more to gain from the zealous sympathy of its professors than he
could lose by the aversion of those who still cultivated a languid
paganism, took Christianity to be the religion of the Empire, it was
already a great political force, able, and not more able than willing,
to repay him by aid and submission. Yet the league was struck in no
mere mercenary spirit, for the league was inevitable. Of the evils and
dangers incident to the system then founded, there was as yet no
experience: of that antagonism between Church and State which to a
modern appears so natural, there was not even an idea. Among the Jews,
the State had rested upon religion; among the Romans, religion had
been an integral part of the political constitution, a matter far more
of national or tribal or family feeling than of personal[6]. Both in
Israel and at Rome the mingling of religious with civic patriotism had
been harmonious, giving strength and elasticity to the whole body
politic. So perfect a union was now no longer possible in the Roman
Empire, for the new faith had already a governing body of her own in
those rulers and teachers whom the growth of sacramentalism, and of
sacerdotalism its necessary consequence, was making every day more
powerful, and marking off more sharply from the mass of the Christian
people. Since therefore the ecclesiastical organization could not be
identical with the civil, it became its counterpart. Suddenly called
from danger and ignominy to the seat of power, and finding her
inexperience perplexed by a sphere of action vast and varied, the
Church was compelled to frame herself upon the model of the secular
administration. Where her own machinery was defective, as in the case
of doctrinal disputes affecting the whole Christian world, she sought
the interposition of the sovereign; in all else she strove not to sink
in, but to reproduce for herself the imperial system. And just as with
the extension of the Empire all the independent rights of districts,
towns, or tribes had disappeared, so now the primitive freedom and
diversity of individual Christians and local Churches, already
circumscribed by the frequent struggles against heresy, was finally
overborne by the idea of one visible catholic Church, uniform in faith
and ritual; uniform too in her relation to the civil power and the
increasingly oligarchical character of her government. Thus, under the
combined force of doctrinal theory and practical needs, there shaped
itself a hierarchy of patriarchs, metropolitans, and bishops, their
jurisdiction, although still chiefly spiritual, enforced by the laws
of the State, their provinces and dioceses usually corresponding to
the administrative divisions of the Empire. As no patriarch yet
enjoyed more than an honorary supremacy, the head of the Church--so
far as she could be said to have a head--was virtually the Emperor
himself. The inchoate right to intermeddle in religious affairs which
he derived from the office of Pontifex Maximus was readily admitted;
and the clergy, preaching the duty of passive obedience now as it had
been preached in the days of Nero and Diocletian[7], were well pleased
to see him preside in councils, issue edicts against heresy, and
testify even by arbitrary measures his zeal for the advancement of the
faith and the overthrow of pagan rites. But though the tone of the
Church remained humble, her strength waxed greater, nor were occasions
wanting which revealed the future that was in store for her. The
resistance and final triumph of Athanasius proved that the new society
could put forth a power of opinion such as had never been known
before: the abasement of Theodosius the Emperor before Ambrose the
Archbishop admitted the supremacy of spiritual authority. In the
decrepitude of old institutions, in the barrenness of literature and
the feebleness of art, it was to the Church that the life and feelings
of the people sought more and more to attach themselves; and when in
the fifth century the horizon grew black with clouds of ruin, those
who watched with despair or apathy the approach of irresistible foes,
fled for comfort to the shrine of a religion which even those foes
revered.
[Sidenote: It embraces and preserves the imperial idea.]
But that which we are above all concerned to remark here is, that this
church system, demanding a more rigid uniformity in doctrine and
organization, making more and more vital the notion of a visible body
of worshippers united by participation in the same sacraments,
maintained and propagated afresh the feeling of a single Roman people
throughout the world. Christianity as well as civilization became
conterminous with the Roman Empire[8].
FOOTNOTES:
[4] According to the vicious financial system that prevailed, the
_curiales_ in each city were required to collect the taxes, and when
there was a deficit, to supply it from their own property.
[5] See the eloquent passage of Claudian, _In secundum consulatum
Stilichonis_, 129, _sqq._, from which the following lines are taken
(150-60):--
'Hæc est in gremio victos quæ sola recepit,
Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit,
Matris, non dominæ, ritu; civesque vocavit
Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.
Hujus pacificis debemus moribus omnes
Quod veluti patriis regionibus utitur hospes:
Quod sedem mutare licet: quod cernere Thulen
Lusus, et horrendos quondam penetrare recessus:
Quod bibimus passim Rhodanum, potamus Oronten,
Quod cuncti gens una sumus. Nec terminus unquam
Romanæ ditionis erit.'
[6] In the Roman jurisprudence, _ius sacrum_ is a branch of _ius
publicum_.
[7] Tertullian, writing circ. A.D. 200, says: 'Sed quid ego amplius de
religione atque pietate Christiana in imperatorem quem necesse est
suspiciamus ut eum quem Dominus noster elegerit. Et merito dixerim,
noster est magis Cæsar, ut a nostro Deo constitutus.'--_Apologet._
cap. 34.
[8] See the book of Optatus, bishop of Milevis, _Contra Donatistas_.
'Non enim respublica est in ecclesia, sed ecclesia in republica, id
est, in imperio Romano, cum super imperatorem non sit nisi solus
Deus:' (p. 999 of vol. ii. of Migne's _Patrologiæ Cursus completus_.)
The treatise of Optatus is full of interest, as shewing the growth of
the idea of the visible Church, and of the primacy of Peter's chair,
as constituting its centre and representing its unity.