arm of Antony, in that immense disorder of revolution; to reconstruct
the great Empire of Egypt, placing at its head the first general of
the time, creating an army of Roman legionaries with the gold of the
Ptolemies; to make Egypt and its dynasty the prime potentate of Africa
and Asia, transferring to Alexandria the political and diplomatic
control of the finest parts of the Mediterranean world.
As the move failed, men have deemed it folly and stupidity; but he who
knows how easy it is to be wise after events, will judge this confused
policy of Cleopatra less curtly. At any rate, it is certain that her
scheme failed more because of its own inconsistencies than through the
vigour and ability with which Rome tried to thwart it; it is certain
that in the execution of the plan, Antony felt first in himself
the tragic discord between Orient and Occident that was so long to
lacerate the Empire; and of that tragic discord he was the first
victim. An enthusiastic admirer of Egypt, an ardent Hellenist, he is
lured by his great ambition to be king of Egypt, to renew the famous
line of the Ptolemies, to continue in the East the glory and the
traditions of Alexander the Great: but the far-away voice of his
fatherland still sounds in his ear; he recalls the city of his birth,
the Senate in which he rose so many times to speak, the _Forum_ of his
orations, the Comitia that elected him to magistracies; Octavia, the
gentlewoman he had wedded with the sacred rites of Latin monogamy; the
friends and soldiers with whom he had fought through so many countries
in so many wars; the foundation principles at home that ruled the
family, the state, morality, public and private.
Cleopatra's scheme, viewed from Alexandria, was an heroic undertaking,
almost divine, that might have lifted him and his scions to the
delights of Olympus; seen from Rome, by his childhood's friends,
by his comrades in arms, by that people of Italy who still so much
admired him, it was the shocking crime of faithlessness to his
country; we call it high treason. Therefore he hesitates long,
doubting most of all whether he can keep for the new Egyptian Empire
the Roman legions, made up largely of Italians, all commanded by
Italian officers. He does not know how to oppose a resolute _No_ to
the insistences of Cleopatra and loose himself from the fatal bond
that keeps him near her; he can not go back to live in Italy after
having dwelt as king in Alexandria. Moreover, he does not dare declare
his intentions to his Roman friends, fearing they will scatter; to the
soldiers, fearing they will revolt; to Italy, fearing her judgment of
him as a traitor; and so, little by little, he entangles himself
in the crooked policy, full of prevarications, of expedients, of
subterfuges, of one mistake upon another, that leads him to Actium.
I think I have shown that Antony succumbed in the famous war not
because, mad with love, he abandoned the command in the midst of the
battle, but because his armies revolted and abandoned him when they
understood what he had not dared declare to them openly: that he
meant to dismember the Empire of Rome to create the new Empire of
Alexandria. The future Augustus conquered at Actium without effort,
merely because the national sentiment of the soldiery, outraged by the
unforeseen revelation of Antony's treason, turned against the man who
wanted to aggrandise Cleopatra at the expense of his own country.
And then the victorious party, the party of Augustus, created the
story of Antony and Cleopatra that has so entertained posterity; this
story is but a popular explanation--in part imaginatively exaggerated
and fantastic--of the Eastern peril that menaced Rome, of both its
political phase and its moral. According to the story that Horace has
put into such charming verse, Cleopatra wished to conquer Italy, to
enslave Rome, to destroy the Capitol; but Cleopatra alone could not
have accomplished so difficult a task; she must have seduced Antony,
made him forget his duty to his wife, to his legitimate children,
to the Republic, the soldiery, his native land,--all the duties
that Latin morals inculcated into the minds of the great, and that
a shameless Egyptian woman, rendered perverse by all the arts of the
Orient, had blotted out in his soul; therefore Antony's tragic
fate should serve as a solemn warning to distrust the voluptuous
seductions, of which Cleopatra symbolised the elegant and fatal
depravity. The story was magnified, coloured, diffused, not because it
was beautiful and romantic, but because it served the interests of the
political _coterie_ that gained definite control of the government
on the ruin of Antony. At Actium, the future Augustus did not fight a
real war, he only passively watched the power of the adversary go
to pieces, destroyed by its own internal contradictions. He did not
decide to conquer Egypt until the public opinion of Italy, enraged
against Antony and Cleopatra, required this vengeance with such
insistence that he had to satisfy it.
If Augustus was not a man too quick in action, he was, instead, keenly
intelligent in comprehending the situation created by the catastrophe
of Antony in Italy, where already, for a decade of years, public
spirit, frightened by revolution, was anxious to return to the ways
of the past, to the historic sources of the national life. Augustus
understood that he ought to stand before Italy, disgusted as it
was with long-continued dissension and eager to retrace the way
of national tradition, as the embodiment of all the virtues his
contemporaries set in opposition to eastern "corruption,"--simplicity,
severity of private habits, rigid monogamy, the anti-feministic
spirit, the purely virile idea of the state. Naturally, the exaltation
of these virtues required the portrayal in his rival of Actium, as
far as possible, the opposite defects; therefore the efforts of his
friends, like Horace, to colour the story of Antony and Cleopatra,
which should magnify to the Italians the idea of the danger from
which Augustus had saved them at Actium; which was meant to serve as a
barrier against the invading Oriental "corruption," that "corruption"
the essence of which I have already analysed.
In a certain sense, the legend of Antony and Cleopatra is chiefly an
antifeminist legend, intended to reinforce in the state the power of
the masculine principle, to demonstrate how dangerous it may be to
leave to women the government of public affairs, or follow their
counsel in political business.
The people believed the legend; posterity has believed it. Two years
ago when I published in the _Revue de Paris_ an article in which I
demonstrated, by obvious arguments, the incongruities and absurdities
of the legend, and tried to retrace through it the half-effaced lines
of the truth, everybody was amazed. From one end of Europe to the
other, the papers résuméd the conclusions of my study as an astounding
revelation. An illustrious French statesman, a man of the finest
culture in historical study, Joseph Reinach, said to me:
After your article I have re-read Dion and Plutarch. It is
indeed singular that for twenty centuries men have read and
reread those pages without any one's realising how confused
and absurd their accounts are.
It seems to be a law of human psychology that almost all historic
personages, from Minos to Mazzini, from Judas to Charlotte Corday,
from Xerxes to Napoleon, are imaginary personages; some transfigured
into demigods, by admiration and success; the others debased by hate
and failure. In reality, the former were often uglier, the latter more
attractive than tradition has pictured them, because men in general
are neither too good nor too bad, neither too intelligent nor
too stupid. In conclusion, historic tradition is full of deformed
caricatures and ideal transfigurations; because, when they are dead,
the impression of their political contemporaries still serves the ends
of parties, states, nations, institutions. Can this man exalt in a
people the consciousness of its own power, of its own energy, of
its own value? Lo, then they make a god of him, as of Napoleon or
Bismarck. Can this other serve to feed in the mass, odium and scorn
of another party, of a government, of an order of things that it is
desirable to injure? Then they make a monster of him, as happened in
Rome to Tiberius, in France to Napoleon III, in Italy to all who for
one motive or another opposed the unification of Italy.
It is true that after a time the interests that have coloured
certain figures with certain hues and shades disappear; but then the
reputation, good or bad, of a personage is already made; his name is
stamped on the memory of posterity with an adjective,--the great, the
wise, the wicked, the cruel, the rapacious,--and there is no human
force that can dissever name from adjective. Some far-away historian,
studying all the documents, examining the sequence of events, will
confute the tradition in learned books; but his work not only will not
succeed in persuading the ignorant multitude, but must also contend
against the multiplied objections offered by the instinctive
incredulity of people of culture.
You will say to me, "What is the use of writing history? Why spend so
much effort to correct the errors in which people will persist just
as if the histories were never written?" I reply that I do not believe
that the office of history is to give to men who have guided the great
human events a posthumous justice. It is already work serious enough
for every generation to give a little justice to the living,
rather than occupy itself rendering it to the dead, who indeed, in
contradistinction from the living, have no need of it. The study of
history, the rectification of stories of the past, ought to serve
another and practical end; that is, train the men who govern
nations to discern more clearly than may be possible from their own
environment the truth underlying the legends. As I have already said,
passions, interests, present historic personages in a thousand forms
when they are alive, transfiguring not only the persons themselves,
but events the most diverse, the character of institutions, the
conditions of nations.
It is generally believed that legends are found only at the dawn
of history, in the poetic period; that is a great mistake; the
legend--the legend that deceives, that deforms, that misdirects--is
everywhere, in all ages, in the present as in the past--in the present
even more than in the past, because it is the consequence of certain
universal forms of thought and of sentiment. To-day, just as ten or
twenty centuries ago, interests and passions dominate events, alter
them and distort them, creating about them veritable romances, more
or less probable. The present, which appears to all to be the same
reality, is instead, for most people, only a huge legend, traversed by
contemporaries stirred by the most widely differing sentiments.
However the mass may content itself with this legend, throbbing
with hate and love, with hope and the fear of its own self-created
phantoms, those who guide and govern the masses ought to try to divine
the truth, as far as they can. A great man of state is distinguished
from a mediocre by his greater ability to divine the real in his world
of action beneath its superfice of confused legends; by his greater
ability to discriminate in everything what is true from what is merely
apparently true, in the prestige of states and institutions, in the
forces of parties, in the energy attributed to certain men, in the
purposes claimed by parties and men, often different from their
real designs. To do that, some natural disposition is necessary, a
liveliness of intuition that must come with birth; but this faculty
can be refined and trained by a practical knowledge of men, by
experience in things, and by the study of history. In the ages dead,
when the interests that created their legends have disappeared, we
can discover how those great popular delusions, which are one of the
greatest forces of history, are made and how they work. We may thus
fortify the spirit to withstand the cheating illusions that surround
us, coming from every part of the vast modern world, in which so
many interests dispute dominion over thoughts and will. In this sense
alone, I believe that history may teach, not the multitude, which will
never learn anything from it, but, impelled by the same passions,
will always repeat the same errors and the same foolishnesses; but
the chosen few, who, charged with directing the game of history, have
concern in knowing as well as they can its inner law. Taken in this
way, history may be a great teacher, in its every page, every line,
and the study of the legend of Antony and Cleopatra may itself even
serve to prepare the spirit of a diplomat, who must treat between
state and state the complicated economic and political affairs of
the modern world. And so, in conclusion, history and life interchange
mutual services; life teaches history, and history, life; observing
the present, we help ourselves to know the past, and from the study of
the past we can return to our present the better tempered and prepared
to observe and comprehend it. In present and in past, history can form
a kind of wisdom set apart, in a certain sense aristocratic, above
what the masses know, at least as to the universal laws that govern
the life of nations.
The Development of Gaul
In estimating distant historical events, one is often the victim of
an error of perspective; that is, one is disposed to consider as the
outcome of a pre-established plan of human wisdom what is the final
result, quite unforeseen, of causes that acted beyond the foresight of
contemporaries. At the distance of centuries, turning back to consider
the past, we can easily find out that the efforts of one or two
generations have produced certain effects on the actual condition of
the world; and then we conclude that those generations meant to
reach that result. On the contrary, men almost always face the future
proposing to themselves impossible ends; notwithstanding which, their
efforts, accumulating, destroying, interweaving, bring into being
consequences that no one had foreseen or planned, the novelty or
importance of which often only future generations realise. Columbus,
who, fixed in the idea of reaching India by sailing west, finds
America on his way and does not recognise it at once but is persuaded
that he has landed in India, symbolises the lot of man in history.
Of this phenomenon, which is to me a fundamental law of history,
there is a classic example in the story of Rome: the conquest of Gaul.
Without doubt, one of the greatest works of Rome was the conquest and
Romanisation of Gaul: indeed that conquest and Romanisation of Gaul
is the beginning of European civilisation; for before the Græco-Latin
civilisation reached the Rhine over the ways opened by the Roman
sword, the continent of Europe had centres of civilisation on
the coast or in its projecting extremities, like Italy, Bætica,
Narbonensis; but the interior was still entirely in the power of a
turbulent and restless barbarism, like the African continent to-day.
Moreover, what Rome created in Asia and Africa was almost entirely
destroyed by ages following; on the contrary, Rome yet lives in
France, to which it gave its language, its spirit, and the traditions
of its thought. Exactly for this reason it is particularly important
to explain how such an outcome was brought about, and by what historic
forces. From the propensity to consider every great historical
event as wholly a masterpiece of human genius, many historians have
attributed also this accomplishment to a prodigious, well-nigh divine
wisdom on the part of the Romans, and Julius Cæsar is regarded as
a demigod who had fixed his gaze upon the far, far distant future.
However, it is not difficult, studying the ancient documents with
critical spirit, to persuade oneself that even if Cæsar was a man of
genius, he was not a god; that from beginning to end, the real story
of the conquest of Gaul is very different from the commonly accepted
version.
I hope to demonstrate that Cæsar threw himself into the midst of
Gallic affairs, impelled by slight incidents of internal politics,
not only without giving any thought whatever to the future destiny
of Gaul, but without even knowing well the conditions existing there.
Gaul was then for all Romans a barbarous region, poor, gloomy, full
of swamps and forests in which there would be much fighting and little
booty: no one was thinking then of having Roman territory cross the
Alps; everyone was infatuated by the story of Alexander the Great,
dreaming only of conquering like him all the rich and civilised
Orient; everyone, even Cæsar. Only a sequence of political accidents
pushed him in spite of himself into Gaul.
In 62 B.C., Pompey had returned from the Orient, where he had finished
the conquest of Pontus, begun by Lucullus, and annexed Syria. On his
return, the conservative party, irritated against him because he had
gone over to the opposite side, and having been given something to
think of by the prestige that the policy of expansion was winning
for the popular party, had succeeded by many intrigues in keeping
the Senate from ratifying what he had done in the East. This internal
struggle closed the Orient for several years to the adventurous
initiatives of the political imperialists; for as long as the
administration of Pompey remained unapproved, it was impossible to
think of undertaking new enterprises or conquests in Asia and Africa;
and therefore, of necessity, Roman politics, burning for conquest and
adventure, had to turn to another part of Europe.
The letters of Cicero prove to us that Cæsar was not the first to
think that Rome, having its hands tied for the moment in the East,
ought to interfere in the affairs of Gaul. The man who first had the
idea of a Gallic policy was Quintus Metellus Celerus, husband of the
famous Clodia, and consul the year before Cæsar. Taking advantage of
certain disturbances arisen in Gaul from the constant wars between the
differing parts, Metellus had persuaded the Senate to authorise him to
make war on the Helvetians. At the beginning of the year 59, that is,
the year in which Cæsar was consul, Metellus was already preparing
to depart for the war in Gaul, when suddenly he died; and then Cæsar,
profiting by the interest in Rome for Gallic affairs, had the mission
previously entrusted to Metellus given to himself and took up both
Metellus's office and his plan. Here you see at the beginning of this
story the first accident,--the death of Metellus. An historian curious
of nice and unanswerable questions might ask himself what would have
been the history of the world if Metellus had not died. Certainly Rome
would have been occupied with Gallic concerns a year sooner and by
a different man; Cæsar would probably have had to seek elsewhere a
brilliant proconsulship and things Gallic would have for ever escaped
his energy.
However it be, charged with the affairs of Gaul accidentally and
unexpectedly, Cæsar went there without well knowing the condition of
it, and, in fact, as I think I proved in a long appendix published in
the French and English editions of my work, he began his Gallic policy
with a serious mistake; that is, attacking the Helvetians. A superior
mind, Cæsar was not long in finding his bearings in the midst of the
tremendous confusion he found in Gaul; but for this, there is no need
to think that he carried out in the Gallic policy vast schemes, long
meditated: he worked, instead, as the uncertain changes of Roman
politics imposed. I believe that there is but one way to understand
and reasonably explain the policy pursued by Cæsar in Gaul, his sudden
moves, his zigzags, his audacities, his mistakes; that is, to study
it from Rome, to keep always in mind the internal changes, the party
struggle, in which he was involved at Rome. In short, Gaul was for
Cæsar only a means to operate on the internal politics of Rome, of
which he made use from day to day, as the immediate interest of the
passing hour seemed to require.
I cite a single example, but the most significant. Cæsar declared Gaul
a Roman province and annexed it to the Empire toward the end of
57 B.C.; that is, at the end of his second year as proconsul,
unexpectedly, with no warning act to intimate such vigorous intent,--a
surprise; and why? Look to Rome and you will understand. In 57 B.C.,
the democratic party, demoralised by discords, upset by the popular
agitation to recall Cicero from unjust exile, discredited by scandals,
especially the Egyptian scandals, seemed on the point of going to
pieces. Cæsar understood that there was but one way to stop this
ruin: to stun public opinion and all Italy with some highly audacious
surprise. The surprise was the annexation of Gaul. Declaring Gaul a
Roman province after the victory over the Belgæ, he convinced Rome
that he had in two years overcome all Gallic adversaries. And so, the
conquest of Gaul--this event that was to open a new era, this event,
the effects of which still endure--was, at the beginning in the mind
that conceived and executed it, nothing but a bold political expedient
in behalf of a party, to solve a situation compromised by manifold
errors.
But you will ask me: how from so tiny a seed could ever grow so mighty
a tree, covering with its branches so much of the earth? You know that
at the close of the proconsulship in Gaul, there breaks out a great
civil war; this lasts, with brief interruptions and pauses, until
the battle of Actium. Only toward 30 B.C., is the tempest lulled, and
during this time Gaul seems almost to disappear; the ancient writers
hardly mention it, except from time to time for a moment to let us
know that some unimportant revolt broke out, now here, now there, in
the vast territory; that this or that general was sent to repress it.
The civil wars ended, the government of Rome turns its attention to
the provinces anew, but for another reason. Saint Jerome tells us that
in 25 B.C., Augustus increased the tribute from the Gauls: we find
no difficulty in getting at the reason of this fact. The thing most
urgent after the re-establishment of peace was the re-arrangement of
finance; that signified then, as always, an increase of imposts:
but more could not be extorted from the Oriental provinces, already
exhausted by so many wars and plunderings; therefore the idea to
draw greater revenues from the European provinces of recent conquest,
particularly from Gaul, which until then had paid so little. So
you see a-forging one link after another in the chain: Cæsar for a
political interest conquers Gaul; thirty years afterward Augustus goes
there to seek new revenues for his balance-sheet; thence-forward
there are always immediate needs that urge Roman politics into Gallic
affairs: and so it is that little by little Roman politics become
permanently involved, by a kind of concatenation, not by deliberate
plan.
We can easily follow the process. Augustus had left in Gaul to exact
the new tribute, a former slave of Cæsar's, afterward liberated,--a
Gaul or German whom Cæsar had captured as a child in one of his
expeditions and later freed, because of his consummate administrative
ability. It appears, however, that, for the Gauls at least, this
ability was even too great. In a curious chapter Dion tells us that
Licinius, this freedman, uniting the avarice of a barbarian to the
pretences of a Roman, beat down everyone that seemed greater than he;
oppressed all those who seemed to have more power; extorted enormous
sums from all, were they to fill out the dues of his office, or to
enrich himself and his family. His rascality was so stupendous that
since the Gauls paid certain taxes every month, he increased to
fourteen the number of the months, declaring that December, the last,
was only the tenth; consequently it was necessary to count two more,
one called Undecember and another, Duodecember.